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Innumerable downtrodden populations have fought the domination of political and economic elites throughout history out of a desire to be free. Liberty was the motto of the Atlantic revolutionaries who, at the end of the 18th century, defeated autocratic kings, haughty nobles, and slaveholders, bringing an end to the Old Regime. In the 19th and 20th centuries, black civil rights activists and women fought for the development of democracy in the name of freedom, while populists and progressives fought to end workers’ economic supremacy. We think of freedom as an emancipatory ideal for good reason.
Many people have been inspired by the desire to be free throughout history. For good reason, we consider freedom a glorious concept. Throughout history, countless oppressed groups have fought for their freedom against the rule of political and economic elites. The Atlantic revolutionaries overthrew despotic rulers, pompous aristocrats, and slaveowners at the close of the 18th century, bringing the Old Regime to an end. Black civil rights activists and women struggled for the development of democracy in the name of freedom in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while populists and progressives fought to abolish workers’ economic dominance. For good reason, we consider the liberty to be a liberatory ideal. Throughout history, the longing for liberty has inspired many people.
The Atlantic Revolutions’ authors adamantly rejected that they would offer greater freedom. Liberty, according to Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson, an ardent opponent of the American Revolution, consisted in the ‘security of our liberties,’ as he put it. And, in that sense, the American colonists were already free, even if they didn’t have a choice over how they were ruled. As subjects, they had ‘greater security than any people had ever had before.’ This meant that sustaining the status quo was the only way to protect the colonists’ liberty; attempting to govern themselves would only result in anarchy and mob rule.
This viewpoint became prevalent among European elites during the 19th century, who continued to aggressively fight the arrival of democracy. One of Europe’s most famous political theorists, Benjamin Constant, dismissed the French revolutionaries’ example, claiming that they had conflated liberty with ‘membership in public authority.’ Instead, libertarians should look to Constitution, which firmly established hierarchies. Even though less than 5% of citizens could vote, Constant asserted that freedom, defined as ‘quiet enjoyment and individual independence,’ was completely secure here. Many others, including Hungarian politician Joseph Eotvos, agreed. Writing in the wake of the brutally suppressed revolutions that rose against several European monarchies in 1848, he complained that the insurgents, battling for manhood suffrage, had confused liberty with. ‘the principle of direct democracy.’ However, such ambiguity can only lead to democratic despotism. True liberty, as described by Eotvos as respect for ‘well-earned rights,’ could be best attained through limiting state power to the greatest extent possible, rather than through democratization.
Conservatives in the United States were equally keen to claim that they, and they alone, were the true protectors of liberty. In the 1790s, some of the more radical Federalists attempted, in the name of liberty, to reverse the democratic accomplishments of the previous decade. For example, it was a mistake, in the opinion of staunch Federalist Noah Webster, to believe that ‘to attain liberty, and establish a free government, nothing was necessary but to get rid of kings, nobles, and priests.’ Instead, popular power ought to be restricted, preferably by reserving the Senate for the wealthy, to protect true freedom-which Webster described as the peaceful enjoyment of one’s life and possessions. However, in the United States, such viewpoints took longer to gain traction than in Europe. To Webster’s dismay, most of his contemporaries believed that increasing democracy rather than reducing public influence over government was the best way to protect liberty.
Conservative attempts to recover the concept of freedom, however, gained traction by the end of the nineteenth century. Slavery was abolished, and fast industrialization and large migration from Europe dramatically expanded the agricultural and industrial working classes, as well as providing them with more political power. This sparked growing concern among American elites about the popular rule, who began to assert that ‘mass democracy’ constituted a huge threat to liberty, particularly the right to property. The scion of a powerful Boston family, Francis Parkman, was one of a rising number of statesmen who questioned the idea of universal suffrage, claiming that ‘the masses of the nation… demand equality more than liberty.’
