Liberté (freedom) was, along with brotherhood (see fraternity) and equality, one of the great rallying cries of the French Revolution, and it has been, in one guise or another, an unarguable value of most societies ever since. Inevitably there are dozens of versions of freedom as a supreme political virtue. At its most basic, the demand for freedom is the claim that every human has the right to do exactly what they want to do, at any time, provided only that they do not infringe the equal right of every other individual to a similar freedom. There are very few arguments positively to prove this doctrine, because, like equality, it is usually taken as an obvious natural right, the infringements of which require justification.
There are three major aspects of freedom which have been politically important. Historically the earliest has not been a notion of individual freedom, but of national freedom as endless nations have sought to throw off foreign domination; even today the ‘wars of national liberation’ are still with us, notably in Eastern Europe, and the idea of a ‘free people’ is still a vital coin in political currency. This ideal, of course, says nothing at all about the political and social ties to be found inside the liberated state. The second most important strand historically has been the fight for individualistic, ‘legal’, freedom, originally the demands of the rising economic bourgeoisie for equal political rights and economic laissez-faire against the feudal aristocracies.
This was the essential meaning of liberté to the French revolutionaries. Developing from this has been the demand for civil liberties, for specified basic freedoms that are held to be essential to the chance for man as an individual and for mankind generally to develop and progress. Hence come demands for freedom of assembly, of association, of speech and of religious practice. Within the inevitable limits of imperfection, the basic human freedoms of this sort are available in Western democracies, although economic freedom is often held to have been severely limited in the last few decades by the need for state involvement in controlling the economy. The third broad current in discussions of freedom has come from socialism. It is here held that freedom consists not only in legal permission to do or be something, but in the possibility of so doing. Thus, for example, some socialists would argue that we have very little freedom of expression in modern democracies, because while there is no legal censorship, the media is dominated by capitalist enterprises, or the state, and thus rival, radical, views are prevented from being expressed. Any socio-economic barrier to the carrying out of desires is thus held to be an infringement on freedom, with the obvious inference that there can be no liberty without equality. Much of the clash between these second and third meanings of political freedom relates to deep philosophical divisions in the debate often described as being between the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ conceptions of liberty.
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