"Of such liberty as I have now described, it is impossible there should be an excess. Government is an institution for the benefit of the people governed, which they have the power to model as they please; and to say that they can have too much of this power, is to say that there ought to be a power in the state superior to that which gives it being, and from which all jurisdiction in it is derived. Licentiousness, which has been commonly mentioned, as an extreme of liberty, is indeed its opposite. It is government by the will of rapacious individuals in opposition to the will of the community made known and declared in the laws. A free state, at the same time that it is free itself, makes all its members free by excluding licentiousness, and guarding their persons and property and good name against insult. It is the end of all just government, at the same time that it secures the liberty of the public against foreign injury, to secure the liberty of the individual against private injury. I do not, therefore, think it strictly just to say that it belongs to the nature of government to entrench on private liberty. It ought never to do this, except as far as the exercise of private liberty encroaches on the liberties of others. That is, it is licentiousness it restrains and liberty itself only when used to destroy liberty."

this is from a text that was popular amongst revolutionaries at the time of the american revolution. it's rooted in this idea of "moral freedom", which basically means the freedom to avoid temptation from satan. by this logic, it is reasonable to lynch the gays because they're infringing on your freedom to not be exposed to "immoral" ideas. which is sort of like they do in russia.

that's of course the exact opposite conception we have today. today, we'd talk more about intellectual freedom. this text is really hard to read through as a result of this totally backwards kind of thinking. this guy wasn't a conservative in his period, either, he was a prominent liberal that communicated with some of the early anarchists. he had a big influence on fairly radical liberals like jefferson and paine.

it's just the different concept of freedom that's really startling. so, consider "free love", for example. price (the author) would consider "free love" to be a type of slavery - to satan. in order to emancipate the wicked from the enslavement to evil, "free love" should be restricted by the state. a free society would therefore be one where sexuality was highly regulated, in order to ensure that we do not become enslaved by our own passions.

that's not some dystopian fiction, it's coming from a text written by a leading religious scholar that was one of the dominant ideological arguments underlying the american revolution. this is the concept of "freedom" that north american society was constructed upon - the freedom to not be exposed to ideas that differ from the state's (and church's) official pronunciations.

the same logic would apply to homosexuality, drug use or any other kind of "passion". freedom, to these people, meant the state intervening to ensure we do not become enslaved by our passions. slavery meant giving into satanic pleasures, and even being forced to tolerate ideas that differed from the norm.

i guess the whole tyranny of the majority thing eventually worked itself out. but when you read the constitution or the declaration within the context that the mob understood the word "liberty" as, the whole thing becomes a ridiculous joke....

like, their concept of liberty necessarily implied that society has the right to oppress minority views. they would actually argue with a straight face that a society that tolerates minorities is unfree - *because* they're forced to tolerate those with minority moral views. the whole idea of freedom, to them, was intrinsically related to the ability of the majority to attack minorities if they didn't uphold social norms because it would threaten to unravel the status quo.

so, when you're reading jefferson or paine or whomever else that should be in your mind. "liberty" meant something entirely different to these people than it does to you or i.