ABSTRACT
The concept of freedom is a fundamental part of the vocabulary of politics but it is one of the most difficult to define. Athenian democracy, for example, opposed the liberation of slaves and excluded women and children. Under this form of government, even within the free cities, only men were considered citizens capable of using laws to govern themselves. If freedom defined the 19th century, the 20th would be about liberation. The language of freedom as well as its philosophical, political and legal antecedents is closely tied to the revolutionary rhetoric in Latin America as well as civil metropolitan movements and wars of liberation in Africa and Asia. In the United States, the process during the Civil War which abolished slavery first and then issued the Emancipation Proclamation – two bastions of civil and political freedom – is tied directly to the struggle for civil rights which came much later.
