Sublime

Since slavery means above all the annihilation of social ties and the ability to form them, freedom meant the capacity to make and maintain moral commitments to others. The English word “free,” for instance, is derived from a German root meaning “friend,” since to be free meant to be able to make friends, to keep promises, to live within a

From the perspective of the Communist Manifesto coauthor Friedrich Engels, however, this indebtedness was just the yoke that capitalists needed to keep labor in line. Home ownership, and the mortgage it required, would be “chaining the worker by his property to the factory in which he works.”

the three primordial freedoms, those which for most of human history were simply assumed: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships. We also noted how the English word ‘free’ ultimately derives from a Germanic term meaning ‘friend’ – since, unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends

A free person was someone who was “joined to a tribe of free people by ties of kinship and rights of belonging.”11 Freedom was the idea that together we can ensure that we all have the things we need—love, food, shelter, safety. The way I’ve come to understand it, freedom is both an individual and collective endeavor—a multilayered process, not a

What’s more, there was a strong emphasis in ancient Roman (and modern European) law on the self-sufficiency of households; hence, true freedom meant autonomy in the radical sense, not just autonomy of the will, but being in no way dependent on other human beings (except those under one’s direct control).