The aim, therefore, of patriots, was to set limits to the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over the community; and this limitation was what they meant by liberty.

The ancient Greeks, despite their belief in fate, regarded the individual citizen as possessing moral agency and as a vital participant in the city-state, or polis. Thus, the Greeks were the first to break ranks with the accepted model of government — the monarchy — and chart a path toward demokratia, government by consent. The idea of individual

The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king. This is the only way in which truth can ever find refuge from public persecution, and the good man survive the bad government.

This liberalism relies upon the idea that consciousness is not a thing but an activity; that its elemental constituent is not some soul-like substance but the activity of understanding; that it knows itself and the world only imperfectly, through its reflections on the world and itself; that its freedom is a matter of degree and a function of its