Language does not limit itself to expressing our explicit meanings; it has never been so tame and civil, so polite to our rationalism and our best intentions. Nay, but we haul our very souls up out of our mouths each time we speak, and stand there naked before our interlocutor quite despite ourselves.
This was one of Socrates’ great insights, the very fundamental premise of his entire method, and the principal reason he went about like a hound, sniffing after the logos; not by meditation on the empyrean, nor by rooting about in the soil did he hope to glean his wisdom, but rather through the pursuance of these rabbitlike, foxlike human presuppositions that bind us as slaves, as these were indicated by the words his peers perched upon their very lips. And Plato played on this insight as a master composer on his theme. That basically linguistic adventure is the bedrock of a great part of our Occidental tradition, a deep and firm stone upon which we to this day stand.
The moderns do not lend sufficient attention to their language. They are far too wont to pass off alterations in usage as being merely changes of custom — as if this “merely” were at all warranted! — and so they give but superficial regard to questions of style, word choice, and syntax, though these govern them in ways they do not begin to fathom. The reasons for this carelessness on their part would be the stuff of another essay. We mention here, however, a specific and very grave consequence of these oversights: namely, the taking for granted of subtle changes in vocabulary — what might be termed lexical shifts — as: the gradual disuse of certain terms, the gradual widening of a given term to include cases it never originally would have included, or its gradual restriction to exclude cases it has never excluded, and the gradual substitution of a given term for its near synonym. We might list but a poor few such cases (they are legion in our day) for the reader’s independent reflections: the disappearance of the word nobility and its cognates; the expansion of the word hero to include just about every Sam and Sue; the use of the exceptionally awkward phrase “to have sex” where an elder generation would speak for example of “making love”; or the common, not to say vulgar, way that the word “create” is employed to indicate everything from God’s bringing of the cosmos out of void, to the paper-and-glue tinkerings of our kindergartners — or the equally infantile doings of our contemporary “artists.”
Now, it is our general habit to accept these lexical shifts with pleasant placency, as resulting from more or less empty semantic preferences. Yet anyone who gives more than cursory attention even just to the examples we have mentioned will find that they reflect a considerably deeper and more decisive transformation in one’s very sense of the world, and particularly one’s sense of the human world — a transformation beneath whose laws men labor, and by whose strings they dance. We lay it forth, as a premise to be challenged and investigated, that precisely those changes which appear the least essential in our common daily use or disuse of abstract concepts, are often those which reflect the profoundest incarnations of our worldview — and, if we may be permitted to call it thus, our worldspirit.
One of the prime cases in support of this claim is that which makes the subject of his final essay: namely, the historical movement in our speeches, writings, conversations, toward the word “freedom,” and away from the word “liberty.”
We begin with a number of objections we might anticipate to this very point of departure. It might be urged against us, for instance, that these lexical shifts of which we speak are only the result of the “natural evolution” of languages. In particular, it might be argued this is a matter of the unaccountable taste of different generations, or that we owe our words to the success of certain “memes” alone. But such objections are nothing but parrot replies: they pretend to answer a question by echoing it in a different voice. For if it is the case, for instance, that a given lexical shift is a matter of taste, then of course the question is begged — taste in what? Taste in sound, in connotation, in etymology? And what is the reason for this “taste,” or what is its cause, and why has it changed at all? Do we owe it to our authorities, our intellectuals, our philosophers, our poets, or whom? Or if we owe this transformation to the success of a “meme,” then what accounts for that success? Why is it that modern men are susceptible to just this “meme,” and not to some other? What does that susceptibility indicate about them, about it? Such questions, and the dozens of others that might flow from them, show us up: these words, “taste” and “meme,” while seeming to provide an easy answer to our question, in truth but drive the question back a layer. They are scientistic responses through and through, fit for a scientistic day, for they lay aside the question of first causes as though these causes were simply arbitrary or unknowable.
Now, it might also be held that there is nothing, or at least, nothing rational behind any given lexical shift: these changes “just happen.” The vacuity of such a conclusion is its own disproof: nothing in all the world “just happens,” and if one is really to argue that the causes of these changes are utterly trivial to human thought and human values, or perfectly alien to deeper questions of the spirit of a time, then that argument will want a fuller and much more developed exposition than the simple proclamation in its favor. We will claim that the lexical shift from the widespread use of “liberty” to the widespread use of “freedom” is indicative of a deeper, indeed a very deep philosophical change in our society, and herein we will provide an exposition of that claim. If one wishes to dispute it, then a counter-exposition is obligatory. But as an initial riposte against any challengers, we mention only this: particularly as we are speaking of one of the key concepts of all modern political theory, it is difficult to imagine that an alteration in our basic terminology could be anything but deeply significant. The burden of proof is even quite thrust upon the other side.
A much more practical question will certainly arise at this point: namely, has there really been a shift such as that suggested?
Let us furnish some evidence in support of our claim.
In The Federalist Papers, written at the dawn of the essentially modern American experiment, the word “liberty” is used better than one hundred seventy times; “freedom,” but eight. The American Constitution uses the word “liberty” three times, and “freedom” twice. The Declaration of Independence never references freedom; it uses liberty a single time, in the most classic and memorable phrase ever attached to that word in the modern English tongue. Taking five inaugural addresses of America’s first five presidents, we find that the word “liberty” appears nine times, “freedom” five, or about half as often. (It is interesting to note that four of these uses appear in the 1801 speech of Thomas Jefferson; withdrawing his rather disproportionate contribution, the word “freedom” appears only a single time.) But taking five inaugural addresses from America’s five latest presidents, from Reagan to Obama, we find that while “liberty” is used (outside of quotations from older sources) eight times, “freedom” is used thirty, or about four times as often. In John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, of 1689, one of the founding texts of classic liberalism, “liberty” is used about twice as often as “freedom” (about seventy-five times, compared with about forty times). Similarly with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (eighty-five to forty-five), published around the time of the American Revolution. Hobbes’ Leviathan, written several decades before Locke’s Treatise, provides an even more striking example: while “liberty” appears around one hundred fifty times, “freedom” is employed but four.
But turning to more contemporary works in the liberal tradition, we find a strikingly different pattern. Already by the time of John Stuart Mill, a century and a half ago, the shift was well underway: his Considerations on Representative Government brings the term “freedom” around thirty-five times, but “liberty” ten times fewer than that. In Bertrand Russell’s Power: A New Social Analysis, published in 1938, “freedom” is used about fifty times to ten uses of “liberty.” In John Dewey’s Freedom and Culture, written some eighty years ago, “liberty” appears about thirty times, while “freedom” occurs a full six times as often. (And must attention be drawn to the title itself?) Finally, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, “freedom” appears twenty-one times, and “liberty” but a single time, in a phrase clearly inspired from the old Jeffersonian adage “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.”
