Liberty and germ theory
While seeking liberty, the Founders found freedom
I want to ask one of my favorite statues, Reclining Liberty, about this. Doesn’t liberty often come in opposing pairs?
Isaiah Berlin distinguishes between negative and positive liberty. (Negative liberty is individual freedom from coercion; positive liberty is self-mastery, often accompanied by an insistence that others follow suit.)1 Montesquieu distinguishes between philosophic and political liberty. (Philosophic liberty is the right to do as we please; political liberty is the right to participate in public affairs.)
Maybe Lady Liberty, while standing in New York Harbor or stretched out on a museum lawn, now champions both vertical and horizontal liberty.
Historian David Hackett Fischer presents another pair of opposing liberties. He distinguishes between what he simply calls “freedom” and “liberty,” terms most of us might normally use interchangeably.
According to Fischer, “the original meanings of freedom and liberty were not merely different but opposed. Liberty meant separation. Freedom implied connection.” One is liberated from bondage, but one is freed to a community.2
The etymological distinctions between the two words are worth examining.
“Liberty” comes from the Latin libertas and its adjective liber, which means “released from restraint.” The Greek word eleutheria carries a notion of liberty similar to the Latin liber: Eleutheria may be defined as “an independence by means of separation.”
But “freedom” is a cousin of the Norse fri, the German frei, and other Northern European variants. Their common root, the Indo-European priya or friya or riya, means “dear” or “beloved.” In fact, “freedom” has the same root as the word “friend.”3
The opposing etymology points to the history. Theologian Chaim Wirszubski points out that “ . . . the Romans conceived of libertas as an acquired civil right, not as an innate right of man.”4 Fischer says that, by contrast, “by the eleventh century, most men in Iceland were born free. This prior condition of freedom was a birthright that all freeman shared.”5
Paul seems to have developed this same Rome-versus-Iceland distinction in a conversation with a Roman. Paul was about to be flogged when he thought to assert his Roman citizenship. Then his conversation with his would-be torturer turned personal:
And the chief captain answered, With a great sum obtained I this freedom. And Paul said, But I was free born.6
This King James version of the interaction suggests Fischer’s distinction between earned liberty and innate freedom. But the KJV obscures what later English translations reveal: Paul and the official were comparing how each of them had obtained Roman citizenship.
But citizenship, at least in its earlier Greek form, puts the “friend” in “freedom.” Greek citizenship was all about the polis, the political community to which free people belonged. Grounded in political community, Fischer’s “freedom,” as opposed to his “liberty,” amounts to what we often call public freedom.
This clash of freedom and liberty, Fischer says, helps explain the different views on slavery that led to the American Civil War. The whites who settled the North generally had Germanic notions of freedom, the idea goes. They agreed with Jefferson—and Lincoln—that “all men are created equal.” But many of the whites who settled the South had Roman notions of liberty. They agreed with John C. Calhoun, dismissing “all men are created equal” as “dangerous error.” Instead, Calhoun said, liberty is earned: “. . . liberty is the noble and highest reward bestowed on mental and moral development.”7
How could Fischer’s opposing conceptions of freedom dominate in different regions—generally speaking, freedom in the North and liberty in the South? Different strata of English society—Puritans, Cavaliers, Quakers, and Scots-Irish—brought their notions of freedom, Fischer says, to different regions in waves between 1629 and 1775. The Quakers advocated for a liberty of conscience, and their form of liberty made slavery anathema to them.8 The Scots-Irish believed in “natural liberty,” a form of freedom that championed individualism and made government suspect.9 New England exercised “collective liberty,” which amounted to the public freedom exercised in their town meetings.10 But Virginians considered liberty “as a hegemonic condition of dominion over others and—equally important—dominion over oneself,” ideal for the perpetuation of slavery.11
The American slaveholder’s hypocritical conception of liberty is certainly beyond the pale of Fischer’s liberty from. Fischer makes this clear by beginning his discussion of the Cavaliers’ liberty with the famous question Dr. Samuel Johnson posed in 1775: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”12 Of course, slavery had been legal in Great Britain as late as 1772, suggesting that the American colonists had inherited from England its justifications for slavery as well as its practice of it.
These versions of American liberty and freedom, in Fischer’s account, seem practically genetic in their transmission. Fischer believes in “Albion’s Seed”—the name of his most famous book, which chronicles the influence of English folkways, including liberty and freedom, on America. Concepts of liberty and freedom amount to English seed sown by its colonists in America’s rich soil.
