The words freedom and liberty are often used synonymously. This has historically been the case, and has been especially true within anarchist, liberal, and libertarian discourse. Indeed, I have also used them as synonyms, though I would now like to make a distinction between them. While this work is intended to make a strict and real delineation in concepts, the historical use of these terms—freedom and liberty— as synonyms relegates my argument to the context of this paper, and the definitions here used should not be projected back onto historical works retroactively, including my own (unless updated to suit these definitions), as if my distinction has been perennially pointed out and adhered to. Importantly, there has been no consistent distinction in this regard within the traditions from which I come, and this is not intended to serve as critique or criticism of others’ use of terms from within my tradition, but instead to address a different sense or condition of these terms, which may be found valuable for future discourse.
At some point, liberty came to take on the meaning of “taking license,” license here being understood as permission to transgress and indeed infringe upon the law. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, this occurred by the 1550s, with the meaning of liberty being “unrestrained action, conduct, or expression,” and then “go beyond the bounds of propriety,” “privileges by grant,” and “a person's private land.” [1], [2] Freedom too, originally meaning “power of self-determination […] emancipation from slavery, deliverance” and “exemption from arbitrary or despotic control, civil liberty,” would come to mean “possession of particular privileges” around the same time.[3] This reflects a generalized attack on both concepts by Sophist means, a rhetorical change away from the original conception. Of course, long before these distinctions, the original meaning was not adhered to strongly anyway (as the prior existence of the state shows, its nature soon to be demonstrated), though we can see that there was an original meaning.
If we are to describe a situation in which one is free from hindrance by others, it would seem easy to describe this as either “freedom” or “liberty,” but only so far as we divorce the situation from the context in which it occurs and do not distinguish between the two as I will be doing. What is the nature of the hindrance? Hindrance from what? If one is being hindered...
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You can find more like this on my real blog, Ambiarchy Blog, where I cover topics such as:
- Pantheism: The Belief that Nature is God
- Mutualism: The Belief in Anarchy and Cooperation
- Antapodism: The Belief in Friendship Between Humanity and Nature
... as well as other topics related to natural philosophy, natural theology, science, and history, including but not limited to:
- Witnessing Shell Theory: An Alternative Natural Cosmology
- Henogenic Volution Out-of-Everywhere: An Alternative Approach to Evolution
- Ambiarchy: An Alternative to Neo-Anarchism
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