This draws a clear portrait, and no one can dispute that a marked changed in usage has occurred, at least in the most evident part of political or theoretical life. As for our private interactions, let the reader recall for himself the last time he happened to hear the word “liberty” uttered in common discourse. It is a safe wager that it appeared in one of these curious bastards or holdovers of our contemporary speech, like “civil liberties,” or else in some standardized expression, most likely that several times alluded to above.
Now, it may be argued that this change is due, less to an alteration in worldview, than to some second-order cause. It may be, for instance, but part of a general tend toward the use of Anglo-Saxon, rather than Grecian or Latinate, vocabulary, as these last have begun to seem pretentious or pompous; or perhaps we owe it to a mere question of sound. The first explanation will have to account for the fact that similar transformations have not come with other, equally essential words of our speech: no one widely substitutes “sameness” for “equality,” for instance; no one generally substitutes the verb “lord” for the verb “govern.” Indeed, so far as the last is concerned, even the opposite has been the case, suggesting that something else lords it over our use of these words than their linguistic stock. As for the argument regarding “sound” — it may well be that this has played some role, but it is difficult to believe that this same preference would not have informed the ears of the past as much as the ears of the present. Following this argument, then, one is forced to make reference to certain obvious changes in the social makeup, and most evidently in the transformation from traditional, aristocratic, elitist orders to modern, democratic, plebeian ones. One must then come back to the question of taste — which, as indicated, is rather the opening of the problem than its closure.
Another and subtler argument can be made, thus: the American Constitution uses “freedom” in one of the most cited parts of the entire document, which is to say, the the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. The Declaration of Independence has likewise and rightly left its stylistic mark on today’s language. It may be that the language of the Americans through the wider Anglophonic world has simply habituated English speaking peoples to the use of “freedom” in the place of liberty; for, out of simple customary deference to what has almost become a slogan of the modern world, no one speaks of liberty of speech. Given that this Amendment is so commonly disputed and referenced amongst Americans, who form the numerical majority of English speakers, might it not be that the world simply acquired the habit, over long generations, of thinking more exclusively in terms of freedom than of liberty?
This surely has had its impact. But it only drives the question back a fold. For it supposes that human beings are, if not careless, then at least purely conventional speakers. Though that theory is certainly not indefensible for the run of human beings, yet the writers of the Constitution were anything but careless and conventional. They were statesmen of the first order, and statesmen of the first order are never perfect strangers to the theory underpinning their language. The founders used the term “freedom” most advisedly, wherever they used it. Why did they use freedom in these places, and not liberty?
Let us phrase the point thus: if one were to speak of the freedom of speech, or the liberty of speech, is there a difference we might discern between these expressions?
One difference leaps immediately to the fore: freedom of speech appears to guarantee the absence of external impediments to speech, whereas liberty of speech appears to imply as well a certain power of speech. The blathering drug-addled mendicant who rambles on in broken English about aliens, the end of the world, the spirits inhabiting politician X and the hidden agenda of policy Y, certainly has freedom of speech; does he have liberty of speech? But surely not. Christopher Hitchens, Steven Pinker and Jonathan Bowden, for instance, have liberty of speech — that is, they possess an “inner freedom” which permits them, not only to say whatever comes to mind, but to say it well; they possess the faculty of speaking with eloquence, facility, and persuasiveness, on any subject they would fain.
This gives us a fine point of departure for our investigation. Freedom seems connected with external things; to possess freedom is to be unrestricted by external obstacles. We speak of a “sense of freedom” in particular when we find ourselves suddenly liberated of limitations that previously had governed us — in dreams, for instance, in which the laws of physics are suspended; or when we are given flight through some aerial mechanism like a parachute or a hang-glider; or again, when we stand at a great height as upon a mountain, or travel to a foreign land where the usual ligatures of custom seem severed. Freedom is, by our contemporary understanding, freedom from restrictions, be these physical, intellectual or legal.
Liberty, meanwhile, is somehow connected with inner or outer powers, potencies, capacities, especially as these meet with freedom. One popular dictionary definition gives for liberty “the power to do as one pleases.” This seems to me an admirable definition, as it grants to the word “liberty” a meaning diverse from that ascribed to “freedom” — and since, as we have seen, liberty is but rarely used in the place of “freedom” any longer, precisely such differences as these are the quarry we seek. For we do not accumulate these words of our language for the sake of redundancy; our dictionaries are not merely aids to our stuttering, nor supplements to our merely popular word games.
Now we note an interesting consequence of these definitions, which are now beginning to take form before our eyes: “freedom” understood as we have indicated can be embodied in the principle “equality before the law,” that founding political principle of all modern politics. Indeed, “freedom” is not only compatible with this principle, it is requisite to it. Equality before the law means precisely that all human beings be guaranteed the same degree of “freedom” from the unjust interference of the state: “freedom” and equality are sister-concepts, and can be united within this principle. Freedom in republican government has clear political manifestations.
There can be no such manifested clarity in our day for the principle of liberty as distinguished from freedom, for liberty so understood implies inequalities. Liberty can only be attained given powers and capacities which do not pertain to everyone, and which differ amongst themselves in degree and perhaps in kind. Supposing first the desirability of liberty, and second the possibility of augmenting the overall level of liberty in a given society by means of the laws, the social ideal of liberty would appear to require precisely the opposite of equality under the law: namely, it would require an elitist discrimination between different citizens based on their interior powers, idea which is antipodal to republicanism, to say nothing of democracy. At best, liberty could be preserved in such a society through the notion of “meritocracy,” which purportedly permits those with the greatest talents or skills, the greatest natural or acquired liberty, to float commonly to the surface. But this cannot be considered the direct embodiment of liberty in law, so much as the elimination of all influences obstructive to it: it is “freedom” once more.
All of what has just been said would seem to contradict an element of our earlier reasonings: for if it really is the case that a transformation has been effected in the modern outlook and language, the nature of that transformation is reflected surely also in all its parts. We have said that the republican thinkers of the past predominately thought in terms of the concept of liberty, and not freedom, but we have identified in the concept of liberty an anti-republican, or at least an a-republican, principle. But surely they, the great advocates of republicanism, did not embrace a concept antithetical to their aims? If what we have said is true, why was the concept of liberty associated so strictly with the political transformation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — so much so indeed, that the proponents of those transformations were known universally as “liberals”?
