 Some people seem to think that liberty is something that was invented that Ein Rand or Thomas Jefferson or maybe John Locke just sat down one day and thought about the idea of liberty and began to explain it to others. In fact, the story is much more complicated and a lot more interesting. The story of liberty is the story of the growth of the idea of liberty and very importantly of the institutions of liberty. In this short presentation I'll talk mainly about those institutions and ideas as they developed in Europe and then other societies that grew from Europe. But that's not to say that these are unique to European societies. We also find the ideas of freedom and Islamic civilization, Chinese civilization and elsewhere. I'll focus on the Western tradition because it's been so influential around the world. But remember, every society has at least two narratives, a narrative of liberty and a narrative of power, coercion and domination. And indeed those two narratives are intimately connected because the story of liberty is to a very large degree the story of putting constraints, controls and limitations on the exercise of power. We call that constitutionalism or limited government. Let's start very, very far back in the past, between 4500 and 4800 years ago with the oldest story recorded in any human language, the epic of Gilgamesh. It's a story of a great king, Gilgamesh, who's powerful, superb, knowledgeable and expert. But as the epic tells us, he would not leave the young girls alone, not unknown among holders of executive power. He effectively raped the young women in the city of Uruk, over which he was the king, by raping them on the night of their wedding to their husbands. This is a form of exerting power and domination over society and of course of humiliating the whole society. The story tells us that the people prayed to the gods for some savior and they created an artificial man, a natural man, Enkidu. Enkidu comes to the city, he struggles with Gilgamesh and neither is able to defeat the other. It's the first story, if you will, of checks and balances in human history. As it is said, let them be regular rivals and let Uruk be allowed peace. So the story is that being subject to the arbitrary power of another person or group of persons is terrible, unbearable, incompatible with human liberty or dignity. We need to have checks and balances, checks on power. And what restrains power is some other kind of power. If we want to see how that worked or played out in the rest of human history, let's turn briefly to the societies of Greece. We think of Athens as a birthplace of democracy and personal freedom and compared to other societies of the day, that certainly was the case. One should not overly romanticize these cases. The vast majority of the population in the classical period in Athens were in fact slaves and not free persons. But those who were free had more freedom than was experienced by people in other societies. The Greeks were invaded twice by the Persians. And as a consequence of their victory over the Persians, their ability to defend their homeland, they began to ask for what was it that we were fighting. And people begin a great period of thinking, philosophizing, writing poetry about justice and about freedom. And it comes to the fore as a topic not only to be experienced but also to be discussed. And then during the Peloponnesian War, which pits Sparta against Athens, again a great discussion about what distinguishes these two societies. Sparta, beloved of many philosophers, it was a militaristic, controlled society in which individual freedom was virtually unknown, versus commercial, free-wheeling, much more open and fluid Athens, a far more free society. Unfortunately for our story, most philosophers throughout history have favored Sparta over Athens. But Sparta gave virtually nothing to human civilization. From Athens we derive, of course, literature, philosophy, art, history, geometry, sciences, and so many other contributions to human civilization. They, of course, were overcome, notably by the Roman Republic, and that's another interesting element or chapter in the story of freedom. The Roman Constitution was an extremely elaborate set of legal principles and doctrines, powers, privileges, and immunities that made it very difficult for any one person to acquire total power over the state. Students of Roman history are sometimes confused by all of the different officers, lecturers and censors and tribunes and so on, that exercised power within the Roman Republic, and, of course, the Senate, which means, in effect, the old wise people, the former office holders who formed the Senate of Rome. If you want to understand the role of the Roman Constitution, it made it very difficult for anyone to establish an individual tyranny. And it lasted a very, very long time, but, of course, finally comes to an end and is replaced by the Roman Imperium or the Roman Empire, in which those institutions of the Constitution were ignored and finally swept away and all power vested in the hands of one person. It's a lesson that citizens of modern republics should never forget, the importance of maintaining the Constitution and the danger of putting too much power in the hands of any one person or group of persons, most notably the executive. Now, if we want to look at this as a matter of stages, that's one way to understand human history, that civilization also comes to an end. In the year 476 to pick one significant date, among many, the last Roman emperor in Rome is expelled from the city, Romulus Augustulus Triumfus, by