Its value, preconditions, and enemies
“I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the times in which we live I am ready to worship it,” wrote France’s greatest 19th century historian, Alexis de Tocqueville, in 1856. The danger facing us now, is that too few people share this sentiment, yet understanding the value and preconditions of freedom, and recognising its enemies, is arguably more vital than ever.
According to the latest detailed annual survey (2026) of global freedom produced in New York by Freedom House, only 21% of the world’s population live in ‘free countries’ and global freedom has declined for the 20th consecutive year. Add to these grim statistics the huge potential threat to personal privacy and liberty posed by current advances in surveillance technology, and the desire of governments to use them, and no room for complacency should remain in anyone’s mind about the fragility of the world’s few genuinely free societies.
Recognising this truth is all the more important since this fragility is cultural as well as technological given the emergence in recent years, in all the western democracies, of a mindset, rooted in identity politics, which takes offence at criticisms and robust expressions of unconventional opinions, and seeks, with increasing success, to use the coercive power of the State to outlaw them. The very fact that it should have been thought necessary in Britain to create an organisation like the Free Speech Union in 2020, speaks volumes about the extent to which our traditional liberties are no longer appreciated or valued by significant sections of public (especially elite) opinion.
Why, then, should we care about freedom and worry about its potential demise? What is the value, function and purpose of liberty?
That citizens of the ‘Free World’ should now need to re-engage with such great traditional questions is both tragic and shameful, but in doing so we can at least rediscover what it is that gives life to any civilisation worthy of the name, and what it is that is worth fighting for.
Rediscovering the traditional arguments for liberty
The first great foundational truth underpinning the defence of freedom, is the recognition that human beings are not biological robots or interchangeable units with no significant role or purpose outside the collective, but unique individuals gifted with reason, conscience and free will. As such, they are ends in themselves with ‘natural rights’ to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” – to quote that famous phrase from the 1776 American Declaration of Independence. Furthermore, if the existence of God and the Divine inspiration of the Bible is acknowledged, these foundational premises are (and were, historically) massively reinforced by the assertion that individuals are made in the image of their Creator, and therefore the objects of His love.
From these great foundational truths flows the obvious and logical conclusion that human beings do not belong to the State, and that all totalitarian ideologies and systems, political or religious, are therefore inherently immoral and evil.
The second great argument for liberty, similarly rooted in the fundamental nature of human beings, is based on the indisputable fact that the individual mind is the source of all creativity and progress, a theme developed at length, and with passionate eloquence, in American writer, Ayn Rand’s powerful philosophical novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). This being the case, it also logically follows that no unnecessary hindrance, obstacle, or prohibition, should restrict the freedom of individuals in the use of their gifts, talents, faculties, and resources.
Two other powerful and related arguments buttress the moral case for liberty, namely, the role of freedom in promoting the moral growth of human beings and the pursuit of truth.
Unless we are free to choose between good and evil, right and wrong, we cannot be held responsible for our actions and we cannot learn from our mistakes and grow into better people. It is also true, from a theological point of view, that we cannot enter into a love-relationship with our Creator if our obedience and worship is coerced. That is why Jews and Christians believe God has given us free will, and with it, the ability to think and discover truth. We are not, and were never intended to be, passive and unquestioning subjects of Church or State.
If freedom of conscience is essential to moral and spiritual growth, it is an equally essential requirement for the pursuit of knowledge and truth, as Milton argued in defence of the freedom of the press in the 17th century, and John Stuart Mill argued in his famous essay On Liberty in 1859. Unless we are free to compare and discuss ideas, and to pursue different avenues of inquiry, we cannot grow in our understanding of life, society, and the world in which we live. This is especially important in religion, politics, and science. The more controversial the issue, the more wide-ranging its implications, the more we need to be free to listen to different points of view and form our own opinions. That is why it is essential that political correctness, and the ‘cancel culture’ it has bred, should not be allowed to reduce the ideological space within which it is permitted to debate homosexuality, Islam, the theory of evolution, or any other contemporary ideological ‘hot potato’.
