In the aftermath of the attacks of 11 September 2001, George W. Bush famously told the US Congress that America’s enemies “hate our freedoms”: freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to vote, assemble and disagree. Those freedoms matter enormously. People have struggled and died for them, and there are still many places where exercising them can mean imprisonment or worse. But reading Bush’s speech today, there is something striking about what is missing.
Freedom is presented almost entirely as protection from political interference. There is little sense that freedom might also depend on the conditions in which a person lives. An American may be legally free to leave a job, but unable to survive the loss of income or health cover. Someone may be free to leave an abusive relationship but have nowhere affordable to go. Political participation may be guaranteed while time and energy disappear into long hours, rent, childcare and debt.
These are not abstract concerns. According to the latest Federal Reserve survey, only 63% of US adults could meet an unexpected $400 expense entirely from cash or its equivalent, while 26% had gone without some medical care because of cost. This is happening in one of the richest societies humanity has ever created.
So perhaps we have allowed the meaning of freedom to become too narrow. Freedom is not simply the number of doors the law says are open. It is also the number of doors a human being can genuinely walk through. It means having sufficient control over the conditions of your life to choose a direction and, importantly, to change it.
China makes this uncomfortable, which is exactly why it is useful. There are serious restrictions there on political opposition and freedom of expression, association and protest, repeatedly raised by UN experts. China also retains capital punishment. None of this should be minimised or excused because of economic development.
But another reality has to count as well. In May this year, the United Nations Resident Coordinator in China described the lifting of around 800 million people out of absolute poverty as an achievement “without historical precedent”.
If freedom has anything to do with the real possibilities available to a human being, it is difficult to argue that this extraordinary transformation has nothing to do with freedom. Access to food, housing, electricity, transport, education, healthcare and economic possibilities opens futures that extreme poverty closes.
This does not mean that China is “freer” than the United States. It means that the question itself is badly framed. Political freedoms can be restricted while material possibilities expand. Formal political rights can also coexist with economic conditions that severely limit what millions of people are actually able to do with their lives. Both are forms of freedom and both can be taken away.
Norway is interesting because it shows that this does not have to be a choice between two competing models. It combines extensive social provision and high taxation with strong political and personal liberties. According to the OECD, income inequality and relative poverty are below its averages, while Norwegians worked an average of 1,407 hours in 2024 compared with an OECD average of 1,736.
Norway is certainly not a utopia. Housing has become increasingly expensive and household indebtedness remains among the highest in the OECD. Its enormous petroleum wealth also makes it difficult simply to copy its model elsewhere. But it demonstrates something important: strong social provision does not inherently require the sacrifice of civil and political freedom.
The Humanist economist Guillermo Sullings identified another problem with the way we use the word. Historical liberalism, he argued, represented genuine progress when it challenged the absolute power of the state. But economic liberalism gradually appropriated the language of freedom to defend the power of accumulated capital.
Sullings points to a revealing contradiction. The freedom of an employer and an employee to enter into a contract is treated as economic freedom, while attempts to regulate that relationship can be denounced as interference. Yet workers coming together in a trade union to improve the conditions under which they sell their labour are also exercising freedom. “Why should freedom’s reach be to the level convenient for some and not for others?” he asks.
That question becomes even more important when wealth accumulates sufficiently to become power. There is nothing objectionable about people creating, working, saving, exchanging or enjoying the results of their efforts. But once somebody possesses wealth far beyond anything they could possibly spend on their own life, another billion does not meaningfully expand their personal freedom. What it expands is their capacity to acquire property, companies, land, media, political influence and control over resources on which other people depend.
At that point, accumulation is no longer simply about what the wealthy person is free to do. It begins to shape what everybody else is able to do. If extreme concentrations of wealth give a tiny number of people increasing power over housing, workplaces, information, essential services and political decisions, then their growing economic power actually reduces the field of freedom available to the rest of society.
The same principle applies to beliefs. A genuinely free society must allow people to believe very different things — religiously, politically and morally. But the freedom to hold a belief cannot become a right to impose that belief on the lives of others. Someone may believe homosexuality is immoral; that does not give them the right to prevent another person marrying, forming a family or living openly. Maximum freedom of belief has to be accompanied by minimum power to impose belief.
This broader understanding of freedom sits naturally within Silo’s conception of the human being. In his Fourth Letter to My Friends, the human being is presented not as a passive creature adapting to fixed conditions but as a historical and intentional being, capable of imagining and constructing futures that do not yet exist. The freedom of another person therefore matters not only because they possess certain legal rights, but because they possess intentions, projects and a future of their own.
Seen from this perspective, poverty, censorship, debt, discrimination, economic domination and political repression have something important in common. In different ways, they can narrow the range of futures that people are able to construct for themselves. Education, material security, political participation, free expression, social cooperation and time can enlarge that range.
This does not give us a simple league table in which America, China, Norway or anybody else can be declared the winner. It gives us a better way to look at all of them. Human institutions should be judged by whether they expand the real possibilities available to human beings, and by whether the growing power of some is being purchased through the shrinking possibilities of others.
A genuinely free society should protect us from arbitrary government without abandoning us to economic domination. It should defend freedom of conscience without allowing belief to become coercion, and it should provide enough material security for legal rights to become usable possibilities.
A free society should not merely leave you alone. It should leave you a future.
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This article was produced by the author with AI support.