one of his German generals. And from that point on, there's no longer a Roman emperor in Rome. Northern Europe enters what is later known as the Dark Ages, the shriveling of urban life, the abandonment of the cities, the decline of trade. The causes for this are complex and are still discussed among historians, but what we do see is the retreat of Roman civilization from the north of Europe and a collapse in literacy, science, commerce, learning, and the other things we associate with civilization. But there's a very important institution that remains in Rome, and that is the Christian Bishop of Rome. Later comes to be known as the Pope. Il Papa means the father of the church. And that institution begins to acquire a great deal of the prestige formally accorded to the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. That's very, very significant because later, as urban civilization begins to return to Europe, there is a great conflict between the German emperors, the first German emperors crowned in the year 800, and the bishops of Rome, or that is to say the popes. These are two institutions that overlap, that coincide in jurisdiction, and they come into a great conflict, especially in 1073 when a German monk named Hildebrand becomes Pope Gregory VII. He issues what is called the Dictatus Pope, the dictates of the pope, a kind of list of demands in 1075 that include the idea that the pope can release subjects of a king from their obligations of obedience. This is very dangerous stuff. A great conflict comes about between these two powers, what is called the investiture crisis. Who has the power to invest the bishops of Germany with their insignia of office and their authority within the church? The emperor says that's his responsibility, and the pope says it's his. There's a great conflict between the two. It was resolved in 1077 when Emperor Henry IV went to Canossa to ask the forgiveness of the pope. It's a very complicated story, involves also a Norman army came to nearby a great deal of international diplomacy and military strategy, but the significance of this is that power cannot be conceived as one unitary sphere held by one person or one institution. Then instead there's a big crack in power. On the one hand the church, on the other hand the empire claiming authority over you. Neither one of them successfully able to do it at the same time that they interpenetrate each other. Now the significance of that is if one is oppressing you, you can go to the other. If that one is oppressing you, go to the former. And this introduces competition in the exercise of power. And from this crack between on the one hand the church authority and on the other hand that of the empire, many, many other cracks emerge. The emergence of independent kingdoms, city-states, independent bishoprics, a wide variety of institutions. So that Western Europe becomes highly fractured politically with a great deal of competition among all the different sources of political authority. That is tremendously significant in understanding the emergence of institutions in Europe because there was institutional competition. Again, if one was oppressing you, you could go someplace else. And as a consequence, one of the things that rulers were able to offer people to attract them to come, as merchants, as investors, as workers, was more freedom. And that competition for freedom helped to steer Europe towards a freer society in contrast to some of the other more centrally controlled systems of the Eurasian land mass. During this period also, you see the development for the first time of what comes to be called civil society. Civil society emerges in what are known as the independent cities or the free communes of Europe. These were associations, often founded by merchants, who had come together and taken oath to each other in public to live according to the law, not to harm anyone, to pay everyone what was due to them, and to join in the common defense of their rights and freedoms if they're assaulted or threatened by someone else. These communes, also known as cities, take as their slogan in German, Stadtluft macht frei. City air makes you free. If someone could escape from their feudal obligations or surf, for example, and get into the cities, for a year and a day, that person became a free person and the city would defend the liberty and independence of that person. So these became places of production, of exchange, and very importantly, of liberty. They were oath-based fellowships. You sometimes hear political philosophers say, oh, there are no social contracts. It's merely an interesting device for us to explore our intuitions about justice. This is a common theme in much contemporary political philosophy, but it's actually false. History is full of social contracts. Many of them very, very explicit and taken in public. Quite often, the citizens would join together and hold hands and recite the oath in public. So those were social contracts that established the freedom and independence of the city and also the freedom and independence of the citizens who lived there. Now it's quite interesting in English, we have two words to describe this. One is derived from German Burg, which means a fortified or strong place, because typically these were built with walls around them. And the other is Civitas from Latin, the word for a city as an association of persons. We get civil from Civitas, civil society, life in these free and independent cities. And from the German Burg, we get by means of the French bourgeois, bourgeois society and bourgeois life. And this