We will get nowhere in our reflections if we do not engage a bit with our histories, and in a way that, alas, is growing rarer and rarer amongst us. The true founders of our modern politics, the revolutionary philosophers of the Enlightenment, did not take their political concepts as they found them, but rather put to practice other principles that they themselves formed and founded. All true revolutions in this world owe their existence, not to the guerrillas, the soldiers, the generals, the merely political legislators that as midwifes bring them to term, but rather to those much more dangerous and much more audacious legislators who, tampering with the “natural order” of our concepts, seed into the ever-fertile womb of time the very possibility of the political orders they would father.
Now, the statesmen founders of all our modern Western states inherited the concept of liberty from the so-called “Enlightenment,” which owed it in turn to that vast archaeological endeavor made possible by the Renaissance’s resurrection of classical antiquity, wed with a dangerous revolt against the Church. The idea of liberty we owe originally, by this pedigree, to the same origin as the word itself: to the Romans, and deeper yet to Classical Antiquity. That is a long and hardly unbroken genealogy; even despite the the fact that between antiquity and the High Middle Ages lies the intercession of several centuries of darkness, there are several epochs involved in this history during which the concept was molded to fit the needs and creeds of diverse times. Yet there was more or less a degree of continuity stretching at least from the Romans through the Renaissance, guaranteed in large part by the perpetuation of the Latin tongue and writings in the usances of the Church, a continuity which was decidedly broken in the blooming of modern thought, most especially through the intercession of the English liberal tradition.
To arrive at an adequate understanding of our present situation, it is necessary then to go back, to acquire at least a superficial acquaintance with the older ideal of liberty.
The word “liberty” comes down to us from Ancient Rome, to which it owes also the better part of its substance: it comes down to us from the libertas which the Romans from the first held so dear. The libertas of the Romans was, like our present day concept of freedom a predominately political designation;26 it indicated the state of being free from the arbitrary rule of tyrants, creditors, or any other lord. One could not be liber and at the same time be subjected to the will of another man. Hence the importance of the law in Roman society; for to enjoy libertas meant to subject oneself freely to no rule but that of the law.
There is a certain kinship between this idea and our contemporary concept of “equality before the law.” But unlike our notion of freedom, the ideal of libertas did not attach itself to all subjects of Rome; indeed, it did not attach itself even to all Romans. Libertas as a concept accompanied the idea of citizenship, civitas, and was indivisible from it; only the full citizen enjoyed libertas; only full citizens could count themselves “equal before the law,” and then only compared to one another, only inter pares. For citizenship was highly restrictive in all phases of Roman history, save its decline. Quite beyond the fact that Rome in any epoch whatever enjoyed a going institution of slavery, full citizenship attended only to a specific class of Romans: namely, free adult males of appropriate birth, or else those who were selected out by these to receive the dignity of an honorific citizenship. Nor was citizenship irrevocable; although the event of it was rare, any Roman could have his citizenship stripped from him, and with it his libertas; no Roman was indemnified against slavery.
The question is why this should have been so: or why the Romans should have drawn such lines around the body of civitas, which then reflected also in the sphere of libertas.
Libertas was given to some and not to others on the basis primarily of merit or excellence. This is made clear from the fact that, although citizenship was conferred on any man born a Roman (which birth itself was held to entail implicit merit, the merit of the blood), yet in all other cases citizenship was granted through due deliberation on the part of the Roman state, as when a certain foreigner performed exceptional acts which redounded to the glory of Rome. The Roman form of government could be considered a very broad aristocracy or a classically mixed regime, with all full citizens as collective rulers of limited power. This is far from being identical to democracy, despite what our school textbooks sometimes insinuate, for the simple reason that it depends on a conception of citizenship which considers high personal caliber to be its prerequisite.
Now, the fact that libertas was implicated with excellence helps us to explain the limits set on citizenship. The Roman ideal of excellence was virtus, from which we of course derive our word and our very notion of virtue. But virtus in the Roman sense is yet foreign to us. Etymologically, it derives from the Roman word for man, man as masculine (vir) and therefore as distinct from human (homo). Virtus was in particular that set of excellences which pertained to what the Romans considered to be the paramount expression of human nature, namely, masculine nature: virtus thus includes such virtues as courage (or manliness), prudence, and justice. It was reclaimed, not to say reconstituted, in the ideal of virtù.
The laws, far from establishing what we would call the “freedom” of all Romans, were fashioned with an eye to promoting and elevating the qualities of virtus. The political dimension of liberty in Rome was determined by this sense of virtue, rather than being determining of it, as it is in our day: the law, far from being indifferent to inherent worth, existed to foster it. But this entails what is to us an altogether most curious aspect of the Roman idea of libertas: libertas was not at all the freedom to do as one lists; libertas was rather inherently tied up with comportment and attitudes which were rigidly limiting of human action, and which resisted all license and licentiousness. Our modern idea of freedom, as we have said, implies the unobstructed ability to do as one pleases, limited only by the law; the Roman idea of libertas was far from being so libertine. A man, for instance, who neglected work or military duty; who used his money thriftlessly or with profligacy; who outraged his parents or the public decorum, or usurped common standards of dignity; who had neglected the gods or the sacred customs; who contemned politics and withdrew from public life — such a man, though he had broken no law, could not be thought to possess virtus, and therefore neither libertas. This leads us to the apparent paradox that the ancient ideal of liberty was in fact in its way coercive, restrictive, and precisely “illiberal.”
Certain attempts on the part of modern theorists to unravel this knot are touchingly clumsy, as when that most constant liberal Benjamin Constant, in his comparison of the ancient idea of liberty with the modern, claims that “among the ancients the individual, almost always sovereign in public affairs, was a slave in all his private relations.” Poor Mr. Constant simple could not fathom the ancient view, and so stood before it in helpless bemusement. His assessment ignores two essential facets of ancient liberty: it was accorded to some individuals, but not to others, who were slaves simply, both in public affairs and in private relations; and it totally denies the fact that libertas is inseparable from that very “slavery in private relations” to which Constant so artlessly alludes.
