Free Thinkers vs Paid Thinkers: What a Freethinker Is, and Who Can Afford to Be One

Last updated: October 20, 2026

In the usual definition, a freethinker is someone who forms beliefs by reason and evidence rather than by accepting authority, tradition or dogma, historically above all the authority of religion. The word turns up in England in the 1690s, when William Molyneux, in a 1697 letter to John Locke, called John Toland “a candid freethinker”, according to the Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on freethinkers, and it became a banner in 1713, when Anthony Collins published A Discourse of Free-Thinking and defined free-thinking as “The Use of the Understanding, in endeavoring to find out the Meaning” of a proposition and then judging it by the strength of the evidence, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reports. Three centuries later, plenty of people online describe themselves as free thinkers, which makes the older question more interesting: can you think freely when someone is paying you to think?

The meme answers with a reaction shot: “free thinkers when paid thinkers show up”, over the face of a man who has just seen something deeply alarming. It has a cousin in the “so-called free thinkers” meme, which, as Know Your Meme documents, shows a row of identical robots from the film I, Robot marching in step.

A Friend of Locke Starts a Fight

The term “free-thinker” became a fighting word in 1713, waved as a banner by Anthony Collins and thrown back at him as an accusation.

Collins (1676 to 1729) was a friend of John Locke in Locke’s old age, and the SEP names Locke as one of the main influences on his philosophy. His Discourse argued that people have a right, and even a duty, to examine any question for themselves, including questions of religion, and judge it by evidence. The book provoked fierce replies. The classical scholar Richard Bentley answered with Remarks upon a Late Discourse of Free-Thinking, which, according to the SEP, charged that Collins’s definition was too broad, in effect a definition of thinking as such. Whether Collins himself was a deist (someone who holds that God can be known by reason without revelation) or an atheist writing with caution is still debated: the SEP reports that some scholars place him among the deists, while David Berman has argued that he was in fact an atheist.

Nietzsche Did Not Want to Be a Freethinker

Nietzsche wrote about “free spirits”, and he went out of his way to say that they were not freethinkers. For him, most so-called freethinkers were just conformists of a newer kind.

In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), section 44, he writes that he and his kind are “something else than ‘libres-penseurs,’ ‘liben pensatori’ ‘free-thinkers’”, in Helen Zimmern’s translation, and whatever else these honest advocates of “modern ideas” like to call themselves. In the same section he calls such people “wrongly named ‘free spirits’”, “levellers” who serve “the democratic taste”. Reason as such was not his complaint. As he saw it, freethinkers had swapped one herd for another: they rejected the church but accepted, without examination, “Equality of Rights” and “Sympathy with All Sufferers”, democratic values that he elsewhere in the book (section 202) calls the inheritance of the Christian movement. You can dislike his politics and still feel the sting. A thousand people rejecting the same authority in the same words is still a crowd, which is roughly where the robot meme comes in. Our post on Max Stirner’s “spooks” follows the same suspicion even further.

Socrates Worked for Free, and Said So

The worry about paid thinking goes back at least to Athens. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates presents his refusal to charge fees as evidence of his honesty (more on his method in our post on Socrates’ theory of knowledge).

He tells the jury, in Benjamin Jowett’s translation, that the report “that I am a teacher, and take money” has no more truth in it than the other charges. He names the travelling teachers who did charge, Gorgias of Leontini, Prodicus of Ceos and Hippias of Elis, who persuade young men to pay them for instruction they could have had for nothing at home. Later in the speech he offers his poverty as proof that he never asked anyone for pay. But Socrates does not say that taking money corrupts thinking. He says that if a man were really able to teach, receiving money for it “would be an honour to him”. In this passage he does not accuse the sophists of fraud; he disclaims their kind of wisdom for himself and leaves, with visible irony, the question of whether they really have it. The harsher equation of fees with corruption comes from elsewhere: in Xenophon’s Memorabilia (1.6.13), Socrates compares those who sell wisdom for money to prostitutes.

The Philosopher Who Turned Down a Professorship

Some philosophers have refused paid positions to protect their independence, and Spinoza’s refusal is the best documented.

In February 1673 Johann Ludwig Fabritius, writing in the name of the Elector Palatine, offered Spinoza a professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg, with “the most ample freedom in philosophical teaching”, on the understanding that he would not use it “to disturb the religion publicly established”. Spinoza replied on 30 March 1673 and politely declined, while asking leave to consider the matter further. He wrote that he did not know “the limits, within which the freedom of my philosophical teaching would be confined”, added that teaching would take him away from his own research, and said he was moved by his love of quietness, not by hope of a better post. Three years earlier he had published the Theological-Political Treatise (1670) anonymously, and its subtitle, as the SEP quotes it, argues that the freedom to philosophise can be granted without harm to piety and the peace of the state. His refusal is a classic example of the free thinker’s bargain: independence bought at the price of a salary.

So, Can Paid Thinkers Think Freely?

They can, though the question deserves better than a shrug. Salaries create dependencies, and so does the attention economy that pays free thinkers on the internet.

Journalists, academics, podcasters and streamers usually depend on someone, whether an employer, a funding body, advertisers or an audience. A self-described free thinker who earns money from a following is not outside that system. They are paid in a different currency, and the pressure to keep the audience happy can be at least as strong as the pressure from an editor. Socrates’ remark about honourable fees suggests that money alone does not ruin a mind; it does create incentives a careful thinker should be able to name. A practical test follows from the history: free thinking is less about who pays you than about whether you would say what you now believe if it cost you the payment. Spinoza could answer that question. Most of us would need a moment.

For a philosopher who thought most of our “free” ideas were ghosts we obey, read Max Stirner’s Spooks Explained: Truth, Morality and the Madhouse of Fixed Ideas.