What does it mean to be free? What is liberty? How did it develop in Western society? After all, the idea that every individual has inalienable human rights that no other person or group of people, no matter how large, has any authority or ability to justly violate is not an old ideal. In terms of human history it is a rather young one and most of human history is the story of autocrats, emperors, and tyrants striving to assume to themselves as much power over the lives of others as possible. The only saving grace of the past was that the technology to do that simply did not exist. But today it does. Modern technology while making our lives easier also makes it possible for those in power to monitor, track, manipulate, and control millions of people at once, to murder them from thousands of miles away, and to disappear them without a trace in the night. We live in an age where the totalitarian dream of an absolute state has never been more possible, which is what makes it so important to understand the origins of individual liberty more than ever before. If we do not then we will not have the tools to preserve it in the face of the constant efforts of those in power to dismantle it and increase their control over every aspect of human life.
Dr. Frank Furedi is the emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent and a visiting professor at the University College of London’s Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction. This article by Dr. Furedi traces the origins of liberty – with its challenge to the authority of the state, concepts of voluntaryism and anarchy, the rights of rebellion against the state, and the willingness to question and disobey those in power – back to the influence of Christianity and the Protestant Reformation. This makes the Western concept of liberty an inherently Christian concept, the importance of which I will expand upon in a short Afterword at the end of Dr. Furedi’s article which demonstrates the historically Christian origins of liberty in Western society. Other than the Afterword, I have added some pictures to the article to illustrate some of the people, ideas, and places mentioned in it. Everything else is as it was originally publish by Dr. Furedi.
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The Invention of Individual Freedom
The ideas set out by Martin Luther sparked a reformation in the idea of authority itself.
It is unlikely that Martin Luther set out to shatter authority. Yet the Reformation, which started with the publication of his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, set in motion a chain of events that fundamentally undermined the idea of authority itself. Luther demanded that the papacy respond to his criticisms of the Church’s moral failings. His actions did not simply call into question the moral authority of the Church. His defiant stand gave voice to a sentiment that would eventually provide legitimation for disobeying all forms of authority.
Luther’s challenge to the papacy’s moral status converged with the ascendancy of secular political forces that challenged its power. This intermeshing of religious and political conflict, which eventually led to the disintegration of a united Christendom, also provoked an irresolvable debate about the locus of religious authority. Luther’s claim that Christians could have direct access to God without the need for an intermediary threatened the role of the clergy and the Church hierarchy. His theology of reform also opened up a wider debate on obedience and resistance to political rule. The very idea of authority – religious and political – became, for the first time, a focus for philosophical debate. Until this point, authority was rarely questioned explicitly: the authority of individual rulers or the legitimacy of a particular claim to authority was challenged, but not authority itself.
Did Luther really hurl the legendary words – ‘Here I stand, so help me God, I can do no other’ – at his accusers? In a sense it does not matter. Luther did not merely assert the authority of individual conscience to justify his own actions; he advanced a compelling case for the value of people being able to act in accordance with the dictates of their conscience. In so doing, his argument implicitly called into question the right of external authority to exercise power over the inner life of people.
The distinction that Luther drew about the nature of authority represented an important step in the conceptualisation of a new limit on its exercise. His Treatise on Good Works (1520) asserted that ‘the power of the temporal authority, whether it does right or wrong, cannot harm the soul’. This idealisation of the soul and its protected status from external authority encouraged European culture to devote greater interest in individual conscience and eventually to endow the self with moral authority.
In helping to free the inner person from the power of external authority, Luther’s theology contributed to the weakening of the very concept of external authority, including that of divine authority. The freeing of the inner person from the power of external authority restricted the exercise of absolute authority in all its forms.
Luther’s protection of the soul from secular imposition led to the paradox of inner freedom with external domination. Nevertheless, the coexistence of apparently contradictory relations to authority could not indefinitely survive without one giving way to another. The recognition of a sphere where political rule could not legitimately coerce the individual ultimately undermined the status of absolutist authority in all spheres of life. It soon became clear that once individuals are granted inner freedom they find it difficult to unquestioningly obey any form of authority.
When Luther suggested that he could not but obey his individual conscience, he provided the basis for an argument that was soon perceived as subversive. The very suggestion that individual conscience could oppose external authority would, in the years to come, crystallise into the affirmation of the ideal of individual freedom. That is why the English historian Christopher Hill went so far as to claim that the ‘essence of protestantism – the priesthood of all believers – was logically a doctrine of individualist anarchy’.
