World history is nothing but the evolution of consciousness of the idea of freedom! — Hegel

Last year in Sydney I presented a seminar for the Shab-e Sokhan group entitled “A Genealogy of the Idea of Freedom,” which is available on SoundCloud. My initial intention was simply to add that seminar to the body of material on my YouTube channel, but I then decided to reproduce the seminar from the beginning as a series under the same title, so that I might have the opportunity to revisit the concepts more carefully. The link below is to the first part of this series, examining two concepts of liberty in the thought of Isaiah Berlin, the major twentieth-century philosopher and statesman whom many regard as the last philosopher of freedom in the tradition of classical liberalism.

Perhaps no other word or concept in history has been praised and debated as much as freedom, and perhaps for no other word have people fought so continuously or shed so much blood in its name. How many poems have been written in its name; how many epics have been recorded in the name of freedom; how many crimes have been committed in its name; and how many tyrannies have been established under the banner of freedom.

Our human desire for freedom may be sensed in this statement attributed to Gandhi: “I know no price for freedom, because freedom is the spirit of life. What price would we not be willing to pay in order to live?” Within such a conception of freedom, a human being's being free is as self-evident as a human being's being human. Freedom, then, is not one value alongside others, but the highest word that gives meaning to ethics, to our choices, and to our historical struggle for the advance of consciousness.

Why have I chosen the title “A Genealogy of Freedom” for this series?

In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche, in my view rightly, argues that concepts that have a history cannot simply be defined. One can instead study the development of their meaning through history, arriving at a historical understanding of the concept that may in turn lead to a deeper understanding both of the concept itself and of the course of its evolution.

Freedom too, as a historical concept, cannot simply be defined; but we can study the historical development of its meaning. The concept and its definition have repeatedly been contested throughout the history of philosophy, and studying that development is what I intend to do in this series.

In this inquiry we will examine three hundred years of thinking about freedom in the West. Focusing on the Anglo-Saxon tradition of classical liberalism, we will begin in the mid-seventeenth century with Thomas Hobbes and his enormously influential Leviathan; then consider the thought and works of John Locke and Rousseau in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; proceed to Jeremy Bentham; and finally examine John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century. Before beginning this examination of the tradition of classical liberalism, however, the first part will look at the views and ideas of Isaiah Berlin, the twentieth-century philosopher of freedom whom we may regard as one of the last great classical liberal philosophers and, indeed, as a bridge between classical liberalism and neoliberalism.

We will also devote particular attention to the thought and works of the great French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau: how his ideas influenced the development of thinking about freedom in Western civilisation, particularly modern revolutions and what Berlin calls positive liberty.

We will also turn to the German philosophical tradition, its distinctive approach to the idea of freedom, and the particular role of Hegelian thought in the development of that concept within the history of Western political philosophy.

Finally, we will examine the views of existentialist philosophers, as well as psychologists in the existentialist tradition, concerning a third dimension of freedom—what might be called freedom from within, or the freedom of the human spirit.