Freedom and the Law - Bruno Leoni

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of mathematical or logical procedures, we feel obliged nonetheless to sound a note of warning against confusing these procedures with those of people who speak of matters like “freedom.” A triangle is certainly a concept, whether or not this concept is also something else—for instance, an object of experience, of intuition, or the like. “Freedom,” while presenting itself as a concept, is also what many people believe in as a reason for living, something they say they are ready to fight for, something they say they cannot live without. I do not think that people would fight for triangles. Perhaps a few mathematicians would do so. But many people say that they are prepared to fight for freedom just as they are prepared to fight for a piece of land or to protect the lives of their loved ones.

      This is not intended to be a panegyric on behalf of freedom. The facts referred to here can easily be verified in the historical records of many countries or observed in everyday life. The fact that people are prepared to fight for what they call their “freedom” is related to the fact that they also say they have “maintained” or “lost” or “restored” their “freedom,” although they never say that they have “maintained” or “lost” or “restored” triangles or other similar geometrical concepts. On the other hand, “freedom” cannot be actually pointed to; it is not a material thing. Even if considered as a material thing, “freedom” could not be the same for everybody, since there are different meanings of “freedom.” Nevertheless, we probably can say that “freedom” is, at least for each person who speaks of it, a reality, a definite thing. “Freedom” may be a situation deemed suitable to those who praise it; it may be an object of nonsensorial experience inducing an awareness of nonmaterial things like values, beliefs, and so on. “Freedom” seems to be an object of psychological experience. This means that it is not conceived of by ordinary people simply as a word, as a nominal entity the meaning of which it is only necessary to agree on by means of a stipulation similar to those of mathematics or logic.

      Under these circumstances, I wonder whether or not we can define “freedom” stipulatively. Of course, every definition is to some extent stipulative, since it implies a certain agreement about how a word is to be used. Even lexicographic definitions do not exclude stipulations concerning the way of describing, say, what people mean by a certain word of ordinary usage in France or in England or in both countries or all over the world. For instance, we can make stipulations about the languages to be taken into consideration in elaborating a lexicographic definition or about the choice to be made among the meanings of the same word when dictionaries give several. But in all such cases we never forget that there are some uses which are revealed by common dictionaries and which cannot be changed by stipulation without disregarding the meanings of the words as other people actually use them.

      Stipulations are simply instrumental devices to convey to others something we want them to know. In other words, they are a means of communicating or transmitting information, but the information itself cannot be stipulated. We can stipulate that black shall be called “white,” and white, “black,” but we cannot make stipulations about the actual sensorial experiences which we communicate and to which we arbitrarily give the name “black” or “white.” A stipulation is possible and also useful in so far as there is a common factor that makes its communication successful. This common factor may be an intuition in mathematics or a sensorial experience in physics, but it is never itself a subject of stipulation in its turn. Whenever a stipulation seems to be based on another stipulation, the problem of finding a common factor that permits the stipulation to function is simply postponed; it cannot be eliminated. This would be the limit of Humpty Dumpty's power if Humpty Dumpty were not a fictitious character in a children's tale, but a real person making stipulations with other persons about the use of a word.

      It would be of little use, therefore, to make a stipulative definition of “freedom” that would not convey to other people some kind of information included in the very meaning of that word as already understood, and it may be questioned if the theorists, in speaking of stipulative definitions, had such a thing as “freedom” actually in mind.

      Thus, if a stipulative definition of “freedom” is to have significance, it must transmit some information. It is doubtful whether information knowable only by the author of the definition would be of any interest whatever to other people who have no share in the content of that information. Being completely personal, it would be of little concern to others. Indeed, it would be impossible to reveal it to other people. An exclusively stipulative definition of “freedom” could not avoid this deficiency. Whenever political philosophers have proposed a stipulative definition of “freedom,” they have not only wanted to transmit information about their personal feelings and beliefs, but also to remind others of feelings and beliefs that they considered as common to those whom they addressed. In this sense also the stipulative definitions of “freedom” proposed from time to time by political philosophers are more or less clearly concerned with some lexical use of the word “freedom” and therefore with some lexicographic research about it.

      Thus, a really effective definition of “freedom” must be, in the last analysis, a lexicographic one, regardless of the fact that this will involve the difficulties of lexicographic research.

      To sum up: “Freedom” is a word used by people in their ordinary language to mean special kinds of psychological experiences. These experiences are different at different times and in different places and are also connected with abstract concepts and technical words, but they cannot merely be identified with abstract concepts or reduced to a mere word. Finally, it is possible, and probably also useful or even necessary, to formulate a stipulative definition of “freedom,” but stipulations cannot avoid lexicographic research because only the latter can reveal the meanings people actually attach to the word in ordinary usage.

      “Freedom,” by the way, is a word with favorable connotations. Perhaps it may be useful to add that the word “freedom” sounds good because people use it to point to their positive attitude toward what they call “being free.” As Maurice Cranston has observed in his essay on Freedom (London, 1953) quoted above, people never use expressions such as “I am free” to mean that they are without something they consider to be good for them. No one says, at least in speaking of day-to-day affairs, “I am free from money” or “I am free from good health.” Other words are used to express the attitude of people toward the absence of good things: they say that they lack something; and this applies, so far as I know, to all the European languages at present as well as in the past. In other words, to be “free” from something means “to be without something that is not good for us,” while, on the other hand, to lack something means to be without something that is good.

      Of course, freedom has little meaning when it is complemented only by the expression “from something,” and we expect people to tell us also what it is that they are free to do. But the presence of a negative implication in the word “freedom” and in certain related words like “free” seems unquestionable. This negative implication is also present in derivative words connected with the term “liberty,” which is simply the Latin counterpart of “freedom” and not a word with a different meaning.2 For instance, “liberal” is a word that designates both in Europe and in America a negative attitude toward “constraint,” regardless of the nature of the “constraint” itself, which in its turn is conceived of very differently by American and by European “liberals.”

      Thus, “freedom” and “constraint” in ordinary language are antithetical terms. Of course, one can like “constraint” or some kind of “constraint,” like the Russian army officers of whom Tolstoy said that they liked military life because it turned out to be a sort of “commanded idleness.” Many more people in the world like “constraint” than we probably imagine. Aristotle made a penetrating remark when he said at the beginning of his treatise on politics that people are divided into two broad categories, those who were born to rule and those who were born to obey rulers. But even if one likes “constraint,” it would be an abuse of words to say that “constraint” is freedom. Nevertheless, the idea that “constraint” is something very closely connected with freedom is at least as old as the history of political theories in the Western world.

      I think that the main reason for this is that no one can be said to be “free

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