Page - 59 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

60 | www.limina-graz.eu Isabella Guanzini | Ideas of Freedom In the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (§ 482) Hegel writes: “No idea is so generally recognised as indefinite, ambiguous, and open to the great- est misconceptions (to which therefore it actually falls a victim) as the idea of Liberty: none in common currency with so little appreciation of its meaning” (Hegel 2012, 101).1 The following remarks have as their point of departure the awareness of the unavoidability and impossibility of the question of freedom, cautiously crisscrossing different interpretative theories. The ideal-typical charac- ter of these readings, which by now has become classic, seems to grant the question of freedom a schematic intelligibility, without nevertheless dis regarding the elements of indeterminacy, ambivalence, and polysemy marking this experience as well as its complex and dialectical manifes- tations throughout history. The last part of this contribution considers a contemporary philosophical-political paradigm, which problematizes the present ambivalent experience of freedom invoking ancient practices, in order to rethink freedom as a necessary political construction in the public sphere. The Liberty of the Ancients – Communitas The comparison between the two distinct meanings of the notion of lib- erty finds not so much its seminal theorization as the outcome of a secular debate in the speech entitled “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns” by Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) (Constant 1988). Constant gave this speech at the Athénée Royal in Paris after the dramatic events of the French Revolution and in response to the new despotism that resulted from them. Indeed, such a contraposition had been anticipated in the literary field by the querelle des anciens et des modernes, whose elabora- tion during the enthusiastic years of the scientific and astronomic Revolu- tion acquired its full thematization with the English and French political philosophy of the 17th and 18th century (from Hobbes and Hume to Rous- seau). In the 20th century, the division between the two concepts of liberty is proposed again by Isaiah Berlin (Berlin 2002) within a context where the value of individual freedom can no longer be called into question. “No idea is so generally recognised as indefinite, ambiguous, and open to the greatest misconceptions as the idea of Liberty.” 1 In a similar way, Montesquieu states that: “There is no word that admits of more various significa- tions, and has made more different impressions on the human mind, than that of liberty” (Montesquieu 1977, 209).