Human Freedom: From Pericles to Measurement

摘要

Although people have been seeking freedom for millennia, it has not been freedom for all-excluded were slaves, serfs, women, outsiders, the defeated, and so on. That changed in the past few centuries as the circle of those considered deserving of freedom expanded. Along the way, a rigorous debate on freedom and what it is took root, blossoming during the Enlightenment when the great freedom philosophers explored both the nature of freedom and what came to be viewed as a universal right to it. They also identified the relationship between economic freedom, including property rights, and other freedoms.