At the BBC News magazine, John Gray provides a primer on the meaning of freedom. In particular, he looks to an older generation of political thinkers – Bertrand Russell, and, further back, John Stuart Mill – who grasped the way democratic rule can encroach on a free life:
Where this older generation differed from many today is that they thought of freedom as a lack of restriction on how we can act. Being free meant simply the absence of obstacles to living as we choose. While it's a view that's been criticised because it seems to see individuals as being separate from society, it seems to me to capture better than any other what freedom means and why it's important for every human being.
We need freedom because our goals and values are highly diverse and often quite different from those of the people around us. Having a voice in collective decisions – the basis of democracy – is a fine thing, but it won't protect your freedom if the majority is hostile to the way you choose to live.
Many will tell you that this danger can be dealt with by bills of rights that put some freedoms beyond the range of political interference. But politics has a habit of finding ways around the law, and when the state is weak declarations of rights tend to be unenforceable.
The Dish 