Over at PseudoPolymath, Mark Olson has what I regard as a very oddly reasoned post about the meaning of liberty in the Declaration of Independence. He has been reading a book called Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Fischer, which according to his recounting, details 4 different waves of immigration to America in 4 different areas of the country and how their views on various things differed. In particular, he notes that they had different conceptions of what the word "liberty" meant. Based upon this, he makes a rather odd argument that concludes that the word "liberty" in the Declaration of Independence means something very different from what we mean today. Let me paste what I take to be the essence of his argument:
However, given that Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin took part in penning that influential document with the phrase "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" it is odd that it would seem from "their folkways" or Mr Fischer's research that the 2nd word "Liberty" would mean very different things than we presume it does today. Today we view Liberty as freedom from undue restraint. That is specifically not what it meant in Puritan New England nor the patriarchal heirarchical Virgiinia colonies. Thus it is very likely that when the authors wrote of Liberty that word meant something very different from what we presume it means today. In fact, it probably meant something different for the Yankee authors Adams and Franklin than it meant for Jefferson.
The reason I find this an odd argument is that it seems quite strange to me to define the words of specific men by looking at the various ways the word was used by the cultures they came from. This is especially true when those men told us precisely what they meant by the term themselves in many places. Surely it is better to look at their own definitions than at the way someone else from the same area might have used them? A good example of the faultiness of this reasoning would be the word "theory". Scientists mean one thing by it, while the public tends to mean something radically different. That doesn't mean that we should interpret what a scientist means by theory by looking at the colloquial usage in the state the scientist comes from.
First, let's take a look at how the author of the book Olson is reading says the word "liberty" was defined in Massachusetts and Virginia after separate waves of immigration. Massachusetts first:
First "liberty" often described something which belonged not to an individual but to an enteir community. For two centuries the founders and leaders of Massachusetts wrote of the "liberty of New England" or the "liberty of Boston" or the "liberty of the Town." This usage continued from the great migration to the War of Independence and even beyond. Samuel Adams, for example, wrote more often about the "liberty of America" than the liberty of individual Americans.
But this is simply a matter of context. We would still use liberty and its synonyms in this context today. We say that Kuwait was "freed" of "liberated" from Iraqi rule, but that is not the same thing as saying that the people of Kuwait have "liberty" in the context of individual rights, which is the context in which the word is used in the Declaration (remember, the sentence begins with "all men are created equal", clearly speaking of individual liberty, not national freedom from foreign reign). Certainly that usage of the term in a different context has no bearing on the meaning of the word as used in the Declaration.
Olson then gives three other definitions of liberty, apparently from Fischer's book, all from the Massachusetts milieu (which spawned John Adams). The second:
A second usage was usually meant in the plural and placed on individiuals. "Liberties" granted to individuals meant specific exemptions from prior restraint and applied only to a given invidual. If John Smith or the tenants of a particular community were given the a specific "liberty" of fishing in a particular creek, that implied a restraint on individuals not in that group from doing the same. In England it was felt that a persons rank was in part defined by the liberties that he possessed and this was also true in Massachusetts.
But clearly not true about its usage in the Declaration. Again, recall that the statement about life liberty and the pursuit of happiness begins with "all men". No reasonable person could interpret this to mean that liberties are to be handed out by "rank" or standing in society (their actual practice notwithstanding). The third:
A third usage of "liberty" in New England was the idea of "soul liberty" or "Christian Liberty" this was a freedom (and obligation) to order ones own acts and life in a Godly way (and not in any other). This is not the idea of religious toleration but of a justification for the opposite, the persecution of Quakers, Baptists, Anglicans, and any other but Puritans.
Again, clearly not the same as the way the term is used in the Declaration. Indeed, this was precisely the sort of persecution that the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration explicitly forbids; thus, the first amendment, which guarantees freedom of religion for all and forbids establishements that would persecute those of other faiths. The fourth:
The final meaning of liberty in New England was termed as well with "freedom" and mean freedom or liberty from the tyranny of circumstance. The idea (and somewhat meager implementation) of a economic safety net was implemented not in terms of collective welfare but of freedom from want in the face of circumstances beyond one's control.
Again, same answer as above. This is simply a matter of context. We still use the "freedom from want" in this manner, but that has nothing to do with how the term was used in the Declaration. Context really does matter. A bat is either a piece of wood or a flying mammal depending on the context in which it is used. Now on to how he says the word was defined in Virginia:
In place of New England's distinctive idea ordered liberty, the Virginians though of liberty as a hegemonic condition of dominion over others and -- equaly important -- dominion over oneself...
