Liberty. The concept of liberty is hardly less
ambiguous than that of nature. For some thinkers of
the eighteenth century like Mandeville, Helvétius, and
de Sade, it means the negative freedom from con-
straint and the right to self-realization. For others, like
Schiller, it is self-perfection. There is a rather general
consensus that the progress of civilization is due to
individual initiative and spontaneous inventiveness.
Liberty of action and of thought are the prerequisites
for bringing about great things. However, in contrast
with the rhetoric of Rousseau and the French Revolu-
tion, liberty is not regarded as an attribute of human
nature. It is a gift of culture, inseparable from civilized
society, the great achievement of European history
since the Italian late twelfth century. According to
Voltaire (Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations
[1756], Ch. LXXXIII), the citadins of Italy were differ-
ent from the bourgeois of the northern countries of
Europe in that they admitted loyalty only to their own
republic rather than to feudal masters. William
Robertson (A View of the Progress of Society in Europe
[1769], Works [1834], III, 129ff., 274ff.) and Gibbon
(Decline and Fall, Ch. 56) take up the same theme,
which is developed with greater theoretical finesse by
John Millar (The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks
[1778], Ch. V, Sec. III) and especially by Adam Smith
in the Wealth of Nations, Book III, Ch. III: “On the
Rise and Progress of Cities and Towns after the Fall
of the Roman Empire”; Smith ascribes also “the pres-
ent grandeur of Holland” to its “republican form of
government” (Book V, Ch. II, Article IV). Rousseau
in the Second Discourse (1755) and the Lettre à
D'Alembert (1758) and Jean-Louis Delolme in his Con-
stitution de l'Angleterre (1771) feel authorized to pro-
nounce on questions of liberty because of their experi-
ence as citizens of the small republic of Geneva. All
are agreed that the process which started in the city
republics has come to its perfection in the England
of the day, the only large country ever to have secured
liberty to its citizens. This widespread literature deal-
ing with the constitutions of the free peoples found
its culmination in Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de
Sismondi's
Histoire des républiques italiennes au moyen
âge (
History of the Italian Republics, 1803-18), which
treats history as the history of liberty, a notion which
inspired the work of Benjamin Constant, Auguste
Comte, and Hegel.
Though a precious gift of culture, liberty, for the
Enlightenment, is not an end in itself. It is a means
to the attainment of happiness, a necessary, though not
a sufficient, condition of the good life. However, if the
individual is to be free from restraint, is liberty not
incompatible with order and good government? Locke
had already rejected Filmer's definition of “'liberty'
for everyone to do as he lists, to live as he pleases,
and not to be tied by any law”; he called such a
condition “the perfect condition of slavery.” In Locke's
view, “Liberty is to be free from restraint and violence
from others, which cannot be where there is no law”
(Of Civil Government [1690], Book II, Chs. IV and VI).
According to Hume only the madman is fully free; the
absence of law and good government entails lack of
liberty and security of individuals. Montesquieu
disparages absolute liberty as a merely rhetorical no-
tion and defines a free people as “that which enjoys
a form of government established by law” (Mes pensées,
Ch. XXII, No. 631). The Encyclopédie distinguishes
moral, natural, civil, political liberty, and liberty of
thought. Natural liberty is the individuals' right to
happiness and self-fulfilment “under the condition that
they don't abuse it to the detriment of others”; civil
liberty “to live under the rule of law; the better the
laws, the better the liberty”; political or English liberty
exists when everyone is conscious of his security...
“good civil and public laws safeguard this liberty”
(article “Liberté”). Liberties, rather than liberty in the
abstract, are predicated by the writers of the Enlight-
enment including Adam Smith, the protagonist of
laissez-faire under the rule of law, who, following
Hume, sees “a continuous state of war with their
neighbours, and of servile dependency upon their su-
periors” as the alternative to “order and good govern-
ment” (Smith, Book III, Ch. IV). Liberty requires and
justifies the reform of onerous laws, but not individual
license; it aims at reconciling the duties and rights of
the individual with his role as a citizen. However, this
prevailing conception of liberty is opposed to that of
the later Diderot who makes allowances for a capri-
cious liberty of the artist which resembles closely the
self-willed arbitrariness of the masters of feudal courts
with their admiring and sycophantic followers. It is
equally at variance with the tendencies of popular
eighteenth-century writers who, unlike the Scottish
historians and Voltaire, instead of following Thucydides
and Xenophon, turned “to the extravagant repre
sentations of Plutarch, Diodorus Curtius and other
romancers of the same class (who) ranted about liberty
and patriotism... (as) something eternally and
intrinsically good, distinct from the blessings which it
generally produced” (Macaulay, “On Mitford's History
of Greece” [1824] in Complete Works, London [1879],
VII, 686). Historians like Charles Rollin and political
writers like H. F. Daguesseau thus aspired to a revival
of republican Rome, holding up an idealized vision of
a political order which was certainly not based on the
insights of the science of human nature. Though the
vision was unrealistic, it contributed effectively to the
breakup of the existing order.
