Page - 64 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

65 | www.limina-graz.eu Isabella Guanzini | Ideas of Freedom The Liberty of the Moderns – Immunitas “First ask yourselves, Gentlemen, what an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a citizen of the United States of America understand today by the word ‘liberty’. For each of them it is the right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested, detained, put to death or maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals” (Constant 1988, 310–311). The liberty of the moderns – as European culture could understand it be- tween the 18th and 19th century – is negative liberty: first and foremost, it concerns the condition under which the subject enjoys the possibility to act without impediments and coercions, namely freedom from any constraint and external determination. This freedom finds a legal recognition in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (Article 5): “Nothing that is not forbidden by Law may be hindered, and no one may be compelled to do what the Law does not ordain”. Isaiah Berlin defines the “negative” meaning of liberty as that which is “involved in the answer to the question ‘What is the area within which the subject – a person or group of persons – is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?’ […] If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree […]. The wider the area of non-interference the wider my freedom” (Berlin 2002, 169–170). According to this second meaning, liberty is understood as the absence of impositions and as emancipation from the oppressive power of a sovereign or a government, from a religious despotism – internal or external – and from the forces of nature that lie outside our control. Thanks to negative liberty, the subject can think and act beyond the constraints of censorship and submission, thereby conquering a private sphere of self-determina- tion (freedom of opinion, of the press, of assembly, of religion, of associa- tion, etc.) shielded from the intrusiveness of public power. Negative liberty lies at the basis of the thinking of many important politi- cal philosophers, both English (Locke, Hobbes, Bentham, Mill) and French (Helvetius, Constant, Tocqueville), and it is the expression of what can be called liberal freedom, namely of that political perspective aimed at guaran- that is to be given, and that therefore will establish a lack” (Esposito 2010, 6). Within the community, therefo- re, individuals are deprived of what is most proper to them, i. e. their subjectivity: they are subject insofar as they are subjected to a debt, an expropriation. Only under this con- dition of “alteration” can the subject join and live within the community. “No one may be compelled to do what the Law does not ordain.”