Towards a Worldwide Index of Human Freedom

Human Freedom from Pericles to Measurement • 17
states, “[C]ommerce inspires in men a vivid love of individual independence.
Commerce supplies their needs, satisfies their desires, without
the intervention of the authorities…. [N]ot only does it emancipate
individuals, but, by creating credit, it places authority itself in a position
of dependence.” Despite the earlier quote, he credits the commerce of
Athens for allowing a somewhat higher level of individual freedom than
other Greek states.9
Constant, Stark, and Hanson are on to something that all too often has
gotten lost in the recent philosophical literature on freedom, and that is
the link between property rights and commerce, or economic freedom,
and other freedoms. This will be discussed later.
It goes virtually without saying that the ancients did have versions of
positive freedom, as is evidenced in Plato’s Republic, for example, or in
sects like the Pythagoreans. As this is not contested, to my knowledge,
nothing further will be added.
This section has suggested that the concepts of both negative and, less
controversially, positive freedom were alive in the classical world, though
it agrees with Stark about the lack of universality in the concept of freedom.
One could go further and suggest that the much earlier Epic of
Gilgamesh reveals a very human joy in being unconstrained in free action
and even a version of positive freedom when Gilgamesh understands and
accepts his mortality. It is beyond the scope of this review to explore other
cultures, though this would be an important endeavor. Nonetheless, the
evidence presented strongly suggests that the ideas of both negative and
positive freedom are not simply modern constructs.
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment thinkers were not mere theorists: they had a world
to remake. Thomas Hobbes, the first great English theorist of the
Enlightenment, saw a continental European world that had virtually collapsed
into flames and blood. Then the relatively calm England of his
youth fell into civil war in as the Roundheads fought to remove Charles I,
the bloodiest internal conflict since Henry VII seized the English throne
almost 150 years earlier. This is important context to understanding
not just Hobbes, but the political thinking of all early and perhaps all
Enlightenment thinkers.
This section focuses on three thinkers: Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.
With the possible exception of Rousseau, these are not unusually vague
thinkers. Yet, for each, there is considerable dispute over what they actually
meant, how they tied their premises to their logic and then to their
9 Constant is perhaps too optimistic about the stability and impact of commerce: “Hence it
follows that an age must come in which commerce replaces war. We have reached this age.”
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