The moral and economic case for private property and free enterprise
It is especially important, at this juncture, to realise that the great traditional arguments for ‘civil liberty’ embrace the economic as much as the political sphere, a truth not only denied by the collectivist Left, but equally unrecognised by large sections of the so-called ‘educated’ middle classes, all too many of whom now depend for their livelihood on jobs in the State sector, and therefore misjudge or distrust the motives and aspirations of those who own and run private businesses, or derive their income from the private ownership of land and other assets. Hence the phenomenon of many supposedly ‘apolitical’ voters unconsciously imbued with the socialist prejudice that a free market economy is an amoral jungle whose participants are chiefly motivated by greed rather than any concern for the common good.
Consequently, the first point that needs to be made to set the record straight, is that individuals have a moral right to the product of their labour, especially if that labour has brought into being resources or benefits which did not previously exist. This is particularly true of successful entrepreneurs and innovators who not only create new jobs and businesses, but often end up creating entire new industries.
Secondly, there is nothing wrong with the pursuit of self-interest and the profit motive since we have every right to seek our own material well-being and that of our families. To deny this is equivalent to saying that we should only value the lives and happiness of others, never our own, which is obviously perverse. Furthermore, if it is morally legitimate for trade unionists to campaign for higher wages, it is equally legitimate for private businesses and investors to earn their livelihood by seeking the best return they can on their expenditure of effort and capital. Initiative and enterprise deserve to be rewarded, not punished, particularly given the fact that in a genuinely free market economy, private businesses and the self-employed can only survive and prosper by satisfying consumers who can take their custom elsewhere. Public sector unions, by contrast, employed by State monopolies (especially in education and health-care), and financed by captive taxpayers, do not face similar constraints.
Finally, it needs to be pointed out again and again that ‘self-interest’ is not synonymous with selfishness, which implies the exclusive pursuit of one’s own interests at the expense of others. It is precisely because life is valuable that we should seek both our own good (without false guilt), and that of other people, a truth perfectly expressed by the New Testament injunction to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. That is why no-one should think it odd that generations of rich and successful entrepreneurs in Britain, the USA, and elsewhere, have been prominent philanthropists, financing a host of charitable projects and causes in housing, medicine, art, education, scientific research, and many other fields.
The moral and economic case for private property and free enterprise is not only undiminished by the false and shallow arguments of its socialist critics; it also derives its strength from the self-evident truth that private property rights and freedom of choice of occupation and employment are essential conditions of productive achievement. Without them, personal thrift, creativity and effort are stillborn, and general poverty results, as has been demonstrated in every age and culture, particularly in 20th century socialist countries. What is more, the moral case for free market capitalism includes the insight, typically overlooked by snobbish intellectuals, that it is precisely the economic dimension of freedom – the opportunity to set up and run one’s own small business, be it a pub, or a fish and chip shop, or one’s services as a self-employed plumber or electrician – that is most valued by ‘ordinary’ people from humble backgrounds, and gives them purpose, independence, and dignity.
To these considerations must be added the most powerful argument for a competitive free enterprise economy: that it is the indispensable foundation of liberal democracy since the existence of private property and economic freedom diffuses power throughout society rather than concentrating it in the hands of the State. A multitude of independent businesses, organisations, institutions, and websites, provide the necessary resources and platforms for the financing of opposition parties and political campaigns. Without them, no effective challenge can be mounted against overmighty government, as was pointed out long ago by John Stuart Mill in his great landmark essay On Liberty. To quote the famous relevant passage:
“ If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint-stock companies, the universities, and the public charities, were all of them branches of the government…if the employees of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government for every rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free otherwise than in name.”
Underlying this classic and eloquent warning of the threat to democracy of economic collectivism, is perhaps the most vital insight of all, as rooted in the realities of human nature as all the other arguments for a free society. Liberty, and the habits and institutions supporting it, not only gives us the ‘space’ we need for personal growth and fulfilment; it also offers some protection against evil by limiting the extent to which we can harm each other.
