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Clarissa Woodberry
posted 6 March 2007

Liberty is often seen as a lofty ideal but precisely defining what it means in the modern world, and defending individual liberty in specific cases can be complicated. Political culture today is increasingly focused on the individual, yet this has not necessarily lead to greater protection of individual liberty.

Instead, legislation is often introduced to protect the individual by removing certain liberties. We can see this by looking at recent or proposed legislation in Britain such as the child vetting procedures, identity cards and the ban on incitement to religious hatred, all of which are premised on the idea that individuals are vulnerable to various threats. The apparent consensus that it is legitimate to legislate on every area of life on this basis means understanding how our liberties should be interpreted and protected in the modern state is crucial. Charles Fried, a law professor at Harvard University, studies this problem in Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government - a vigorous and sometimes provocative defence of liberty in its many forms.

Fried starts his defence of liberty by looking at the human condition - the 'rock-bottom, indigestible fact of each person's lonely individuality, his ultimate responsibility for his own beliefs, judgments, and choices'. He argues that our liberties must be pre-political and natural rather than created by the state. Fried focuses on the naturalness of each individual's liberty. By doing this he makes clear that protecting liberty should be the priority of government and that liberty cannot be based on what freedoms the government of the day decides to grant us. When that happens the relationship between the individual and the government has fundamentally altered and 'government cannot be constrained by that freedom'.

Modern Liberty has a historical overview of the development of liberty. Fried demonstrates that, while liberty might be natural, interpretations of liberty have varied hugely over time. In ancient times liberty normally referred to a city state not being dominated by another. Whether the individual lived under a tyranny within the state was not so important. In the modern world liberty is much more of an individualistic concept - in Benjamin Constant's words 'individual liberty is the first need of the modern man'. This is a crucial difference reflected in the changing role of the state as it has evolved and expanded from protecting general security to protecting individual rights as well. One weakness of Modern Liberty is that Fried directs his analysis almost entirely at the Western world, so there is little on liberty in other cultures. Because Fried argues that liberty is the universally natural state, it would be interesting to read his views on, and explanations for, the different conceptions of individual liberty in say, the Islamic world.

Throughout the book, Fried is emphatic about liberties being based outside the state, but he acknowledges that the state has a crucial role in defending individual liberty. After arguing so strongly against the overbearing role of the state (he describes it as often being 'the greatest threat to liberty') he concludes that it would be impossible to do away with the state. This is because 'a modern complex government will have to draw lines adjudicating between competing interests: the liberty interests of individuals competing with the liberty interests of the collective majority'. This question over where the rights of the individual and the interests of the majority collide is never entirely resolved.

The latter section is devoted to the often conflicting aims of liberty and equality, an especially pertinent question since the creation of the modern welfare state. Fried's argument is that decisions made with the aim of equality infringe individual liberty while lowering standards for all. For example, in Quebec, all private healthcare was banned to stop the rich buying better private healthcare that the majority could not afford. The motivation behind this legislation - (aiming to stop financial resources determining the quality of healthcare) is understandable, but the law denied individual choice in the name of equality. Fried makes strong critiques of prioritising for equality at the expense of liberty, but he could have given greater acknowledgment of the inequalities of wealth that motivate the desire for equality. Fried also barely covers the importance of wealth in making liberty more than just a word in many circumstances - the huge difference between liberty enshrined in law and in practice. Under the US constitution, every citizen born in the country is entitled to run for president, but the money needed to even contemplate standing means that, in practice, this freedom is not available to the majority.

Even though Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government is mainly concerned with the situation American its focus on universal values makes it highly relevant. Importantly, Modern Liberty remains accessible and readable while engaging with some deep philosophical questions. It should be read widely as it is concerned with the central debates of modern politics - the apparent conflict between the desire for liberty and equality and where the division between the state and the individual should be.