Freedom = Liberty ??

[Dave]

I hear lots of people using the terms 'freedom' and 'liberty' interchangeably.

I've also heard some people say that's a mistake.

What do you think?

[Xenophage]

what's the difference?

[Bryan]

More or less- liberty is freedom from undue government- a subset of freedom.


http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Liberty
freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control.



For our purposes (this movement)- they are basically interchangeable IMO.

[ClayTrainor]

i'll take either one :cool:

[Bryan]

i'll take either one :cool:

hear hear

[RSLudlum]

Actually there is a difference we should all be somewhat aware of.

Freedom is an external state that exists after Liberty is exchanged through social contract. Liberty is an individual aspect involving personal choice. Also "freedom" is the absence of external restraint (as from bondage.)

Felix Morley discusses this in his book Freedom and Federalism (written in 1959) that I just read a month ago. I highly recommend it to everybody here interested in States Rights and the true practice of Federalism (or how it had been eroded away by the 50's).


here's a little excerpt from Ch. 18:



A comparable, if less deliberate, procedure is being followed in the US as we move to wards 1984 [Orwell's book] and the presumable triumph of Amlib, or American liberalism. It was a long step backwards so to degrade freedom as to equate it with security. This degradation permits the nationalization of freedom, so that official pronouncements now no longer refer to the US as 'a free people' but almost invariably as 'a free nation.' Yet there is still a difference between the Oceania and the Eurasia of Orwell's biting satire. The Western socialist believes that security, miscalled freedom, can be obtained from the state without the surrender of individual liberty. this the communist categorically denies. To him dependence on the state is really and wholly that. When the state supplies freedom it necessarily denies liberty. The latter is indeed only a captious claim to the non-existent right of opposing the general will. To the communist, in short, individual liberty is treason.

Thus we see that to distinguish between freedom and liberty is no mere semantic exercise. The differentiation is forced upon us by the claim of centralized government that it can provide freedom, and the all too reasonable expectation that what officials provide the will soon begin to define selectively. Indeed President Franklin D. Roosevelt said as much in his 'Four Freedoms' message when he denounced 'trouble makers' and asserted that 'a free nation has the right to expect full cooperation from all groups.' That is exactly what Rousseau meant in stating 'whosoever refuses to obey the general will...is forced to be free.'

...

Far from being an intellectual tour de force, the distinction between freedom and liberty accurately locates the highwater mark of totalitarian democracy. That murky tide may rise to submerge the rock of freedom. But it can never overwhelm the winged spirit of liberty.

A truth not disagreeably self-evident is that the authoritarian state can, and is prone to, extend its physical control over every aspect of a free society, of course including free enterprise. Slowly but surely, in less that a century, Americans have witnessed first the nationalization of rights, then the nationalization of power, now the nationalization of the concept of freedom itself. With such a well-established trend it is futile to expect that a mere mechanism like the free market will remain immune. For all the volumes that have been written about free enterprise it is, after all, only one of the many emanations from the basic concept of freedom. Therefore it will disappear if it's source is eliminated. Once freedom itself has been nationalized, it is only mopping up to nationalize a particular industry.


pp 304-306. Liberty Press edition. 1981

[UtahApocalypse]

i'll take either one :cool:

I will take both :)

[Conza88]

Difference is only from the origin of the word.

Liberty is Greek. And Freedom is latin, or something like that.

Robert LeFerve has some lecture on it.

[nate895]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/stromberg/stromberg14.html

[Conza88]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/stromberg/stromberg14.html

Good stuff :D

[Truth Warrior]

I think it's a significant error to mistake and interchange the two words for each other.<IMHO> Liberty implies permission and allowing.

"Freedom, Peace and Prosperity" -- Ron Paul