In this society the exercise of freedom of thought and expression could be agrievous oVense. ‘‘Heresy’’, wrote Thomas Aquinas, ‘‘merits not only excommuni-
cation, but death, for it is worse to corrupt the faith, which is the life of the soul,
than to issue counterfeit coins, which administer to the secular life. Since
counterfeiters are justly killed by princes as enemies to the common good, so
also heretics deserve the same fate.’’
Modernity turned things upside down. Freedom of thought, which in the
Thomistic world pointed the way to excommunication and death, became the
Wrst freedom of the modern political order. A term is needed to mark the great
divide between premodern and modern freedom. In the scholarly taxonomy of
political ideas that term is ‘‘liberalism.’’ This usage may well raise the hackles of
those students of politics who think of themselves as conservatives in contrast with
and opposition to liberals. My understanding of the term copes with that criticism.
I recognize and indeed emphasize that as a value system pervading the politics of
modern times, liberalism in the broad sense has been expressed in a variety of
diVerent and sometimes conXicting ways, ranging from laissez-faire to the welfare
state to democratic socialism. In this big ideological tent of modern liberalism,
IWnd right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats, Tory democrats and
Labour socialists, and, in general, the mainstream political tendencies of modern
Western democracies.
At the American founding Thomas JeVerson reasserted theWrst principle of
liberalism in the curt, explosive manifesto with which he led oVhis argument for
independence: ‘‘all men are created equal.’’ This assertion of equality is a powerful
message of liberation. To say that all are equal is to deny that any have authority
over others. The egalitarian denial of authority to the few, moreover, follows from a
positive faith in the capacities of the many. The claim of ‘‘equal rights’’ for each
would be empty and unconvincing absent this premise which aYrms the capacity
of the many for self-government, individually and collectively. That capacity is no
small power. The attack on hierarchy did more than assert the rights of self-
government. It liberated not only what people do, but what they think. The
liberation proclaimed in the rights of self-government presumes the liberation
embodied in the capacity claimed for the human mind. According to liberal
doctrine, the reason men should be free to govern themselves is that they can
think for themselves. They ought to be free outwardly because they are free
inwardly. Thanks to that capacity—James Madison called it ‘‘a gift of nature’’—
theirWrst freedom is freedom of thought and expression, appropriately enshrined
in the First Amendment. ‘‘I have sworn eternal hostility’’, said JeVerson, ‘‘to every
form of tyranny over the human mind.’’
The prospect is boundless. The break out of the old closed society toward a new
world which was opened up and driven on by the liberated mind led to achieve-
ments on a grand scale. Democratic politics, capitalistic wealth, and scientiWc
progress in their diVerent ways expressed the independent, inquiring, inventive
encounters with modernity 695