When William Graham Sumner, a powerful Yale professor, warned of the emergence of a new, democratic sort of despotism, he spoke for many when he said that the only way to avert it was to limit the scope of government as much as possible. Sumner decided that ‘the doctrine of liberty’ was ‘laissez-faire,’ or, in plain English, ‘mind your own business. When conservative politicians like Rand Paul and advocacy organizations like FreedomWorks or the Congress Society talk about their love of liberty, they usually don’t mean the same thing as civil rights activists like John Lewis or the revolutionaries, abolitionists, and feminists who walked in Lewis’ footsteps. Instead, they’re channeling 19th-century conservatives like Francis Parkman and William Graham Sumner, who felt that freedom is about defending one’s property rights, even if it means impeding democracy. Hundreds of years later, the two opposing perspectives on liberty are still completely incompatible.
On the eve of colonialism, Europeans had a range of ideas about freedom. Some developed during the early modern era’s political struggle, while others dated back to ancient Greece’s city-states. Others are barely recognized now, but some laid the foundation for modern conceptions of liberty. Freedom was not a single concept, but a collection of rights and privileges, many of which were exclusively available to a limited portion of the population. Throughout Europe, freedom was considered a moral or spiritual condition rather than a political or social one. What it meant to be free was to give up a life of sin to follow Christ’s teachings. ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord resides, there is liberty,’ the New Testament says. Because those who accepted Christ’s teachings became ‘free from sin’ and ‘servants of God’ at the same time, service and freedom were mutually reinforcing rather than conflicting states in this idea. ‘Christian liberty’ had no connection to later conceptions of religious tolerance, which didn’t exist anywhere near the time of colonization. Religion was more than spiritual conceptions and rituals in the premodern age; it was a belief system that pervaded all aspects of people’s lives. As a result, religious beliefs became intricately related to what came to be known as ‘secular’ problems, such as who had basic rights. The economic, political, and social status of a person were closely interwoven. Every country in Europe had a church that decided what kinds of religious worship and beliefs were acceptable. Both state-sanctioned persecution and church-sanctioned condemnation afflicted dissenters. It was practically unknown that a person’s religious beliefs and practices are a matter of private choice rather than a legal requirement. The religious conflicts that raged across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were about determining which religion would rule a kingdom or territory, not about citizens’ right to select which church to worship in.
In its secular form, the association of liberty with obedience to a higher authority emphasized that liberty meant obeying the law. According to Aristotle, the law is liberty’s ‘salvation,’ not its adversary. However, the link between liberty and the rule of law did not entail that all subjects of the monarch were equally free. The social classes in early modern European civilizations were highly hierarchical, ranging from the king and hereditary nobility to urban and rural peasants. Inequality was pervasive in nearly all social interactions. The king claimed to rule under the authority of God. Those in positions of power ought to be respected by those below them.
Within their households, men had power over their wives and children. According to the legal notion known as ‘coverture,’ when a woman marries, she surrenders her legal identity, which is ‘covered’ by that of her husband. She couldn’t own property or sign contracts in her own name, she couldn’t control her salary if she worked, she couldn’t write a separate will, and she couldn’t get a divorce unless she was in the direst of circumstances. The husband was a businessman who also represented the entire family in court. His wife’s ‘company,’ which included domestic services and sexual encounters, was solely owned by him. In Europe, family life was built on male dominance and female submission. Indeed, political writers in the sixteenth century related the king’s power over his subjects to that of the husband over his family. Both of their lives had been meticulously planned by God. They backed up their argument with a verse from the New Testament: ‘As the male is the head of the woman, so is Christ the head of the Church.’ Neither sort of power could be called into question without putting the social order in jeopardy.
Understanding one’s social station and carrying out the tasks that came with it provided liberty in this hierarchical society. Most men lacked financial freedom. Because of property restrictions and other factors, the electorate was confined to a small percentage of the adult male population. Employees were required to follow the law to the letter, and violators of labor contracts were subject to legal penalties. When ‘liberties’ meant formal, specific advantages granted to individuals or organizations by contracts, royal edicts, or purchases, such as self-government, tax exemption, or the ability to follow a particular trade, the Middle Ages left an indelible impact on European notions of liberty.
