Although liberty has been analyzed from the pre-Aristotelian to the postmodernist philosophers and the preeminent psychologists of the twentieth century, do we know what the founders had in mind when they used that word?  I contend that the way liberty is thought about today is not what the founders intended.  The set of ideas that was originally connected with liberty has changed.  I have come up with a musical metaphor–a four note-chord–to  to help capture the network of thoughts that were activated when the word “liberty” was spoken.

The four notes are: (1) personal liberty—the ability to do as one pleases within the rule of law, (2) political liberty—the right to participate in the government that makes those laws, (3) internal liberty—the ability to gain control over selfish passions and destructive impulses that prevents a person from making good choices and passing good laws, and (4) public good liberty—a benevolent consciousness of, and participation in, the welfare of the community.  All four types of liberty were understood as necessarily working together.  No single idea rang louder than the others; nor were they ranked in order of importance.  In the four-note chord of liberty, personal and internal liberty were balanced and a virtuous person would to a large degree self-limit behavior that was harmful to the public good.

To extend the musical metaphor, just as various sound vibrations are related to different emotional states, different types of liberty can lead to dissimilar end states.  The notes may be played separately, but when heard together it is a qualitatively different experience.  The effect of the four-note chord of liberty was a dignified state of virtuous living—a life that was in tune.  This is what the founders had in mind when they used the word “happiness”  There was a harmony within the person and a harmonizing within the community.  Liberties were not just “things” that citizens possessed; with each deciding on their own what to do with their freedom.  The founders knew what should be done: elevate the human condition.

Personal liberty without internal liberty could lead to extravagance, wastefulness, and licentiousness—a generally disordered life.  If one lacked the understanding of when not to act, then liberty simply collapsed into personal chaos.  Neuroscientists know that the balance between action and restraint is true down to the smallest unit of behavior—the firing of the neuron.  There can be no behavior if neurons do not fire; but for a neuron not to fire and to inhibit action requires more brain energy.  The ability to moderate behavior by inhibiting immediate impulses is one of the most important functions of the mature and healthily functioning frontal cortex—the crowning achievement of human evolution. 

For the founders, the ideal of moderation was the lynchpin virtue of the intelligent life.  From the philosophers of antiquity to the Enlightenment, moderation was the cardinal trait for the achievement of the happy life.  Liberty to simply “do your own thing” was liberty misunderstood.  Montesquieu, one of the founders’ favorite political philosophers, wrote, “liberty in no way consists of doing what one wants…liberty can consist only in having the power to do what one should want to do and in no way being constrained to do what one should not want to do.”^[1]   Or as Cicero, another founders’ favorite, wrote, “a very distinguished philosopher, was once asked what his pupils achieved, he answered that they learned to do of their own free will what the laws would compel them to do.”^[2]

 [1] Charles Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), 155.

[2] Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero: On the Commonwealth and on the Laws, ed. James E. G Zetzel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3.

Words have histories, and perhaps no word has a longer or more complex history than liberty.  Hegel wrote that history is the history of liberty.  If true, then the history of the United States is one of the most important chapters.  Although this nation’s history has been periodically marred by visceral attempts to assert that one ethnic, religious, or racial group was more American than another, to be an American does in fact mean that one belongs to a community that is unified by an idea: liberty and the pursuit of a fulfilled life (i.e., happiness) are inalienable rights. The United States was the first nation to be founded not upon myth, conquest, or accident, as most others have before, but upon a demand for the protection of those rights.

Of all values, liberty has become the first principle of American political and social life and remains the ultimate banner word upon which any cause hoping to gain traction will center its rhetoric.   At other times and places values such as a belief in God and religious revelation, or obedience to a monarch were supreme.  In America, however, liberty has remained the core value upon which major policies are ultimately justified.  The need to defend and promote liberty at home and abroad has been the decisive cause mentioned in every declaration of war by a United States president.  Nations that do not encourage liberty are simply thought of as wrong; or in recent decades, in need of rebuilding.  Protection of liberty and the right to pursue happiness has been the litmus test for what is good.  In the history of the United States, these are the human values that are meant to connect the present to the past.

This nation’s beginning is not obscured by the vagaries of the ancient past, nor do we need to reach back to a Herodotus-type history, where fact and fiction are blended to both inform and entertain.  The United States was founded in the bright light of recent history.  We know who the founders were, what they wrote, who they read; and as tenuous as it might be for one person to ever claim this about another, what they were thinking.  We group the men together who were instrumental in the formation of the United States and label the collective “the founders.”  This singular term is unfortunate for they were a group that was riven by internal conflict with the major players shifting positions in the years between the Declaration and the Constitution.  Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration but was absent from, and an early critic of, the Constitutional Convention.  Leading supporters of independence such as Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine turned ardent critics of where they believed the newly independent nation was headed.  Colleagues such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton became political enemies with the rise of bitter party politics between the Republicans and the Federalists.  Yet despite their profound differences, one transcendent belief allows us to group them as a unity.  This was their truth: liberty and the pursuit of happiness were the raison d’etre of good government.  The United States is not just a country, it is a cause.