Freedom is so fundamental a concept that it is difficult to find a thinker who has passed it by without reflection. For thousands of years it has been sought and struggled for, yet it remains elusive.

The disputed question throughout history, however, has been: what is freedom? Although freedom is so basic and fundamental that few philosophers or philosophical schools have failed to interpret it, disagreements over its definition have been so severe that one group's definition of freedom may appear to another as a complete definition of slavery. Isaiah Berlin's observation that more than two hundred definitions of freedom have been proposed therefore seems entirely plausible.

Nietzsche writes in On the Genealogy of Morality that concepts which have a history cannot be defined; one can only study the development of their meaning through history in order to gain a historical understanding of them, which may lead in turn to a deeper understanding of the concept and of its evolution.

Freedom, then, as a historical concept cannot simply be defined, but its historical development can be studied, because both the concept and its definitions have repeatedly been challenged across the history of philosophy.

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