These transatlantic folkways create what literary essayist George Steiner describes as almost a genetic version of the past:
[It] is not the literal past that rules us . . . It is images of the past. These are often as highly structured and selective as myths. Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility.13
Steiner’s “genetic information” insight comports with a nineteenth-century historical concept called ”germ theory” or “germ thesis.” In this theory, free institutions came like germs from Germany to Britain and from Britain to America.
Fischer himself applies what he calls a “modified ‘germ thesis’” of how a place’s cultural origins can affect it. He combines germ thesis with elements of the two prominent theories that replaced it in the twentieth century: the Turner thesis that the American environment explained more than first settlers’ folkways, and the still-later “migration model” based on the effects of ethnic pluralism.14
But what about First Nations, who don’t count as “seed” or as environment? Why didn’t their folkways stick like those of Medieval England, which according to historian Lewis Mumford gave New England its direct democracy in the form of townships and town meetings?15
Historian Charles C. Mann disagrees with Mumford. Mann argues that the freedom and equality that animated the Algonquians in New England influenced the development of the region’s townships, pulling them away from John Winthrop’s hierarchical “city on a hill” governmental model. Mann also thinks that the southern Native American nations, many of whom willingly captured and returned whites’ runaway slaves and sometimes even owned slaves, were still under the cultural sway of Cahokia (ca. 800-1300 C.E.), the last of probably many First Nations experiments in imperialism. Cahokia existed in what is now Louisiana.16
Mann isn’t alone in associating what Fischer calls liberty and freedom with pre-contact indigenous life on Turtle Island. Historian Pekka Hämäläinen explains the freedom of Northeastern Nations as a reaction to Cahokia:
North American Indians had experimented with ranked societies and all-powerful spiritual leaders and had found them deficient and dangerous. They had opted for more horizontal, participatory, and egalitarian ways of being in the world . . .17
Hämäläinen’s lively histories of American First Nations focus on the nations’ power, based on their adaptability, covenanting, and diplomacy, as well as their practice of public freedom.18
Indigenous freedom, therefore, belies Fischer’s notion of America as merely freedom’s soil, lying fallow for centuries, waiting for European seed. Historians have argued persuasively that indigenous freedom influenced the Age of Enlightenment19 and, later, the creation of America’s balanced Constitution.20
But these arguments about causation, including Fischer’s, miss the bigger point: freedom isn’t just an idea that we can trace as intellectual history. Freedom is, at bottom, neither conception nor culture. Freedom doesn’t arrive only as cultural inheritance, which as the Greek historian Polybius first understood, freedom’s children tend to squander.21 Freedom is action and interaction.
A cause can be freedom’s causation. Using Fischer’s definitions, liberty from can engender freedom to. In Philadelphia from 1774 to 1781, Congress’s struggle for liberty from Great Britain engendered freedom to conduct the new nation’s business. Congress’s famous Declaration trumpets both independence from and interdependence with. It indicts King George, but it also records the signers’ mutual pledge of “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
Liberty may bring the horns and strings, but freedom must pick them up and practice together.
The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in my earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.
Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, 1st Farrar, Straus and Giroux ed, by Isaiah Berlin, ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).
David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideals, America, a Cultural History 3 (Oxford University Press, 2005), 5.
Fischer, 5.
Chaim Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome During the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge University Press, 1960), 3.
Fischer, 6.
Acts 22:25-28 KJV.
John C. Calhoun, “Speech on the Oregon Bill,” Teaching American History, Ashbrook Center, accessed June 2, 2026, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/speech-on-the-oregon-bill-3/.
David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, America 1 (Oxford university press, 1989), 595-603.
Fischer, 777-82. The backcountry Scots-Irish form of liberty resembles Berlin’s negative liberty.
Fischer, 199-200.
Fischer, 410-11.
Fischer, 410.
George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes towards the Redefinition of Culture, T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures 1970 (Yale University Press, 1971), 3.
Fischer, 4-6.
Mumford, The City in History, 328-35.
Mann, 1491, 385-92, 296-304.
Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, First edition (Liveright Publishing Company, 2022), 24.
David Graeber and David Wengrow offer an even more ambitious account of indigenous political freedom and experimentation in their 2021 book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
David Graeber and D. Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, First paperback edition (Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 441-92.
Grinde and Johansen, Exemplar of Liberty.
Polybius may have been the first to discover how the cycle of generations affect the cycle of governments. Polybius believed that one generation would forget the gains of its parents’ generation and repeat the mistakes of forgotten generations before it. Democracy, for instance, degenerates into ochlocracy (mob rule) as the people become influenced by demagogues. Polybius, Histories, 372-73, 378-79.