04/29/2009: "on liberty and freedom"

oft ist es die deutsche sprache, die dort noch einmal differenziert, wo andere sprachen sich mit nur einem ausdruck begnügen. bei der "freiheit" ist es allerdings anders: während chinesen angeblich gar kein wort hierfür kennen, und wir deutschen eben nur das eine, macht man im land of the free standesgemäß noch einmal eine unterscheidung - nämlich die zwischen "liberty" und "freedom". indes ist eine grenzziehung zwischen den beiden termini (anscheinend auch für native speakers!) nicht leicht zu bewerkstelligen. im folgenden zwei schöne beiträge, die einfach zu wertvoll erschienen um irgendwann aus dem web zu verschwinden:

What We're Fighting For? - The difference between liberty and freedom.
by Geoffrey Nunberg

What exactly are we fighting for? In his speech to the nation on Wednesday, President Bush said it was to "defend our freedom" and "bring freedom to others." Nowadays, Americans always go to war under the banner of freedom, ours or theirs: Operation Iraqi Freedom follows Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.

There was a time when the campaign would have been fought in the name of liberty. The recent efforts to rebaptize French fries as "freedom fries" contrast with the World War I renaming of sauerkraut as "liberty cabbage" and dachshunds as "liberty dogs." Freedom fries may have owed something to alliteration, but liberty was much more prominent in the patriotic lexicon back then than it is now. Americans bought liberty bonds and planted liberty gardens; factories turned out liberty trucks and liberty aircraft engines.

If it ever came to all that today, it's a safe bet that we would be talking about freedom bonds and freedom trucks. For that matter, a modern patriot who was writing the Pledge of Allegiance from scratch would probably conclude it "with freedom and justice for all."

This shift from liberty to freedom is a subtle one, which few other languages would even be able to express. The French national motto is usually translated as "Liberty, equality, fraternity," but liberté could as easily be translated as freedom.

Even in English, the words can sometimes seem to be equivalent. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin used them more or less interchangeably in his essay "Two Concepts of Liberty," and so did the historian Eric Foner in his "Story of American Freedom," which traces the evolution of the concept from Colonial times. Indeed, the words are often incanted in the same breath. "The issue is freedom and liberty," Mr. Bush said a few days before the war began. Or as the Grateful Dead said, "Ooo, freedom/ Ooo, liberty/ Ooo, leave me alone."

But English hasn't taken the trouble to retain all those pairs of Anglo-Saxon and Latin near synonyms just so its thesauruses could be heftier. There's a difference between friendship and amity, or a paternal manner and a fatherly one.

Liberty and freedom are distinct, as well. As the political theorist Hanna Fenichel Pitkin has observed, liberty implies a system of rules, a "network of restraint and order," hence the word's close association with political life. Freedom has a more general meaning, which ranges from an opposition to slavery to the absence of psychological or personal encumbrances (no one would describe liberty as another name for nothing left to lose).

But the two words have been continually redefined over the centuries, as Americans contested the basic notion of what it means to be free. For the founders of the nation, liberty was the fundamental American value. That was a legacy of the conception of "English liberty," with which Britons proudly distinguished themselves from the slavish peoples of the Continent who were unprotected from the arbitrary power of the state. Echoing John Locke, the Declaration of Independence speaks of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The text doesn't mention freedom at all. It was liberty that Patrick Henry declared himself willing to die for, and liberty that the ringing bell in Philadelphia proclaimed on July 8, 1776.

Liberty remained the dominant patriotic theme for the following 150 years, even if freedom played an important role, particularly in the debates over slavery. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address began by invoking a nation "conceived in liberty," but went on to resolve that it should have a "new birth of freedom."

But "freedom" didn't really come into its own until the New Deal period, when the defining American values were augmented to include the economic and social justice that permitted people free development as human beings. Of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms — of speech, of religion, from want and from fear — only the first two might have been expressed using "liberty.'

The civil rights movement made "freedom now" its rallying cry. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used "freedom" 19 times in his "I Have a Dream" speech, and liberty only twice. Feminists extended freedom to cover reproductive rights, while Timothy Leary spoke of the "fifth freedom . . . the freedom to expand your own consciousness."

But as Professor Foner has observed, freedom is too central in the American consciousness to remain the property of one political side. The conservative reclaiming of the word began during the cold war, when it was expanded to include the benefits of free markets and the consumer choices they provided. Then, too, freedom was a conveniently vague label used to describe free-world allies like Franco's Spain, whose commitment to liberty was questionable.

