Author: tortminder

The terms “freedom” and “liberty” have become clichés in modern political parlance. Because these words are invoked so much by politicians and their ilk, their meanings are almost synonymous and used interchangeably. That’s confusing – and can be dangerous – because their definitions are actually quite different.

“Freedom” is predominantly an internal construct. Viktor Frankl, the legendary Holocaust survivor who wrote Man’s Search For Meaning, said it well: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way (in how he approaches his circumstances).”

In other words, to be free is to take ownership of what goes on between your ears, to be autonomous in thoughts first and actions second. Your freedom to act a certain way can be taken away from you – but your attitude about your circumstances cannot – making one’s freedom predominantly an internal construct.

On the other hand, “liberty” is predominantly an external construct. It’s the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views. The ancient Stoics knew this (more on that in a minute). So did the Founding Fathers, who wisely noted the distinction between negative and positive liberties, and codified that difference in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

The distinction between negative and positive liberties is particularly important, because an understanding of each helps us understand these seminal American documents (plus it explains why so many other countries have copied them). The Bill of Rights is a charter of negative liberties – it says what the state cannot do to you. However, it does not say what the state must do on your behalf. This would be a positive liberty, an obligation imposed upon you by the state.

Freedom comes from Old English, meaning “power of self-determination, state of free will; emancipation from slavery, deliverance.” There were similar variants in Old Frisian such as “fridom,” the Dutch “vrijdom,” and Middle Low German “vridom.”

Liberty comes from the Latin “libertatem” (nominative libertas), which means “civil or political freedom, condition of a free man; absence of restraint, permission.” It’s important to note that the Old French variant liberte, “free will,” has also shaped liberty’s meaning.

In short, freedom is inherent to humans. It exists within them by virtue of their humanity. Liberty is a political construct that allows people to enjoy freedoms such as property rights, free speech, freedom of association, etc.

Sadly, liberty has not been the natural state of mankind.

private property, free speech, and freedom of association are negative rights. In other words, these are rights that prevent others – above all, the state – from transgressing on you personally or on your property.

Along with these rights come responsibilities. In other words, you must bear the consequences of your actions as you exercise them.

Like all negative rights, free speech comes with responsibility; if you use that speech to spread information which is false and causes harm, then you’re not protected carte blanche. Others can petition the court for the panic you’ve caused as a result of your exercise of free speech.

On the other hand, positive rights are granted by the government and involve the trampling of an individual or another class of individuals’ rights. These kinds of rights – like state-funded healthcare or public education – are justified on abstract grounds, such as the “public good” or the “general will.” By their very nature, they require the state to take from one group in order to give to another, usually in the form of taxes.

Appeals to the general will originate from the famous 18th century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who emphasized that a strong government makes individuals free and that individuals submit to the state for the sake of the greater good. If that sounds backwards to you, you’re not alone. If you don’t want to go along with the “will of the people” (or as Rousseau defined it, “the general will”), then the state can compel you to do so – even if that means trampling your individual rights and responsibilities. Rousseau’s concept of freedom had nothing to do with the independence of the individual.

Jefferson’s philosophy held that an individual’s unalienable rights are not given to one in a document, but by their Creator (and subsequently codified in the Bill of Rights “in order to prevent the misconstruction or abuse of its powers” as it states in the preamble.) In other words, an unalienable right is God-given. It isn’t granted by a president, a king, or any government – otherwise it can be taken away.

The manipulation of what liberty and an individual’s rights and responsibilities constitute has already made its way to the U.S., where the lack of understanding of what liberty truly means has been apparent since the advent of the Progressive Era.

During this period, political pundits and economic theorists became obsessed with scientism, which is “the over-reliance on or over-application of the scientific method” as a means of trying to move society forward towards an ambiguous utopia. Instead of focusing on the defense of foundational principles like liberty and the rights and responsibilities of the individual, 20th-century intellectuals focused more on “scientific” ways to plan society from the top down.

Discussions about freedom and liberty – as well as the important distinction between negative and positive liberties, which form the bedrock of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights – have become quite quaint, as people use these words in Orwellian fashion to justify a litany of government intrusions in our lives. When we let their meanings become obscured, we cede to those whose underlying goal is more state power the ability to manipulate the public for their own tyrannical ends. We not only need to comprehend the differences between freedom and liberty, but also recover their original meaning so that there is foundational clarity in political discussions.