Liberty and freedom as principles of organizing political and civic and political societies have always been a concern of political thinkers and statesmen. Greeks put liberty and freedom at the core of civic life. They were concerned with the collective life and active participation of the individual in the affairs of the polis. Pericles, a great orator and advocate of Greek democracy, treated freedom in terms of participation in political activity. Similarly, Aristotle considered participation in public office as the basis of citizenship. Pericles favoured freedom of discussion and maintained that ‘the great impediment to action is, in our opinion, not discussion, but the want of that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action.’ Another statesman, Euripides, also proclaimed this virtue of Greeks when he said, ‘This is true liberty, when free-born men, having to advise the public, may speak free.’4 What both Pericles and Euripides declare is that free discussion and active participation in public life is a civic virtue for Greeks. Freedom of discussion and speech becomes fundamental to participation in public life. Thus, we can say that for Greeks, a citizen’s freedom means freedom to understand, to discuss and contribute by active participation in the public life of polis. Sabine calls this as the ‘ideal of civic freedom’ and says ‘… the supreme value for the individual lies just in his ability and his freedom to contribute … in the common enterprise of civil life.’5 This way of conceiving relationship between the individual and the polis by the Greeks does not project any anti-thesis between the individual and the authority. However, Aristotle’s defence of slavery was to exclude a part of human beings from this civic freedom.
Marcus Cicero (106–43 BC), an eminent political thinker at the beginning of the Roman Empire, wrote De Republica (The Commonwealth) in which he advocated the republic and not monarchy as the form of government for the Roman Empire. He suggested a composite state balancing aristocratic, monarchical and democratic elements, along the lines of Aristotle’s mixed constitution.6 Particularly, Cicero discussed two types of offices—Consuls and Tribunes, which possessed executive, judicial and indirect legislative powers. Consuls represent the supreme executive power of the State and reflect the interest of the nobility or patricians and manifested the monarchical elements. To check this, Tribunes were elected by common people or plebeians and manifested democratic elements. The significance of Cicero’s discussion of consuls and tribunes lies in the fact that he felt that tribunes represented the people’s freedom and countered the interest of the noble classes in the empire. For Cicero, replacement of monarchy, which was the initial form of government that Rome possessed, by republic was premised on the granting of liberty to the people—plebeians. As such, Rome as republic was identified with existence of liberty to the people to elect and get represented. Cicero felt that preservation of liberty or what can be said republican liberty should be premised on ‘triple division of powers’,7 power of the Senate (aristocratic elements), power of the Consuls (monarchical elements) and power of the Tribunes (democratic elements).
While the Greeks were concerned with civic freedom and cherished active participation in public life as the core of liberty, in the Roman Empire, participation of the plebeians was considered as the core of republican government. This shows that liberty was conceived in terms of democratic participation in the affairs of the polis, state or the republic. Another element found in Cicero and Roman concept of law in general, is the idea of subjection to law or supremacy of law over personal power of emperors as compatible with freedom. Cicero’s famous statement: ‘We are servants of law in order that we may be free’,8 signifies this.
This Greek and Roman concern for civic freedom and republican liberty of the people got replaced with ‘idea of salvation and freedom of soul’ after the emergence of Christianity. Concern for liberty and freedom of human beings vis-à-vis political authority, civic life and political obligation was replaced by the doctrine of Christian obedience. It required obedience to constituted civic authorities as well as to the Church. As such, it was in fact a doctrine of dual obedience, one to temporal power in the State and the other to the religious power in the Church. This is exemplified in the dictum, ‘render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.’9 The idea of individual or human freedom conceived in political and civic sense is absent in medieval Europe. Conflict between the State and the Church in medieval Europe was exemplified by the struggle for supremacy between the imperialists (supporters of state’s or king’s power) and the papalists (supporters of church’s power). The Church claimed supremacy as the custodian of ecclesiastical or religious–spiritual authority. This not only required priority of individual and human being’s submission to it over the temporal authority, it also restricted the freedom of conscience. The Church’s absolutism insofar as the question of restricting individual ‘freedom to search and judge’ for himself within the Christian belief was however sought to be countered by conciliar theory. William of Occam sought to curb papal absolutism and advocated Christian freedom against the Pope in the sense that he gave priority to Scriptures against the decretals of the popes. He wanted overall supremacy of the Church but based on ‘constitutionalized form of church government by means of a General Council representing the sound body of Christian scholarship and belief.’ William wanted to include clergy, laymen and even women in the council to make a religious affair representative. William and conciliar theory sought to give individual freedom to search and freedom to judge within the fold of Christian belief.
