Are Freedom and Liberty Twins?

SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH HAVE A UNIQUE opportunity: They get to choose between and freedom. No other European language, ancient or modern, offers such a choice. I German knows only Freiheit, French only liberte, and so on. But what the choice worth? Almost all political theorists writing on these topics English assert or assume that the distinction makes no difference. Sir Isaiah Berlin, for instance, his famous essay on liberty, declares that he will both words to mean the same.2 Maurice Cranston, more attentive to semantic detail, nevertheless concludes that, in English usage the words 'freedom' and are virtually interchangable. Which to employ, he says, is usually a matter of literary style, but he specifies no stylistic criteria, mentioning only that 'liberty' tends to be used legal and political contexts, 'freedom' philosophical and more general ones.3 Context may well be a clue; yet freedom of speech and press, say, are surely much discussed political contexts, and English philosophers have long disputed about liberty and necessity. Nor there anything either philosophical or general about a free lunch. Among the many theorists equating freedom with liberty there is, however, one striking exception. Hannah Arendt considered precisely this conceptual difference central to her most urgent theoretical concerns, and took our blindness to it as symptomatic of fundamental modern debilities. Who right: Arendt or everyone else? How to adjudicate such a dispute? Most people might well say, if asked, that they use the words interchangeably, but that proves little. People generally cannot give an explicit account of the regularities of their language, which they consistently observe speaking. Modern scholarship offers two tools for investigating semantic differences: etymology and the analysis of ordinary usage. Neither tool very useful unless applied technical, painstaking detail. That the tedium may be worthwhile this case