Understanding Of Liberty Research Articles

A laboratory of liberty: the transformation of political culture in republican Switzerland, 1750-1848

Based on a tradition of political innovation, Swiss citizens recalibrated their understanding of liberty and republicanism through public political debates, during the revolutionary transformation to a rights-based society. The resulting hybrid political culture enhances our understanding of the international Age of Revolution.

A liberdade como condição das relações de poder em Michel Foucault

O presente artigo tem como objetivo apresentar a reflexão sobre a liberdade, a partir das relações de poder em Michel Foucault. Tem como material de análise documentos apresentados no formato de entrevistas, artigos, ou organizados em livros, a exemplo dos cursos do Collège de France, proferidos por Foucault. É nesse disperso material que se encontram as ofertas analíticas sobre a liberdade, neste autor que tanto priorizou as pesquisas sobre as relações de poder. A compreensão da liberdade, na cartografia foucaultiana, mostra-se como possibilidade estratégica de enfrentamento às relações de poder, as quais operam com dispositivos entranhados e móveis em todos os espaços da vida social na sociedade capitalista.

Women, Missions and Modernity: From Anti-Slavery to Missionary Zeal, 1780s to 1840s

This paper focuses on women and the early period of the modern missionary movement from the late eighteenth century to the 1830s, considering links between the anti-slavery campaigns and the development of overseas missions within a framework of early twenty-first century understandings of modernity. There are three sections. The first discusses women's writing in relation to anti-slavery, the second examines the shift from women's anti-slavery activism at home to broader activities at home and overseas, while the third focuses on the London-based Female Education Society and its role as an organising body for women in educational work overseas. Connecting the three sections is an understanding of women's lives in a changing world, caught up in Britain's expanding empire. The women described here were mostly from Christian families in a time when religious affiliation was in a state of flux. This paper argues that women's interest in anti-slavery became enmeshed with a desire to bring education to those who would attain freedom and was encompassed in broader understandings of liberty and enlightenment. The desire to educate expanded to include the “heathen” in many parts of the world, and this paralleled the burgeoning of modern missions.

'Ouvrez l'histoire'. Revolutionaire geschiedenispolitiek in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (1792-1799)

‘Ouvrez l’histoire’. Revolutionary Historical Politics in the Southern Netherlands (1792-1799)Based on speeches given by revolutionary administrators in Antwerp and Brussels during the French period, this article investigates the uses of the past in official revolutionary discourse. The revolutionary conception of liberty – based on a break with the past and a return to mankind’s original state of natural freedom – was diametrically opposed to the historically grounded Brabantine understanding of liberty. Yet in practice, elements of the native historical culture were subtly integrated into the official discourse. At a national level, the cherished myth of the Belgians as defenders of freedom was invoked to enhance the revolutionary claim. At the local level, parallels were even drawn between the revolutionary intervention and specific episodes of local urban history, thus making the revolutionary message more recognizable for the population. These findings provide greater nuance to the existing picture of the French discourse as firmly anti-historical and unadjusted to local circumstances.

The Rule of Freedom

How can liberty be implemented through state institutions? And what kind of liberty are we thinking about in the contemporary world, since this concept is generally acknowledged as ambiguous? In order to understand the modern state as a rule of liberty, one must investigate the essence of liberty itself. It is widely known that liberty can be viewed in many ways, but what kind of liberty can govern the contemporary political order? Among the philosophers who have examined authority from the point of view of liberty is Benjamin Constant, who has distinguished liberty understood as personal security from liberty recognized as participation in political life, and who has likewise stressed that these two understandings of liberty are complementary. Another widely known vision of freedom is the division of liberty into negative and positive; the latter, in Berlin’s original understanding of the term, remains unclear. Such doubts however do not apply to the negative concept of liberty, as Berlin called it, or its equivalent in Constant’s understanding of liberty understood as personal security. Both authors concur that this understanding of liberty is fundamental, and should above all find its expression in contemporary state institutions. In order to reveal the logic of liberty thus understood, we must turn to its very roots; that is, to Thomas Hobbes’s concept of liberty. For it is Hobbes who first precisely defined that understanding of liberty, and who first consciously engaged in designing a state based from start to finish on the liberty of the individual.