President Ronald Reagan understood the power that "freedom" had acquired. His second Inaugural Address mentioned freedom 14 times and liberty only once. But in the mouth of Mr. Reagan and other conservatives, freedom conveyed what Isaiah Berlin called its negative sense, an absence of constraints on markets and individual action. Mr. Reagan's program of "economic freedom" included deregulation, tax cuts and a weakening of unions, which earlier conservatives had championed in the name of the "liberty of employers."

The invocation of freedom became as reflexive for the right as it had been for New Deal Democrats and those in the civil rights movement. Opponents of civil rights legislation appealed to "freedom of association," and opponents of affirmative action have spoken of "freedom from race." On the National Rifle Association's Web site, the word freedom is three times as frequent as the word liberty.

But as the expanding use of "freedom" makes every policy and program a part of the national mission, "liberty" has receded from the patriotic vocabulary. If we still venerate the word now, it's less as a rallying cry than as a stand-in for the legalistic niceties that the founders took such trouble over. That's why the word still comes up when the conversation turns to the domestic war on terrorism, whether in the expression "civil liberties" or standing alone.

Lately, Bush administration figures have been trying to wrest the word from the critics of their homeland security measures.

When a special appeals court upheld the wiretap provisions of the USA Patriot Act a few months ago, Attorney General John Ashcroft called the decision "a victory for liberty, safety and the security of the American people." And last week, the secretary of homeland security, Tom Ridge, announced Operation Liberty Shield, which will step up surveillance of those suspected of terrorist ties and authorize indefinite detention of asylum-seekers from certain nations.

BUT many still hold that liberty and safety, like guns and butter, are notions that are more appropriately opposed than conjoined. They're mindful of Benjamin Franklin's warning that "they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Right now, "Iraqi Freedom" conveys something more basic than "American freedom" suggests — it is simply emancipation from tyranny, not a choice of S.U.V.'s or an end to double taxation of dividends. The Iraqis may someday enjoy those more advanced varieties of freedom. Ultimately, they may even enjoy liberty. But that will require more time, and as we have had ample opportunity to learn, eternal vigilance.

Sunday New York Times, Week in Review, of March 23, 2003.

Freedom vs. Liberty
by Joseph R. Stromberg

English is a language blessed, or cursed, with an overflowing wordhoard. 30% or so of our vocabulary comes to use from Old English (with some reinforcement from Old Norse). To this Germanic base, the Norman Conquest added tens of thousands of Norman French words – very roughly 60% of the whole vocabulary. There was a constant trickle of new borrowings from Scandinavian languages, Low German, and Dutch down the centuries. The Renaissance encouraged borrowing of learned terms from Latin and Greek. These last make up a good part of the last ten or so percent of our usable words. To tangle things even more, English explorations and conquests brought in words from India, the Americas, and Australia.

If we wish to speak of the ruler, we have a choice of "regal" (Latin), "royal" (French/Latin), "imperial" (Latin), or "kingly" (Old English). Owing partly to the efforts of pro-Saxon 19th-century English writers, we now have resort to the English core vocabulary ("native" or Anglo-Saxon) when we write in elevated style. Tolkien’s works, for example, show a much lower presence of French/Latin words than would be met with elsewhere. Still, English remains an interesting mixed tongue. Thus it is not suprising that we should have two words for such a fundamental notion as freedom or liberty.

I begin on the ground of etymology: "Liberty" derives from Latin libertas, from liber, "free."

A curious aspect of this word is that Romans used liberi (plural) to mean "children." The French linguist Émile Benveniste explains this on the basis of a Roman marriage formula, which gave the procreation of more free persons as the purpose of marriage ("to obtain free [beings]"). Such children would be free as members of a class or community of free persons (as opposed to slaves).

What are the wider connections of liber? It seems the word arises from common Indo-European *leudhos, from which came Greek eleutheros, "free," as in Eleutherian. There is an allied verb in Germanic: Gothic luidan and Old English leodan, meaning "to grow." German Leute, "people," stems from this verb, as did Old English leod, which lives on in poetry as "leed." Slavic ljudu and Lithuanian liáudis both mean "people" and reflect *leudhos. Hence, the original or ur-meaning had to do with growth, specifically the growth of a kin group, within which one was free.

