Post Date: November 22, 2006

Professor Charles Fried might never have written his latest book if he hadn’t been asked to speak to a group of Harvard Law Students in 2003 about a book that influenced him deeply.

Fried chose to talk to the students about John Stuart Mill’s "On Liberty." He still found Mill's rhetoric and conclusions "terrific," but was disappointed to discover "it’s rather thin on the arguments" justifying liberty as supreme among competing values in a democratic society, he said recently.

So when Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. asked him to write a volume for the "Issues of Our Times" series, Fried knew immediately what topic he would address.

The result, "Modern Liberty," published by W.W. Norton & Company in November, is an impassioned yet accessible defense of liberty, which Fried came to understand as freedom "to do as we choose, or at least to be free from restraints imposed by others on what we do."

"It is a relation in which every person refrains from interfering with the self-determination of others," Fried writes.

Threats to liberty had been on his mind long before he began his career as a law professor, top Justice Department official and justice on Massachusetts' Supreme Judicial Court.

In his book, Fried describes how his family was "chased from Prague--the most prosperous, most commercial, most comfortable, bourgeois and civilized of cities--by a homicidal maniac," Adolf Hitler, and settled in the United States with little more than "some carpets, dishes and my father’s talents."

"He recalls thinking later about liberty while watching his students donning "Mao T-shirts and my colleagues forming Marxist reading groups," an experience he describes as part of "one long Nazi march through the Skokie of my mind."

But in his book, Fried purposely avoids focusing on historical threats to liberty like fascism and Communism. Instead, he offers an assessment of liberty in the current age, in answer to the question: where do the biggest threats to liberty come from today? His answer is that the most relevant and immediate threats to liberty are the subtler tyrannies that would be imposed by people from both the left and the right in the name of other, competing values--even benign ones like "equality," "community," or "virtue."

Equality and liberty are often thought to go hand in hand in a democracy, and yet, he points out, today they are often at odds. (He calls equality "liberty’s closest competitor and nearest relative.") The enforcement of equality--which is increasingly achieved through legislation and regulation--often comes at the price of liberty. Giving some people more equality can necessarily mean taking away some liberties from the rest of us. When the two values are at odds, he believes, equality shouldn’t trump liberty. Rather, "what is owed each of us is equal liberty."

Instead of exploring familiar issues like abortion or wiretapping, he looks at less obvious debates that nonetheless have real impact on people’s daily choices. For example, should Wal-Mart be prevented from opening a store in a Vermont community? Looking even further north, he examines the impact of Quebec's French language charter, which requires citizens to subordinate other languages. He also focuses on Quebec's egalitarian health care system.

Fried's conclusions don't fit neatly into any single political box--including libertarianism. He comes out against many forms of regulating sex, but in favor of the redistribution of wealth. "You can’t have the rule of law without mutual respect and you can’t have that if there are vast disparities of wealth and opportunity," he says. "That’s not a libertarian position."

At the heart of liberty, Fried concludes, is freedom of the mind.

"Without freedom of the mind, there is no choice, and liberty is about choice," Fried says. "To choose, you’ve got to decide what you're going to choose. And if you're not free to determine what you're going to choose, you can be as physically free as you want but you're still subject to manipulation."

Please click here for a related story and to view a webcast of the "Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government" panel discussion. Real Player required.