CONCEPTIONS OF LIBERTY

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21218, 14 September 1940, Page 11 (Supplement)

CONCEPTIONS OF LIBERTY

A Contrast :: German and Anglo-American

(By Dr. Harold W. Dodds, President of Princeton University.)

JN THE YEAR 1775, believing a war with England inevitable, a man who had failed twice in business and once as a farmer before he turned to the successful practice of the law and became a leader in propaganda for the independence of the Colonies, made a speech in the second revolutionary convention of Virginia which concluded with these words: “ I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.” By his famous peroration Patrick Henry won immortality in the school history books and struck a responsive chord in the hearts of Americans which has Not Yet Ceased to Vibrate. To our colonial forefathers the chief threat to liberty was government. Liberty, as they viewed it, was the absence of arbitrary civil restraints upon the full self-realisation of the individual. Destroy unnatural hindrances to the free play of natural reason imposed by arbitrary authority and vested privilege and all would be well. We now know that this expectation was not realised. Moreover, hindsight being better than foresight, we are now able to realise that governmental tyranny is not the sole threat to our liberties. But let us not forget that underlying all other freedoms is civil freedom and that our ancestors were correct in the importance they attached to it. Those who press for social revolution will do well to consider more seriously the loss of political liberty which they so lightly esteem. As one looks about the world, he can as an American be thankful to those heroic figures ol past times who through the centuries struggled to establish the Great Liberties which we casually accept today as if they had existed forever. A certain radical school of writers intent upon debunking many traditional values, less influential at the moment than a few months ago before the Russian-Ger-man pact, asserts that historically the demand for political liberty has been nothing more than the rationalisation of a desire for a greater share of the property or privileges possessed by the few but withheld from the many. Thus the Historic Contests For Freedom of government, of opinion, of speech, of assembly, of religious worship, are said to have been merely deceptive cloaks concealing the acquisitive urge to make money. I submit that this is too low an appraisal of human nature. Our own war of independence had its economic aspects, of course, but of great significance was its ideology which ran to the natural rights of individuals as human beings. No man’s quest for freedom cannot be explained in economic terms. When the Scottish Parliament in the time of Robert Bruce issued its manifesto against submission to English rule, it was not a regard for economic interest that moved them to declare: “ It is liberty alone that we fight and contend for, which no honest man will lose but with his life.” In our more enlightened age some might call this war-mongering, but millions arc at this very moment matching it with their lives.

Ouj- forefathers believed that love oi liberty was a dominant native constituent of all human beings. Of late, however, we have seen that the sentiment for freedom can be bought off; that other sentiments may displace it; that mankind can be led into a willing surrender of his liberties. We cannot, therefore, be as sure as were ealier generations of the commanding position which the urge to liberty instinctively holds in the hearts of men; and this leads us to a consideration of a different theory of freedom diametrically opposed to America’s tradition but productive of sweeping and horrible consequences abroad. To the German philosophers of the Nineteenth Century Obsessed With the Idea of Order the theories of freedom which underlay oui War of Independence seemed to spell anarchy and disorder. This temperamental iear of disunion made them hostile to liberty as understood in England and the United States, and led them to stress order imposed from above as the basic element necessary to cement society together. Now it is true that order is required to sustain liberty. This is often diffcult for young people to understand, as any college dean will testify. But the definition of freedom coined by the German philosophers is so extreme, so opposed to cur own tradition, that it is difficult for us to comprehend it. According to their doctrines, the highest freedom is found in the ordered life dictated by the rulers of the State. The individual is free to the extent that his life is dissolved in the State. True freedom is submission—surely a distorted use of a good word. According to this concept, the ants and bees would appear to be freest of living things. I do not ask you to understand this doctrine which has for several generations characterised German thought. And yet we cannot deny its fearful power once it has become the ideal of a nation. I have set forth two antithetical doctrines of liberty, the one which stresses the individual’s right to a life of his own and the other the individual’s subjection to the State, for a very specific purpose, viz., to point out one characteristic which they have in common. Although poles apart in other respects, Each Has a Common Element without which any theory of freedom would be nonsense. It is recognition of the truth that liberty for each individual implies a harmonious relationship to a force or power outside and above himself which he is, in the last analysis, accountable. In other words, no philosophy of liberty can escape the grim fact of responsibility. Thus, the most extreme doctrines of individual liberty ever current in America insisted upon man’s duty to obey reason. No man or nation which declined this responsibility could be free. To the sorrow of our rationalistic forefathers the goddess of reason failed to establish dominion over the minds of as it was expected she would, but this did not alter the principle that liberty, in the old phrase, is not license to act capriciously. All free action is integrated action.