What Is Liberty?
A genealogy of a changing definition, Filmer to Berlin
Almost everyone says he favors freedom. The argument is over what freedom is: free from what, free to do what, and who gets to decide. Each time the definition moves, the meaning of law, rights, government, and equality moves with it. We follow the definition from Filmer to Berlin and argue that Lockean liberty, once the belief Locke assumed and could not secure is gone, is moral licence by definition.
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If there are no laws, are you free?
Imagine a society with no government and no law. A man is free to build what he wants, say what he wants, buy what he wants, and defend his property. He is also free to take another man’s property, refuse his debts, and settle disputes however he chooses, and so is everyone else. Is that the most liberty a man can have, or is he less free, because anyone stronger can take what he has?
Filmer: liberty as the absence of restraint
Robert Filmer states the popular definition in order to refute it, and he states it starkly. Locke quotes the sentence back at him in the Second Treatise:
The structure is the point. Liberty is the absence of restraint, so every law is a restraint and every restraint is liberty lost. Government is always a subtraction. Filmer draws the conclusion without flinching. Where every man does what he pleases, he writes, “it may be truly said, there is no government; for the end of government is that every man should not do what he pleases, or be his own judge in his own case.” On this definition there is a real tension between liberty and government, and Filmer refuses to wish it away. If freedom means no restraint, every law is a loss of freedom, and the only question left is how much loss a people will tolerate.
Locke: liberty as freedom from arbitrary will
Locke answers Filmer by name. “Freedom then is not what Sir Robert Filmer tells us,” he writes in §22, and he replaces the definition:
The question changes. Filmer asks how much a man is restrained. Locke asks who has the power to direct him. Law stops being the enemy of liberty, because a known, standing law binds everyone, including the man who would otherwise rule by whim. Locke puts it flatly in §57: where there is no law, there is no freedom.
The test. Take two cases. In the first, a general law says no person may enter another’s property without permission. A man’s freedom is constrained, and the same law protects him from everyone else. In the second, the king declares that this man may not use his property because the king does not like him. There is no general law, only another man’s will. For Locke the second case is the real enemy. Law can restrain action without destroying liberty. Arbitrary power destroys it, and that distinction is the foundation of classical liberalism.
What each one calls the evil
The contrast runs deeper than liberty against authority. Ask each man what the fundamental political evil is. For Locke it is arbitrary will. A man is unfree when he is subject to another man’s discretion rather than to a known, standing law, so bad government is arbitrary power and liberty is security from it. For Filmer it is disorder, the disorder that follows when men exercise liberty against the proper order of nature and authority. Bad order is rebellion and unrestrained will. Good government is authority that orders those wills toward the common good. So his own definition: the greatest liberty in the world is for a people to live under a monarch, and every other pretext of liberty is “a liberty only to destroy liberty.” Under it all is a claim about the will itself:
| FILMER | LOCKE | |
|---|---|---|
| Fundamental problem | Disorder. | Arbitrary will. |
| What causes it | Disordered desires, and rebellion against legitimate authority. | One man’s unchecked power over another. |
| What liberty is | Ordered freedom under legitimate authority. Natural liberty cannot exist. | Freedom from arbitrary will under a known, standing law. |
| What law does | Orders and restrains the will. | Defines and protects the sphere of liberty. |
| Primary danger | Anarchy and disorder. | Tyranny and arbitrary power. |
| Primary task | Preserve order. | Preserve liberty. |
What each thinker does with Locke
Montesquieu and the American founding build Locke’s answer into institutions: separated powers, independent courts, regular laws, consent, due process. The design question becomes how to build a government that cannot itself become arbitrary. The definition itself moves again with three later thinkers.
Mill: liberty becomes individual self-direction. On Liberty (1859) moves the Lockean idea toward autonomy. Locke asked whether a man is subject to another’s arbitrary will. Mill asks whether a man’s conduct harms anyone else, and what concerns mainly himself is his own affair:
Rousseau: a different direction. Rousseau asks whether a man can be free at all while governed by a will not his own. That sounds like Locke, but The Social Contract (1762) takes it elsewhere. Genuine freedom is self-government, and the individual becomes free by taking part in the general will. Locke wants freedom from another man’s will. Rousseau wants freedom through the general will, and the distance between those two is the political history of the next two centuries.
