Negative Liberties & RWE

[alice wellintown]

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is
One Man,--present to all particular men only partially, or through one
faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole
man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is
all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and
soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parceled
out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint
work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies, that the
individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own
labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this
original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to
multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it
is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is
one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and
strut about so many walking monsters,--a good finger, a neck, a
stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things.