By Matthew Spalding*
Liberty is the essential idea that is America. It is at once our greatest inheritance, our greatest achievement, and our greatest bequest to posterity. The Declaration of Independence asserts unalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and the Constitution is meant to “secure the blessings of liberty.” In his Farewell Address, Washington reminded Americans of “the love of liberty” that is “interwoven with every ligament of your heart.” At Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln noted that before this nation was dedicated to the proposition of human equality, it was “conceived in liberty.”
To this day, the United States is a magnet for those seeking opportunity and prosperity, attracting the talented and enterprising, rich and poor alike. The Founders knew that this would be the case. James Madison predicted that this country “will be the workshop of liberty to the civilized world.” After all, it had been in the name of liberty – political liberty, religious liberty, economic liberty – that many had come to America in the first place.
So important is the concept that English – unlike any other language – has two words to describe it: liberty as well as freedom. We tend to use the term freedom more nowadays, for it has a powerful and evocative ring to it. But the words are often used interchangeably, as when the patriotic hymn sings of “My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,” and at the same time proclaims, “From every mountainside, let freedom ring.” The Founders preferred and widely used the word liberty.
There is a difference between these two terms that helps us understand the Founders’ concept of the principle. Freedom is understood as more expansive, and suggests a general lack of restraint, especially a lack of political restraint, as when we speak of the United States as a “free society.” It is often used to suggest a more open-ended sense of autonomy, meaning that we are free to do whatever we want. But from the Founders’ view, freedom must be understood within the context of constitutional and moral order, which meant reasonable limits and cultural bounds. Liberty means the rightful exercise of freedom, the balancing of rights and responsibilities.
Consider how we use the two words. All animals can be said to have freedom. Men can be free, but so can fish in the ocean or birds in the sky. But liberty is an inherently human word. While we say man has liberty or is a liberty to do something, we do not say the same of animals, because animals lack a rational capacity to choose their own actions. This distinction reflects a much larger and more significant point. In the American tradition, liberty was never understood to man anything and everything, but came with duties and obligations appropriate for human self-government.
The view of liberty appropriate for self-government did not appear spontaneously. The moment in which this nation was conceived was not a chance occasion in time; rather, it was the culmination of a larger tradition, stretching back well before this nation began, that forms the foundation upon which America is built – and without which it would not have come into being. This foundation was the tradition and history of art, custom, philosophy, and political thought, originating thousands of year ago with Greco-Roman culture and its descendants, fundamentally shaped by Judeo-Christian theology and spiritualism, that came to be called Western civilization and that formed western Europe and then North America. The United States is a product of this great development.
The American Founders understood themselves in the context of the ideas and institutions that came out of this tradition, out of that profound learning and wide experience that had been transmitted over time from Athens, to Jerusalem, to Rome, to London – and not to Philadelphia. A deep realization of this civilization and their gratitude for its inheritance gave the American Founders a profound sense of their responsibility to the past and to the future. It is reflected in the art, architecture, rhetoric, and symbols of the early republic: The Founders saw America continuing, and potentially surpassing, the greatest civilizations of the West.
So we begin our understanding of this first principle of liberty by reference to the deep roots of human freedom as they took hold in America. The four core roots that provided the most definition and nourishment to America’s liberty are the “Britishness” of America, the importance of religious faith and the development of religious liberty, the intellectual influences that shaped the American mind, and America’s unique experience in democratic governance.
From his book, “We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future”