What such analyses fail to comprehend is the necessary and stringent ligature between liberty, understood as the political privileges attending the moral culmination of human nature, and restraint. To decipher this connection, consider the ballerina. She displays the most remarkable liberty of movement, the most beautiful and exhilarating freedom from gravity and all human clumsiness; but she did not gain this liberty, nor does she exercise it, through an embrace of anarchy nor through a complacent satisfaction with the mere lack of physical weights or chains. We all of us possess that freedom, and it reveals itself as a terribly cheap and tawdry sort of freedom when compared to that which the ballerina enjoys. She gained her liberty by imposing on herself a rigid and extraordinarily restrictive regime, which mandates in great detail the elements of her diet, her waking, her sleep, and imposes on her the necessity of study, practice, physical training, and regulates all her life, within and without, in a startling manifold of particulars. She gained this liberty, that is to say, by yoking herself beneath a harsh and most tyrannical law. Watch her as she flies almost birdlike across the stage, and leaps and capers as the gazelle: even now, in this moment, she is beholden to that law; even now, in this moment of most perfect liberty, she is most “slave.”
Now, “freedom” in our modern sense might be a kind of bland precondition for such preparation and such self-mastery as she has attained; certainly, she could never have even so much as begun were she bound in some dungeon cell. But in and of itself “freedom” is perfectly indifferent to such graces, and too keen an adoration of it can even be detrimental to the conquest of a greater liberty, which can only be attained by an almost habitual servitude before one’s own inner law. In private life, “freedom” in the contemporary sense is perhaps not hostile to liberty in the older; but there can be no doubt that it is prejudicial to it.
The Church inherited this view of human liberty, modifying it only by moralizing it through the special Christian doctrine of of liberum arbitrium, by which human action is understood as being the consequence of the free agency of the human being, so that the moral and practical consequences of action redound to personal merit. Man’s choice to sin, to err in a moral sense, renders him servant to the devil, slave to iniquity. The crown of freedom is thus moral uprightness, culminating in a truly free life in accord with the will of God; the contrary exercise in freedom of will is in fact a relinquishment of freedom. Freedom is that which one acquires by moral merit; freedom is moral liberty.
Given the classic idea of human liberty, an idea steeped in merit and virtue, one must of course wonder to what we owe our modern “value-neutral” or amoral conception. Surely, it did not spring of the void. Did it arise, perchance, from some peculiarly utilitarian Anglo-Saxon turn of mind? That would explain our lexical shift, but it will not as easily explain a certain aspect thereof: namely, that our modern idea of “freedom” began as a modern idea of liberty. That is to say — the founders of modern liberalism, as even the name of their philosophy implies, did not speak of freedom but almost exclusively of liberty.
This makes then for a twin mystery: in the first place, why did the founders of modern liberalism prefer the word “liberty”? And second, why did later developments in modernity substitute the word “freedom”?
The idea of law that entered into the practice of modern politics first through the American Revolution and the Constitution which was its issue, was taken from the classic model — or rather say, the classic model as it was interpreted through the modern lens. The father of the English liberal tradition was none other than Thomas Hobbes, who defined liberty thusly (Leviathan, Book II, Chapter 5):
Liberty, or FREEDOME, signifieth (properly) the absence of Opposition; (by Opposition, I mean externall Impediments of motion;) and may be applyed no lesse to Irrational, and Inanimate creatures, than to Rationall. For whatsoever is so tyed, or environed, as it cannot move, but within a certain space, which space is determined by the opposition of some externall body, we say it hath not Liberty to go further. And so of all living creatures, whilest they are imprisoned, or restrained, with walls, or chayns; and of the water whilest it is kept in by banks, or vessels, that otherwise would spread it selfe into a larger space, we use to say, they are not at Liberty, to move in such manner, as without those externall impediments they would. But when the impediment of motion, is in the constitution of the thing it selfe, we use not to say, it wants the Liberty; but the Power to move; as when a stone lyeth still, or a man is fastned to his bed by sicknesse.
It is most interesting to see that Hobbes here, so emphatically draws our attention here to the term freedom. It would be tempting to suggest that this might have had something to do with the very lexical shift we are studying; but though this is more than possible, we must at once qualify any claims to that effect with the simple memorandum that the term freedom is used in Leviathan but four times, as compared to the very liberal usage of liberty, which occurs some hundred and fifty times. If Hobbes had any will to effect a lexical shift from “liberty” to “freedom,” he went about it in a most oblique way.
Now, the definition that Hobbes provides us, which has subsequently tacitly informed the governing definition for the entirety of the English liberal tradition to the modern day, can be understood as Roman liberty sans virtue. The moral element has been expelled from Hobbes’ philosophy; Hobbes has unyoked libertas from virtus. Put otherwise, the notion of freedom which we have inherited from the Hobbesian tradition, the notion that we take so far for granted that we no longer intuitively perceive any other possibility, is in truth a delimitation of the concept reigning at that time.
The Hobbesian idea of freedom comes to us, not directly from Hobbes himself, but rather via Locke, who said the following of liberty:
The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.
This would appear at first to be closer to the Roman tradition, insofar as it recognizes a “law of nature” which might qualitify liberty. Yet any attempt to define this “law of nature” by Locke’s own proclamations on it are bound to end in confusion and a sharp restriction of the notions of duty which governed the old Roman idea of virtus. That would be a long and perhaps not entirely fruitful digression on the present theme; suffice it to say that the vulpine Locke had very little Roman in him. Much more to our point is this: both Hobbes and Locke, who together surely form the origin of the English liberal tradition, spoke of liberty and not freedom simply because the political tradition of which they were the heirs did not speak of freedom; that tradition, even in good old England, was Roman in extraction, and historically expressed itself in the lingua franca of the day, Latin. (Both Hobbes and Locke were fluent in Latin, often publishing their major works in both Latin and English.) Moreover, they were responding to other philosophers, as Machiavelli and Descartes, who, being Romance thinkers, used words cognate with our English “liberty,” as the Italian libertà and the French liberté. It would have been more resonant with them, as it were, to think in Latin, and it would have been quite natural for them to use that form most consonant with the wider European culture of their day. These reasons can quite adequately explain the motive power behind the overwhelming presence of the word “liberty” in the older political thought and documents of our tradition.
Moreover, the men responsible for the practical implementation of the ideas of classical liberalism in English-speaking countries were not Hobbes and Locke, though they were surely inspired by them; they were thinkers in their own right, who had a special relation to these ideas. In particular, the Founders of the American Constitution had great respect for a certain notion they had formed of the Roman Republic, which in certain key ways they took as their model, disputing it most apparently in its militarism and its inveterate aggressions against its neighbors. What they owed to Rome influenced, without a doubt, their peculiar use of the term “liberty.”
It is poignant in this connection to note the use that Publius in The Federalist Papers makes of another much fraught word — virtue. In several places, the virtue of the people is recognized as a specific against the abuses of power.27 The office of the Presidency is recognized as a magnet attracting “characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.”28 It would be a gross exaggeration to claim that the Founders had for virtue the same esteem that the Romans had for virtus (suffice it to note how relatively little they mention virtue at all); but it is surely not excessive to suggest that they had due respect for virtue in the lives of human beings; and if they did not believe that virtue should be the ruling principle behind the social order, yet they still believed it would be one of the motive forces of the Republic.