Yet Luther was not a lover of human freedom: he insisted on absolute obedience to the external authority of secular rulers; and his violent denunciation of the Peasants’ Revolt and his call for its bloody repression demonstrated a fanatical determination to uphold external authority. Though the Reformation gave rise to anti-authoritarian tendencies, creating the conditions for the restraint of external power in people’s inner life, it also sanctioned the use of unrestrained coercion in public life. This contradiction between the aspiration for individual liberty and the imperative of order in public life remains unresolved, centuries after the Reformation.
Luther’s aim was to reform corrupt practices of the papacy. However, the movement for reform and the counter-reaction it provoked soon escalated into a bitter and violent religious war. Paradoxically, the religious wars that engulfed large parts of Europe from 1524 to 1648 weakened the moral standing of not only the Roman Church but also of Christianity. Religious conflict reduced the moral and political influence of Christianity overall, which in turn encouraged the de-sacralisation of authority. Once authority lost the validation of the divine it had to account for itself in the secular world and new secular arguments had to be developed to justify the claim to authority and obedience to it. From this point onwards, authority in European society could rarely be taken for granted.
Note: Original article can be found here.
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Martin Luther’s challenge to the authority of the Catholic Church began as a religious declaration that the authority of the Word of God supersede all authority of the men who led the church. It ended up being the intellectual foundation upon which all authority would be challenged. This is a key to understanding the nature of liberty as well, it has always meant freedom from government control and regulation of your life. Liberty is not the freedom from want, desire, labor, or suffering. Such things are not even possible in this life and anyone promising otherwise is trying to sell you dystopia as utopia. The history of liberty in the West (and I would wager everywhere else) bears out the truth of what liberty is – freedom from government control over your life, freedom from the ability of those in power to beat you, cage you, or kill you in order to compel you to live in accordance to their wishes and their ideals. Thus knowing the nature of liberty we can therefore jealously safeguard it against the utopians, the statists, who demand that we give up just a little bit more of our liberty, of our self, up in exchange for their dreams (and the nightmare those dreams always become.) It is only once have this freedom that we are able to build a truly better society, not by top down social engineering but through the peaceful interactions between each other necessary to solve our wants and needs. True community is only possible once people are free from government dictation.
Those familiar with the ideas of Dr. Carl Jung would not be surprised by the role of religious ideals in undermining state power and thereby promoting human liberty. Dr. Furendi’s history of liberty as emerging from the Protestant Reformation is historical proof for the arguments about the important of religion to liberty that Dr. Jung lays out in his book The Undiscovered Self. There Dr. Jung argued that the only set of ideas that could challenge the authority of the State is the authority of God because religion gives man a source of ideas, beliefs, and morality from outside himself and humanity. Religion therefore provides liberty for society as it gives alternatives to human existence other than obey those in power. This of course brings these two influences into direct conflict with one another. Those with political power in government seek to establish their supremacy over the influence of religion either by suborning religious ideals, thus turning religion into merely another vector for spreading the intellectual ideals of the State which further ensure its authority, or to destroy it and replace the role of God in a person’s life with submission to the Government. This according to Dr. Jung is inevitable, the human impulse to worship is an undeniable part of our psyche. If we do not worship God or the Gods we will come to worship men as gods.
When Luther challenged the Catholic Church he didn’t just challenge the church, he (perhaps unwittingly) challenged the entire system upon which religious and political power was founded, the ideas that justified challenging the authority of one immediately justifying challenging another. This is why men like John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson followed after Martin Luther and didn’t come before him. It is also why retaining the religious nature of the liberal revolt against the state is so necessary (liberal here meaning its true definition as one who loves liberty and not as a twisted synonym for leftist.) It doesn’t strictly need to be any single religion, though Christianity, with its roots in Hebraic theology which teaches the supremacy of God’s laws to men and Christ’s rejection of the authority of Caesar, including state power to tax, has historically been the largest influence on Western society and, as Dr. Furedi demonstrates, the soil in which the tree of liberty has sprouted and grown.
The key is that religion is truly believed in and adhered to by its members to the point that they will refuse to obey government laws when they violate the individual or groups religious beliefs. It is no accident that as the United States has become increasingly secularized it has also seen the power of the government increase as people replace their faith in God with a faith in Government. If we are to reassert our liberty we have to invigorate the institutions which provide the only authority which can challenge the powers of the government, we have to embrace and empower our religious organizations. They are the only organizations which provide the ideological, social, communal, organizational, and inspirational counterweights to the Government and its mass propaganda programs. In our own religions and own ways we must declare, like Martin Luther 500 years ago, like the Saints a century ago, that, “Here we stand, for with us it is The Kingdom of God – or Nothing!