Such is the rhetorical appeal of the idea of liberty that a variety of political philosophiesclaim to honour it. Republicans and Marxists, no less than libertarians and liberals,maintain that they and they alone are the true defenders of freedom. The literature ofcontemporary political theory is thus replete with rival analyses of the meaning ofliberty, and disputes about its measurement, distribution and institutional requirements. Our aim here is to gain some understanding of the meaning and the conditionsof liberty by working through the thicket of contemporary argument, though we mayhave to rest content with a better knowledge of the terrain.
Citation: Castle, Clara Francelia. Perfect liberty. Senior thesis, Kansas State Agricultural College, 1894. ; Morse Department of Special Collections ; Introduction: Man early shared the love of greater gain, which generated oppression and bondage. The question of liberty has been the thought and highest interest of the nations. Much study has been put upon the beginnings and growth of liberty; and to understand its nature, has been the desire of man. Often, for the best growth of liberty, there must be revolution and bloodshed, before it can be fully established. The settlement of the colonies, the separation from England, and the civil war, examples of revolution that were necessary, for the higher advancement of liberty. Individual and civil liberty are closely connected. Religion, society, and custom, may be transformed into a yoke that binds. The final triumph, when perfect liberty will exist.
Fundamental ideas.--The influence of the discovery of steam and the mechanical inventions upon industry.--The industrial corporation.--The relation of the railway and the "Trust" to industrial liberty.--The influence of the "Trusts" and other parasites upon industrial liberty.-- Obstacles in the way of reform.--Protection.--Paternal government.--England and America; the relation of each to industrial liberty. ; Mode of access: Internet.
James Baker will provide a close reading of our selection of James Gillray prints, using the idea of liberty - central to British identity - in order to draw out the contemporary and historical questions of freedom, fashion, bodies, and politics contained by the prints on display at Nottingham Contemporary. Baker is the convenor of Cradled in Caricature, a multidisciplinary project that approaches the notion of caricature in its broadest sense - using it as a jumping-off point to discuss exaggeration, stereotyping, representation, and characterisation.
As an attribute of the people, liberty is self-protection from the abuse of power. It further is republican government, the rule of law, and civic independence, or it is the result of the same. Meanwhile, intelligence is an attribute of the great, and oppression is the goal of their ambitions. Machiavelli designates the people as the guardian of liberty. He appears to be their champion and the champion of republican constitutionalism. But Machiavelli is also an inveterate admirer of expansionist Rome, designating it the republic most worthy for imitation by moderns. He takes this position despite admitting that Rome destroyed every republic in the ancient world; he even boasts that Rome's glory was all the more remarkable because the love of liberty made Rome's adversaries incomparably obstinate. Does liberty then merely serve the end of glory, or has Machiavelli other relationships and valuations in mind?
Liberty is the essence of human nature and is necessary for optimal health. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government placed unprecedented restrictions on personal liberty in the name of public health, confining millions of Americans to their homes, forcing hundreds of thousands of businesses and parks to close, shuttering abortion clinics, heavily regulating churches, monitoring gatherings in private homes, restricting interstate travel, and shifting disease burdens onto protected populations. Personal liberty is sustenance for individual health. Medical principles of patient autonomy, patient privacy, and social justice are closely related to legal concepts of personal liberty, the liberty of constitutional privacy, and the liberty to be free from discrimination. This article defines liberties as active or passive for public health purposes. Active liberty is the liberty to do, and passive liberty is the liberty not to be done to. Restrictions on active liberties—like stay-at- home orders, business closures, and gathering size restrictions—tend to cause inactivity and lead to related side effects like social isolation, financial distress, and medical distancing. Restrictions on passive liberties—like quarantine, contact tracing, and intrusion into private homes—lead to more insidious health side effects related to discrimination and privacy-protective behaviors, in addition to social isolation, medical distancing, and financial distress. This paper examines how active and passive liberties were restricted during the COVID-19 pandemic and the side effects of those restrictions. This paper also advocates for a holistic approach to public health policy that incorporates the health effects of liberty and the side effects of restrictions of liberty into public health policy, following principles of the practice of medicine, which requires the artful application of science to disease in ways that account for human frailties. Often protecting liberty preserves health. Many medical research studies have found ...
