Lecture
The concept of individual freedom in its legal aspect arose in the ancient city-states of Greece and Rome in the fifth to sixth centuries BC, in connection with the philosophical theories of Plato, Aristotle and Pericles. Many political aspects of freedom are linked to ancient citizenship: personal freedom, an equal right to decide matters of state and to take part in the administration of justice, freedom of speech, and so on. At that time, however, the ideas of freedom did not gain wide currency throughout the world, since they contradicted the very foundations of the slave-owning order.
In the philosophical and religious tradition of the Middle Ages, freedom is an inalienable characteristic of God, the capacity to create the world «out of nothing», guided by good will.
Amid the fierce struggle between the estates and royal power, and between the enserfed and their enslavers, society increasingly demanded that arbitrary rule be curbed at every level, from the level of the state as a whole down to the local level. The palm of primacy in the matter of giving legal form to human freedom in all its manifestations rightfully belongs to England, which is traditionally regarded as the birthplace of modern constitutionalism.
The clearest evidence of the «legal codification» of libertarian ideas was the adoption in 1215 of the Great Charter of Liberties («Magna Carta»), which became the cornerstone of English freedom.
In the 14th to 16th centuries, the wave of revolutionary changes in the sphere of human rights and freedoms subsided somewhat, which was to a considerable extent due to geopolitical transformations in Europe; at that time the attention of both the leading representatives of political and legal thought and broad sections of the public was focused more on questions of sovereignty and the institutional and politico-territorial organization of state power than on the legal position of the individual person.
By the 17th century, however, the situation had changed radically. The transition from patrimonial to national statehood objectively brought to the fore the problem of the individual person as the maker of politico-legal history, as an active participant in the transformation of the state.
In examining the evolution of politico-legal views on human freedom and their consolidation in constitutional acts, it must be acknowledged that priority in this sphere undoubtedly belongs to the European countries.
The United States of America also made a notable contribution to the development of legislation on human freedoms and rights.
The modern understanding of human freedom took shape by an evolutionary path. From this point of view, world history can be divided into three major stages:
1) from ancient times to the Renaissance – the formation of the socio-political and socio-economic preconditions of individual freedom;
2) from the Renaissance to the time of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions – the formation of the ideological foundations of individual freedom;
3) from the time of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions to the present – the formation of the politico-legal foundations of individual freedom.
Freedom — is an idea reflecting such a relation of the subject to his own acts in which he is their determining cause and they are not directly conditioned by natural, social, interpersonal-communicative, individual-internal or individual-generic factors.
In ethics, freedom is connected with the presence of a person's free will. Free will imposes responsibility on a person and credits him with his words and deeds.
In law, freedom — is the possibility of certain conduct on the part of a person, established in the constitution or another legislative act (for example, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and so on).
The category of freedom is close to the concept of a right in the subjective sense, but the latter presupposes the existence of a legal mechanism for its realization and, usually, a corresponding duty of the state or another subject to perform some action.
By contrast, legal freedom has no clearly defined mechanism of realization; what corresponds to it is a duty to refrain from performing any actions that would infringe this freedom. Thus, in the «Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen» (1789, France), human freedom is interpreted as the possibility «to do anything that does not harm another: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of every man has no limits except those that assure to the other members of society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can be determined only by law».
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