This is a portion of a speech delivered by Michael Knowles at Georgetown University on Tuesday, September 26, 2023.
There is a crucial fact about liberty, a fact at odds with our mistaken, modern, liberal notions of what liberty is. Modern liberal culture tells us that liberty is the right to choose. This is how most people today — even conservatives — think about liberty. But this is not the way our forebears thought about liberty. This is not the way our civilization has understood liberty for most of history. From the ancient pagan Greeks all the way up through the medieval and Renaissance Christians right up until just a few hundred years ago, liberty was understood quite differently.
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