The Limits of Liberalism

I may also have, or at any rate wish to have, freedom from certain things: from being robbed and killed, from being arrested on a policeman's whim, from starving amid plenty, from being forced to marry a particular person, from being compelled to worship in a way that violates my conscience, from being kidnapped, hauled to another continent, and put to work in cotton fields.

On one level, every freedomto can be expressed as a freedomfrom, and vice versa. If I have freedom to learn the saxophone, the implication is that I have freedom from being forbidden to learn it. If I have freedom from being forced to marry a particular person, I implicitly have freedom to marry someone else of my choosing. (I might be forbidden to marry anyone, but freedom from that implies freedom to marry someone). However, freedomfrom seems to also have a certain priority over freedom

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overthrow by conspiracy, coup, and revolution. Machiavelli, in fact, suggests that they also gain a measure of freedom from foreign conquest as well. A legitimate hereditary ruler who is forced out has a good chance of returning to power (Machiavelli, 1995, p. 7), while republics, which Machiavelli regards as having the strongest institutional legitimacy, are so difficult to keep subjected that he recommends that a conqueror destroy them outright rather than have any expectation of holding onto them (Machiavelli, 1995, p. 17). If a legitimate state has freedomfrom, does it also have freedomto? If so, freedom to do what? At the beginning of this discussion, we identified liberalism as a political philosophy concerned with freedom. This concern, however, is much older than liberalism itself. It can in fact be traced back to antiquity. In his discussion of the difficulty of sustaining a conquest of free states, Machiavelli draws more examples from antiquity from than his own era (Machiavelli, 1995, p. 17). Aristotle, a native of antiquity himself, is specifically concerned with free states or communities. He starts his discussion by identifying a city as "some sort of partnership," an expression with implications
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Approximate Word count = 3944
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)