ABSTRACT
'Lyberte or freedome is a moche swete thynge.' Freedom is an idea, like justice or education, that is used to defend and to embellish social policies and institutions of almost all persuasions. Freedom is one of the most important words in our language, not so much because it helps resolve disputes or solve intricate dilemmas, but because to consider it and its diversity of meanings is inevitably to learn something more about civilized human life and values. The word is important because it represents an idea that we cannot do without, and because it has survived the persistence of philosophers and poets and politicians to reduce it to a single operational definition. Some would argue that this characteristic ambiguity of the word is evidence that its worth in terms of human knowledge has been overestimated, and that it may even be an impediment to 'philosophically sound' cultural advancement, that is to say, meaningless. To conclude of freedom, on the grounds that its 'real meaning' eludes analysis, that the word must be meaningless, leads one to the same conclusion about the Tao, the Pentateuch, most of Plato, Shakespeare, Marx, and Freud, most music (excluding, perhaps, military marches and the mnemonic alphabet songs of childhood), and the Constitution of the USA, for example.
