Escaping Hobbes: liberty and security for our democratic (not anti-terrorist) age

Liberty Security Human Rights Democracy

There are few words more dangerously confusing in their meaning than ‘liberty’ and ‘security’. The first has a range which takes it across a spectrum from the essence of human freedom at one end to a far narrower statement about the need for unrestrained movement at the other. Liberty is sometimes thought of as concerned with the individual qua individual and, on other occasions, with the individual within society: at one moment the word seems to be about the need to be left alone by all authority, while at the next, it positively suggests active participation in the government of the state. No one seems quite sure whether ‘liberty’ is – in any of its incarnations – the same as ‘civil liberties’, and even if it is, there are, as Jeremy Waldron has pointed out, at least four separate meanings to the latter term.