persists in place names in English, places like Pittsburgh or Hillsborough or the boroughs of New York all come from this old German term. So it means not only a place, a place in which people enjoyed freedom, but also it has come to mean in English a kind of behavior, civil behavior. It means you're respectful to other people. If you say to your children, be civil, it means don't hit other people, keep your hands to yourself, don't steal from them, keep your promises. These are the fundamental rules of civil society, which is rooted in civil behavior based on respect for other persons. At about the same time in European society, you see also a development towards constitutionalism and explicit limitations put on the powers of rulers, notably of kings. Magna Carta from 1215 is a clear example of this in England in which the bishops and the barons imposed on King John a very explicit list of limitations on his power and authority. But this is not a uniquely English experience. It's happening all around Europe. The Golden Bull of Hungary of 1222 is a notable example of that. A common theme was what was called redress before supply. If the king wanted resources from the population, the form of taxes, he had to redress their grievances, had to listen to them and address injustices that were happening in the kingdom. That comes forward into the modern age as a slogan that is familiar to all Americans, no taxation without representation, which has its roots in this medieval struggle to put limitations on the powers of kings. Now, if we want to look forward a little bit further to the real formulation of a principles of a free society, we should look to the Dutch Republic, the Dutch play an especially important role in the development of the institutions and the ideas of liberty. In the year 1556, Philip II of Spain had received the Netherlands as an inheritance from his father, Emperor Charles V, and he began very quickly to attempt to modernize this backward little province of the Netherlands, instituting new taxes on them and new principles of organization. The people there rebelled against this. They said, you have not asked our estates, our parliaments, our representative bodies before imposing these new taxes, and this led to widespread rebellion. Also, the introduction of the Inquisition caused a great deal of resentment, although most of the Dutch at this time were Roman Catholic, as the merchants of Antwerp wrote in a petition to Philip II, so many heretics come here to trade. To introduce the Inquisition will be ruined. Merchants are real pioneers of religious toleration. They understand a very simple principle. If you burn your customers alive, you won't get the second sale. They have a strong interest in promoting religious toleration. The struggle of the Dutch against the tyranny imposed on them by the Spanish king was ultimately successful in 1606 with the establishment of the United Provinces and later of the Dutch Republic, which becomes the center of the free press and of all kinds of ideas being spread throughout Europe because they had an unregulated printing trade. They would print anything in exchange for money. What the Dutch had revolted against was the principle of absolutism, the new doctrine, the new modern idea that the king should be absolute in the exercise of his power, that there were no limits on the king's authority. This idea was the enemy of liberty in all times and all places, and I should say it's still with us. Many people still believe that the state or the president or the ruler should have unlimited and arbitrary authority with no constraints. At that time, it was the explicit ideology of many of the kingdoms of Europe that the Dutch revolted against it successfully. At about the same time, there's emerging a new doctrine, an intellectual doctrine of individual rights, the idea that all individuals have basic fundamental equal rights. This emerges, for example, among the Spanish scholastics who had debated within Spain not only about the powers of the king, but also about the rights of these new creatures that they had discovered in their vast empire, the Indians. When the Spaniards came in contact with these people, many people, of course, began to abuse them, to enslave them, to murder them, to confiscate them as European empires spread throughout what they called the New World. There was a great debate, though. What is the status of these creatures? Are they human beings like us? Or are they some kind of natural slaves? Among the Spanish scholastics emerged a group of people who defended the rights of the Indians, Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolome de las Casas among them. And they argued they're just like us. They have cities, they have laws, they have marriages, they have jurisdictions, and we should respect them. The doctrine that they articulated was known as dominium, that they have self-mastery over their own persons. They are moral agents, and they command our respect. As we are well aware, the European empires throughout the New World were often extraordinarily cruel and brutal in their treatment of the indigenous peoples. But the doctrine that these people deserve protection became, in fact, intellectually dominant, and those who abused and shackled and murdered them were considered aberrant and guilty. Indeed, when Francisco Meroquín became the Bishop of Chiapas, which is more or less Southern Mexico, and Guatemala, he was a follower of Bartolome de las Casas, and he committed the church to the defense of the indigenous peoples. And it is not an accident that