freedom

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noun

1. Departure from normal rules or procedures: liberty, license. See restraint/unrestraint.
2. The state of not being in confinement or servitude: emancipation, liberation, liberty, manumission. See free/unfree.
3. The condition of being politically free: autonomy, independence, independency, liberty, self-government, sovereignty. See dependence/independence, free/unfree.
4. Ease of or space for movement: elbowroom, play. See tighten/loosen.

n

Definition: ease
Antonyms: difficulty, limitation, reserve, restraint, restriction

n

Definition: independence, license to do as one wants
Antonyms: captivity, confinement, imprisonment, incarceration, limitation, servitude, slavery, subjection, suppression

n

Definition: opportunity
Antonyms: chance

from English
This word originated in England

English had its beginnings about fifteen hundred years ago, when the "Angle-ish" spoken by Angles and Saxons separated from other Germanic languages as the Angles and Saxons themselves, crossing the water to settle in what they would call "Angle-land," separated from other Germanic tribes. Since that time, no word has been of more significance to English speakers than freedom. This word was not carried to England as part of the Angles' and Saxons' Germanic language heritage, nor was it imported from another language. Instead, it seems to have been a homemade invention, put together from two existing Germanic words to form a distinctive concept.

The elements of freedom are free and doom, to use the modern spellings. Free originally meant "beloved" and is related to the word friend. By the time English came into being, free had evolved to take on its modern meaning, with the idea that one who is beloved is a friend, free from bondage. The development of doom is more complicated. Nowadays we think of doom as a judgment--and a harsh one at that--or as an unhappy fate. A thousand years ago, in the time of the early English language, doom had a different emphasis. It did indeed mean judgment, but it meant a considered judgment, related to the present-day deem.

Put free together with doom and you have the condition of being judged to be free. It involves being free and thinking about it, being free and accepting the responsibility for making the judgments that being free entails.

Appropriately, one of the earliest appearances of English freedom, in about the year 888, is in the best-known translation of a philosophical work ever to appear in English. The translation was made by King Alfred himself, the only English ruler ever to be called "the Great." Fate or free will? Necessity or freedom? That was the question Alfred answered in favor of the latter in his translation of the Consolation of Philosophy by the Roman Boethius. For the Latin libertas, our present-day liberty, Alfred uses the newly created freedom. To be governed by righteousness, he writes, is to be "on tham hehstan freodome," that is, in the highest freedom. He writes of the "fulne friodom" or "full freedom" attained by those who do not seek earthly gains. Through such language Alfred made a Platonic work into a decidedly more Christian one. Alfred needed all the Platonic and Christian consolation he could find in the grim days of Viking invasions and the near anarchy of what we call the "Dark Ages" after the collapse of the Roman empire.

Freedom made itself thoroughly at home in English at an early date. In addition to Alfred's Boethius, about fifty other extant Old English texts use it, including English translations of St. Augustine's soliloquies, Pope Gregory the Great's book on pastoral care, and the Venerable Bede's famous history of the English church and people.

There are a thousand or so words like freedom that appear to be truly English, that is, that do not seem to have existed in the ancestors of our language but were newly made after English developed from Proto-Indo-European and Germanic and that appear in the written records of the earliest period of English, about a thousand years ago.

The rest of English-speaking history might be said to be the development of the meaning of freedom. Much later, in the fourteenth century, we admitted the French liberty to our language in equal partnership, but freedom has remained fundamental. It has certainly been the watchword of the American experience. "Those who deny freedom to others," declared Abraham Lincoln, "deserve it not for themselves." In the darkest days of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt spoke with hope of "a world founded upon four essential human freedoms": freedoms of speech and worship, freedoms from want and fear. And Martin Luther King Jr. concluded his most famous speech with the refrain, "Let freedom ring."

