Liberty is the ability of individuals to have agency (control over their own actions). There are different conceptions of liberty, which articulate the relationship of individuals to society in different ways, including some which relate to life under a "social contract" or to existence in a "state of nature", and some which see the active exercise of freedom and rights as essential to liberty. Understanding liberty involves how we imagine the roles and responsibilities of the individual in society in relationship to conceptions of free will and determinism, which involves the larger domain of metaphysics.
The following are books published by Gryphon Editions in the Classics of Liberty Library series. The Classics of Liberty Library includes classic books about freedom, liberty, politics, justice and American history. This series contains both full leather and quarter
bound volumes.
Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke - 1992
Speeches and Writings of Abraham Lincoln - 1992
Two Treatises of Government by John Locke - 1992
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill - 1992
Areopagitica by John Milton - 1992
Common Sense and The Rights of Man (together in 1 volume) by Thomas Paine - 1992
The Framing of the Constitution of the United States by Max Farrand - 1992
Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville - 1992
The American Commonwealth by James Bryce - volume one 1993 - volume two 1997
Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington - 1993
The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster With an Essay on Daniel Webster as a Master of English Style by Edwin P. Whipple - 1993
A Vindication of The Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft - 1993
The Debate on the Constitution: federalist and antifederalist speeches, articles, and letters during the struggle over ratification - 1993
Men and Books Famous in the Law by Frederick C. Hicks - 1994
Democracy by Thomas Jefferson - 1994
An Inquiry into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith - 1994
A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution of the United States by Joseph Story - 1994
Congressional Government by Woodrow Wilson - 1994
The English Constitution by Walter Bagehot - 1995
Scenes in The Life of Harriet Tubman by Sarah H. Bradford - 1995
A disquisition on government; and A discourse on the Constitution and government of the United States by John C Calhoun - 1995
Essays, The First Series and The Second Series by Ralph Waldo Emerson - 1995
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - 1995
Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman and Rose D Friedman - 1995
Hume's Moral and Political Philosophy by David Hume - 1995
The Republic by Plato - 1995
St. Thomas Aquinas on Law and Justice - 1996
The Politics of Aristotle - 1996
Four Essays on Liberty by Sir Isaiah Berlin - 1996
The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle - 2 volumes - 1996
Democracy of The Constitution: and other addresses and essays by Henry Cabot Lodge - 1996
The Man Versus The State by Herbert Spencer - 1996
Freedom of Speech by Zechariah Chaffee - 1996
The Degradation of The Democratic Dogma by Henry Adams - 1997
Essays on Political Economy by Frederic Bastiat - 1997
Utopia with The Dialogue of Comfort by Sir Thomas More - 1997
Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman - 1997
An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony - 1997
Maxims of George Washington, Political, Social, Moral, and Religious by John Frederick Schroeder - 1997
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity by Sir James Stephen - 1997
The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc - 1998
The Orations of Demosthenes: pronounced to excite the Athenians against Philip, King of Macedon by Thomas Leland Demosthenes - 1998
The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and addresses of Learned Hand together with the Bill of Rights - 1998
Popular Government: Four Essays by Henry Sumner Maine - 1998
A Critical Examination of Socialism by William Hurrell Mallock - 1998
Culture and Anarchy: an Essay in Political and Social Criticism by Matthew Arnold - 1999
Lectures introductory to the study of the law of the Constitution by Albert Venn Dicey - 1999
The Constitution of Liberty by Friedrich A von Hayek - 1999
The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Santayana by Russell Kirk - 1999
On Civil Liberty and Self-Government by Francis Lieber - 1999
The Real Roosevelt, his forceful and fearless utterances on various subjects by Theodore Roosevelt - 1999
Letters on the Study and Use of History by St John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke 2000
Addresses and Orations of Rufus Choate - 2000
The Challenge to Liberty by Herbert Hoover - 2000