that region has such a high percentage of indigenous persons because the church stood up and defended them. This doctrine of individual rights spreads throughout Europe and came to be prominent among other political movements, most notable among them, the levelers. So let's turn our attention for a moment to England and look at what is happening there. The doctrine of absolutism also comes to England, in particular in 1603 when King James VI of Scotland becomes King James I of England and proceeds to attempt to establish an arbitrary, unlimited and absolute power over the kingdom. In 1625 he died and his son Charles I came to the throne continuing his father's policies. They were resisted by such important figures as Sir Edward Cook who defended the common law and the supremacy of the law over the king. And a civil war broke out at the end of which the king was, as the English colorfully put it, shortened, he was beheaded, and the Stuart monarchy for a time brought to an end. During this period of the English Civil War a particularly important group emerges, very important for the discussion of the story of liberty. They were known as the levelers. That was a term initially applied by their enemies who said they wanted to level everyone, make everyone the same. They denied that. They said that's not the case. We understand that there are differences among persons and talents in all sorts of ways. But before the law everyone should be considered the same and equal. That was the sense in which they admitted to the term leveler. Such important figures as William Walwyn, Richard Overton, John Lilburn, who struggled for the rights and liberties of common ordinary people. They believed in religious freedom. They believed in the rights, equal rights of men and women. They believed in the freedom to trade. They believed in the protection of property, your life, your liberty, and your estate. And they wanted an explicit constitution to limit the powers of the parliament and of any royal authority. Lilburn in 1637 was arrested and brought before this court of star chamber a kind of secret court. He was found guilty of illegal printing in the kingdom. His refusal to recognize the jurisdiction of this court finally led to its abolition in 1641 and the establishment of principles of the right to trial by a jury. Lilburn is a very important figure and the reformation of the legal system. And indeed, when he died, he died in the arms of his wife Elizabeth, who was also a prominent leveler when he was let out of prison. In his last words, I shall leave this testimony behind me that I died for the laws and liberties of this nation. The levelers articulated a theory that was coherent and that rested on this notion of individual rights for every human being, regardless of race or religion or color or condition, is entitled to equal freedom before the law. Those principles that had been articulated by the levelers during the English Revolution continued. They persisted in English and European history generally, notably during the glorious revolution of 1689, partly because of the influence they exercised on John Locke. Locke's two treaties of government came to be extremely influential for the development of the ideas of freedom and they were clearly influenced by leveler ideas, which he then articulated further and applied to a wider range of topics and subjects. Those ideas came to have a great influence on the American colonists as they resisted, attempts by the British Crown and Parliament to exert authority over them. They thought that they had established their own independent colonies governed by their own laws. For example, in Virginia, the House of Burgesses, which was their representative body, remembered the importance of that word Burg in European history. This went back to there being citizens, citizens or burger, as it's called, Germans. They articulate these ideas. They go back to the Magna Carta to defend the rights of free men against royal absolutism or even the authority of a foreign parliament in which they have no representation. Now, the story after that is much better known to students of modern history, the development and growth of liberty, the abolition of slavery or the tremendous benefits that were brought by these institutions of freedom and limitations on state power. In subsequent talks, we can talk about the backward motions that were made notably in the 20th century as tyrannical governments, socialism, fascism, national socialism, Bolshevism and other ideologies contested the ground that had been prepared by liberalism and swept away the institutions and the principles and practices of freedom. But we should remember one very important point that what made possible the institutions of liberty was a widespread understanding of what liberty meant. Let me conclude with a quotation from a letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson written in 1815. It's about the American Revolution. He asks, quote, what do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people and this was affected from 1760 to 1775 in the course of 15 years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. The records of the 13 legislatures, the pamphlets, newspapers and all the colonies ought to be consulted during that period to ascertain the steps by which the public opinion was enlightened and informed concerning the authority of parliament over the colonies, end quote. What Adams is telling us here is how important ideas are and how important it is to maintain the ideas of liberty because without them liberty has no future.