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is a very popular icon of liberty.]] Liberty is a than Concrete freedom. WESTERN PHILOSOPHY Classical philosophy Liberty was greatly prized by many Classical writers such as Aristotle , Demosthenes , Cicero and Tacitus , often in the context of democratic institutions. It was often opposed to Fatalism and other conceptions of Destiny . Christian Theology developed elaborate ideas about the relationship between liberty and the Morality of action, as is seen in the works of Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas , which would be continued by Kant , who defined liberty as the Autonomy of the rational Subject . However, the moral conception of liberty, which finds its ultimate definition in Kant's philosophy, went hand-in-hand with a Philosophy Of History (or Theodicy ) which considered God (or, in Hegel 's case, the '' Weltgeist '') of being the ultimate actor of history, instead of Human Being itself. Enlightenment philosophy The articulated themselves in the course of the French Revolution and in the 19th century. Spinoza's critique of free will This individualist conception of liberty, based on and Lacan 's Psychoanalytic theories on the Mirror Stage . 19th century philosophy and the dialectics between liberty and equality The first half of the 19th Century for Western Civilization was marked by a series of turbulent wars and revolutions, such as the Revolutions Of 1848 , which gradually formed into an idea and doctrine now identified as ''individual liberty''. As exposed by the 1789 Declaration Of The Rights Of Man And Of The Citizen , the chief philosophical ground for "liberty" in this most recent period has been the idea of Human Rights and civil rights, and that human beings are too valuable to be in Slavery (as well as the idea that human beings ought to control their own Destiny ). Much of this philosophy stems from Religious View s, although Christian s, Jew s, Muslim s and followers of other religions have often practiced Slavery in the past. However, the conception of individual liberty was criticized from different angles by Marx , Nietzsche and Freud . Socialist conceptions (both Anarchist and Marxist , since the division between these two political philosophies would stem from their difference in appreciation of the role of the State ) criticized the "formal liberties" explicited by the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which Marx called the "rights of the Egoistic Bourgeois ". Marx argued that Civic Rights such as Freedom Of Expression were only Abstract rights insofar as the Material conditions to exercice them were not insured. For example, Concentration Of Media Ownership would be said by marxists as impeding the effective exercice of one's right to free expression, selecting which categories of person have the possibility to express themselves in the media. Thus, Equality was seen as a main component of a society's grade of liberty. Liberty without equality, Anarchists argue to this day, is only the "freedom of the powerful to Exploit the weak". 20th century philosophy The socialist and, in particular, marxist conception of liberty has harshly criticized the liberal conceptions of an individual freedom, based on the Social Contract or on a system of Checks And Balances , as first theorized by Montesquieu . Following the 1917 Revolution , the world divided itself into two blocs, one claiming to be the " Free World " while the other pretended to be the Revolution ary representative of the Proletariat . After World War II , Neoliberal thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek argued that liberty, far from being improved by Social Justice and equality, was in fact endangered by socialist regimes practicing centrally-planned economics. However, Hayek's definition of a "socialist regime" would include, in fact, many representative democracies which had turned themselves into Welfare State s, such as Germany or France . EASTERN CIVILIZATION The Chinese sage Lao Tsu warned against over-reaching governments, in a way analogous to the development in the western world of post- Locke an ideas of Negative Liberty . He taught that government by example and "not doing" ( Wú Wéi ) was superior to government by law and discipline. MIDDLE EASTERN CIVILIZATION The Jewish religious tradition features several individuals who stood up to statist power at crucial moments, including of course Moses , who demanded that the Pharaoh of Egypt "let my people go." The Maccabees rebelled against mandatory assimilation to Greek culture and the Zealots (less successfully) rose against the Roman Empire . Muslim jurists have long held that the legal tradition initiated by the Qur'an includes a principle of permissibility, or '' Ibahah '', especially as applied to commercial transaction. "Nothing in them transactions is forbidden," said Ibn Taymiyyah , "unless God and His Messenger have decreed them to be forbidden." The idea is founded upon two verses in the Qur'an, 4:29 and 5:1. POLITICAL THOUGHT: DEMOCRACIES, LIBERALISM AND SOCIALISM , '' Liberty Leading The People '', 1830]] The modern conceptions of Democracy , whether Representative Democracies or other types of democracies (including the past Communist "popular democracies"), are all found on the Rousseauist idea of Popular Sovereignty . However, Liberalism distinguish itself from Socialism and communism in that it advocate for a form of Representative Democracy , while socialism claims to work for a Direct Democracy (although, in the case of communism, this was supposed to be achieved through a period of Dictatorship Of The Proletariat , a concept which was instrumentalized during the Cold War to legitimate Authoritarian regimes). Liberalism is a Political current embracing several historical and present-day ideologies that claim defence of individual liberty as the purpose of government. Two main strands are apparent, although both are founded on an Individualist Ideology . In continental Europe the term usually refers to Economic Liberalism , that is the right of individual to contract, trade and operate in a market free of constraint. In the United States it often refers to Social Liberalism , including the right to dissent from orthodox tenets or established authorities in political or religious matters. Both are core political issues, and highly contentious. A school of thought popular among US Libertarians holds that there is no tenable distinction between the two sorts of liberty -- that they are, indeed, one and the same, to be protected (or opposed) together. In the context of U.S. Constitutional Law , for example, they point out that the constitution twice lists "life, liberty, and property" without making any distinctions within that troika. Individualists , such as Max Stirner , demanded the utmost respect for the liberty of the individual. From a very similar perspective from North America, Primitivist s like John Zerzan proclaimed that Civilization ''not just the state'' (as in socialist thought) would need to be abolished to foster liberty. Some in the US see protecting the ideal of liberty as a Conservative policy, because this would conform to the spirit of individual liberty that they consider is at the heart of the American constitution. Some think liberty is almost synonymous with Democracy , at least in one sense of that word, while others see conflicts or even opposition between the two concepts. QUOTES Some notable quotations that include liberty are:
STATUES AND MONUMENTS A temple was erected to the Goddess Liberty on the Aventine Hill in Rome by the father of Tiberius Gracchus during the second Punic War. A statue of the goddess Liberty was also put up by Clodius on the site of Cicero's house after it had been pulled down. A Statue Of Liberty now exists at the entrance to New York harbour in the United States. The Copper Statue of the goddess of Liberty was a present from the Republic of France, as a centennial gift to the US and a sign of friendship between the two nations. The pedestal was constructed by the United States. The Statue of Liberty is often used as a symbol of the ideals of the United States, and in particular of ''liberty in general''; as such it is a favored symbol of US libertarians. The Liberty Memorial is dedicated to World War I and World War II victories for liberty against the Axis . BIBLIOGRAPHY
SEE ALSO Various concepts of liberty and freedom
Various political ideologies
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