Concerning Justice by Lucillius A. Emery - 2001
History of the Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770 by Frederic Kidder - 2001
An inquiry into the principles of the good society by Walter Lippmann - 2001
The Logic of Liberty: Reflections and Rejoinders by Michael Polanyi - 2001
Letters Concerning the English Nation by Voltaire - 2001
The Fathers of the Constitution: A chronicle of the establishment of the Union by Max Farrand - 2002
The Constitution of England by Jean Louis de Lolme - 2002
Crisis in Freedom: The Allen and Sedition Acts by John Chester Miller - 2002
Democracy and Leadership by Irving Babbit - 2003
The Reconciliation of Government with Liberty by John William Burgess - 2003
The American Democrat, or Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America by James Fenimore Cooper - 2003
The Evolution of The Constitution of the United States by Sydney George Fisher - 2003
Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt - 2003
The High Court of Parliament and Its Supremacy: An Historical Essay on the Boundaries Between Legistration and Adjudication in England by Charles Howard McIlwain - 2003
A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger by James Alexander - 2004
Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review by John Hart Ely - 2004
The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A von Hayek - 2004
Liberty and Tyranny by Francis W. Hirst - 2004
The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation by Charles Howard McIlwain - 2004
On Compromise by John Morley - 2004
Congress, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court by Charles Warren - 2004
The Lost German Slave Girl: The Extraordinary True Story of Sally Miller and her Fight For Freedom In Old New Orleans by John Bailey - 2005
The American Republic: its constitution, tendencies, and destiny by Orestes A. Brownson - 2005
Hue and Cry: The story of Henry and John Fielding and their bow street runners by Patrick Pringle - 2005
The Evolution of Modern Liberty by George L. Scherger - 2005
The American Constitution As It Protects Private Rights by Frederic Jesup Stimson - 2005
A History of Freedom of Thought by J. B. Bury - 2006
The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System by Milovan Djilas - 2006
The Paradoxes of Freedom by Sidney Hook - 2006
Daniel Webster by Henry Cabot Lodge - 2006
The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner - 2006
Common Sense in Law by Paul Vinogradoff - 2006
Twilight of Authority by Robert Nisbet - 2007
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Individualist and classical liberal conceptions of liberty typically consist of the freedom of individuals from outside compulsion or coercion, also known as negative liberty. This conception of liberty, which coincides with the Libertarian point-of-view, suggests that people should, must, and ought to behave according to their own free will, and take responsibility for their actions, while in contrast, Social liberal conceptions of (positive liberty) liberty place an emphasis upon social structure and agency and is therefore directed toward ensuring egalitarianism.
Philosophy
Liberty is a historically controversial philosophy. One understanding of liberty asserts that freedom is found in a person's ability to exercise agency, particularly in the sense of one having the freedom to choose what authorities one will submit to agency with in exchange for rights derived from that authority to develop resources to carry out their own will, without being inhibited; Social Contract. According to Thomas Hobbes, for example, "a free man is he that... is not hindered to do what he hath the will to do."
John Stuart Mill, in his work, On Liberty, was the first to recognize the difference between liberty as the freedom to act and liberty as the absence of coercion. In his book, Two Concepts of Liberty, Isaiah Berlin formally framed the differences between these two perspectives as the distinction between two opposite concepts of liberty: positive liberty and negative liberty. The latter designates a negative condition in which an individual is protected from tyranny and the arbitrary exercise of authority, while the former refers to having the means or opportunity, rather than the lack of restraint, to do things.
Mill offered insight into the notions of soft tyranny and mutual liberty with his harm principle. It can be seen as important to understand these concepts when discussing liberty since they all represent little pieces of the greater puzzle known as freedom. In a philosophical sense, it can be said that morality must supersede tyranny in any legitimate form of government. Otherwise, people are left with a societal system rooted in backwardness, disorder, and regression.
