Freedom vs. Libertyby Joseph R. StrombergEnglish is a language blessed, or cursed, with an overflowing wordhoard. 30% or so of our vocabulary comes to use from Old English (with some reinforcement from Old Norse). To this Germanic base, the Norman Conquest added tens of thousands of Norman French words – very roughly 60% of the whole vocabulary. There was a constant trickle of new borrowings from Scandinavian languages, Low German, and Dutch down the centuries. The Renaissance encouraged borrowing of learned terms from Latin and Greek. These last make up a good part of the last ten or so percent of our usable words. To tangle things even more, English explorations and conquests brought in words from India, the Americas, and Australia. If we wish to speak of the ruler, we have a choice of "regal" (Latin), "royal" (French<Latin), "imperial" (Latin), or "kingly" (Old English). Owing partly to the efforts of pro-Saxon 19th-century English writers, we now have resort to the English core vocabulary ("native" or Anglo-Saxon) when we write in elevated style. Tolkien’s works, for example, show a much lower presence of French/Latin words than would be met with elsewhere. Still, English remains an interesting mixed tongue. Thus it is not suprising that we should have two words for such a fundamental notion as freedom or liberty. I begin on the ground of etymology: "Liberty" derives from Latin libertas, from liber, "free." A curious aspect of this word is that Romans used liberi (plural) to mean "children." The French linguist Émile Benveniste explains this on the basis of a Roman marriage formula, which gave the procreation of more free persons as the purpose of marriage ("to obtain free [beings]"). Such children would be free as members of a class or community of free persons (as opposed to slaves). What are the wider connections of liber? It seems the word arises from common Indo-European *leudhos, from which came Greek eleutheros, "free," as in Eleutherian. There is an allied verb in Germanic: Gothic luidan and Old English leodan, meaning "to grow." German Leute, "people," stems from this verb, as did Old English leod, which lives on in poetry as "leed." Slavic ljudu and Lithuanian liáudis both mean "people" and reflect *leudhos. Hence, the original or ur-meaning had to do with growth, specifically the growth of a kin group, within which one was free. English got "liberty" as Norman-French liberté <Latin libertas, an abstract noun deriving from liber, which also gives us "liberal," "liberate," and other words. Down through all those medieval charters we can follow the course of libertates – freedoms, privileges, or reserved rights – which nobles, landed gentry, and burghers sometimes cowed kings into acknowledging. It remained for the liberal thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries to theorize a generalized notion of liberty. Turning to our Germanic (Old English) words, "free" and "freedom," we find their source in Indo-European *priyos, meaning "dear" or "one’s own." Cognate (kin) words include Sanskrit priyas and Persian (Avestan) fryo, both meaning "dear," Sanskrit prináti, "pleases," and Slavic prijatel, "friend." By the time we reach the Celtic and Germanic tongues, we find ourselves on home-ground with Welsh rhyyd, "free," and in Germanic – Gothic frijon, "to love," freis, "free," and freihals, "freedom." Old English freo and feols answer to the last two Gothic terms. Freihals is interesting in that it literally means "free-neck" (hals, "neck," lives on in German Hals and Scots hawse), that is, the status of one who does not bend the neck or wear the collar of servitude, or as Winfred Lehmann puts it, "one who is possessor of his own neck as opposed to a slave who is the property of his master." Very literal-minded, these ancestors of ours! Given the root meanings of *priyos, it is not shocking to find that Gothic frijonds, Old English freond, English friend, and German Freund, and so on, are also built on that stem. There is also, apparently, a connection with Old English frith and German Frieden, "peace." With differing suffixes are built German Freiheit (= "free-hood") and English "freedom." (The Old English suffix -dom comes from Indo-European *dhê-, "set, settle, establish," which yields Greek thesis and thema ["theme"] and probably Sanskrit dharma, not to mention English "deem" and "doom.") This is a striking field of meanings: "dear," "one’s own," "friends," "peace," "freedom," and so forth. As with *leudhos, "freedom" seems wholly bound up with life in small communities. Can republican theory and radical decentralization be far behind? Benveniste, who is very helpful on the etymologies, believed that they showed that freedom is granted by the community. As a follower of Marcel Mauss, and therefore of Durkheim, he could not have done otherwise. It makes more sense to say that "freedom" is only meaningful in society: "Freedom is a sociological concept. It is meaningless to apply it to conditions outside society: as can be well seen from the confusions prevailing everywhere in the celebrated free-will controversy" (Ludwig von Mises, Socialism [Jonathan Cape, 1936], p. 191). A third word root of some interest here is Indo-European *s(w)e-, "self." Derivatives include Greek ethos, ethic- (<*swedh-), Latin sodalitas, "religious society" (<*swed-), and English "sib" and "self" (all with various suffixes added to *s(w)e-. One could add Greek idios, "one’s own," "private," (<*s(w)id-, with different vocalism) whence "idiot," the man who thinks of nothing but his own interest). *S(w)e- is the basis of most reflexive and many third-person possessive pronouns in the Indo-European languages, including Latin, se, suus, sua, suum, Spanish su, and Slavic svoj-. The latter is interesting, as it seems to provide the first syllable of the pan-Slavic word for freedom: svobodá. Only the lack of a good Slavic etymological dictionary keeps me from dogging its footsteps further. It is just as well to stop the word-kinship quest here. Otherwise, I would be tempted to make a purely etymological argument for freedom-as-self-ownership ("possessor of his own neck") and the philosophers would become very cross indeed. As for the semantic range of "liberty" and "freedom," as they have come down to us, it seems that our native word is looser than the French/Latin one. We speak of "free play" (in mechanics), "free will," "free stuff," "free fall," and iceboxes that are "frost-free" (where "free" = "unburdened with"). It is easy to see how confusion might creep in. Careless thinkers might take freedom to mean getting goodies from the state. Even so, "freedom" seems a bit more world-bound or concrete than "liberty." The latter conjures up the abstract public liberty in relation to the state. I expect that in practice we shall go on using the two words rather interchangeably, even if they are not exact synonyms in their full semantic range. It is said that Chinese has no word, as such, for freedom. That would be interesting, if true, but I am more than ready to be set right on this point, if not. Ancient Sumerian had ama-gi, the cuneiform script for which you will find all over the endpapers of any book published by Liberty Fund.
Communal, decentralized, republican or otherwise, liberty and freedom are very old notions with a pedigree at least as impressive as those of any opposing concepts. It would be premature, then, to agree with the song-wright who claimed that "freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose." Freedom might well be the very "thing" it is most important not to lose. Note: This essay grew out of a discussion around the imaginary water cooler and got completely out of hand. Works consulted include Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (University of Miami Press, 1973), pp. 262-272, Winfred P. Lehmann, A Gothic Etymological Dictionary (E. J. Brill, 1986), pp. 127-129 and 234-235, and Calvert Watkins, ed., The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (Houghton Mifflin, 1985), pp. 37 (*leudh-2) and 53 (*prî-). July 10, 2001 Joseph R. Stromberg [send him mail] is the JoAnn B. Rothbard Historian in Residence at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a columnist for Antiwar.com. Copyright © 2001 LewRockwell.com |