Some reflections about the moral and cultural preconditions of freedom
The process of rediscovering and restating the case for liberty would not be complete without some more in-depth consideration of the moral and philosophical presuppositions underlying it. This is all the more important given that most people lucky enough to dwell in long established free societies take their freedoms for granted, paying little heed to their philosophical and historical origins. As a result, they fail to see the dangers and enemies that have confronted liberty throughout the modern era and continue to threaten it today.
Reference has already been briefly made to the theological dimension of the debate about freedom – to the fact that historically, the value attached to individuals and their rights and liberties was rooted in a set of beliefs about their relationship to God and its implications. Most of the seminal thinkers and statesmen of the old Western classical liberal tradition, for example, were religious believers (mainly Christians), from Aquinas and John of Salisbury in the Middle Ages, to Milton, Sidney, and Locke in the 17th century, and Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and the authors of the American Constitution in the 18th century. And that is to name just a few of them. Consequently, we need to take a closer look at some of these implications.
The first and most important one was (and is) the belief in objective truth and moral values. We cannot recognise the evil of tyranny and be motivated to condemn and resist the abuse of power, unless we first acknowledge that the preciousness of human life and liberty, and the wickedness of seeking its enslavement and destruction, are self-evident moral axioms as rational and objective as the rules of logic and mathematics. To fail to ‘see’ the wrongness of cruelty, injustice, and oppression, for example, is to suffer from the moral equivalent of colour-blindness.
The second presupposition is that individuals have free will and must therefore be held accountable for their words and actions – a statement of fact and principle as vital in politics as it is in criminal trials.
Finally, and not least important, was (and is) the Biblical view of human nature: the belief shared by Jews and Christians alike that it is ‘fallen’, and therefore radically imperfect and corruptible, which is why institutional limits, checks and balances of all kinds, need to be placed around the power of government to limit its potential capacity to oppress its citizens. And if anyone doubts the centrality of this core belief to the history of freedom, they should read the debates surrounding the creation of the American Constitution, in which it played a prominent role.
Remove these philosophical and theological foundation stones, and the temple of liberty collapses in ruins, which raises a key and very controversial question: the link between God and freedom, and conversely, between atheism and tyranny.
Whilst it is obviously true that disbelief in God does not preclude recognition of the objective reality and character of the moral axioms underlying the arguments for liberty, it represents a philosophical blind spot – a failure to perceive their theistic and religious implications.
Our conviction, for instance, that it is wrong to imprison peaceful political dissidents, or murder their families, or sexually abuse children, are statements of value which transcend time, place, and culture. Their truthfulness remains an eternal reality regardless of who we are, where we come from, or whether we live or die. Even if the Universe were to cease to exist tomorrow, they would still remain eternally true. Does this transcendent quality not suggest some connection with a non-physical Reality ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ the world revealed to our senses, and investigated by the natural sciences? And since the ‘Moral Law’ written on our hearts (if we are not psychopaths) is grasped and possessed by our minds, is it not reasonable to conclude that it is somehow rooted in, and an expression of, a supreme and eternal Divine Intelligence?
That, at any rate, lies at the core of the moral argument for the existence of God. The ‘Good’ is not just an eternal universal category, ‘hanging in the air’ without support, so to speak, but an expression of God’s nature and character. Or to put it another way, God is not just our Creator, but also Goodness and Reason and Beauty personified – the eternal and Divine source of all being, of our very ability to think, choose, and act, and of everything that is most precious in life and human existence.
From these great foundational truths (if they are acknowledged), flows a momentous conclusion about human accountability. We are responsible to God for the use we make of our gifts, talents, and resources, and above all, for the way in which we treat other people. If, having been given free will, we turn to evil, becoming predators seeking power and dominion over the lives of others, we will face God’s judgement in Eternity if we do not repent.
Not only, then, is it possible to argue that the case for liberty has always had a necessary religious dimension, as most of our classical liberal ancestors thought; but the actual existence and maintenance of free societies also benefited in the past from the belief of so many of their citizens in the reality of this Divine sanction. Their allegiance to the moral norms and values upholding the laws and institutions defending freedom was strengthened by the conviction that there would be a price to be paid for violating them.