Liberty and political thought
The first known use of the word freedom in a political context dates back to the 24th century BC, in a text describing the restoration of social and economic liberty in Lagash, a Sumerian city-state. Urukagina, the king of Lagash, established the first known legal code to protect citizens from the rich and powerful. Known as a great reformer, Urukagina established laws that forbade compelling the sale of property and required the charges against the accused to be stated before any man accused of a crime could be punished. This is the first known example of any form of due process in the history of humanity.
Like Urukagina, most ancient freedoms focused on negative liberty, protecting the less fortunate from harassment or imposition. Other ancient legal codes, such as the Code of Hammurabi, similarly forbade compulsion in economic matters, like the sale of land, and made it clear that when a rich man murders a poor one, it is still murder. Still, these codes depended on a certain virtuousness of kings and ministers, which was far from reliable.
The modern concept of liberty has its origins in the Greek concepts of freedom and slavery. To be free, to the Greeks, was to not have a master, to be independent from a master (to live like one likes). That was the original Greek concept of freedom. It is closely linked with the concept of democracy, as Aristotle put it:
"This, then, is one note of liberty which all democrats affirm to be the principle of their state. Another is that a man should live as he likes. This, they say, is the privilege of a freeman, since, on the other hand, not to live as a man likes is the mark of a slave. This is the second characteristic of democracy, whence has arisen the claim of men to be ruled by none, if possible, or, if this is impossible, to rule and be ruled in turns; and so it contributes to the freedom based upon equality."
So to the Greeks democracy was the system of government of a free society.
The populations of the Persian Empire enjoyed some degree of freedom. Citizens of all religions and ethnic groups were given the same rights and had the same freedom of religion, women had the same rights as men, and slavery was abolished(550 BC). All the palaces of the kings of Persia were built by paid workers in an era where slaves typically did such work.
In the Buddhist Maurya Empire of ancient India, citizens of all religions and ethnic groups had some rights to freedom, tolerance, and equality. The need for tolerance on an egalitarian basis can be found in the Edicts of Ashoka the Great, which emphasize the importance of tolerance in public policy by the government. The slaughter or capture of prisoners of war was also condemned by Ashoka. Slavery was also non-existent in the Maurya Empire. However, according to Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund, "Ashoka's orders seem to have been resisted right from the beginning."
Roman law also embraced certain limited forms of liberty, even under the rule of the Roman Emperors. However, these liberties were accorded only to Roman citizens. Still, the Roman citizen enjoyed a combination of positive liberty (the right to a trial, a right of appeal, law and contract enforcement) and negative liberty (unhindered right to contract and the right to not be tortured). Many of the liberties enjoyed under Roman law endured through the Middle Ages, but were enjoyed solely by the nobility, never by the common man. The idea of unalienable and universal liberties had to wait until the Age of Enlightenment.
Social contract
The social contract theory, invented by Hobbes, John Locke and Rousseau, were among the first to provide a political classification of rights, in particular through the notion of sovereignty and of natural rights. The thinkers of the Enlightenment reasoned the assertion that law governed both heavenly and human affairs, and that law gave the king his power, rather than the king's power giving force to law. The divine right of kings was thus opposed to the sovereign's unchecked auctoritas. This conception of law would find its culmination in Montesquieu's thought. The conception of law as a relationship between individuals, rather than families, came to the fore, and with it the increasing focus on individual liberty as a fundamental reality, given by "Nature and Nature's God," which, in the ideal state, would be as expansive as possible. The Enlightenment created then, among other ideas, liberty: that is, of a free individual being most free within the context of a state which provides stability of the laws. Within the context of social liberty, in On Liberty, John Stuart Mill sought to define the "nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual” and as such, he describes an inherent and continuous antagonism between liberty and authority and thus, the prevailing question becomes "how to make the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social control"
Spinoza's critique of free will
This individualist conception of liberty, based on free will, was not however shared by all philosophers. Spinoza criticed this notion as a conception of the human being as an "empire in an empire", that is as a reality autonomous from Nature and its laws. According to Spinoza, to be free is not to be able to do whatever one wants (which is only submission to one's passions), but to achieve knowledge of God, identified in Spinoza's immanence philosophy with Nature. Thus, the illusion that determinism is opposed to liberty endures only as long as one does not know the laws governing their actions. Hegel also criticized the notion of individual freedom which made, as in the social contract theory, the individual atom the foundation of society. According to him, subjectivity was only the effect of a previous intersubjectivity: the you and the we preceded the I, a conception which would be later explored by phenomenology and Lacan's psychoanalytic theories on the Mirror stage.
