Give Me Liberty…or Death

The immortal words of Patrick Henry, "Give me liberty or give me death," have formed the bedrock of American political thought since the founding of our nation. During that time, however, political philosophers have offered numerous variations of the meaning of “liberty,” and two of those variations — positive liberty and negative liberty — have figured prominently in our modern political debate. In order to better understand the meaning of liberty, we will read and discuss two foundational contributions to the understanding of liberty: John Stuart Mill’s 1839 classic On Liberty (Penguin Classics, 2007) and Isaiah Berlin’s 1958 essay Two Concepts of Liberty (available online in PDF). Our investigation will include accompanying readings of the Bill of Rights, FDR's Four Freedoms (1940), Second Bill of Rights (1944), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).