On Freedom: Essays from the Frankfurt Conference

The essays in this volume were sponsored by the Rockford Institute and presented at a conference entitled "For Your Freedom and Ours," held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Together these essays make one of the most forceful cases in print for the importance of individual freedom in modern civilization. The volume is very patriotic about American freedom, and yet it offers many critiques and cautions about the rapid erosion of American freedoms in this century. The volume opens with Leopold Tyrmand praising American freedom. But it is not a freedom without limits. As in American jazz, there is individual freedom within a central form. Nikolaus Lobkowicz also cautions that freedom is not our highest value. "If freedom were out highest value, a dungeon would be the only real evil" (p. 10) . Freedm takes on its importance only in the company of the other moral values that our society cherishes. Freedom itself can be used for good or evil, and Lobkowicz discusses many ways that societies have used it for evil. After arriving at a more specific definition of freedom, Leszek Kolakowski grounds the freedom of the individual in the very nature of humanness. As such our view of human nature cannot be proved empirically, but is derived from our religious heritage. C-4