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Absence of interference or impediment. Unfortunately, and as a reflection of the importance which has been attached to ideas of freedom, almost every aspect of its characterization is controversial. Gerald MacCallum has suggested that all statements about freedom can be cast in the same form—A is free from B to p (p stands for any verb of action)—and that disputes about freedom are disputes about the three terms involved, referring to the agent, the obstacle, and the action or state to be achieved, respectively. This may help to diagnose disagreement, and it does provide a formal framework in which various conceptions may be cast, but it does not itself provide a substantive account. There may be one concept of freedom (in this formal sense), but many conceptions of it (that is, many substantive ways of filling out the formula). Isaiah Berlin proposed in a famous lecture that two accounts of liberty be distinguished: negative liberty, focusing on the absence of interference by others, and positive liberty, focusing on an agent's capacity to p. Berlin particularly emphasized the connection between the positive conception and a willingness to accept an intrapersonal notion of freedom, because he was suspicious of the idea of the self upon which such intrapersonal notions rested—they seemed to rely upon a higher self and a lower self, or a similar bifurcation. Three problems will illustrate how substantively different conceptions of freedom may be put forward. First, attempts have been made to distinguish freedom from ability. In most social contexts the concern is with interference or impediments which are the responsibility of other persons, suggesting to some a distinction between a person's ability to do something and his or her freedom to do it. Hence I am free to fly like a bird (no one is interfering or will impede me) but I am unable to do so; I am able to do many actions which I am legally unfree to do. If I break my wrist accidentally, I am unable to write; if you handcuff me I am unfree to do so. But in these last two examples the distinction between ability and freedom looks less straightforward than in the first two, because in both cases the immediately relevant impediment is physical. The most obvious description of the handcuff case is that I am unfree to write because disabled by you, suggesting ability is a condition of freedom. If ability is a condition of freedom, however, I am unable and therefore unfree to fly like a bird. Clearly, both the agent and others can affect physical capacity, and this in various ways: handcuffs are a temporary impediment, but some disabling conditions are not reversible; both the agent and others can affect an individual's abilities in an accidental way and in an intentional way. (Suppose I deliberately broke my wrist: is the relationship between my ability to write and my freedom now the same as if you had handcuffed me?) In Hillel Steiner's conception of freedom, a person is unfree if and only if his action is prevented by another person. Hence a person is unfree to p only if he is unable to p because of someone else—a conception which makes freedom depend on ability but only in interpersonal cases.

The second major difficulty arises specifically from the comparison of interpersonal and intrapersonal cases. Some, like Steiner, see freedom solely in interpersonal terms. Others, however, have wanted to extend the range of freedom-reducing impediments or obstacles with which a person may be faced to include those which arise from ‘internal’ characteristics or dispositions. Suppose I am unlucky enough to suffer from agoraphobia. No one else is responsible for my condition—it has not been imposed on me by others, even if they might be able to help me overcome it. If we say that my freedom would be enhanced by the removal of this phobia, we accept that freedom can be intrapersonal. Alternatively, if we restrict freedom to interpersonal cases, we may say that I am free to walk in open spaces but apparently psychologically unable to bring myself to do so.

A third problem is the relation between freedom and resources. To be able to achieve some objectives, or even to do particular actions, persons require access to the components of action—most fundamentally space and, often, funds. To describe someone who lacks the resources to p as free to p is to suggest that if he or she is now provided with the resources there has been no increase in freedom, only resources; and many writers accept that characterization of the situation. Others have suggested the need to distinguish formal freedom from substantive freedom. In the present case, there would be no change in the person's formal freedom, but an increase in his or her substantive freedom. (A similar point is made about rights.) The freedom persons care about is substantive.

This suggestion raises another issue: whether it is plausible to characterize freedom independently of the reasons we might have for valuing it. Some hold that there are two quite separate questions: What is freedom? Why, if at all, is freedom valuable? Others regard the attempt at separation as implausible. For example, many discussions of freedom make reference to the value of individual choice or autonomy. Is the point of having freedom to enhance choice or autonomy, or is what freedom is the having of choice or autonomy? One approach is to distinguish between freedom in some general sense and particular freedoms (although it is not clear how ‘freedoms’ are to be aggregated). A class of apparently valueless freedoms—for example, to do the many things I am free to do but do not choose to do, or the things I am free to do but lack the resources to do—may be consistent with an explanation of the value of freedom. My wants may change, I may acquire the resources, and the value of freedom in general (it enables choice, it respects autonomy) is compatible with contingently valueless freedoms.

The various responses to the controversial aspects of ‘freedom’ mentioned here (and others) have generated many conceptions of freedom. Attempts to adjudicate between them have raised the charge that ideological preference masquerades as philosophical discrimination.

— Andrew Reeve

The state of being free; the absence of restrictions.


freedom of association
the right to peaceably assemble as guaranteed by the First Amendment.

freedom of expression
general term referring to the

freedom of press
, religion, and speech.
freedom of press the right to publish and circulate one’s views, as guaranteed by the First Amendment.
167 A.L.R. 1447. Closely related to

freedom of speech
(below). See open court.

freedom of religion
see establishment clause. freedom of speech the right to express one’s thoughts without governmental restrictions on the contents thereof, as guaranteed by the First Amendment. 333 U.S.
507, 509.