A liberty is a privilege… through which men may enjoy some benefit above the common subject,’ according to one legal definition. Certain commercial operations, for example, were confined to those with ‘freedom of the city.’ Many civil liberties were not available at the time. The law defined what kinds of religious worship were permitted. The government has a history of suppressing media it doesn’t like and criticizing it can lead to incarceration. Personal independence was only attainable to a small percentage of the population, which was one of the reasons authorities saw ‘masterless men’ as so dangerous those without regular jobs or otherwise under the influence of their social superiors. Regardless, every European nation that invaded the New World claimed to be spreading freedom to its own citizens as well as Native Americans.
The English Civil War, which lasted from the 1640s until the early 1650s, ended the power struggle between Parliament and the Stuart rulers James I and Charles I. Religious differences over how far the Church should distance itself from Catholicism in terms of doctrine and ritual sparked this long-running feud. Conflict arose between the king’s and Parliament’s separate powers, resulting in repeated references to the concept of the ‘freeborn Englishman’ and a significant development of the concept of English liberty. The concept of empire as the world’s guardian of liberty, as well as the belief in freedom as a common heritage of all Englishmen, helped legitimize English colonization in the Western Hemisphere and cast imperial wars against Catholic France and Spain as struggles between freedom and tyranny.
In 1642, a civil war erupted, with the troops of Parliament triumphing. The monarchy was dissolved in 1649 and was declared a Commonwealth and Free State’ a nation controlled by the people’s will. After the king’s execution, Oliver Cromwell, the victorious Parliamentary army’s commander, governed for nearly a decade. The House of Commons and the hereditary nobles of the House of Lords accused the Stuart rulers of jeopardizing liberty by collecting taxes without parliamentary authorization, imprisoning political opponents, and leading the kingdom back to Catholicism. A civil war broke out in 1642, with Parliamentary troops triumphing. In 1649, the monarchy was abolished and was declared a ‘Commonwealth and Free State,’ or a country governed by the choice of the people. The victorious Parliamentary army’s commander, Oliver Cromwell, ruled for over a decade after the king’s execution. The Levelers exemplified the current idea of liberty as a universal right in a community founded on equal rights, not a function of social position. The Diggers, a new group, went even further, intending to give independence an economic foundation by establishing shared land ownership. ‘You are like men in a mist, striving for independence and not knowing what it is,’ stated Gerard Winstanley, the Diggers’ leader. True liberty applied equally to ‘the poor and the rich,’ and everyone was entitled to a comfortable livelihood in their own land.’
The Levelers, Diggers, and other radical movements generated by the English Civil War had been defeated or forced underground even before the monarchy was restored. However, English immigrants would bring some of the libertarian concepts that were popular in the 1640s and 1650s to America. In the Civil War, Thomas Rains borough was murdered, but his brother William and other Levelers sailed to Massachusetts.
These fights, which were accompanied by heated debates about the rights of freeborn Englishmen, echoed across’s colonies, separating them both internally and externally. During the Civil War in the 1640s, the majority of Newers supported Parliament. Some returned to join the Parliamentary army or become preachers to assist build a godly commonwealth at home. However, as the idea of religious toleration for Protestants gained traction, Puritan leaders became increasingly uneasy. Roger Williams’ charter for the Rhode Island colony he created after being expelled from Massachusetts was given by the Revolutionary Parliament in 1644. Several of Anne Hutchinson’s supporters became Quakers, one of the groups that arose during the Civil War. These clashes echoed across’s colonies, separating them both internally and externally, and were accompanied by passionate discussions regarding the rights of freeborn Englishmen. The majority of Newers supported Parliament during the Civil War in the 1640s. To help construct a Christian commonwealth at home, some returned to join the Parliamentary army or become preachers. Puritan leaders became more anxious as the idea of religious toleration for Protestants gained ground. In 1644, the revolutionary Parliament granted Roger Williams a charter for the Rhode Island colony he founded after being exiled from Massachusetts. During the Civil War, several of Anne Hutchinson’s supporters became Quakers, one of the many religious sects that developed.
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