Citation: Rice, Arthur Daniel. Government and liberty. Senior thesis, Kansas State Agricultural College, 1892. ; Morse Department of Special Collections ; Introduction: The nineteenth century has been noted for two antagonistic tendencies; the one being toward greater freedom of individual action; the other toward vesting more power in government, consequently placing greater restrictions upon individual liberty. These opposing tendencies have been largely fostered by two schools of political thought equally extreme in their views. The Spencerian school holds that the State is a voluntary association of individuals for mutual protection, from which the person may withdraw at pleasure; that government is a necessary evil; and it looks with extreme jealousy on every act of government that is not an act of police. The socialistic school on the other hand holds that the government should not protect society against crime and foreign and domestic danger but also that it should oversee, control and even own the industries of the people regardless of individual rights. Happily, these tendencies have been neutralized by the conservative wisdom of statesmen and by the good sense of the people themselves, thus forming a middle ground of political belief.
Paul Spicker's book takes the three founding principles of the French Revolution - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - and examines how they relate to social policy today. The book considers the political and moral dimensions of a wide range of social policies, and offers a different way of thinking about each subject from the way it is usually analysed.
Wordsworth once declared that for an hour thought given to poetry, he had given twelve to the state of society. However true this declaration might be, it helps to remind us that some of Wordsworth's noblest verse and prose was inspired by political passion. The most prominent fact about Wordsworth's politics is that he was a trueborn Englishman, and his roots struck deep into English soil. He was country-born and country-bred. Besides, he belonged by birth to the middle class. Thanks to this middle class, upbringing. A sense of moderation governed his course in life and kept him away from committing himself to any definite party throughout his life. Wordsworth reached maturity without meeting anyone who claimed priority on the account of rank. It is because of this moderate temper coupled with impatience of restrictions that Wordsworth's mind seemed to be a productive soil for the revolutionary notions of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. His interest in public affairs was motivated by the consequence of the American War as well as by the French Revolution. He had been too young, thoughtfully to consider the American War while it was going on. Therefore, when it ended, disbanded men began to return to the lakes. There he met some of these men and heard about others; and from what he saw and heard, he could conceive a horrible sense of war with all the suffering and evils it inflicts on the poor. On the other hand, in summer 1790, Wordsworth, accompanied by his friend Jones, set off for a walking tour in France and Switzerland – a tour that had significant consequences. Wordsworth landed at Calais on July 13th , 1790 – the eve of the day on which the king was to swear fidelity to the new constitution, and over-whelm people by a great tide of joy. In November 1791, Wordsworth went off again to France where he visited Paris, Orleans, and Blois in the main. In Blois, he made friendship with Michel Beaupy, a Republican officer in a mess of Royalists. The misery Beaupy witnessed among the extremely poor peasantry converted him not only to a Revolutionary citizen, but also to a patriot of the world. His heart was very much devoted to the cause of the common people and the poor. No other man, says Coleridge, had as great an influence upon Wordsworth as this benevolent and magnanimous patriot did.
This paper was presented as the Seventh Annual Anthony Kennedy lecture at the Lewis & Clark School of Law on September 23, 2015. My topic was Justice Kennedy's majority opinion in the recent Obergefell case, recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. In the first part of my lecture, I placed the Obergefell opinion in context, taking into account Justice Kennedy's place on the current Court, and his past jurisprudence. In particular, I noted that while Justice Kennedy is undoubtedly the co-called "swing Justice" on the Roberts Court, he is quite different from past swing Justices such as Sandra Day O'Connor and Lewis Powell. The latter were considered to be moderate pragmatists, lacking strong judicial philosophies. Not so for Justice Kennedy. From his first years on the Court, his jurisprudence has been notable for a passionate commitment to Liberty in all of its aspect, and his firm belief that protection for Liberty is intrinsically tied to protection of individual Dignity. This commitment appears in his privacy jurisprudence of course (culminating in Obergefell), but also in other areas including notably free. Moreover, unlike his colleagues, Justice Kennedy's commitment to liberty transcends political boundaries, encompassing such "liberal" Liberty claims as abortion and the free speech rights of pornographers, and such "conservative" claims as property rights and commercial speech. I then raised some doubts about the reasoning in Obergefell. I noted that the plaintiffs in the case had raised both Due Process (i.e., Liberty), and Equal Protection (i.e., Equality) claims, and the Court's formulation of the questions presented preserved both. Yet Kennedy's opinion is almost all Liberty, with a tiny dollop of Equality. I suggested that this emphasis is probably a product of Kennedy's own preferences and comfort levels. While Justice Kennedy has always been a strong advocate of Liberty claims, his relationship to Equality is more ambivalent. He unquestionably is firmly committed to nondiscrimination principles, and even (unlike his conservative colleagues) committed to racial integration. However, he has demonstrated -- notably in the Parents Involved decision -- grave discomfort with policies that classify individuals based on qualities such as race. Indeed, this discomfort ties into his commitment to Dignity, because he sees such typecasting as itself in consistent with individual Dignity. As a consequence, Liberty must have seemed the easier path to take. Ultimately, however, I do believe this choice was a mistake, for several reasons. First, I think that jurisprudentially, Equality is the stronger argument. The Court's entire substantive due process jurisprudence, which was the basis of the Due Process holding in Obergefell, rests on somewhat shaky foundations, given its lack of textual grounding. Equal Protection, on the other hand, is a well-established, textually based doctrine; and the argument for extending heightened scrutiny to discrimination against LGBT individuals strikes me as extremely powerful, under existing precedent. Second, an Equality based holding would have been broader, granting more protections to sexual minorities than a narrow decision focused on marriage. Third, it is possible that an Equality based holding would have generated less intense opposition than a holding that redefines marriage (though this is admittedly speculative). Finally, I also believe that Justice Jackson was correct in his argument, in the Railway Express case, that in a democracy, equality-based constitutional decisions are generally preferable to liberty-based ones, because they interfere less with legislative authority.
