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Not long after the historian, Seeley, had defined ‘perfect liberty’ as ‘the absence of all government’, Oscar Wilde wrote that a man can be totally free even in that granite embodiment of governmental constraint, prison. Ten years after Mill's famous defence of civil freedoms, On Liberty, Richard Wagner declaimed:
I'll put up with everything—police, soldiers, muzzling of the press, limits on parliament… Freedom of the spiriti is the only thing for men to be proud of and which raises them above animals.
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References
1 Seeley's comment is quoted by Bernard Bosanquet on p. 119 of his The Philosophical Theory of the State (Macmillan, 1958)Google Scholar; Wilde, 's remark is from his essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, included in De Profundis and Other Writings (Penguin, 1979), 29Google Scholar; and Wagner, 's outburst is recorded by his wife, Cosima, in her Diaries (Oxford University Press, 1979).Google ScholarPubMed
2 Two Concepts of Libert (Oxford University Press, 1958).Google Scholar
3 See, for example, his Genesis and Structure of Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960).Google Scholar
4 Quoted by Boswell in Ch. 26 of his Life of Samuel Johnson.
5 ‘Freedom as Self-mastery’, in Freedom, Dewey, and Gould, (eds) (U.S.A.: Macmillan, 1970).Google Scholar
6 London: Penguin, 1968, 69, 188.
7 Quoted in Biedermann, W., Goethes Gespräche, Vol. 3.Google Scholar
8 Op. cit., 18.
9 See Taylor, Charles, ‘What's Wrong with Negative Liberty?’, in The Idea of Freedom, Ryan, A. (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar, for an elaboration of this point. The title of his essay reveals the use to which he puts the point.
10 Op. cit., 44.
11 Griechische Kultur (Berlin: Safari, 1958), Pt. 4, Ch. 15.Google Scholar
12 Quoted in Berlin, , op. cit., 20.Google Scholar
13 Quoted in Berlin, , Russian Thinkers (London: Pelican, 1968), 88.Google Scholar
14 See Stern, J. P., The Führer and his People, (Glasgow: Fontana, 1975).Google Scholar
15 Actually, a distinction is needed here between (i) a word's having a metaphorical sense in the language, and (ii) someone's using a word metaphorically. I may use ‘pencil-sharpener’ non-literally, e.g. to refer to an avant-garde sculpture, but (as far as I know) the expression has no metaphorical sense in English. It is only where (i) obtains that it will be true both that someone using ‘W’ metaphorically is talking about W (in a metaphorical sense) and that ‘“W” refers to W’ remains a semantic truism when ‘W’ is occurring metaphorically. When I use ‘pencil-sharpener’ metaphorically, I am not talking about pencilsharpeners—even in a metaphorical sense, since there isn't one.
16 Op. cit.
17 Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke, Vol. 4, Schlechta, K. (ed.) (Berlin: Ullstein, 1977), 414Google Scholar. ‘“Equality of souls before God”. In this is the prototype of all theories of equal rights… Small wonder that men end up taking it seriously, taking it practically—that is, politically, democratically, socialistically…’.
18 Götzen-Dämmerung, Werke, Vol. 3, op. cit., 471.Google Scholar
19 See O'Hear, A., ‘Guilt and Shame’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 77, 1976Google Scholar, for an interesting discussion of two notions the contrast between which has much to do, in my terminology, with the different modes of assessment— ‘factocentric’ and ‘homocentric’ respectively—in which they have central significance.