The reasons atheism weakens the foundations of free societies
The problem with atheism, by contrast, is that it is a self-refuting and incoherent world view which undermines the case for liberty, and weakens the foundations of free societies, because it gives human beings no value. It does so because it discredits all reasoning, implicitly denies the reality of free will, undermines human responsibility, and deprives all moral norms and judgements of any objective basis in reality.
Living, as we have done for decades, in secularised post-Christian societies, such statements may seem perverse to many people, but close examination will reveal that they are fully justified.
We do not accept the truthfulness of any assertion or belief if it can be shown to be entirely determined by non-rational causes, yet this is effectively what atheism invites us to do, for if atheism is true, our minds are wholly dependent on our brains (we have no souls) and our brains are accidental by-products of the physical universe.This means that all our thoughts, beliefs, and choices, are the end result of a long chain of non-rational causes. How then can we have free will or attach any validity or importance to our reasoning processes, including the arguments supporting atheism? If we are bound to think or behave the way we do because of our internal biochemistry, how can we be free agents or know that we are in possession of objective truths about science, ethics, or politics? We wouldn’t regard the print-out from an un-programmed computer as anything but meaningless gibberish, so how can we, on atheist premises, attach any meaning or significance to the intellectual output of accidental by-products of a random, undersigned, and purposeless cosmos? And if, on these atheist premises, our thoughts have no more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees, how can any lasting value be attached to human life and liberty? That, unfortunately, is where the inherent logic of atheism leaves us, regardless of the good intentions and goals of particular unbelievers.
Happily, of course, we know that we do have free will and the capacity to think, choose, and discover truth, because the argument that we don’t, like all forms of philosophical scepticism, is self-refuting. We cannot ‘know’ that we know nothing; similarly, we cannot ‘know’ that we don’t have free will, since that claim is, on sceptical premises, itself ‘determined’ regardless of whether it’s true or not. The point being made here, however, is that whilst Christians and other religious believers can point to God as the ultimate creative source of human consciousness and moral awareness, atheists can offer no credible explanation for this phenomenon.
Disbelief in God and in the objective reality and universality of the ‘Moral Law’ described by C.S.Lewis in his great classic, The Abolition of Man, has had terrible consequences for liberty over the past century and a half.
In the first place, it has, in the western democracies, reduced people’s awareness of the difference between right and wrong, and the reality of evil, and in so doing, undermined their inner freedom by weakening their incentive and ability to resist their worst impulses and control their desires and appetites. It has also undermined the concept of ‘duty’ and accountability, and with it, the sense of moral obligation within marriage and the family. The result, not surprisingly, is what we see all around us today: the selfish pursuit of sexual pleasure and personal gratification at the expense of others, especially children; the break up of the traditional heterosexual family; and the growth of delinquency, mental illness, drug addiction, sexually transmitted disease, and crime.
What is more, this process of cultural decay and social fragmentation has not only weakened the bonds of civil society; it has also created a void subsequently filled by a huge expansion of the role and reach of the State, as more and more people, unable to cope, have looked to the power of government to solve their problems and relieve them of their traditional duties to provide for themselves and the care of their dependants.
The growth of atheism has removed a theological barrier to tyranny
Worst of all, however, the growth of atheism and agnosticism has facilitated the spread of tyranny by removing the theological and psychological barrier represented by that previously mentioned Biblical perspective on human nature. Instead of the humble acknowledgment that power corrupts, imposing objective limits on the ability of imperfect human beings to create perfect societies, the way opened up over a century and a half ago for the acceptance of secular utopian ideologies and belief systems promising Heaven on Earth.
Winwood Reade, for example, whose famous book, The Martyrdom of Man (1872) was a Victorian best-seller and Bible for his secular contemporaries, proclaimed that “Supernatural Christianity is false. God-worship is idolatry” and put his faith instead in science, envisaging a glorious future in which Man would not only conquer Nature, but also subdue the evils within him. He would abolish idleness and stupidity, and establish world government. “Finally men will master the forces of nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds. Man will then be perfect; he will then be a creator; he will then be what the vulgar worship as a god” – an insane vision anticipating by 50 years Bernard Shaw’s similar prophecy at the end of Back to Methuselah.