If our contemporaries take this as being a point of no great importance for the commonweal, then no more eloquent proof can be found of the degree to which the early moderns were mistaken in their linking virtù and republicanism. Today, the word “virtue” is antiquated at best, and has almost vanished from our speech. (The New Right can claim the distinction of returning it to its just centrality in speech, deed, and intent.) We find here, in the uncoupling of virtue from the social order, one of the cardinal elements of our contemporary society — and indeed, our contemporary plight — and it is worth lavishing all due care upon the understanding of it.
We submit that the fortunes of this word “liberty” declined simultaneously with those of its sister concept “virtue”; that the historical rise of the word “freedom” came through the sacrifice of the Roman concept of libertas; that our modern condition represents in part the decline of the Roman ideal in our Western politics and faith, and its gradual supplantation by another ideal, one artificed in the furnaces of the Enlightenment, but as of yet unfinished, undisclosed, undeclared, uncomprehended.
We submit finally that the new ideal can only be given form through an adequate analysis of the modern conception of “freedom,” based on a credible explanation for why that term has come so far to dominate our public discourses.
We have spoken to one half of our mystery — namely, why the word “liberty” was once used almost to the exclusion of “freedom,” only a few short centuries ago. But we have not resolved the complementary half of this riddle: namely, why it should have fallen from favor with us, and come gradually to be replaced by another, etymologically altogether diverse, word.
I would offer my theory on this; but be it know that this theory is grounded in a certain hermeneutical principle which I do not expect will find much favor in our present intellectual atmosphere. I christen this the etymological principle, and hold to it quite regardless of whither my contemporaries might tend. I have in the penultimate essay of this work summed the principle up thus: the etymology of a word is its destiny.
To introduce this principle, let us begin with a simple question — wherein lies the significance of a word? When a doubt as to the definition of a word is raised, we are wont, in a kind of reflexive habit, to defer at once to our dictionaries. For daily purposes, no fault can be found in that strategy. Yet when it becomes our instinctual reaction in the face of weightier and as it were more philosophical queries, this habit is decidedly less wholesome. I will not be alone in having found this method employed with any number of concepts, and with such regularity that it has acquired a kind of formulaic normalcy. “What is concept X?” goes the line. “Well, the dictionary definition is — ” Indeed, the wakeful reader will note that we ourselves have not neglected this practice, in this very essay.
Now, the dictionary definition reflects modern usage, and this is the natural gate of entry into a subsequent deepening of the analysis; for — lesson from the cartographers — nothing indicates the depths like the surface. But the same practice becomes a vice when the dictionary definition becomes, not the commencement of an inquiry, but its very close. Modern usage gives nothing but the most cosmetic presentation of the conclusions of modern thought, with no reference to the more problematic, hidden or contradictory aspects of the same. The modern usage of a word is its symptomatic usage, the way a word is superficially understood, the way a word is produced through the intersecting influences of countless subterranean, and therefore invisible, principles and axioms.
We are all of us accustomed to thinking of language as malleable with time, and its concepts as fluid rather than once and for all definite. Our idea of “love,” for instance, is not identical to the idea of “love” three-hundred years ago, to say nothing of same idea three-thousand years ago. Then it is already evident that the dictionary definition will tell us what the present idea of “love” is, while presupposing and thus interring the elder roots, from which the present idea has grown; and it therefore buries also the relation between the various phases of this idea. The mere dictionary definition of a word, to put the matter most concisely, conceals the genealogy of the word. That means it conceals far more than it reveals.
Very well — but a step now the further. All influences on a word, be they consciously imposed or organically emergent, be they extensions of the term, restrictions of it, or alterations of it, are ever necessarily responses to the original meaning of the word. No philosophical builder, no matter how revolutionary or innovative, can graft upon the rootstock of a given word a branch fundamentally alien to it; such a graft would quick be rejected by the host and would wither before it could bloom. No evolutionary “mutation” will break the growth from the stock. No amount of Orwellian authoritarianism can make liberty mean slavery, without the intervention of many yoked or heeled generations, and the total suppression of human memory for long centuries — all of which is easier said than accomplished; for not even the totalitarian state imagined by Orwell himself might have been sufficient to this gargantuan task. The subtlest and most excellent “lexical manipulators” of the ages have ever selected their host grafts with care, and have injected their meanings as near to the origin as possible. And many have known that it is far easier to divide than to unite.
It will be intuited what follows from this: in all words, no matter how distantly they appear to stand from their origins, no matter how diverse their acceptations have become from their original spirit and substance, the original meaning yet in some more or less ghost-like manner dwells and has its life; it lies as the concealed principle guiding all the subsequent history, all the successive destiny of the word — the taproot to the trunk. It can therefore be resurrected; it is ever and always latent within the word. Our concepts may change, but never so radically as to supplant themselves. Or at the very least, we may not discount the possibility of a perpetual influence of a word’s first origins, save as we perform clear genealogical investigation of the word in question to demonstrate that a radical break has somewhere or other been effected.
This I call the etymological principle. It seems to me in itself sufficient justification for rooting about in a word’s long history, as was once commonplace in the study of philology, a study nowadays generally neglected. It also provides, I think, real vindication of the oft-maligned neologism, and suggests, for the same reason, a unique virtue in our English tongue.
Now, I would like to evoke this principle in our present investigation to comprehend with greater clarity why we have adopted the word “freedom” in the place of the word “liberty.” I may set my thesis thus, in its simplest terms: the etymological roots of freedom are more accepting of our modern notion than were those of the concept of liberty. The Enlightenment use of the word liberty, which was nothing but an already anachronistic inheritance from a declining Roman and Roman-Catholic tradition, was destined to be gradually replaced with a word issuing from an extraneous font, which seemed to accord more precisely with the distinctly modern vision. The founders of our modern republicans, we have said, embraced the modern conception of “liberty,” but did not altogether abandon the virtue-tradition to which it was attached. It would be well for us to understand more intimately the shift that this represents.
We cannot do better for such investigations than to turn once again to the archetypes of the modern political Founders — those men in whom an advanced degree of modern political doctrine first wed itself with the qualities and circumstances of statesmen. These were the Founders of the American political tradition, the practical forerunners of the subsequent tectonic shift in political practice throughout all the West, of which we are the immediate heirs.