Another problem, during the state-church controversy, relates to the persecution of religious minorities belonging to other sects of Christianity. In the state-church controversy, the kings and emperors resorted to the divine rights of kings theory to legitimize their power as if it had also been drawn from the God. This implied that a king following a particular sect, say Catholic, invokes his authority as drawn from the God and requires political as well religious obedience from the people. A group of people of other sects, say Protestants, would have a problem submitting to him in political as well as religious matters. This contradiction often resulted in persecution and killings of people of other sects.
In short, we can say that medieval Europe was not conducive for liberty and freedom including religious freedom. Feudal socio-economic relations and multiple power centres that resulted in a chain of economic and political obligations further aggravated this. As Fernand Braudel says that ‘it is no accident that the Middle Ages spoke much more of libertates (liberties) than of libertas (liberty). In the plural, the word meant very much the same as privilegia (privileges) …’10 Liberty in such a situation meant privileges to one group or class against the interests of the other. The nobility, the vassal, the clergy, and the emerging bourgeoisie had their respective privileges. In fact, political power and affairs of the state were not a matter of civic freedom or republican liberty as the Greeks and Romans envisaged, but merely a matter of privileges. These privileged classes even ‘bought the offices of state’, as Braudel points out. On the other hand, the concept of individual liberty as the freedom of an individual or everyone’s freedom by virtue of being a person, as we understand today, was even inconceivable. It was left to Renaissance and Reformation to install individual liberty and human freedom including the freedom of conscience as the intellectual concern of political and philosophical thought in Europe.
Three revolutions, namely, Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment promised Europe the end of the ‘medieval darkness’ and put human reason and greatness of human being as an individual at the centre of social, religious and political landscape. Renaissance humanism if we term it so, was also a call for what Descartes summed up in the seventeenth century: I think, therefore I am. It gave way to liberties of a few privileged classes to revolts of many. The revolts manifested in political, economic and religious fields. It is reported by Braudel that there were various peasants’ uprisings in France (Jacquerie in 1358, Paris in 1633, in Rouen, north-western France in 1634–9, in Lyon, eastern-central France in 1623, 1629, 1633 and 1642), in Germany (in 1524–25).11 The conditions of peasants in Europe could be understood when we look at the plight in Bohemia where they were allowed to work on their own land only one day in a week, in Slovenia where they could work only ten days in a year. The feudal system and its system of bond-service had no place for liberty for all.
Politically, the English Revolution (1688) and the French Revolution (1789) were revolts against the decadent feudal system and degenerating nobility. Practically, these were revolts to place the emerging bourgeoisie at the seat of political and economic power in Europe. The 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen which declared that ‘Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights’ though landmark in the history of freedom and liberty, only promised the equality of liberty of the emerging capitalists and the landed bourgeoisie. The peasants at land and the working class of the emerging industrial economy were still to fight for their liberty. Emergence of liberalism and capitalism as political and economic frameworks advocated individual liberty as the fundamental principle and invariably as part of ‘natural rights’. Politically, it symbolized freedom of political participation in liberal democracy and economically it required contract based on ‘free’ labour as the basis of capitalist-industrial economy. However, this liberty was also circumscribed, politically by restricting the freedom of political participation to the propertied classes and also by exclusion of women (England granted voting rights to women only during the First World War) and economically by defining freedom and liberty in terms of ‘protection of property’. Laski opines that freedom which liberalism sought ‘had no title to universality, since its practice was limited to men who had property to defend.’12 Thus, liberalism and capitalism advocated and practised liberty as freedom of private property un-interfered by the State.
With emergence of socialist thought in Europe and particularly Marxian thought, realization of liberty as a universal principle came to be recognized. Liberalism, starting with negative view of liberty however, sought to address the socio-economic conditions without which enjoyment of liberty was meaningless and class-biased. As a result, positive view of liberty became an integral part of liberal thought. It is also argued that liberalism in its initial phase favoured negative liberty, i.e., liberty as non-interference by the state, primarily because the authority of the State was not completely in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Non-interference would mean circumscribing the interference of the elements of nobility and the landed interests and when bourgeoisie became sure of their hold on the authority of the State, interference of the State could be accepted in the form of positive liberty. In the latter half of nineteenth and in twentieth century, socialist thought introduced principles of equality and justice as the defining elements for universal enjoyment of liberty and freedom.
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