Liberty

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Liberty is the state of being free. In most Western societies, liberty is considered a good thing, and something that is to be preserved. Writing in 1917, John Dewey echoed Leo Tolstoy's critique of the conception of liberty in classical philosophy as freedom that is protected but also constrained by the rule of law, dismissing it as resignation in the face of oppression.^[2]:46-70 He argued that philosophy should be more than apology for established order and that liberty should be conceived as the freedom necessary as individuals strive for full self-actualization.

History

The Swiss canton of Vaud has enshrined the word Liberté on its flag since 1803. Nevertheless, the United States considered itself the defender of liberty for a long time. However, despite the rather large statue devoted to Liberty (given to the US in 1886 by France), the US government backslid considerably after 9/11 by denying the due process that keeps its long-suffering citizens liberated. (Some people would have you believe that giving people guns is the answer to that problem; this ignores the fact that the government can always bring bigger and better guns.) That's not even getting into the things that the NSA and TSA have been doing since 2001. Then there is the whole matter of slavery being legal for the first 89 years of the country's independent existence.

"Liberty, equality, and fraternity" was the slogan of a revolution that ended up going very badly. Too often, people promise liberty just in order to switch out the boot that's doing the oppressing (e.g., the Russian Revolution). People may also deploy a conception of liberty that demands a privileged status for themselves and the subordination of others, as is the case with the contemporary American Tea Party movement.

In the United Kingdom, Liberty (the National Council on Civil Liberties) is an organisation that seeks to protect civil liberties and promote human rights for everyone.^[4]

Negative and positive liberty

Negative liberty has been defined as the absence of barriers to one's actions, whereas positive liberty has been defined as having opportunities to choose actions in one's life.^[6] This distinction has been traced at least as far back as Immanuel Kant.^[6]

In his wide-ranging book On Freedom, historian Timothy Snyder expands on the ideas of negative and positive freedom, defining positive freedom as having five 'dimensions', the normal three spacial dimensions, the fourth dimension of time, and a fifth 'dimension' of people having individual choices.^[5] He contrasts these dimensions to his earlier concepts of the politics of eternity^[7] and the politics of inevitability, withe former representing three-dimensional authoritarian regimes with no future, and the latter representing the four-dimensional political systems where the ideology is that things will always progress regardless of individual actions. The politics of inevitability represents the widespread post-Soviet belief that capitalism alone can bring democracy to the world.^{[8][5]:149-161[9]} The fifth dimension represents not just that people's actions matter but that people should be given the ability to make personal choices, including serendipitous ones if they are to be positively free.^{[5]:66-68,99-100}

In On Freedom, Snyder explores five aspects of positive freedom:^[5]

1. Sovereignty — Snyder refers to the two German words for body, Körper and Leib. Though they are roughly synonyms, Körper can also refer to a corpse, whereas Leib implies a person with the ability to make informed judgments or with liveliness. In Nazi Germany the word Körper was almost exclusively.^[5]:21-62
2. Unpredictability — Making serendipitous choices in life can sometimes change one's life and others' lives for the better, and is one way that enables informed choices. In post-Soviet Europe, a trade union leader became prime minister (Lech Wałęsa in Poland), a playwright became president (Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia), and an actor became President (Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukraine).^[5]:63-111
3. Mobility — the ability to move freely in the world experience new perspectives, as well as the idea of social mobility^[5]:112-161
4. Factuality — the idea that facts, that one cannot make informed decisions without having access to truthful information.^[5]:162-194
5. Solidarity — one cannot be free without the support of other people, past and present, one's family, one's friends, one's community, or one's labor union^[5]:195-226

In practice

On January 6, 1941, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave what became known as the Four Freedoms speech as a State of the Union address to Congress. At that time, World War II was already ongoing with Nazi Germany invasion of its neighbors, and Imperial Japan's full-scale war with China. The United States had not yet entered the war. The four freedoms that Roosevelt outlined were:^[10][11]

1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of worship
3. Freedom from want ("secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world")
4. Freedom from fear ("world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world")

The speech also argued against isolationism and for supporting countries that were resisting aggression, implicitly Great Britain, France and China.

After Japan initiated war with the United States, Roosevelt signed an executive order that took away the freedom of 120,000 Japanese Americans for the duration of the war (Japanese-American concentration camps), a majority of the detainees were US citizens.

See also

For those of you in the mood, RationalWiki has a fun article about Freedom.

• Liberalism
• Libertarianism
• Privacy

References