All of which brings us to the subject of socialism, the totalitarian ideology which, promising its own particular vision of Heaven on Earth, has instead been the curse of modern times, responsible for the worst evils of the 20th century, the greatest loss of human life in history, and continues to cast its malignant shadow over all our futures. And to avoid misunderstanding at this stage of the argument, let us first be clear what we mean by ‘socialism’ given that many sincere but muddleheaded supporters of democracy and human rights naively embrace the socialist label as a badge of virtue and humanity, little realising its full implications.
Historically, socialism, communism, and Marxism have been interchangeable terms describing the same basic social model set out most succinctly in Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848): namely, an economic system based on the abolition of private property and the collectivisation of agriculture, land, industry, and banking – i.e. of those very “means of production, distribution and exchange” to whose nationalisation the British Labour Party was once traditionally committed by that notorious Clause IV of its constitution, originally inscribed on every Party membership card. Or to quote Lenin’s even more concise definition in his book, State and Revolution (1917), socialism means that “ The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory with equality of work and equality of pay.”
And here we come to the key fact the centrality of which must never be lost sight of. Wherever in the world this collectivist system has been established in all its fullness, oppression, mass murder and poverty have invariably followed in its wake, and for precisely the reasons set out long ago by John Stuart Mill in that famous passage from his 1859 essay On Liberty, quoted earlier, and subsequently restated and explored at much greater length, and in forensic detail, by F.A.Hayek in his great 1944 landmark study, The Road to Serfdom.
Why socialism is an inherently destructive totalitarian ideology
Socialism’s destruction of liberty and democracy, however, has not just been the predictable result of its concentration of all power and resources in the hands of the State; it has also been the logical outcome of its fanatical pursuit of ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’ as the supreme moral goal of all government activity and legislation.
Understanding why this is the case is especially important given that so many leftist politicians and activists constantly complain about ‘inequality’ in society, and trumpet their commitment to eliminating it, claiming that this objective, together with the defence and advancement of ‘workers rights’, is what they mean by ‘progressive politics’ in general, and ‘socialism’ in particular.
The problem, though, with this central objective is that it represents, however unintentionally, a totalitarian agenda since its full and complete implementation cannot be achieved without a drastic increase in the power of the State over its citizens. Even if ‘equality of outcomes’ is rejected as a goal of government policy, on the grounds that it is unfair and economically suicidal to prevent unequally talented and productive individuals from reaping differential rewards in life, the alternative goal of ‘equality of opportunity’ – which everyone in modern politics claims to want to achieve – necessarily entails the imposition of equality of outcomes.
And the reason for this ought to be obvious, because even if all the participants in the ‘race of life’ begin their journeys on a level playing field, benefiting from equally good parenting, health care, living standards, and education, innate differences of talent and qualities of character, not to mention luck, will quickly produce differences of outcomes, meaning that their children – the next generation – will not enjoy equality of opportunity unless the coercive power of government levels the playing field again.
Whether this is done through abolishing all rights of inheritance, or through heavy progressive taxation (key demands of the 1848 Communist Manifesto), or by any other means, it would inevitably entail, in every generation, the compulsory redistribution of property and wealth from successful and enterprising individuals to those less talented, fortunate, and hard-working than themselves. However, even this degree of continuous State licenced highway robbery would not, by itself, be sufficient to achieve a constantly and truly re-levelled playing field. To bring that about requires far more drastic action: the abolition of the traditional nuclear family, and the collectivisation of all child-care and education – also part of the original socialist agenda set out in the Communist Manifesto and other later writings of Marx and Engels.
No wonder libertarian economist, Murray Rothbard, concluded in his classic 1974 essay, Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature : “when the implications of such a world. are fully spelled out, we recognise that such a world and such attempts are profoundly anti-human; being anti-human in the deepest sense, the egalitarian goal is, therefore, evil and any attempts in the direction of such a goal must be considered as evil as well.”
