The concept of freedom plays a crucial role in the above, as in most critical accounts of power relations. In this concluding chapter, I want to return to the suggestion, introduced in chapter 2 and implicit in the ethnographies of schooling at North End and Fair View, that students of power conceptualize freedom as political freedom, asking how particular power relations affect participants' social capacities to act in ways that shape them. I begin by engaging what is widely regarded as among the strongest defenses of the notion of freedom implicit in accounts of power-with-a-face: Isaiah Berlin's “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in which he argued, famously, that freedom is best understood as “negative.” It is the absence of interference by others in the form of social limits that prevent actors from doing or being what they otherwise might do or be. I take up Berlin's argument as a means to tackling the normative question my own argument begs: How might one acknowledge that social relations are necessarily implicated in relations of power, and at the same time draw distinctions among, and articulate grounds for criticizing, particular relations?

De-facing power, my claim is, requires neither retreating to a relativistic stance according to which all social relations are equivalent, nor abandoning the ambition to criticize and to inform strategies for changing specific relations of power. Instead, it draws attention to conceptual and normative links between theories of power and theories of democracy.