What is Liberty?

The original meaning of liberty was "protection against the tyranny of the political leaders." ¹

This protection consisted of limits that the people placed on their rulers. When rulers did something that the people thought was not consistent with these limits, then the people could claim that they were being denied their liberty.

Questions of liberty during the American revolutionary era emphasized civil or social freedom. This meant that the people were primarily concerned with the form of control or limits a government could have over their thoughts and actions. The major issues focused on how much power a government or the society could legally have to restrict, control or regulate their behavior. The leaders of the rebellion raised other concerns. They questioned the government's existence, the relationship between the government and its citizens and the people's rights in a society regardless of the government in power.

Below are a number of definitions of liberty that are useful in constructing a sense of what people have meant by this term. The different meanings also arose during the American revolutionary era.

• "In the Renaissance, liberty meant freedom to study classical literature and philosophy rather than just documents approved by the Roman Catholic Church.

• In the Protestant Reformation, liberty meant the right to private interpretation of the scriptures rather than hearing only the version interpreted by the Church.

• In the English (or Glorious) Revolution of 1688, liberty meant freedom from the over-control by the monarchy."
  Everett Dean Martin, Liberty (1930

• Liberty is "individual free self-assertion by each (person), allowing the greatest possible self-assertion to each (person), compatible with a like free self-assertion by everyone else."
  Eugene C. Gerhart, American liberty and natural law (1986)

• "The idea of liberty is one which each epoch reshapes to its own liking."
  Marc Bloch, The historian's craft (1942)

• "By Liberty, I understand the Power which every Man has over his own Actions, and his Right to enjoy the Fruit of his Labour, Art, and Industry, as far as by it he hurts not the Society, or any members of it, by taking from any Member, or by hindering him from enjoying what he himself enjoys. The Fruits of a Man's honest Industry are the just Rewards of it, ascertained to him by natural and eternal Equity, as is his Title to use them in the Manner which he thinks fit: And thus, with the above Limitations, every Man is sole Lord and Arbiter of his own private Actions and Property.

• "There is no word whatsoever that has admitted of more various significations, and has made more different impressions on human minds, than that of Liberty. Some have taken it for a facility of desposing a person on whom they had conferred a tyrannical authority; others for the power of choosing a person whom they are obliged to obey; others for the right of bearing arms, and of being thereby enabled to use violence; others in fine for the privilege of being governed by a native of their own country or by their own laws."
  Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws Book XI, ch. 2 (1748)

• "The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names--liberty and tyranny."
  Abraham Lincoln, Address at Sanitary Fair, Baltimore
  April 18, 1864

  ¹John Stuart Mill, On liberty, ed. David Spitz (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 3.

  Questions:

  1. In your own words, what is liberty?
  2. Do the authors of these definitions tend to be close or very different in their notions of what liberty is? Explain.
  3. Which of these definitions comes closest to the definition of those who opposed Parliament?
  4. Which of these definitions comes closest to the definition of the Loyalists and members of Parliament?

      

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