Defending Liberty Regardless of the Cost
“If liberty means anything at all,” British author George Orwell once observed, “it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” In broader terms, not only saying but also doing things and supporting causes that, owing to general depravity, have become unpopular is the very essence of freedom. Liberty has never spread by spontaneous combustion; instead, it owes its popularity today to the fearless efforts of those down through the ages who have been willing to stoke the flames of freedom regardless of personal cost. Such disruptive souls have always incurred the wrath of whatever establishment seeks to defend the status quo, and have often paid dearly for their intransigence.
This issue of The New American features two such individuals, separated by a wide gulf of space and time, yet whose tireless and obstreperous support of liberty have earned them the enmity of the powers that be.
The first of these is Algernon Sidney, an Englishman of the 17th century whose lot it was to behold England’s fitful efforts to throw off the yoke of monarchy during that turbulent period. Sidney not only witnessed the overthrow and execution of Charles I and the short-lived, chaotic republic that followed, but also saw the restoration of the monarchy and subsequent efforts to reconstitute the old absolutism once upheld by Tudors and Plantagenets. Incapable of suppressing his passion for individual liberty, Sidney challenged court apologists such as Sir Robert Filmer, who defended the monarchy as a divinely sanctioned institution, and attacked aristocrats eager to restore the old power structures. For his contumacy, Sidney paid the ultimate price, having first to flee his country and then, upon his return, to suffer the ignominy of arrest, imprisonment, a show trial, and finally, death by decapitation as an enemy of the regime. Marginalized and ultimately destroyed by the powers of his day, Sidney’s posthumous triumph was evident not only in the overthrow of the last absolutist British monarch in the Glorious Revolution five years after his death, but also in the creation of the United States of America less than a century later. All of the American Founders revered Sidney and his Discourses Concerning Government, and regarded him as perhaps history’s foremost martyr for liberty, an exemplar of the degree of courage and civic virtue necessary for the cause of freedom to win out.
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