Now, the political world in which the Founders lived, the political world they effectively revolutionized, was decidedly monarchic or aristocratic. The republican principle, which the Founders introduced into political practice, is described by Publius in The Federalist Papers, in the justly famous Federalist No. 10, as follows:
Theoretic politicians, who have patronized [the democratic] species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.
A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking.
To effect such a radical change from the previous form of government which ruled throughout the West, it was necessary to dismantle the prior classes and ranks that formed the natural skeleton of aristocratic rule. The existence of these classes and ranks as such presupposed political inequality, such that certain individuals were accorded a greater share of power based on their social status alone — which meant, to prior eras, it presupposed the excellence which attached or supposedly attached to that status. This is clearly incompatible with representational government, or “indirect democracy,” for the simple reason that there is no necessary correspondence between the will of the hereditary upper classes and the will of the people. We are all too familiar with the arguments against the old monarchies and aristocracies to much dwell on them here — nor is this the place to defend their less often recognized, and to our eyes much superior, virtues.
In order to supplant this aristocratic class principle with the republican representational principle, it was necessary to redefine the relation between the people and the government; it was necessary to transpose it from the kind of paternalistic and patronizing over-rule which was the norm before the French Revolution, to the participatory and representative rule which gradually gained apotheosis throughout the West after it. The name for the new principle was equality under the law. Ideally, this means that any given single individual within such a regime owns a relation to the laws of the state which is precisely identical to that of any other given individual, regardless of the respective wealth or poverty, gender or race or status, internal or external conditions of the two.
No one will deny that this principle was from the start imperfectly executed; but neither can anyone deny that the subsequent birth and growth of all modern Western states follows hard upon its adoption, so much so that the history of the West appears to hindsight as the almost unbroken expansion and perfection of that principle, until its notable corrosion in recent years in the acid of the progressivist worldview.
What is this “equality before the law,” and what is its relation to liberty as it was classically, and freedom as it is presently, understood?
We have already seen how the classical or Catholic ideal of liberty was wed to the principle of virtue or moral quality, and therefore also to the principle of merit; the political embodiment of classical or Catholic liberty resulted therefore in precisely the opposite of equality before the law. It resulted, that is to say, in institutionalized strata of society, each stratum characterized by a peculiar relation to the laws of the land, based on the qualities or limitations which were seen to pertain to it. Liberty, as a guiding principle to the social order, is basically elitist. This formed a pretty conundrum for early modern political theory, because it had need of a principle of “political liberty” which did not culminate in the aristocratic class principle. It was part of the genius of the modern political philosophers to see their way to a solution of this problem.
We have already noted how Hobbes’ clever wit had perceived that the Roman ideal of libertas was a hybrid notion: it contained at least two distinct and therefore distinguishable elements. The first and best known to us presently is the absence of external constraint; the second is the rigorous consummation, known as virtue, of an internal constraint, known as human nature. In the classical or Catholic understanding, the first followed the second: one was given one’s external liberty because one was such a man as could well use it, because one was a virtuous or moral man. The principle of justice, put otherwise, was the outward recognition of a natural hierarchy of human beings, in the composition of the state and the allotment of offices, powers, honors, duties, privileges and prerogatives. The modern philosophers, and particularly the philosophers of the English liberal tradition, turned this idea of justice on its head: liberty, by their discernment, was understood as the outward elimination of restraints, so as to permit the acquisition of virtue or morality — something much more akin to our contemporary notion of “meritocracy” or “equality of opportunity.” In the classical and aristocratic conception, liberty follows merit or is the expression of merit; in the modern and fundamentally democratic conception, liberty precedes merit and is the social and political condition of merit.
Thanks to this analysis of liberty (and note it well: modern philosophy, and with it the entirety of the political left, is essentially analytic), and its consequent delimitation of the concept of liberty, the modern state became attainable. In the principle of equality before the law, universal equality and liberty, principles hitherto taken to be enemies, are wed for the first time in history. And if one wishes to know the outcome of this matrimony, and whether it has been a happy match, or has proved in the end to have been a hasty and ill-considered coupling of convenience, the answer is evident enough: it has come out as happily as any marriage, in which one party becomes utterly and wretchedly enslaved to the other, who is permitted to exert his will tyrannically and in blithe disregard of reason or measure. And to perceive the lord here, the ruling principle of modern political philosophy, it will be clear to anyone with his eyes open, to which of these concepts one must look.
Indeed, so far as the old idea of liberty goes, the promise of its dissolution was already contained in this early compromise. One had unshackled virtue from liberty, in hopes that early might continue its life, separately now and independent; the result was the death of both. The masses do not understand virtue, save as it is embedded into a religious morality; once one liberates them from the bonds of the Church and the old primary Estates, the very idea of virtue withers and dies. It is no accident that our language has gradually ceased to include the words virtue, honor, nobility; it is no accident we no longer speak, as once we spoke, of right and wrong, good and bad, high and low. The creeping relativism of modernity, in its practical character, owes its being in great part to the utter disregard, on the part of the majority of human beings, for human excellence. This could well have been anticipated by anyone not blinded by the charm of “liberation”: the masses touch human excellence at no point; how then, by their own lights alone, could they ever come to seek or to praise it?
To our present purpose, the result for liberty of the death of virtue has been this: liberty has been hollowed of half its meaning, and that half which was, moreover, the greater and more fundamental part of it. It is like a nut, the meat of which has rotted out, leaving only the shell and sheath. It, like virtue, is a word that no longer signifies; it is a word one no longer has use for, a word one no longer comprehends, a word one slowly sloughs off our speeches, and buries more profoundly in our dictionaries. For note this well: it is not merely that these old concepts of value and worth do not intimate anything to us any more: it is that they intimate too much, and of things we find vaguely disgraceful, obsolete, or disagreeable. They conjure up a splendid past which reproaches modernity, and which modernity in turn most virulently denounces. There is a repulsion in its ignorance of these words, an active and most storied evasion and avoidance.
But a problem emerges in its relation to “liberty” which never arose in its relation to “virtue” (or to honor, nobility, excellence, etc.), a most telling problem — aye, one of those problems that quite embarrassingly denude an epoch. Our society, our state, our pitiful substitute for a culture, get by well enough without the concept of virtue, nor do most men today for a moment feel the lack. But the concept of liberty, as any review of our politician’s speechifying makes abundantly clear, is integral and indispensable to them. Modernity found itself pulling away from a word that yet gave it light and heat, like a planet trying to rid itself of one of its twin stars; what then to be done?