Berlin: the modern vocabulary. Isaiah Berlin named the two ideas in 1958. Negative liberty is freedom from interference, the absence of obstacles placed by other men, and it asks what a man is free from. Positive liberty is self-mastery, being the author of one’s own decisions rather than the instrument of outside forces, and it asks who or what controls a man’s life.
These definitions do not replace one another. They coexist, which is why two Americans can both say liberty, mean it sincerely, and mean different things.
Three men, one word
Three men can each say sincerely that he is defending freedom and each mean a different thing, because the definitions were built by different thinkers for different purposes.
| WHAT HE SAYS | WHICH LIBERTY | |
|---|---|---|
| The first | “You can’t tell me what to do.” | Negative liberty. |
| The second | “I’m not really free if I don’t have the education and economic opportunity to pursue my goals.” | Positive liberty. |
| The third | “Society shouldn’t allow people to make choices that destroy themselves.” | Liberty tied to human flourishing. |
Four definitions, four politics
| LIBERTY IS | SO THE POLITICS ARE |
|---|---|
| The absence of restraint | Minimize coercion. Government should do relatively little. |
| Protection from arbitrary power | Build institutions that make arbitrary government impossible: constitutions, separated powers, property rights, due process, the rule of law. This is the Lockean, classical liberal project. |
| Individual autonomy | Give each man a large private sphere in which he determines his own life. This is modern civil libertarianism. |
| The capacity for self-realization | Government supplies the conditions people need to be genuinely free, so intervention is justified in liberty’s own name. Ending poverty is freedom. Education is freedom. Dismantling the social structures that constrain a man is liberation. |
The fourth definition is the break. The demand moves from leave me alone to give me the conditions necessary to be free, and at that point one word licenses opposite programs.
Who defines the good?
Once liberty means a man’s ability to pursue his own purposes, the next question cannot be avoided: what if his purposes are evil? The older Christian tradition rejects the premise. Liberty, on that account, is not freedom from external constraint but freedom to live according to what is true and good. The question is not who controls me but what am I made for. Four questions sit under the whole debate: what is liberty, what is man, what is government, who determines the good. The last is deepest, because a man’s definition of liberty depends on his definition of the human person and the human good.
Lockean notions of freedom invariably bring moral licence.
Locke insisted otherwise. In §6 the state of nature is a state of liberty, “yet it is not a state of licence,” because the law of nature governs it. That law is known by unaided reason, and in the state of nature every man is its judge. Government exists only to secure life, liberty, and property. It takes no position on the good life, and the Letter Concerning Toleration puts the care of souls outside the magistrate’s business.
So the only barrier between Lockean liberty and licence is each man’s private assent to a natural law with God behind it. Locke saw the dependency himself. The Letter refuses toleration to atheists, because without God, he says, promises and oaths have no hold. He could exclude unbelievers from the polity, but he could not make anyone believe, and he had already put belief outside government’s business. Once God drops out of the public argument, nothing else has to change. The individual is still the judge of the good, government is still neutral on ends, and the only remaining limit on freedom is the will of other men. Mill states the result: power may be used against a man only to prevent harm to others. Berlin completes it: freedom is measured by the absence of obstacles, not by the worth of what is chosen.
A freedom whose only boundary is other men’s rights protects every self-regarding choice equally, the noble and the degrading alike. That is licence, and it is not an abuse of Locke’s definition but the definition itself, once the belief Locke assumed and could not secure is gone.
Every thinker in the genealogy asked where liberty stops. The Christian tradition asks the question underneath all of them: free for what? If freedom has no objective end, liberty becomes the freedom to define one’s own ends, and the political argument is no longer about how much government we should have. It is about who gets to say what a human being is, and what human beings are for.
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Texts and editions
The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611), for the New Testament.
Robert Filmer, Observations upon Aristotle’s Politiques (London, 1652): the definition of liberty is the passage Locke cites at Second Treatise §22 as “Observations, A. 55,” and the sentence on government is quoted as printed in Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Robert Filmer, Patriarcha, ch. I, in Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Sommerville. The 1680 printing reads “the first cause of the fall of Adam.”
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), Second Treatise §§6, 22, 57, 123–124, and A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), on the care of souls and on atheists.
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), book XI, chs. 3–6, and book XII, ch. 2.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762), book I, chs. 6–8.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London, 1859), ch. 1.
Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969).
From What, and to What? None Gives What He Has Not.
Published by Beyond Left and Right. Filmer is quoted from Sommerville’s edition, Locke by section number, and the New Testament from the King James Version. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com