Topics:  Individual Liberty

The democratic hope was that political liberty involved more than the right to vote; rather, political liberty would depend on deep-ingrained personal habits. Constant had early in the century pointed out the desired form of political liberty-not merely the franchise, the achievement of the Greeks and Romans, but also liberty in the private realm: "Among the ancients, the individual, almost always sovereign in public affairs, was a slave in all his private relations." Early republican thinkers argued that such private habits of liberty were necessary for the continuance of public liberty. As Jefferson wrote, "Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic, . . . not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day, . . . he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power be wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte." A continual theme of those who wrote about political liberty during the nineteenth century, thus, was the question of individual liberty, how the democratic citizen was to maintain attitudes of freedom in his individual consciousness. Romantic writers endorsed connecting political liberty with the liberty of the subjective consciousness, as in Byron's "Sonnet in Chillon": "Eternal spirit of the chainless Mind! / Brightest in dungeons, Liberty, thou art." The quintessential meditation on this issue is John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859), in which Mill laments that citizens of democratic states, having won political liberty, make themselves slaves to conformity and the "despotism of culture." For Mill, individual liberty depends on individuality. But even Mill felt that not everyone was capable of this fullest sort of liberty, holding that liberty applies "only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties," not to members of races he felt were less developed. This line of thinking was anticipated, of course, in pro-slavery arguments of the 1840s and 1850s; John Calhoun, for instance, held that there were necessary contractions of liberty for those "communities" with "moral deficiencies," "so sunk in ignorance and vice as to be incapable of forming a conception of liberty."