Liberty was consistent in Virginian conception with slavery. Liberty was the power to assert your position in a heirarchical society. To the modern reader, Mr Fischer asserts (and I think rightly) that the idea today of hegemonic liberty would be considered a contradiction in terms, but that is because we do not understand a heirarchical society. Liberty in Virginia was a statement of right and rank.
But does Olson seriously think that this is what Jefferson meant when he said that all men are endowed with unalienable rights among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Does he really think that Jefferson meant that all men are endowed with the right to hegemonic domination of others? Well, kind of. He does say that Jefferson probably didn't mean that, but he thinks that the fallback definition, then, is the Massachusetts definitions he cites above:
When a phrase like "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" rings so strongly in our modern American consciousness it seems odd this might be so, when two of the authors would have liberty as the right of a local community to strongly order our lives and the third and principle author would hold liberty is a heirarchical hegemonic declaration of right and rank. But to be fair to Mr Jefferson, his statement of liberty was probably not of the hegemonic variety because in the context of that sentence it is the personal liberty (and personal happiness) which is discussed, not a community liberty. In that regard, the autonomous mastery of self and one's acts and thoughts and servanthood to one's duty would be the key to the liberty which is being referred. This is still not the modern concept of liberty, but in fact is more in line with an Aristotlean view of happiness and its pursuit.
Conspicuously missing from his post is any discussion at all of what Jefferson and Adams themselves said about liberty and what they meant by it. That seems an important thing to leave out, does it not? After all, it's not as though either of them were silent on what they meant. Jefferson in particular wrote voluminously on the subject of liberty and the unalienable rights of the individual and he provided us with a very clear definition. And frankly, it could not differ more from Olson's argument:
Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.
Remember, Olson says that the notion of liberty as "freedom from undue restraint" was "specifically not what it meant in Puritan New England nor the patriarchal heirarchical Virgiinia colonies." But it clearly was what Jefferson meant by liberty. And contrary to his suggestion that liberty has nothing to do with equality in the Virginia conception, Jefferson again obviously disagrees. In Jefferson's formulation, liberty was constrained only by the equal rights of others and their corresponding right to such self-determination.
It should also be noted that the notion of undue restraint is an important one. For the founding fathers, liberty was threatened most obviously by the arbitrary exercise of authority. That is why they wrote the Constitution as they did, to explicitly state the legitimate authority of government and prevent it from going any further (we can only wish they had succeeded in that effort today). The entire point of requiring due process protection when an individual is accused of breaking the law is to preserve liberty against the arbitrary exercise of power by the government. In this, they were united and there is no ambiguity in this definition of liberty.
Like Jefferson, Adams also was clear on what he meant by liberty in the context of the Declaration. He made it clear when he wrote the Massachusetts constitution and included essentially those same protections from arbitrary power that were later placed in the Federal constitution. Indeed, it was Adams who coined the phrase "a government of laws, not of men" to capture that meaning. But in regard to individual liberty, Adams was of the same opinion as Jefferson. Thus he wrote that individual rights are "antecedent to all earthly governments" and "cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws."
When asking what particular men meant when they used a term or phrase, you should always go to their own words for the answer, not to the words of others.
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Using context and cultural provenance is not only interesting, but KEY in conducting good cultural history. The problem with Olson isn't that he is considering context (the foundational method of cultural history), but rather that he is eliminating the complexity of the context. The problem with the Albion Seed theory is that it pretends the four strands were mutually exclusive and didn't intermix; it further ignores the fact that, especially among the elite of the colonies, they were in intellectual dialogue with thinkers in England, most notably in the case of Jefferson, with the works of John Locke. Olson is wrong not because he is contextualizing, but because he has radically oversimplified the context.
I agree it's strange to try to infer the individual author's meanings from assumptions about their backgrounds. If you knew nothing else about an individual work by an unknown author of known background, you might try this analysis, but this is a different situation.
To begin with, my understanding was always that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" was a conscious adaption of John Locke's rights of life, liberty, and property. In that case, it is reasonable to suppose that the authors of the Declaration meant "liberty" in the sense that Locke meant it even if they were familiar with other notions in their own folk idiom. E.g., I can use the words "force", "energy", and "momentum." in a colloquial sense. "The candidate has a lot of momentum going into the primary; her energy makes her a force to be reckoned with." (No, I would never write that way except to make this point). On the other hand, if I knew I was having a discussion about Newtonian physics with some knowledgeable people, I would assume we had all settled on very specific, shared meanings for these terms.