English got "liberty" as Norman-French liberté - Latin libertas, an abstract noun deriving from liber, which also gives us "liberal," "liberate," and other words. Down through all those medieval charters we can follow the course of libertates – freedoms, privileges, or reserved rights – which nobles, landed gentry, and burghers sometimes cowed kings into acknowledging. It remained for the liberal thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries to theorize a generalized notion of liberty.

Turning to our Germanic (Old English) words, "free" and "freedom," we find their source in Indo-European *priyos, meaning "dear" or "one’s own." Cognate (kin) words include Sanskrit priyas and Persian (Avestan) fryo, both meaning "dear," Sanskrit prináti, "pleases," and Slavic prijatel, "friend." By the time we reach the Celtic and Germanic tongues, we find ourselves on home-ground with Welsh rhyyd, "free," and in Germanic – Gothic frijon, "to love," freis, "free," and freihals, "freedom." Old English freo and feols answer to the last two Gothic terms.

Freihals is interesting in that it literally means "free-neck" (hals, "neck," lives on in German Hals and Scots hawse), that is, the status of one who does not bend the neck or wear the collar of servitude, or as Winfred Lehmann puts it, "one who is possessor of his own neck as opposed to a slave who is the property of his master." Very literal-minded, these ancestors of ours! Given the root meanings of *priyos, it is not shocking to find that Gothic frijonds, Old English freond, English friend, and German Freund, and so on, are also built on that stem. There is also, apparently, a connection with Old English frith and German Frieden, "peace." With differing suffixes are built German Freiheit (= "free-hood") and English "freedom." (The Old English suffix -dom comes from Indo-European *dhê-, "set, settle, establish," which yields Greek thesis and thema ["theme"] and probably Sanskrit dharma, not to mention English "deem" and "doom.")

This is a striking field of meanings: "dear," "one’s own," "friends," "peace," "freedom," and so forth. As with *leudhos, "freedom" seems wholly bound up with life in small communities. Can republican theory and radical decentralization be far behind? Benveniste, who is very helpful on the etymologies, believed that they showed that freedom is granted by the community. As a follower of Marcel Mauss, and therefore of Durkheim, he could not have done otherwise. It makes more sense to say that "freedom" is only meaningful in society: "Freedom is a sociological concept. It is meaningless to apply it to conditions outside society: as can be well seen from the confusions prevailing everywhere in the celebrated free-will controversy" (Ludwig von Mises, Socialism [Jonathan Cape, 1936], p. 191).

A third word root of some interest here is Indo-European *s(w)e-, "self." Derivatives include Greek ethos, ethic- (*swedh-), Latin sodalitas, "religious society" (*swed-), and English "sib" and "self" (all with various suffixes added to *s(w)e-. One could add Greek idios, "one’s own," "private," (*s(w)id-, with different vocalism) whence "idiot," the man who thinks of nothing but his own interest). *S(w)e- is the basis of most reflexive and many third-person possessive pronouns in the Indo-European languages, including Latin, se, suus, sua, suum, Spanish su, and Slavic svoj-. The latter is interesting, as it seems to provide the first syllable of the pan-Slavic word for freedom: svobodá. Only the lack of a good Slavic etymological dictionary keeps me from dogging its footsteps further.

It is just as well to stop the word-kinship quest here. Otherwise, I would be tempted to make a purely etymological argument for freedom-as-self-ownership ("possessor of his own neck") and the philosophers would become very cross indeed. As for the semantic range of "liberty" and "freedom," as they have come down to us, it seems that our native word is looser than the French/Latin one. We speak of "free play" (in mechanics), "free will," "free stuff," "free fall," and iceboxes that are "frost-free" (where "free" = "unburdened with"). It is easy to see how confusion might creep in. Careless thinkers might take freedom to mean getting goodies from the state.

Even so, "freedom" seems a bit more world-bound or concrete than "liberty." The latter conjures up the abstract public liberty in relation to the state. I expect that in practice we shall go on using the two words rather interchangeably, even if they are not exact synonyms in their full semantic range. It is said that Chinese has no word, as such, for freedom. That would be interesting, if true, but I am more than ready to be set right on this point, if not. Ancient Sumerian had ama-gi, the cuneiform script for which you will find all over the endpapers of any book published by Liberty Fund.

Communal, decentralized, republican or otherwise, liberty and freedom are very old notions with a pedigree at least as impressive as those of any opposing concepts. It would be premature, then, to agree with the song-wright who claimed that "freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose." Freedom might well be the very "thing" it is most important not to lose.