Libertarianism

“ And we must also insist that laws and regulations are not only not antagonistic to liberty, but are the very conditions of liberty. They are the expressions of the social life; they are the signs of warning, the directing finger posts which the experience of the past has set up for the guidance of the future; they are the wisdom which men have picked up onthe way. They are, so to speak, the hard bony structure of conduct which supports—and which alone can support—the mobile activities through which the free will finds play. ”

“ It is at a moment when the holiest or the freest of constitutions has been proclaimed that the most infamous attempts against liberty, against property,—nay, what do I say?—against humanity and conscience, are multiplied and perpetuated! Does not this contrast alarm you? I will tell you wherefore. Yourselves deceived as to the mechanism of political society, you have sought its regeneration without reflecting on its dissolution; you have considered as an obstacle to your plans the discontent of some, and as a means the enthusiasm of others. ”

“ When he entered a societal group, controls were necessarily imposed. But our society--unlike most in the world--presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas. ”

“ There is enough of the idea of liberty and sound government to lift the struggle out of the region of mere legal resistance to mere legal oppression: there is a growth towards liberty in all the vindication of even class rights and special privileges: a growth towards liberty so spontaneous, I had almost said so little self-conscious, as to show that it is a natural, not a factitious growth: it is not taught by philosophers, it is not extorted by agitators, it is the outgrowth of law and a law-abiding spirit, tending by its very nature to freedom and order conjointly. ”

“ Thus there are certain fundamental liberties, which not even a democracy may legitimately infringe. "No majority, no force of the community may take from you what makes you men." These liberties include, save in rare exceptions, "all that is indispensable to feed life morally and materially,"—personal liberty, religious liberty, unqualified liberty of speech and press, liberty of association, liberty of trade,—all of them liberties, without which men cannot choose their sphere of duty, without which society is destined to waste or stagnation. ”

“ In other words, the law, by a pedantic application of rules of abstract liberty, was depriving workmen of real liberty. Liberty of contract did not mean liberty of life, and it was only by sacrificing individual freedom to the common good in organization that real freedom was to be secured. ”

“ In the building up of the state, the primitive need is sufficient power and permanency of control to make law supreme over the individual will. And where the personal wishes or rights, even of men, come in conflict with this initial step toward social order, those personal wishes and rights are ruthlessly sacrificed; not because individual liberty is ignored in the process of development, but rather because individual liberty can only be permanently secured by making it second to social order in sequence of evolution. ”

“ Is liberty, the first of possessions, to have no duties corresponding to its invaluable rights? And, in fine, ought it not to be some drawback on the enjoyment of our own freedom, if a doubt can come across our minds whether a vast mass of our fellow citizens might not be the better for living under a despotic government? These are very serious questions; and the sooner we are able, with a good conscience, to give a satisfactory answer to them, the better. Till that time, let no man in this country say that the education of the people is nothing to him. ”

“ But free government grows slowly, like the individual human faculties; and like the forest-trees, from the inner heart outward. Liberty is not only the common birth-right, but it is lost as well by non-user as by mis-user. It depends far more on the universal effort than any other human property. ”

“ He exchanges the natural liberty to do and get what he can, a liberty limited by his relative strength, for a liberty at once limited and secured by the general will; he exchanges the mere possession of such things as he can get, a possession which is the effect of force, for a property founded on a positive title, on the guarantee of society. At the same time he becomes a moral agent. Justice instead of instinct becomes the guide of his actions. For the moral slavery to appetite he substitutes the moral freedom which consists in obedience to a self-imposed law. ”

“ We have seen, therefore, that so long as property is confined to the product of men's toil, all is well. The freedom of a savage life which exposed every man to being robbed by every other man is what we call license. The freedom, on the contrary, under the institution of property which secures to men the product of their toil, we may call liberty—liberty being freedom secured by law. ”

“ The untold millions, the men, women & children of toil, the proletariat are by law deprived of their lives, their liberty & their happiness. Law is license.
Anarchy - natural law - is liberty. Liberty is the natural right to do what one pleases, bounded & limited only by the equal right of every one else to the same liberty. Privileges for none; equal rights for all. Liberty, Fraternity, Equality.
The trial, throughout was a travesty on justice. Every law natural & statute was violated in response to the clamor of the capitalist class. ”

“ To take away the free, soaring sense of liberty.
“There is no such thing as liberty,” she heard the quiet, deep, dangerous voice of Don Ramón repeating. “There is no such thing as liberty. The greatest liberators are usually slaves of an idea. The freest people are slaves to convention and public opinion, and more still, slaves to the industrial machine. There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.” ”

“ There has been no liberty at all, save where a state has known how to break out, once for all, from this delusive round; to set barriers to selfishness, cupidity, envy, and lust, in all classes, from highest to lowest, by laws and institutions; and to create great organs of civil life which can eliminate, as far as possible, arbitrary and personal elements from the adjustment of interests and the definition of rights. Liberty is an affair of laws and institutions which bring rights and duties into equilibrium. It is not at all an affair of selecting the proper class to rule. ”

