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Short abstract:

This paper historicizes calculations of freedom. I show that early calculators assumed that free societies were made by free citizens, while later calculators assumed that free citizens emerged from an existing free society. I argue that this shift was due to political fears about decolonization.

Long abstract:

Over the twentieth century, scientists, engineers, and philosophers struggled to quantify freedom. Merging moral and mathematical arguments, these metrics were used to justify and define the stakes of international intervention in the Cold War. This talk constructs a genealogy of freedom calculations from 1948 to 1990, beginning with calculations done by statistical physicists in the 1940s and ending with the legacy of the widely used metric devised by the Freedom House in the late 1970s. By performing a close reading of the technical formulae for freedom, I connect the changing mathematical assumptions of these calculations to the broader political concerns of western technocrats. I show that geopolitical fears sparked by decolonization drove a marked revision in the freedom calculations. As western technocrats became increasingly concerned with the economic and cultural status of newly sovereign nations, calculations shifted from describing individual freedom to describing the institutions of a free society. This change in mathematical form belied a new political assumption—that free citizens were the product rather than the producers of a free society. I conclude by drawing a line between these historical calculations and the quantification of freedom today, showing how midcentury political fears have been laundered into scientific metrics used in museums, public education, and politics.