In a recent essay in Religion Dispatches, Stephanie Russell-Kraft writes about the political history of “freedom” and “liberty.” In this essay she notes the two words have never meant the same thing as they have different ancestries:
“liberty comes from Latin, while freedom comes from German/Old English. The two merged after the Norman Invasion, and it took 1000 years for them to approach each other in meaning.”
She also points out that:
“freedom is the capacity to do things in the world, while liberty is the absence of external institutional constraints.”
Let’s take a closer look at the etymologies of these words and some of their relatives.
Liberty
The word liberty came into English in the late fourteenth century with the meaning of "free choice, freedom to do as one chooses.” Liberty came from the Old French liberte meaning “freedom, liberty, free will” which evolved from the Latin libertatem (nominative libertas) "civil or political freedom, condition of a free man; absence of restraint; permission."
In the late fifteenth century, liberty acquired the meaning of “state of being free from arbitrary, despotic, or autocratic rule or control.”
With regard to the political use of liberty in the twenty-first century, Stephanie Russell-Kraft reports:
“The shift back to liberty has also been championed by the Tea Party and popular libertarians like Ron Paul, who launched his Campaign for Liberty and affiliated student group Young Americans for Liberty during the 2008 presidential campaign.”
She also writes:
“By reclaiming liberty, members of the religious right are reclaiming a world in which Christianity provided the moral structure for the founding of the nation.”
Liberal
The word liberal is from the Latin liber which was used to describe a person who was “free, unrestricted, independent.” In contrast to liber, servus was used for people who were “slavish, servile, subject.” The suffix -alis meaning “of” was used to produce liberalis which meant “worthy of a freeman, fine, noble.”
By the end of the eighteenth century, liberal was being used to mean “not strict or rigorous; not restricted to the exact or literal.” Liberal was also used to imply “free from convention, tradition, or dogma; broad-minded, open-minded.”
In the United States in the twentieth century, liberal began being used in a political sense, meaning according to some people as a person who values equality over freedom when the two ideals conflict. For some American conservatives, liberal is a euphemism for socialist.
Liberal Arts
In the old Greek and Roman systems of education there was a distinction between the liberal arts and the servile arts. The subjects taught in the liberal arts were those befitting a freeman and required the use of mental faculties rather than physical abilities. On the other hand, the servile arts were those subjects involving physical labor and benefitted the lower classes. The concept of liberal arts entered into English in the fourteenth century.
The use of liberal in expressions such as liberal education and liberal profession took on the sense of the education and profession of someone of the upper classes.
Freedom
The noun freedom is from the Old English freodom meaning “power of self-determination, state of free will; emancipation from slavery, deliverance.” The Old English feo, meaning “free, exempt from, not in bondage, acting of one's own will” is from the Proto-Germanic *frija- meaning “beloved; not in bondage” which is from the Proto-Indo-European *priy-a-“ meaning “dear, beloved.” The Proto-Indo-European root *pri- means “to love.”
The suffice -dom is from the Old English dom meaning “statute, judgement.”