Words matter; and no words matter more than the ones that are meant to capture the most elusive and complex of our mental constructs.  The philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that “almost every moralist in human history has praised freedom.  Like happiness and goodness, like nature and reality, the meaning of this term is so porous that there is little interpretation that it seems able to resist.”^[1]  One problem that is generally overlooked is that in typical usage the words liberty and freedom are used interchangeably, depending on how they seem to fit in the flow of a sentence.

In the Declaration of Independence the great verbal stylist Thomas Jefferson began with the claim that liberty was an inalienable right and closed with an assertion about a right to be free. Perhaps if the words are used in the same way they simply must mean the same thing.  While it is generally agreed that liberty and freedom are synonymous they have different origins.

A look back at the different experiences that these words were originally intended to capture provides credence to the theory of the four-note chord.  The fullest experience of liberty is not a solo experience.  Liberty originated from the Latin word libertas which meant unrestricted by restraint.  Freedom has an altogether different origin. It comes from a set of ancient northern European languages.  Whether it be the English word free, the Norse fri, the German frei, the Dutch and Flemish vrij, the Celtic rheidd, and the Welsh rhydd; they all have the same unexpected root.  They come down from the Indo-European priya, friya or riya, which meant dear, beloved, or friend.  To be free meant that a person was joined to a community of similar thinking people by ties of kinship and rights of belonging.^[2]

It appears as though liberty and freedom, the two interchangeable words, may actually pull us in opposing directions.  The origin of liberty implied independence.  Freedom, on the other hand, involved connectedness.  However, these experiences do not need to cancel each other out.  The founders did not think so.  Their vision of a free society was not one where the personal, political and social were separate categories.  Personal independence functioned best within the context of community connections that nourished virtuous behaviors and wise political participation—the four-note chord.

 [1]  Isaiah Berlin, Isaiah Berlin: Two Concepts of Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 15, originally published 1969 as Four Essays on Liberty.

[2] David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5.