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1. Which Freedom?
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Law_001-050.indd 26 10/27/09 8:46 AM 1 WHICH FREEDOM? Araham Lincoln, in a speech at Baltimore in 1864, recognized both the difficulty of defining "freedom" and the fact that the Civil War between the North and the South was based, in a way, on a misunderstanding related to that word. "The world," he said, "has never had a good definition of the word 'liberty.' ... In using the same word, we do not mean the same thing."' In fact, it is not easy to define "freedom" or to be aware completely of what we are doing when we define it. If we want to define "freedom," we must first decide the purpose of our definition . A "realistic" approach removes the preliminary problem: "freedom" is something that is simply "there," and the only question is to find the proper words to describe it. An example of a "realistic" definition of freedom is that given by Lord Acton at the beginning of his History of Freedom: "By liberty I mean assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion." Many critics would say that there is no reason to call "freedom" only the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty, and not, for example, his right or his pleasure; nor is there any reason to say that this protection ought to be assured only against majorities or authority, and not against minorities and individual citizens. As a matter of fact, when Lord Acton, at Bridgenorth in 1877, delivered his famous lectures on the history of freedom, the respect accorded to religious minorities by the English authorities 1 Quoted in Maurice Cranston, Freedom (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1953), p. 13. 26 Law_001-050.indd 27 10/27/09 8:46 AM WHICH FREEDOM? 27 and the English majority was still one of the big issues of the political life of the Victorian age in the United Kingdom. With the abrogation of such discriminatory laws as the Corporation Act of 1661 and the Test Act of 1673, and with the admission, in 1870, of the Protestant Dissenters and of the Catholics (the Papists , as they were called) to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge , the so-called Free Churches had just won a battle that had lasted two centuries. Previously these universities had been open only to students belonging to the Reformed Church of England. Lord Acton, as is known, was himself a Catholic and for this reason had been prevented, much against his will, from attending Cambridge. The "freedom" he had in mind was the freedom that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the most famous of his slogans, called "freedom of religion." Lord Acton, as a Catholic, belonged to a religious minority at a time when respect for religious minorities in England was beginning to prevail against the hostility of the Anglican majorities and against such acts of the legal authority as, say, the Corporation Act. Thus, what he meant by "freedom" was religious freedom. Most probably this was also what the members of the Free Churches in the United Kingdom and many other people in the Victorian age meant by "freedom "-a term that was then obviously connected, among other things, with legal technicalities like the Corporation Act or the Test Act. But what Lord Acton did in his lectures was to present his idea of "freedom" as freedom tout court. This happens quite frequently. The history of political ideas evinces a series of definitions such as the one given by Lord Acton. A more careful approach to the problem of defining "freedom " would involve a preliminary inquiry. "Freedom" is first of all a word. I would not go so far as to say that it is only a word, as several representatives of the contemporary analytical school, in their self-styled philosophical revolution, might maintain. Thinkers who begin by asserting that something is simply a word and conclude that it is nothing but a word remind me of the saying that one must not throw the baby out with the bath water. But the very fact that "freedom" is first of all a word calls, I think, for some preliminary linguistic remarks. Linguistic analysis has received increasing attention in certain [52.205.218.160] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:19 GMT) Law_001-050.indd 28 10/27/09 8:46 AM 28 FREEDOM...