But its democratic instincts, which but seldom lead it astray in such matters, have certainly not failed it here: liberty, to be abandoned, had to be substituted.
We come thus upon the greatest term which has almost single-handedly, together with only a single other, shaken and remolded the regimes of the latest centuries, and put the modern world sure to its courses: namely, freedom. And we ask — what is this freedom which we today take as our political mandate, our justification and our guidance, our compass in the way forward and our spyglass for the way back? Or, to enter this question from the work we have already done: what is it about the etymology, the heritage, of this word freedom, that made it the easy substitute for liberty?
The word freedom in the first place is of Anglo-Saxon derivation. This already distances it from the Roman tradition, if it does not countervail it to that tradition. There is no historical, no genealogical contact between freedom and virtus: already then it is more accessible to our contemporary political definition, and more palatable to our egalitarian taste.
Now, the word freedom is a compound term, the consequence of a primordial unification of two Old English words: it comes down to us from the binding of the Anglo-Saxon freo and the Anglo-Saxon suffix -dom.
Freo is a most intriguing concept, and one most difficult to import into any modern conception. Its approximate meaning would appear to be “not in bondage,” but it has connotations also of will, of being able to exert one’s will, of an internal power or prowess or virtù; also implied is the ability to speak one’s mind (shared, we might mention not altogether incidentally, with the Latin liber). This internal sense is strengthened the more by the connections of the word with the concept of love, suggesting the most curious emergence of the idea of freedom from the idea of being able to love. This is love, however, in an elder, a deeper sense: this is the power of forming and formulating the beloved; this is love as choosing a thing out, granting unto a chosen thing its quality and worth, making a thing lovable through choice, decision, discretion, magnanimity, fiat. This love was arrantly known to the old chivalric orders. Hence the connection as well with liberality (again, shared by the Roman conception), the ability and the will to give gifts, to lavish one’s favors on the beloved. Unsurprisingly, this was often connected also with nobility, the state of being noble, which originally and justly had intimate attachment as well to birth and heritage, and was inseparable from holding property, which idea we have trivialized and plebeianized in our hideous idea of economy. And, in a peculiarly beautiful and peculiarly Anglo-Saxon twist, this concept of free nobility in its turn is bound up with joy, mirth, gladness in the original sense — the overbrimming life and wellspring within the heart that grants value unto things from its own great affluence.29
Most intriguingly, this notion of freedom is connected as well to the idea of one’s people. The freóbearn, “freeborn,” were the members of one’s folk. A freódrihten, “free ruler,” was a master, a noble lord. Freo seems to share a common root with the word freónd, “friend.” Human relations, the very hierarchy of society, its constitution as a society by virtue of its uniting together a free people, was determined in numerous essential respects by the trait of being freo.
To be free — that means, to be of good birth, to be unbeholden and unchained, to be great of heart, vital, most profoundly alive. To be free meant to be master of oneself and of men, to be capable of love and hence of nobility and friendship and loyalty to one’s kith and kin, to God and God’s law. To be free — that means, to be high and full and unburdened of spirit, in bondage neither to man nor to misfortunes, but to be master over the both. Free in this sense was ever and always a term marrying distinction and right. In the first place, only such and such a man of such and such a people could be deemed fully free; secondly only such and such a man of such and such a mettle could ever possibly have fully consummated his freedom. It was not such a quality as could be conferred, nor such a property as could be guaranteed, but was the preserve of the few, the select high few, who were capable of renewing it by deed; and so it is tied to ideas of fate, even of destiny — but also to fortune — but also to deed. It is everywhere and exclusively the issue of a high heart.
The -dom suffix, on the other hand, is linked with judgement, with wisdom, with the ability to determine, to discern, to decide, to choose fate — the very sense preserved in an older use of its most obvious scion in our language, the word doom. Doom, one of the few words of our tongue which has not shed its weight in all the long millennia of its life, originally owed its greatness and its gravity to this: that it indicated the binding judgement of a high and noble mind, if not of God Himself. We, who view no distance between man and man, simply cannot conceive of the divine or semi-divine power once deferred to the judgement of a king — which word, incidentally, most probably also derives from the idea of “noble birth,” and who was the ruler of a king-dom, which was bound to and by his judgement. We simply do not conceive the weight which the injunction of a lord once bore, or a man who held the power of life or death over his subjects. Yet our word “wisdom” (meaning etymologically the judgement and ability to discern or decide form, manner, character) gives us some insight in that direction, as well as our word “sage”; the wise man, he who has culminated the love of wisdom in the possession of wisdom, has a power of judgement which is not granted to us all; his judgement thus has a weight which the judgement of a normal human being does not carry.
Freedom is given to that man who is at once wise and great of heart: freedom is given to a man by a radical inner merit; not even deeds, which are but the expression of a great nature, can grant one freedom, if one does not already possess it. For by the antique and true understanding, excellence does not follow deeds; but deeds follow excellence.
It is difficult to earn a legitimate sense of these meanings, so far down are they buried in time and in the heart — especially in our very debased days, which sometimes force a man to fly back centuries to find even the traces of a nobler speech. But we may put the core meaning of freedom into new flesh as follows: freedom is the judgement of the true heart; freedom is the judgement of love.
Now, it seems clear that such an idea of freedom is radically inadequate without the external obliteration of obstacles: the judgement of the heart, if it remains locked within the heart, is but frustrated desire, so much smothered flame. And thus, not only is the idea of freedom apparently compatible with our modern conception, but it is even easy to believe that that modern conception is its prerequisite.
But more. It is evident that not every human being is or may be “virtuous” in the Roman sense of the word: virtue is the term of distinction to a Roman mind. But if not every human being may be virtuous, then it is clear that not every human being may possess liberty, which the Roman mind predicated upon virtue. Yet — to intercede here with a number of very modern questions — is it not true that every human being possesses a “heart”? that every human being “loves”? Is it not true that all human “hearts,” all human “loves,” are equal, one to the next? Then — may not “freedom,” as opposed to liberty, be granted to any human being, by merely granting him the conditions to choose the way to his “love”?
These are but footprints in the dust of time; these are but the rare and fading traces of that peculiar and corrupt modern logic which has led us slowly, imperceptibly, inevitably, over the long course of over several centuries, to the embrace of a worldly and godless way which, however, has yet to run its course. Liberty is departing; freedom is come. The change was concomitant to the birth of equality in our day, and the consequent denial of all rank ordering; and its birth, which is not to say its destiny, depends decisively on the belief in this equality, in the interchangeability of any human being with any other. Freedom is among us still the handmaiden of equality, and equality is still the chain fettering us to our decaying social order. The very arc of political growth to date, from the dawn of modern liberalism to the present day, has been nothing but the drama of the new ideal of equality, expressed through many theaters and through a variety of plots and subplots; an idea which comes ever more to rule us, until it brings us, in these latter days, to the contemporary notion and sense of morality and politics, our petty present-day goals and our trivialized, trivializing sense of the world, our debased, debasing view of life, and above all to the crisis which these things have precipitated in our regimes and in our souls. Equality can no longer guide us hence: but perhaps, if we be bold, mastered, clear-sighted, there may be a future yet for freedom.
