Philosophers have held different ideas about the nature of freedom and human beings' responsibility for their own liberty. A review of three conceptions of freedom, held by Locke, Rousseau, and Dewey, demonstrates how such ideas were often developed in direct relationship to the writers' own times and circumstances. Locke was an Englishman living in a nation where certain rights were guaranteed but a balance had to be maintained between the rights of individuals and the power of the crown. Rousseau wrote in the shadow of the despotism inherent in the absolute monarchy of France. And Dewey lived in the world's first representative democracy, where freedom had long been guaranteed and its exercise was the responsibility of the individual.
John Locke (1632-1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), who held that freedom was an innate possession of human beings, argued that it derived from God and/or natural law. This led them to devise historical explanations or parables describing the likely evolution of constraints on natural liberty. Both of these philosophers saw human organization as entailing a deliberate surrender of some degree of freedom--by means of a social contract or compact--in order to reduce conflict and assure the safety of individual rights in property of various kinds and other freedoms. Locke saw this as a positive process, susceptible to the influence of reason and leading to improved forms of social organization. Rousseau, however, believed that such organization, because it was inevitably based on terms of inequality, went far beyond the terms of a social contract as people gave away too much and, being unequal and unable to protect their liberty, eventually became subject to tyranny. More recent philosophers, such as John Dewey (1859-1952), have often worried far less about the so-called 'natural' state of humanity and the possibility that freedom is an innate human possession. Instead, Dewey propose...