The problem of economic liberty can be understood along two dimensions: the first concerns what significance economic liberties should have; the second concerns why they should have this significance. The significance of a liberty is a function of two variables; weight and scope. The weight of a liberty is the importance it should be accorded in political deliberation vis-a-vis other societal considerations that might inform the exercise of political authority. The weightier the liberty, the more significant it is, meaning that fewer or stronger societal considerations can justify regulating the sphere of agency protected by this liberty.
In On the People's Terms, Philip Pettit incorporates the Sieyèsian notion of constituent power into his constitutional theory of non-domination. In this article, I argue that Emmanuel Sieyès's understanding of liberty precludes such an appropriation. While a republican, his conceptualisation of liberty in the face of commercial society stood apart from theories of civic vigilance, preferring instead to disentangle individuals from politics and maximise what he understood to be their non-political freedoms. Sieyès saw that liberty was heightened through relations of representation and commercial dependency. This conception of liberty was pivotal to the identity of the nation, and so allowed Sieyès to assess forms of collective injustice committed by the French nobility. It also provided the normative foundation of his theory of constituent power. For Sieyès, constituent power guarded against legislative excess in a decidedly minimal sense, intending instead to separate citizens from the political sphere so they were not burdened with ongoing participation or public vigilance.
Wordsworth once declared that for an hour thought given to poetry, he had given twelve to the state of society. However true this declaration might be, it helps to remind us that some of Wordsworth's noblest verse and prose was inspired by political passion. The most prominent fact about Wordsworth's politics is that he was a trueborn Englishman, and his roots struck deep into English soil. He was country-born and country-bred. Besides, he belonged by birth to the middle class. Thanks to this middle class, upbringing. A sense of moderation governed his course in life and kept him away from committing himself to any definite party throughout his life. Wordsworth reached maturity without meeting anyone who claimed priority on the account of rank. It is because of this moderate temper coupled with impatience of restrictions that Wordsworth's mind seemed to be a productive soil for the revolutionary notions of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. His interest in public affairs was motivated by the consequence of the American War as well as by the French Revolution. He had been too young, thoughtfully to consider the American War while it was going on. Therefore, when it ended, disbanded men began to return to the lakes. There he met some of these men and heard about others; and from what he saw and heard, he could conceive a horrible sense of war with all the suffering and evils it inflicts on the poor. On the other hand, in summer 1790, Wordsworth, accompanied by his friend Jones, set off for a walking tour in France and Switzerland – a tour that had significant consequences. Wordsworth landed at Calais on July 13th , 1790 – the eve of the day on which the king was to swear fidelity to the new constitution, and over-whelm people by a great tide of joy. In November 1791, Wordsworth went off again to France where he visited Paris, Orleans, and Blois in the main. In Blois, he made friendship with Michel Beaupy, a Republican officer in a mess of Royalists. The misery Beaupy witnessed among the extremely poor peasantry converted him not only to a Revolutionary citizen, but also to a patriot of the world. His heart was very much devoted to the cause of the common people and the poor. No other man, says Coleridge, had as great an influence upon Wordsworth as this benevolent and magnanimous patriot did.
