ABSTRACT
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Americans commonly distinguished "liberty" from its wilder twin, "license." Whereas license suggested an unlimited ability to act as one pleased, for good or ill, liberty suggested the ability to act as one pleased only within the boundaries of propriety or moral law. The classical distinction between liberty and license emerges from both of the major intellectual sources of Western culture: Greek philosophy and biblical monotheism. For writers of the liberal-republican tradition, liberty was the opposite of "slavery" rather than of restraint per se; freedom meant an absence of external domination and not simply the lack of all external impediments. Personal liberty depended upon "political liberty," the proper arrangement of political institutions to avoid arbitrary domination, including equal representation, separation of powers, and guarantees of due process. Some modern theorists of liberalism, such as Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, have argued for a return to the liberal-republican view of the contrast between liberty and license.
