Liberty and Liberalism

Liberty and Liberalism
Writings on liberty, a tenet associated with liberalism, were quite popular during the eighteenth century, for the writings by John Wise. His account of liberty and how it violates the law of nature identifies the move from ideals being centred on nature to being centred on man and identifying equality as being a pertinent trait.
As everyman must be acknowledged equal to everyman, since all subjection and all command are equally banished on both sides; and considering all men thus at liberty, every man has a prerogative to judge of himself.(refer footnote १)
His effort in moving theory from the state of nature to the state of man as man moved towards the analysis of society associated with a community and having the individual as their main interest allowed for the justification of legitimacy, social justice, property rights, liberty and ultimately reasoning for war. This movement laid the foundations for the various political systems and governmental organizations represented in the contemporary international system. John Locke identified that for a person to have liberty they have to have freedom.

In contemporary terms, an analogy can be made between Rousseau’s identities that there is goodness in man even though actions sometimes do not represent this idea, and the requirement with regards to the rule of law within democratic societies where a suspect is innocent until proven guilty। The application of this rule of law within a State is associated with civil society, and man’s ability to be free to subscribe to civil society exercises his right to liberty, as he is able to make gains more in both civil and moral liberty than what is lost in natural liberty. If society does not allow man to subscribe to liberty, he has lost his right to equality as he is unable to exercise his will and is unable to exercise his rights to freedom which is not in accordance with the moral norms associated with an international liberal society.

footnote
1 John Wise cited by Saul K. Padover, Sources of Democracy: Voices of Freedom, Hope and Justice, New York, 1973, p.46