Besides that, they probably discussed the document at length before signing it. They should have developed a consensus about what they meant by "liberty" even if there was no outside reference point. I add this only to emphasize that it is strange to assume the signatories could have all meant something different by the same word. But in fact, it is probably enough to conclude that they all meant what they thought Locke meant by it.
In the original draft of the Declaration, Jefferson did indeed use the phrase, "Life, liberty and property." So yes, he clearly had Locke in mind. As Locke's entire philosophy is rooted in the individual, looking at communal meanings of the word seems more than a bit off-target.
And why not also question the terms life and happiness? The whole exercise reeks of postmodern literary criticism.
Please don't mistake my comment as a defense of Olson, who seems at best hamhanded in his analysis.
But folks, since this is a "scienceblog", can I please point you to some naturalistic explanations of meaning production and basic cognitive theories of culture:
1) meanings are by their very nature social; they do not emerge out of an individual's head sui generis like Athena from Zeus's head, but are produced in communication and association with other humans;
2) to understand historically how an individual arrived at a particular meaning, you must situate that person in their context, both the symbolic-linguistic context and the obdurate-phenomenological context, because meanings arise out of groups of people, in association with each other, engaging their existing meaning systems with new experiences in the environment, in order to create new potentialities for meanings;
3) Given the above, it is not postmodern lit-crit, but basic social scientific method to situate socially and historically the production of meanings; not to do so is to deny everything we know scientifically about how brains work, how language works, how cognition works; and to deny everything that social scientists (especially sociologists and historians) have learned about the connection between meaning production and social formation.
kersham said: "As Locke's entire philosophy is rooted in the individual, looking at communal meanings of the word seems more than a bit off-target."
You've conflated Locke's meaning of individual with the social scientific method of tracing Jefferson's meanings. That Locke and Jefferson believed in an individual that existed as a noble entity (like a noble gas) does not mean that such an individual actually exists (it doesn't) nor that because Jefferson believed in such an individual, that his own meanings/philosophies weren't developed in the same way that all humans develop meanings and philosophies, that is, in social interaction and communicatively.
This may help.
Albion's Seed, or whatever they are, has "missed" a fairly significant fact, one that complicates (okay, ruins) their analysis. The Puritans who came to the New World did indeed have a concept of liberty that is totally at odds with our own: they defined liberty as "freedom to do the right thing." Our current defenders of Roy Moore's Ten Commandments granite rock, and those who insist that the law should busy itself with our neighbors' behaviors, are direct descendents of those Puritans. But in the 150 years between the Puritans and the Framers, this little thing called the Enlightenment occurred, and totally changed the meaning of "liberty;" as a previous comment noted, the meaning of the term used by those who drafted the constitution owed a great debt to Locke; it meant freedom to make ones own decisions, live ones own life, free of government interference--until and unless ones actions interfered with a like liberty of others. In other words, liberty meant freedom to "do ones own thing" unless and until that harmed the person or property of a nonconsenting other. It is certainly true that none of the various meanings of liberty were exclusive, or free of ambiguity, or "pure"--but the broad outlines were dramatically different between the Puritans and post-Enlightenment colonists.
I agree with Todd that it's not postmodern lit crit going on here, it's just ignoring the obvious. Of course historical context is important. Of course the common conceptions within a culture are important. But to rely upon such meanings - especially when the only distinction between the meaning one is rejecting and the one he is arguing for is one of context, not intrinsic meaning - and ignore the clear definitions offered by the person who used the term is folly.
And yes, as Sheila just pointed out, it's also folly to pretend that Jefferson's ideas about liberty were limited to that of everyday Virginian usage and to ignore the enlightenment influence that was so obvious in Jefferson's case.
I've responded at a couple of places on Mark's blog. I'm not sure what his point is.
It appears to me that he's arguing that the phrase "life, liberty and happiness," which all scholars agree was a direct descendant from Locke's "life, liberty and property," doesn't imply personal liberty. The reality is that whatever the cultural roots of the meaning of the word, the founders explicitlty meant "personal freedom" in most spheres when they spoke of liberty. If, prior to 1776, the word meant something different, they changed it. Not least, they changed it with the laws they wrote.
Fischer is an interesting writer, one who really delves into the details. I doubt that Fischer's argument is that what we enjoy as modern freedom under the Constitution is somehow in error, as it appears Mark is trending.
But it's not clear at all to me what Mark's point is. Yeah, we all ought to read Fischer. That would be a good point, but it's not Mark's.