19th century philosophy and the dialectics between liberty and equality
The first half of the 19th century for Western civilization was marked by a series of turbulent wars and revolutions, such as the Revolutions of 1848, which gradually formed into an idea and doctrine now identified as individual liberty. As exposed by the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the chief philosophical ground for "liberty" in this most recent period has been the idea of human rights and civil rights, and that human beings are too valuable to be in slavery (as well as the idea that human beings ought to control their own destiny). Much of this philosophy stems from religious views, although Christians, Jews, Muslims and followers of other religions have often practiced slavery in the past.
The conception of individual liberty was criticized from different angles by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Socialist conceptions (both anarchist and marxist, since the division between these two political philosophies would stem from their difference in appreciation of the role of the state) criticized the "formal liberties" explicited by the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which Marx called the "rights of the egoistic bourgeois". Marx argued that Civic rights such as freedom of expression were only abstract rights insofar as the material conditions to exercice them were not insured. For example, concentration of media ownership would be said by marxists as impeding the effective exercice of one's right to free expression, selecting which categories of person have the possibility to express themselves in the media. Thus, equality was seen as a main component of a society's grade of liberty. Liberty without equality, anarchists argue to this day, is only the "freedom of the powerful to exploit the weak".
20th century philosophy
The socialist and, in particular, marxist conception of liberty has harshly criticized the liberal conceptions of an individual freedom, based on the social contract or on a system of checks and balances, as first theorized by Montesquieu. Following the 1917 revolution, the world divided itself into two blocs, one claiming to be the "free world" while the other pretended to be the revolutionary representative of the proletariat. After World War II, neoliberal thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek argued that liberty, far from being improved by social justice and equality, was in fact endangered by socialist regimes practicing centrally-planned economics. However, Hayek's definition of a "socialist regime" would include, in fact, many representative democracies which had turned themselves into welfare states, such as Germany or France.
Eastern civilization
The Chinese sage Lao Tsu warned against over-reaching governments, in a way analogous to the development in the western world of post-Lockean ideas of negative liberty. He taught that government by example and "not doing" (wú wéi) was superior to government by law and discipline.
Middle Eastern civilization
The Jewish religious tradition features several individuals who stood up to statist power at crucial moments, including Moses, who demanded that the Pharaoh of Egypt "let my people go." The Maccabees rebelled against mandatory assimilation to Greek culture and the Zealots (less successfully) rose against the Roman Empire.
Muslim jurists have long held that the legal tradition initiated by the Qur'an includes a principle of permissibility, or Ibahah, especially as applied to commercial transaction. "Nothing in them is forbidden," said Ibn Taymiyyah, "unless God and His Messenger have decreed them to be forbidden." The idea is founded upon two verses in the Qur'an, 4:29 and 5:1.
Liberty statues and monuments
A temple was erected to the goddess Liberty on the Aventine Hill in Rome by the father of Tiberius Gracchus during the second Punic War. A statue of the goddess Liberty was also put up by Clodius on the site of Cicero's house after it had been pulled down.
A Statue of Liberty now exists at the entrance to New York harbour in the United States. The copper statue of the goddess of Liberty was a present from the Republic of France, as a centennial gift to the US and a sign of friendship between the two nations. The pedestal was constructed by the United States. The Statue of Liberty is often used as a symbol of the ideals of the United States, and in particular of liberty in general; as such it is a favored symbol of US libertarians.
The Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, United States is dedicated to World War I and World War II victories for liberty against the Central Powers and the Axis Powers.
Source and additional information: Liberty