John Bingham and the Story of American Liberty: The Lost Cause Meets the 'Lost Clause'

For many years, the nation ignored how slavery and the Southern racial caste system undermined the nation's ideals of equality, liberty, and democracy. We celebrated the Framers of the original Constitution and of the Bill of Rights, but largely ignored our second group of framers who gave the nation the new birth of freedom in the post Civil War amendments. Most of us have never heard of the old time Republicans who framed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, people like John A. Bingham of Ohio. To the extent that it told the story of Reconstruction at all, the dominant view until the 1950s tended to be critical of the Republicans in Congress from 1866-1873 and critical of the Republican Southern state governments established during Reconstruction. The Southern story had a pervasive effect and reconsideration of it was slow to penetrate the law. Raoul Berger's attack on the Warren Court's incorporation decisions show the lingering effects of repressing the story of the clash between slavery on one side and liberty and democracy on the other. Berger's book shows how most Americans had long forgotten a crucial part of their history - that slavery (and the caste system that replaced it) threatened Bill of Rights liberties such as free speech, free press, free exercise of religion, freedom from unreasonable searches, and freedom from cruel and unusual punishments. I will discuss John A. Bingham's understanding of liberty under the Constitution. I start with two speeches Bingham made in the House of Representatives in 1856. Both grew out of the controversy in Kansas. I then discuss his speeches on liberty during the Civil War, and how his views on liberty influenced his work on the Reconstruction Amendments.

Marriage, Slavery, and Natural Rights in the Political Thought of Aquinas

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the language of subjective natural rights can be found in a wide variety of medieval juristic and scholastic texts. This is part of a general trend in the study of political ideas that stresses the continuity between medieval and modern political values. However, many leading scholars of medieval political ideas maintain that no language of subjective natural rights can be found in Aquinas's political writings, based as they are on a famous objective definition of right (jus) as the object of justice (justitia). Other scholars argue that Aquinas's notion of subjective rights is peripheral to his political philosophy. The essay argues that Aquinas, while commenting on canon law texts, explicitly posits a subjective natural right to marry, based on the natural equality and natural liberty of all human beings. This can be seen by his claim that a slave may contract marriage, even without the consent of the master. This is one example of an instance in which Aquinas refers to specific legal issues in order to explicate his understanding of liberty and right. For Aquinas there are certain areas of liberty or mastery (dominium) that are exempt from all human authority, and wherein a person has rights to decide how to pursue natural human goods.

Slaves and Subjects in Othello

IN THE LATE-SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES, England became increasingly involved in the slave trade. During the same period, as numerous scholars have argued, a new form of personal identity developed. I want to suggest that the representation of these phenomena on the early modern English stage shows that they are interconnected. By attending to these interconnections, we can learn a good deal not only about early modern subjectivity but also about our own understandings of liberty and coercion. Using Othello as an example, I will argue that emerging understandings of selfhood help to explain ideas and attitudes about slavery and that they in turn illuminate emerging understandings of self.

Liberty, Protection, and Women's Work: Investigating the Boundaries between Public and Private

During the Progressive Era, the U. S. state and federal courts considered constitutional challenges to protective labor legislation. While courts often struck down generalized protective legislation, they frequently upheld such legislation for women. I explore the reasoning in the cases decided between 1897 and 1923, showing that the courts developed understandings of liberty for women that differed from those for men. In opposition to traditional separate spheres reasoning, I show that the courts viewed men's exercise of liberty as depending on their private capacities to be free, while women's labor was subject to public control due to state interest in their reproductive capacities. I suggest that constitutional theorists who are studying substantive due process should place more emphasis on courts'conceptions of the subjects of due process guarantees rather than considering solely the challenged statutes' restriction of liberty. I develop a dynamic and complex understanding of liberty to capture this aspect of the relationship between constitutional theory and gender.

Some Recent Interpretations of John Stuart Mill

It is usual to interpret Mill's understanding of liberty in terms deriving from his distinction in On Liberty between self-regarding and other-regarding conduct. Granted this distinction and Mill's genuine concern to define and defend it, it remains a relevant question why he attached so much importance to it. This raises a less familiar theme in Mill, namely the inter-connection of self-regarding and other-regarding conduct. An uncommitted reading of the main texts suggests an equivalent value is attached to this. Mill clearly and constantly asserts a close connection between each person's own attempt to improve himself, to cultivate his ‘affections and will’, and the social and political structure in which he acts. Self-regarding virtue and responsible social conduct are interdependent; the quality of each depends upon the quality of the other. A fuller recognition of this and its central place in Mill's revision of Bentham may be of help in examining some of the particular problems raised by recent scholarship on Mill.