We live of language and in language, we human beings, we “social animals.” Had I to define the human being, I might dare christen him a creature of the tongue. All of us, before we may live in the world, first must live in words, in the sphere and the special sense of things that language imposes upon our awareness, or infuses into the world. It is not too much to say that most human beings exist by the substance of their speech. But the etymological principle reveals to us that the river of our words flows from a distant and finally unreachable source, the which would seem, if we be but hunters of the λόγος ἐν ἀρχῇ, to doom us to slavery under invisible influences that daemonlike weave their wiles about us, subtile and immortal. We of the Deep Right, in particular, are always chasing the shadows of that philosophy which is our greatest and most precious human heritage; we are ever running after the Greeks.
Supposing we have arrived at a moment of unparalleled crisis, and supposing we owe this crisis to nothing but that same great and precious heritage; supposing we have come to the end of the long voyage, begun when Thales stumbled into his well, or better yet when Socrates turned his eye from the sky and the earth, and settled it upon the human soul — or better yet still, when he supped of his death to save his soul, and philosophy with it; supposing, at last, that the soul and its language are bound up together and are as indivisible as wine in water: supposing all this, it would seem that the only way of escaping our present dilemma is by finding or founding a new tongue. We would appear to be in dire need of a new language.
No lesser insight than this compelled certain great men of the past century to recommend our attention to the East, to a radically different sense of Being as expressed in a fundamentally foreign worldview.
The West was born in Athens and in Jerusalem. That half of our history which we owe to the Greeks has ever tended in but two directions: inward, and Eastward. When it has failed to delve more deeply into itself, it has chased the sun itself, seeking greater profundity in Oriental founts, in the great religions of the East, in a cycle which owes something even to the natural movement of the heavens and is suggested to us by the changing day itself. Yet there has ever been something frightful in that movement, something which suggests a radical inadequacy in the West, something which seems to indicate a great and terrifying void at the heart of our Western experience. And in modern days it is difficult to avoid the impression that we have exhausted the heritage of Greece to such an extent that now nothing remains for us but a final flight Eastward. It is perceived that we are come to the end of our tether, that the great expedition of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle has at last come to its close with the palpable failure of the modern experiment.
Of course, one might fly back to the ancients, and seek to resurrect them from their graves, and, “sitting at their feet,” to discover the way in which modernity is but the betrayal or misunderstanding of nobler antecedents. One might fathom as well how multifarious is the classic tradition itself, how Rome and Greece are not unitary, not even in themselves, how Plato himself was antagonist to Homer, Socrates to Aristophanes, how there are yet undelved depths therein which have been buried by the strata of foreign or conflicting “traditions” in Heraclitus, Protagoras, Epicurus, Zeno; and in renewed joy at this forgotten continent one might linger long like a lover in that distant past. In one’s heart especially one might do so. But insofar as we are children of our age, we cannot help but give mind as well to its immanent illness. And it is indubitable that the modern tradition, howsoever it might differ from the ancient, was yet born of the ancient, was made possible by the ancient, was carried in the womb of the ancient as seed and scion. Even to flee to the ancients will not suffice to cure our troubles: for tracing well that path, if we do not possess thorough understanding and overview of ourselves, we may but find ourselves come full circle, as the circulus vitiosus or the worm ouroborus feeds upon itself — and upon us.
Then what shall it be? To the East with us, and the Orient, after all? Not yet, Friends — not yet!
The excellent good fortune of the present growing sense of a unified and singular Occidental civilization, is in its thread-like gathering of many divers origins. We cannot too keenly praise the growth of “European identity.” Too long has there been a fruitless tension in Europe between the Romance and Anglo-Saxon countries, which in late centuries have culminated in egalitarian excesses, and the Germanic nations, which, as has been noted by competent observers, have resisted such changes. Nietzsche himself took as his great adversaries Socrates and Plato; he himself contradistinguished his work and his project to that of a Mediterranean antiquity — not to speak of his antagonism to Christianity! Yet Nietzsche, too, called himself a “good European”; he saw beyond the conflict between Rome and Mitteleuropa. He foresaw the rising of a new Europe, capable, for the very richness of its inner tensions, of greater things. “With a bow so tense,” quoth the archer, “we can now aim for the farthest goals.”
In conclusion of the particular aims which have governed our work here, we might suggest that a unified Occident brings multiple languages to a single throat, and with them, the etymological heritage, the destiny and the doom, of a rich multiplicity of traditions. But without a common Muse, no song may be sung.
English over all other modern languages is privileged and blessed on this score — English, that marvelous bastard tongue, which comes of more parents than might decently be named, and is itself kaleidoscopic and variegated and sundry. Europe’s Yesterday belonged to Latin — her Tomorrow, if tomorrow she shall have, will belong to English. To English shall be entrusted the great experiment of seeing whether a European resurrection is possible; also whether a true, spiritual European unification under some new Occidental star is possible; and still again, whether a new aristocracy can be born from the contemporary rabble, a new speech from the rabble’s native tongue. In English, the Latinate and Grecian traditions are intermingled with the Germanic, the Saxon, the Celtic; in English, Christianity absorbed Paganism; in this soil the roots of all Europe interweave and entangle, and the possibility emerges at last, not only of a return to the Greeks and the Romans, and still less of a turning away from them — but rather, of looking at Anglo-Saxony and Germania from Grecian and Roman eyes, and vice-versa, within our very souls.
But even to recognize this possibility is already to admit that the Occident is not spent yet. Perhaps in truth she has even still to be born, and these marvelous millennia before us were but a gestation of such length that one no longer perceives the birth toward which they have ever been tending. Save as we forget our heritage and chain ourselves at the feet of some modern philosophical idol, we shall not perish altogether, nor be forced to betray ourselves with gazes turned dimly to twilit Asia. But we philoccidentals are in desperate want now of a kind of adventuring spirit alit anew in our breasts, a new philosophical and artistic, nay a new philosophico-artistic freedom, which is willing and able to delve deeply the wellsprings of the past — out of love for the future.
finis