The Four Liberties

(The following is a post I wrote for my blog, but I'd like to re-propose it here.)

When I was a young boy, my father detailed to me the concept of the four liberties.  This was after a homework assignment in the sixth grade.  Of course, his was a simplified description, given my age, but it served me well until I could investigate the notions on my own.  He told me that one could not know what is being taken from them if one doesn’t know what one has.  The four liberties he described to me were natural, personal, civil and political.

What is Liberty?

The best and simplest way to define the general term “liberty” is, “freedom; exemption from extraneous control.  The power of the will, in its moral freedom, to follow the dictates of its unrestricted choice and to direct the external acts of the individual without restraint, coercion, or control from other persons“.  Hence, liberty, in all of its forms, is based upon the expression of the free will of the individual.

Natural Liberty

Natural liberty is the right which nature gives to all mankind to do as they wish with their persons and their property to achieve their own happiness, as long as they act within the limits of the laws of nature and that they do not abuse it to the harm of other people.  That is to say that you can’t do as you wish and trample on other people’s liberties or rights.  As a side note, “happiness” in this case does not mean “joy”, but rather “prosperity”.

Personal Liberty

Personal liberty deals with free will and being independent but also refers to a person’s unrestricted ability to move around or to go wherever they wish, as long as they are not under arrest or in prison for some crime. Obviously, you can’t just walk into another’s home without their permission or violate another’s rights in the process.

Civil Liberty

Civil liberty is natural liberty restrained by the written laws of the land.  The “restraint” is a general, social agreement as to what is permissible to assure equal liberties for the greater good of the public.  Another way to look at this is when a person is only controlled by laws which are required to prevent their violating the natural law in order to promote the greatest moral and physical good of the community in which they live.

Political Liberty

Political liberty is the last kind.  This is often mistaken for civil liberty.  Think of this as a type of freedom within secure borders where the People can enjoy their civil liberties under the constitution, the structure and the nature of their established government.  The political liberty of a state should be based upon only those essential laws which are set up for the distribution of legislative and executive powers.  Political liberty is supposed to give the citizen a sense of tranquility that their rights and persons are secure and have nothing to fear from other citizens, foreigners or from their own government.

From Where Do Our Liberties Come?

From what my father told me, the concept of liberty has been discussed by philosophers for as long as we have had organized societies in Europe. The Hellenic Greeks in the classical period called it “eleftheria“.  Of course, the Romans called it “libertas” and they codified it in their civil laws, through which the concepts spread to every corner of their empire.  These two societies contrasted the freedoms and rights between those of the masters and those of the slaves.  The master, or citizen, was defined by his liberties and free will in contradistinction to the lack thereof by the slaves that served them.

Nature or State?

The debate was based upon two, distinct perceptions of the source of our liberties.  One was natural, looking at our freedoms in a pure state of nature, unfettered by societal or governmental oversight.  The other was political, implying an external control over the expression of our liberties for the common good. This was a codification by mutual agreement in the form of customs, morals and the written laws based upon those societal accords.

Not all of the Greek philosophers favored natural liberty.  Plato and Socrates seemed to have preferred written law over the concept of an inherent, natural freedom, rendering rights and liberties as privileges based upon social and legal criteria.  Aristotle’s stance has been subject to much debate, but his views, taken up by St. Thomas Aquinas, were instituted into the Roman Catholic Canons.  Eventually, the Scotsman John Locke penned down the quintessential notions that underscored the principles of the Enlightenment and went into the convictions of the framers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.  For our purposes, rather than cite other, noted historical thinkers as Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Hobbes, Charles de Montesquieu, John Stuart Mill and Frédéric Bastiat, to name a few, we will rely on Locke as the definer of what we intend by liberty.  His was the greatest influence upon the founding fathers.

“In the state of nature, liberty consists of being free from any superior power on Earth.  People are not under the will or lawmaking authority of others but have only the law of nature for their rule.  In political society, liberty consists of being under no other lawmaking power except that established by consent in the commonwealth.  People are free from the dominion of any will or legal restraint apart from that enacted by their own constituted lawmaking power according to the trust put in it …  Freedom is constrained by laws in both the state of nature and political society.  Freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of nature.  Freedom of people under government is to be under no restraint apart from standing rules to live by that are common to everyone in the society and made by the lawmaking power established in it.  Persons have a right or liberty to follow their own will in all things that the law has not prohibited and not be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, and arbitrary wills of others.”- John Locke

Once these notions of liberty and free will sink in, it is easy to understand what our Founding Fathers envisioned as a free society; one where the People were the sovereigns and the privileges ascribed to the government they ratified into existence were to remain few.  The government was to remain non-intrusive and subservient to the will of the People and not the reverse.

What does it all mean?

It is obvious by the tenets delineated above that all personal, civil, and political activities should be conducted in the absence of force, aggression  or coercion.  In a free society, voluntary interactions between free people pursuing their own personal interests should be favored – especially in commerce and economics – over those based upon threats of violence, the loss of liberty and the theft of property.  

When you look at the state of affairs of our government’s activities today, do you believe that those within it are adhering to these principles to protect your liberties?