Introduction

Summary

INTRODUCTION. When and why did it come about that one prevailing way of understanding what it means to be free was replaced by a strongly contrasting account that came to be no less widely accepted, and still remains dominant? The argument of the book is that, in Anglophone political theory, the change happened quite suddenly in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Before that time it was generally agreed that what it means to be free is that you are not subject to, or dependent on, the arbitrary will and power of anyone else. Liberty was equated with independence. But by the early nineteenth century it had come to be generally accepted that liberty simply consists in not being restrained from acting as you choose. What prompted the change, the book argues, was not the imperatives of commercial society, as has often been argued. Rather it was a growing anxiety, in the face of the American and French Revolutions, about the democratic potential of the ideal of liberty as independence.