Lew Daly, Liberty or Freedom?

Reflecting on this, I am struck by the fact that “liberty” and “freedom,” words we tend to use interchangeably, are really quite distinct in origin and meaning. I examine this briefly—very generally—in my forthcoming book God’s Economy, drawing on David Hackett Fischer’s fascinating discussion in his popular (and marvelous) study Liberty and Freedom. Fischer looks at our political heritage from the vantage point of distinguishing liberty and freedom as almost two different traditions. He starts with etymology and cultural linguistics, and the differences he finds in that regard are rather striking. Our English “liberty” derives from Latin and Greek—from the Latin libertas and the Greek eleutheros. The basic meaning here is “release from restraint,” or more generally, being separate and distinct from others. “Freedom,” on the other hand, is an Anglo-Saxon word that derives from the Indo-European root friya or priya, which, strikingly, means “dear” or “beloved.” The Norse, German, Dutch, Flemish, Celtic, Welsh, and English words for freedom all share this root in the concept of endearment or belovedness. We see this in the English word “friend,” sharing the same root as “free,” as with Freund and frei in German. Notably, the oldest known word associated with the idea of freedom is a Sumerian word, Ama-ar-gi, the root meaning of which is literally “going home to mother.” The word was used to describe the slave’s return to his family, his transformation from a condition of bondage to one of belonging, Fischer stresses.

Freedom was intrinsically a collective idea in the Northern languages. Broadly speaking, it did not refer to individual independence, but signified the condition of being joined to a free people, joined by rights of belonging and by reciprocal duties of membership in that people. It is implicitly a concept attached groups if not groups of families, that is, communities. A belonging that frees the person, as the group is free, must be sustained by an equality of rights and duties within the group, independent of other authorities.

While not devoid of corporate applications in the law, Greco-Roman “liberty,” in contrast, meant emancipation from other people—individual separation and independence from others’ control. It is a concept of status attached to individuals. The medieval libertas ecclesiae is translated “freedom of the church” in English, Latin and English “liberty” being insufficiently corporative to apply to the Church as a body (although Latin does have the physical concept of “corpus” itself, of course). In its common use in the Roman Empire, liberty was the opposite of slavery: the context of its meaning was the imperial state stratified into nobility, commons, freedmen, and slaves. Liberty meant release from slavery into the status of freedmen, nothing more. It could not be conceive as arising from one’s membership in a free community.

Our Bill of Rights is the world’s greatest monument of negative individual liberty. But our Christian heritage bears the imprint of the deeper idea that true liberty—freedom—derives from connectedness, not separation. Fischer stresses Germanic influences that shaped this tradition, as with Martin Luther, who described the “freedom of a Christian” as a seemingly paradoxical combination of two conditions. Luther said: “A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none”; at the same time, “A Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one.” Through Christ the person is made free, subject to no other person; and yet, the person is also bound in Christ to serve others. Many of us grew up in churches where something like this was taught.

Baptist “soul freedom” is Germanic too, originating in Central Europe and finding a home at last in the United States, for better or worse. Soul freedom springs in part from the narrower sense of liberty one would expect from a historically persecuted sect. It means liberty of conscience first, in the negative, individualistic sense of restricting outside authority in matters of the soul. But it is not only that: issuing from God’s direct, unmediated reign in a person’s heart and mind, soul freedom breaks down barriers all around you as well. It is oneness with God through which you are connected and equalized with everything God loves. As it’s put in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Jesus Christ.” Luther adds muscle to the point in his Galatians Commentary: “There is neither magistrate nor subject, neither teacher nor hearer . . . neither master nor servant, neither mistress nor maid: for in Christ Jesus, all states, yea, even such as are ordained of God, are nothing.” Notably, the most radical Baptists originally preached and practiced community of goods.

For Roger Williams, the fearless Baptist come-outer and great pioneer of American religious liberties, soul freedom went hand in hand with political democracy and economic equality. He wrote passionately of his struggles to “defend a free people, not enslaved to the bondages and iron yokes of the great oppressions” of the “soul and body.” To these great oppressions, he wrote, “I say liberty and equality, both in land and government.” Now this fits with Fischer’s word study—Williams’ freedom was that of a “free people,” not independent individuals. And the oppressions of a free people were remedied not only by liberty, by political restraint, but by equality in the underlying conditions of a life together, which in Williams’ time meant equality of land.

Williams leads us to the heart of this question of freedom and liberty. The fact is, in America, both traditions are found side by side. This makes sense because we’re a nation of diverse immigrant populations with a national culture synthesized out of many traditions. Strikingly, in common speech, most of the Northern European languages have freedom but not liberty; the Mediterranean languages have liberty but not freedom. Only English contains both (thanks to the Norman Conquest). Only English gives us a choice between liberty and freedom, or the richer possibility of having both, or at least a creative tension between the two. Ethan Allen, the father of Vermont statehood and the first to capture a British fortress in the Revolutionary War (Fort Ticonderoga in 1775), wrote that he and his men, after breaking open the casks of rum, drank to “the liberty and freedom of America.” To our ears today, these may seem like synonyms used for rhetorical effect. But to Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, Fischer argues, they were two different things. And when we recognize how they were different, we realize how impoverished public life has become on the side of liberty as distinct from freedom. As Fischer states:

A person who was born to freedom in an ancient tribe had a sacred obligation to serve and support the folk, and to keep the customs of a free people, and to respect the rights of others on pain of banishment. In modern America too many people have forgotten this side of our inheritance.

Fascinating. But is the Greco-Roman conception of freedom really that opposed to the Germanic/Northern European one?