Freedom and civilization / by Bronislaw Malinowski.

  • Bronisław Malinowski
Date:
1944
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Freedom and civilization / by Bronislaw Malinowski. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    definitions but rather from a surfeit. There reigns a chaos and confusion of meanings, and it will be necessary to put some order into this semantic chaos, and to eliminate a few unnecessary concepts. The intuitive emotional and subjective meaning of freedom, as felt rather than formulated by the man in the street, conceives of freedom as the ability to do what one likes or to do nothing. The claim that liberty is the absence of restraint, of trammels, and of hindrances is persistent. Were we to collect some of the finest poetic phrases, some of the classic epigrams, some of the famous sayings of moralists, theologians and orators, we would always find an emphasis on the subjective feeling of an unlimited scope for choice and expansion in thought, in action, in the affirmation of oneself. Freedom as “absence of restraint” is also the common semantic measure of all dictionary or encyclopedic definitions. “Absence of restraint”, “exemption or release from slavery or imprison¬ ment”, “exemption from arbitrary control”, “the quality of being free from the control of fate or necessity”—these are some typical and recurrent lexicographic entries under the words “freedom” and “liberty”. A modified and moderate insistence on lack of trammels runs through a whole group of explicit and circumstantial arguments and definitions, characteristic of liberal and libertarian thinkers. They argue, define and interpret facts so as to make liberty synonymous with the absence of chains, removal of restraints, and the minimum control of the individual. John Stuart Mill might be taken as representative of this view. His main insistence is on the freedom of thought and speech, and in this his arguments are on the whole unimpeachable. Mill, however, and many other liberal thinkers, who insist that “more liberty and less law” are directly related, often forget that it is not the quantity of law which matters, but its nature. The extreme position verging on
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