A cynical view of the world by Ambrose Bierce

n.

Exemption from the stress of authority in a beggarly half dozen of restraint's infinite multitude of methods. A political condition that every nation supposes itself to enjoy in virtual monopoly. Liberty. The distinction between freedom and liberty is not accurately known; naturalists have never been able to find a living specimen of either.

    Freedom, as every schoolboy knows,
        Once shrieked as Kosciusko fell;
    On every wind, indeed, that blows
            I hear her yell.
    
    She screams whenever monarchs meet,
        And parliaments as well,
    To bind the chains about her feet
            And toll her knell.
    
    And when the sovereign people cast
        The votes they cannot spell,
    Upon the pestilential blast
            Her clamors swell.
    
    For all to whom the power's given
        To sway or to compel,
    Among themselves apportion Heaven
            And give her Hell.
                                                          Blary O'Gary

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IN BRIEF: Being able to use or move about as one wishes.

There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail. — Eric Hoffer (1902-1983).

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For a list of words related to freedom, see:

• Philosophies, Principles, and Parties - freedom: individual option to make choices without coercion

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See words rhyming with "freedom."

  See crossword solutions for the clue Freedom.

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - frihed, åbenhed, frækhed

idioms:

• freedom fighter    frihedskæmper
• freedom from    frihed fra
• freedom of    fri adgang til
• freedom of action    handlefrihed
• freedom of the press    trykkefrihed

Nederlands (Dutch)
vrijheid, vrijdom, gemak, openheid, ongepaste gemeenzaamheid, onafhankelijkheid, vrijmoedigheid, onbeperkt gebruik, franchise/ privilege

Français (French)
n. - liberté, indépendance

idioms:

• freedom fighter    combattant de la liberté
• freedom from    à l'abri de, le fait d'être dégagé de
• freedom of    liberté de, plein usage de
• freedom of action    liberté d'action, liberté d'agir
• freedom of the press    liberté de la presse

Deutsch (German)
n. - Freiheit

idioms:

• freedom fighter    Freiheitskämpfer
• freedom from    Freiheit von
• freedom of    Freiheit für
• freedom of action    Handlungsfreiheit
• freedom of the press    Pressefreiheit

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ελευθερία, ανεξαρτησία

idioms:

• freedom fighter    μαχητής της ελευθερίας
• freedom from    απαλλαγή ή εξαίρεση από
• freedom of    ελεύθερη χρήση
• freedom of action    ελευθερία δράσεως
• freedom of the press    (νομ.) ελευθεροτυπία

Italiano (Italian)
libertà, indipendenza

idioms:

• freedom fighter    combattente per la libertà
• freedom from    libertà da
• freedom of    libertà di

Português (Portuguese)
n. - liberdade (f)

idioms:

• freedom fighter    quem luta pela liberdade
• freedom from    liberdade (f)
• freedom of    liberdade (f) de
• freedom of the press    liberdade (f) de imprensa

Русский (Russian)
свобода, независимость, прямота, незакрепленность

idioms:

• freedom fighter    борец за независимость, борец за свободу
• freedom from    освобождение, свобода от
• freedom of    свобода
• freedom of the press    свобода прессы

Español (Spanish)
n. - libertad, independencia

idioms:

• freedom fighter    luchador por la libertad
• freedom from    inmunidad, exención
• freedom of    libertad de
• freedom of action    libertad de acción, libertad de movimiento
• freedom of the press    libertad de prensa

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - frihet, rörelsefrihet, fri vilja, frigjordhet, privilegium

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
自由, 特权, 坦率

idioms:

• freedom fighter    自由斗士
• freedom from    免于..., 免除..., 豁免
• freedom of    自由, 独立自主的, 自由权
• freedom of action    行动自由
• freedom of the press    出版自由

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 自由, 特權, 坦率

idioms:

• freedom fighter    自由鬥士
• freedom from    免於..., 免除..., 豁免
• freedom of    自由, 獨立自主的, 自由權
• freedom of action    行動自由
• freedom of the press    出版自由

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 자유, 자주성, 면세

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 自由, 自主, 権利, 自由使用権, 気まま, 無遠慮, 自由自在, 解放されていること, フリーダムセヴン

idioms:

• freedom fighter    自由の戦士
• freedom from    免除されて
• freedom of    自由な出入り, 自由使用権
• freedom of action    行動の自由
• freedom of the press    出版の自由

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) حريه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮חופש, חופשיות, חירות‬

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