THE IDEA OF FREEDOM IN LATE MEDIEVAL SCOTLAND

Abstract

can a country be free where there is no liberty of association—or dissociation—where there can be no free elections, where political and economic power resides irreversibly in the dominant cadres of a single party (even in the ramifications of a single family2) backed up by secret police, where there is no freedom of speech, no free press, no effective liberty of conscience, and where all forms of intellectual and artistic expression are bridled by a relentless censorship? The freedom referred to was evidently not internal but external. The president, Mr Ceausescu, was reported to have addressed a large rally of Romanians in Bucharest summoned to celebrate the centenary of their country's independence of Ottoman domination. In a passage whose significance would assuredly not have been lost on his hearers, and which was indeed greeted with special enthusiasm, the president recalled that Romanians had had to fight for their freedom; the humbling of Turkey in 1877 showed that a state, however powerful, which practised policies of domination and oppression was doomed to defeat. Thus, even today, a country's freedom may mean its independence, or at least its belief in its independence, from external powers. Even