“ But let us abandon the discussion of a principle now too trite, for humankind, at least in Europe, is satisfied that unlimited liberty is nowhere consistent with a properly-regulated state of society. ”

“ This is strictly true of communities as well as of individuals.—Civil Liberty (it should be remembered) must be enjoyed as a right derived from the Author of nature only, or it cannot be the blessing which merits this name. If there is any human power which is considered as giving it, on which it depends, and which can invade or recall it at pleasure, it changes its nature, and becomes a species of slavery.
But to return—The force superseding self-government in a state, or the power destroying its Liberty, is of two kinds. It may be either a power without itself, or a power within itself. ”

“ Civil and personal liberty help on the evolution of society; they produce growth of individuals and societies. They are not revolutionary, but are hostile to revolution; they stand related to the revolutionary liberty as the truth to the caricature. It stands, therefore, as one of the tasks before our social science to distinguish these two notions of liberty from each other as sharply as possible, and while manifesting the strength and value of the one to show the error and falsity of the other. ”

“ As liberty consists in the free exercise of our religion, the enjoyment of our rights, and the profits of our labour, with the protection of our persons and properties, it is a privilege of an immense value. ”

“ IX. Free association, liberty, which confines itself to the maintenance of equality in the means of production and equivalence in exchanges, is the only form of society possible, just, and true.
“X. Politics is the science of liberty; the government of man by man, under whatever name it may disguise itself, is oppression. ”

“ Liberty itself will find in such a government, with powers properly distributed and adjusted, its surest guardian. It is, indeed, little else than a name, where the government is too feeble to withstand the enterprises of faction, to confine each member of the society within the limits prescribed by the laws, and to maintain all in the secure and tranquil enjoyment of the rights of person and property. ”

“ Thirdly, from this liberty of each individual, follows the liberty, within the same limits, of combination among individuals; freedom to unite, for any purpose not involving harm to others: the persons combining being supposed to be of full age, and not forced or deceived.
No society in which these liberties are not, on the whole, respected, is free, whatever may be its form of government; and none is completely free in which they do not exist absolute and unqualified. ”

“ The rights of life, liberty and property must first be dear to the mass of the people before laws can be framed for their protection. This is especially true in a self-governing people, but is essentially the same in the most absolute tyranny. ”

“ The highest stage of society towards which we are moving he calls liberty—that is, the synthesis of the thesis, community, and the antithesis, property—but “liberty is equality, because liberty exists only in the social state, and outside of equality there is no society.” ”

“ Where the governing power is dependent upon the governed, no abstract theory of individual liberty or what not, will long prevent the State from taking cognizance of apparent and remediable injustice. Doctrinaire political philosophers, painters of Utopias, peddlars of political panaceas, still have their own little nostrums for society, but the law has been built up, as has seemed right or expedient to the law makers of the time, as a series of arbitrary rules based upon experience, and defining the terms upon which people may best live in each other’s society. ”

“ The notions of social rights, social duties, and liberty are, therefore, all born together, and correct definitions of them all will be consistent and coherent. The notion of liberty which we have been criticizing, however, is hostile to all notions of rights and duties; the man who had that liberty would have no duties, nor any rights, properly speaking, because he would have privileges. Rights and duties, in a combination consistent with liberty, constitute the social bond. Such rights, duties, and liberty are the elements of political institutions which give them their form and value. ”

“ And if, as we have endeavored to show, the right, or power, or authority of society is not derived from a transfer of individual rights, then it is clear that neither the right to life nor liberty is transferred to society. ”

“ The subject of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical Necessity; but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. A question seldom stated, and hardly ever discussed, in general terms, but which profoundly influences the practical controversies of the age by its latent presence, and is likely soon to make itself recognised as the vital question of the future. ”

“ To insist on having the personal liberty that goes with a republic, and at the same time not to set a limit to the resources an individual can own, is a contradiction. A republic has economic laws that are essential to her existence. ”

“ Acknowledge the right to control government, and you acknowledge the right to control life. So long as it lies in the power of one class to impose taxes, to regulate the hours of labour, to admit and to exclude from occupations, and generally to control the political organization of society, so long will its members be tempted to dispose of the members of the subject class in every part of life. When the equality of both classes in the State is admitted, the admission of their equal worth in all their private relations inevitably follows. ”

“ If it means that the members of a society cannot form equal and just laws for self government, unless these members are virtuous, it is false; but if it means that liberty cannot be preserved without virtuous laws. it is true. That vicious men can constitute themselves into a society by laws, free, just and virtuous, respecting themselves, is proved by the associations of nobles, priests, merchants, stockjobbers and robbers, which are contrived, whether the members are virtuous or not, to preserve individual social rights. ”

“ But it is clearly laid down as a fundamental principle of the all-pervasive common law, that rights given by the Creator are unalienable, [Pg 17] and that no human being, however emphatically he may declare, or will, or agree to the contrary, may by any possible act of any other human being or of any set of human beings, whether calling themselves a government or not, or by any possible means, deprive himself, or be deprived of the right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—these being necessarily incidental to the original right of equality. ”