Freedom

For Hayek, it wasn’t enough for Britain to fight the Nazis with tanks and planes. It had to fight them with ideas too. The idea that had to win was that of economic freedom - for the government to let people decide what to do themselves. Without economic freedom, political freedom was impossible. Without political freedom, people can’t think for themselves anymore. The government tells you what to do, what to think, how to live. Modern Western civilization itself was based on the freedom of the individual, said Hayek. If we forget that, then civilization might collapse.

John Stuart Mill differentiated liberty from freedom in that freedom is primarily, if not exclusively, the ability to do as one wills and what one has the power to do; whereas liberty concerns the absence of arbitrary restraints and takes into account the rights of all involved. As such, the exercise of liberty is subject to capability and limited to the rights of others.

To have liberty is to be liberated from something; to be free is to be self-determining, autonomous. Freedom can or cannot exist within a state of liberty: one can be liberated yet unfree, or free yet enslaved.