[G. Adams]

It depends what you mean by free.

Thomas Hobbes considered freedom itself to be the very root of societies problems. Man in a state of nature is free, he possess everything and has a right to everything. However, as all men possess such rights in nature, freedom is an empty and worthless concept. Additionally, because all men are free to do as they please, they fear other freedom to infringe their own freedom. So man looks to deny anothers freedom in order to protect himself. Such a situation whereby man is free, the state of nature would be nasty, brutish and short. The only way to stop this from occuring, and thereby creating pease and stability, is for each man to fear using his freedom to the detriment of others more than losing his freedom to begin with. This requires an allpowerful, absolute government, the Leviathan. Man must obey the leviathans laws without question, for if he doesn't, why should anyone else, and theyby descending again into the terrible state of nature. This agreement to abide by the law is Hobbes version of the Social Contract.

John Locke's idea of freedom is radically different. Locke believed that man had liberty, not license as Hobbes argued, in nature. Each man is naturally free and equal. Additionally, within nature there is a moral law, derived from God, that is natural law. This law teaches us that we must respect each other lives, liberties, property etc. This law can only be discovered through reason, as no-one can simply know natural law. This where 'inconveniances arise'. There will likely be many occaisions where one mans reason leads him to believe one thing that another objects to. It takes an external arbiter, a government, to decide which is reasonable. Therefore man enters into a social contract with one another, that they respect the laws of this arbiter, while that arbiter still respects natural law. This means that the arbiter must respect the natural rights this moral law provides, life, liberty, etc. If the arbiter fails to respect natural law, the individual can defend himself from this arbiters executive arms, or leave the state. So for Locke, while man might not have, or desire full freedom, he desires liberty, to be free to pursue his choices so long as it harms none.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau had another view of freedom. He argued that Hobbes was wrong to see natural man as an aggressive beast, as was free and happy. Natural man has no reason but to be happy, he is independant and self-pleasing (not egoistic, rather he means independant in his survival). However, the spread of mankind created conditions where he could no longer be independant, as there were too many humans to support for the land. So humanity attempted to erect civilisation together. Prior to this, man was happy, compassionate and independant. However, when building civilisation, he attempted to retain his independance, at the expense of compassion. So he took property, which was previously held in common (in as much as no-one had previously claimed it as their own). Man had been corrupted by his new conditions, and his new conditions corrupted him. If one person claims property, all must claim property, and those without must struggle to obtain property. Man's drive to please his needs had become a drive to deny others.

I'll stop with JJ as he goes off course with his solution, at least in my view. He even admits that his own solution would take a virtual god to enact successfully, with the stature and ability of Lycurgus (see Spartan history for details). He predicted that without such a figure an attempt to create his vision would be a bloodbath, between the revolutionaries, reactionaries and innocents percieved as being on the wrong side. And he was right.

So here we have three convincing ideas of freedom, not for you perhaps, but enough for history to record them as important, and all have had great importance for European and American history (hobbes influenced the UK, Locke the US, and Rousseau the French revolution).

One would not have to be mad to see freedom as a bad thing, just to have experienced the world in a vastly different way to you. Statistics show that many in the former Soviet Union prefer the old days. They are told they are free now (arguable), yet their conditions are no better if not worse than before (except for the ability to at least leave, except to where, as everyone seems to hate refugees these days). So can you not see the logic behind why someone would think freedom is an empty concept?

I could perhaps bring this closer to home. I believe the American revolutionaries, or many of them at least, would percieve the US as unfree. Your free speech rights are curtailed, your privacy invaded, gun rights limited, the threat of the state taking up a religion ever present etc. Yet how many Americans today think they are not free? Those who do are thought of as extremists of the looney left or militia-men right.

The real point is, freedom is a normative concept, not an emperical one. So while you may think that someone living under a dictatorship is unfree, they might not. They may give their condition a different name, but the rightiousness they feel about it is as fierce as yours.