The communist holocaust: 94 million – 140 million dead since 1917
The actual record of communist regimes, of full blooded socialism in power, has of course demonstrated the truthfulness of Rothbard’s verdict and vindicated the many prophetic warnings about the destructive totalitarian character of socialism sounded during the 19th and early 20th centuries – a subject examined in detail in other papers of mine on the Cobden Centre website. But one suspects that even the fiercest of those early critics did not foresee just how high would be the price paid in human lives and happiness by the subsequent victories and spread of revolutionary socialism to nearly every corner of our world.
According to the best estimates, for example, the total number of lives lost in internal repression under communist regimes ranges from an absolute minimum of just over 94 million to a possible maximum of 140 million since 1917 – carnage on a scale that completely dwarfs the total numbers, military and civilian, killed on all sides in the First and Second World Wars.
Horrifying it may be, but the bloody and destructive impact of totalitarian socialism on our planet ought not to surprise us for one further and little understood reason: its connection with the atheist mindset of its chief architects and practitioners.
Disbelieving in God, they totally rejected the idea that there is an eternal and Divinely sanctioned Moral Law above the Socialist Revolution and State, limiting its authority, and holding them to account for its violation.
To quote Engels: “We…reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatever as eternal, ultimate and forever immutable moral law…”
Lenin shared the same view, declaring: “We do not believe in an eternal morality.”
Not surprisingly, the evil fruit of his unbelieving atheist outlook was the following definition of the kind of authority he claimed for the revolutionary socialist State: “The scientific concept, dictatorship, means neither more nor less than unlimited power, resting directly on force, not limited by anything, not restricted by any laws or any absolute rules. Nothing else but that.
The connections between atheism, secular utopianism, and tyranny
Which, odd though it may seem to some, brings us back to the logical and psychological connection between atheism, secular utopianism, and tyranny: that the end always justifies the means if it is lofty and important enough.
If, then, you believe, as revolutionary socialists have done, in the possibility of creating a perfect and harmonious society through the elimination of all differences of race, class, nationality, and ability, crushing all opposition to this agenda become an imperative moral duty, not a crime.
Trotsky, for instance, predicted in 1924, in his book, Literature and Revolution, that under socialism “[Man] will become incomparably stronger, wiser, finer. His body more harmonious, his movements more rhythmical, his voice more musical…the human average will rise to the level of an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx” – absurdly romantic sentiments you might normally dismiss as the ravings of an ivory tower intellectual, yet this same man, only a few years previously, and in pursuit of this vision, led the Red Army to victory in the Russian civil war provoked by the communist revolution and seizure of power of October 1917, and together with Lenin and others, created the totalitarian apparatus of repression taken over by Stalin and used to such terrible effect until his death in 1953.
Today, in 2026, the extravagant hopes and illusions that once fuelled support for the socialist project in previous generations may have faded, but the threat to freedom that project represents remains potent and ubiquitous. Not only do the historically most ruthless communist dictatorships remain in control of China and North Korea, both highly militarised anti-Western nuclear powers; but the phenomenon of omnipotent governments presiding over State controlled economies is not confined to overtly socialist countries. It also includes anti-Western Islamic dictatorships like Iran and many African despotisms.
In our own liberal democracies, the resistance of non- socialist parties and institutions, and the hesitations and scruples of many socialist politicians, have long prevented the full implementation of the totalitarian socialist agenda, but the rising tide of taxation, regulation, and State welfare has moved us, and continues to move us, in that direction. It’s only because we in Britain have become so used to this gradual process, and to our dependence on monopolistic State controlled education and health care, that we fail to see and complain about the degree to which all this represents a significant loss of personal liberty and economic freedom.
If, in conclusion, ‘the price of liberty’ remains ‘eternal vigilance,’ we need to be aware of possibly the greatest challenge of all: the need to resist the whole current movement towards world government, and to confront the fear-mongering, especially about environmental issues, fuelling it.
Let us recall instead the eloquent plea with which Hayek concluded The Road to Serfdom : “The guiding principle, that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy, remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth century.”
That should be our guiding star.
Philip Vander Elst, copyright, June 2026
