Believe it or not, some of the most impassioned and vocal champions of liberty are implicated in the crimes that have been committed against her.  Unlike those for whom government can never be large enough, these disciples of liberty are well meaning.  However, their failure to come to terms with liberty in all of its concrete details, to resist indulging their love for abstraction, in short, to understand the nature of liberty, has been detrimental to their cause.

The notion that liberty is something that precedes civilization is appealing.  Still, it is a fiction.  But it is a fiction that dies hard, even—especially—among those who should know better. In fact, the latter have encouraged this idea.  Take John Locke, for instance. 

The political philosophy of Locke, not unlike that of many of his contemporaries, relies upon the concept of “a state of nature.” The state of nature refers to a pre-political condition—life prior to the creation of government. In this state of nature, according to Locke, all human beings are in possession of rights to life, liberty, and property.  Our liberty, that is, consists of these rights that all persons possess simply by virtue of being persons.

Locke exerted an immeasurable influence over America’s founding generation. We see this in the Declaration of Independence, the most widely referenced political document in existence.  There is a reason why most people, particularly those who are fond of quoting the Declaration, appear to know nothing about it other than its affirmation of those “natural rights” that Locke previously invoked.

Given both their universality and high level of abstraction, “natural” or “human rights,” as we now call them, can be enlisted in the service of any grand crusade.  They are the stuff of which utopian dreams are made.

This is one problem with the doctrine of “natural” or “human rights.”  Another is that it suggests that liberty is an all or nothing thing.

It is not.

The kind of liberty that is supposed to have been present in Locke’s state of nature has never existed.  There has never been a state of nature, neither of the sort described by Locke nor that suggested by anyone else.  And even if there had been, so what?  As the inhabitants of a complex political association—a state or country—we are far, far removed from anything as neat and simple as the pre-political situation of Locke’s imaginings.

The doctrine of “natural” or “human rights” to which Locke and his disciples gave expression is in reality the distillation of a centuries-old English tradition.  The institutional arrangements that Locke recommends for safeguarding these rights are just as culturally-specific, just as rooted in the contingencies of place and time, as the rights themselves. 

Liberty is as “natural” and “artificial” as language—and about as intricate as well.  It has never existed in a state of perfection, but only ever exists in varying degrees.  It is a concrete phenomenon, bearing within itself a particular, and particularly dramatic, history of a people’s choices regarding their institutional arrangements.

More importantly, what we call liberty is really an open-ended system of liberties. Since this system is nothing above the totality of its parts, its preservation requires that we attend to its details.  And since each part co-exists in a delicate economy with all of the others, we must consider how our treatment of any one liberty will impact the others. 

This approach to liberty, it should be clear, emphatically fails to accommodate the designs of the utopian dreamers among us. The utopian is a perfectionist who, as such, desires rapid, abrupt, and revolutionary—indeed, destructive—change.  He sorely lacks just those classical virtues of temperance and prudence in the absence of which liberty promises to perish from the Earth.