Joseph Priestley’s Two Concepts of Liberty

The classical liberal meaning of liberty—essentially, being free of initiations of force or encroachment against one’s person, property, or promises due—is often associated with “negative” liberty, after Isaiah Berlin’s “negative” and “positive” concepts of liberty (1958). Prior to Berlin, a famous distinction was made by Benjamin Constant between “modern” and “ancient” liberty (1819).

There is a rough correspondence between Berlin’s “negative” and Constant’s “modern” liberty, but “positive” and “ancient” are not the same. Berlin’s “positive” liberty is “freedom to,” especially freedom to realize some state of being or, as Berlin puts it, “to lead one prescribed form of life,” while Constant’s “ancient” liberty is more specific: the individual’s right to participate in politics.

Meanings and distinctions of liberty have proliferated, but those of Berlin and Constant deserve center stage. Prior to Constant, however, a noteworthy distinction was made by Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), who distinguished “civil” and “political” liberty, with “civil” being similar to Constant’s “modern” and “political” close in meaning to “ancient.” Priestley’s writings help us understand the liberty debate of the late eighteenth century and how the “negative”/“modern”/“civil” notion of liberty—or we might loosely say, the classical liberal meaning, corresponding to Adam Smith’s notion of “natural liberty”—gained clarification and commanded a place in government, culture, and discourse.

Priestley’s “Essay on the First Principles of Government, and on the Nature of Political, Civil and Religious Liberty” (1768) was one of the eighteenth century’s most eloquent defenses of what the author significantly termed “civil liberty.” At that time, “political” and “civil” were sometimes used as synonyms. Priestley’s “Essay” is striking for the care it gives to distinguishing two concepts. He defined “civil liberty” as “that power over their own actions, which the members of the state reserve to themselves, and which their officers must not infringe,” and “political liberty” as “the power, which the members of the state reserve to themselves, of arriving at the public offices, or, at least, of having votes in the nomination of those who fill them.”¹

Civil liberty, for Priestley, consisted of the natural rights that individuals retain in political society. Though Priestley called his distinction an “innovation,” the influence of Lockean natural law philosophy, later repeated in the Declaration of Independence’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” is here apparent. According to Priestley, such rights are crucial for freedom of thought and conscience, exemplified by religious and educational freedom.

Political liberty, meanwhile, comprised political rights such as voting, or the rights of officeholders. Like his contemporaries David Hume and Adam Smith, whom he admired and cited, Priestley valued civil liberty more highly than political liberty. But Priestley also argued forcefully that political liberty was key as a means to protect civil liberty.

Again, Priestley’s “civil” and “political” map fairly well onto Constant’s “modern” and “ancient.” Constant was born thirty-​four years after Priestley. He does not mention Priestley in any of his major political works, but he refers to him in passing in a manuscript titled Fragments d’un essai sur la perfectibilité de l’espèce humaine. This reference is not entirely positive, as he argues that Priestley, along with William Godwin, Richard Price, Condorcet, and Turgot, had been carried away in his optimistic conjectures about human improvement. Nonetheless, the parallel between their respective pairs of liberty suggests that they thought along comparable lines with respect to freedom. Constant, who was partially educated at the University of Edinburgh, was well-​read in many of the political writers Priestley admired, including the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers and Montesquieu. Ultimately, Constant agreed with Priestley that individual freedom could lead to considerable improvements, moral and social.

Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) was born into a Calvinist family and educated at the dissenting academy in Daventry. In 1761, he became a teacher at the famous Warrington Academy, where he taught history, languages, and literature. Perhaps the most prominent Unitarian minister of the period, he was a Socinian who believed that Jesus Christ was not God but rather a man who had been divinely commissioned, performed miracles, and risen from the dead.

Priestley is now most famous as a scientific writer and as the discoverer of oxygen. In 1766, he became a fellow of the Royal Society. In 1772, he was awarded the Society’s prestigious Copley Medal. Priestley was a polymath, writing more than 150 books and pamphlets, treating natural philosophy, theology, religion, politics, belles-​lettres, linguistics, rhetoric, moral philosophy, and history (sacred and secular). In 1794, he emigrated to the United States, where he died in 1804.

Priestley contended that we must distinguish between the form and the extent of political power. The key question for him was not “who, or how many be our governors or how long their office continues,” but rather that “their power be the same while they are in office, and the administration be uniform and certain.” “If the power of the government be very extensive,” he continued, “and the subjects of it have, consequently, little power over their own actions, that government is tyrannical; whether, with respect to its form, it be a monarchy, an aristocracy, or even a republic.”² 

There was little advantage in living under a democracy, he argued, since each member of the state had the chance “of playing the tyrant in his turn.” If everything was dependent on the will of the person or persons in power—whether one, few, or many—the people in the state would effectively be unfree. “Provided the power of government be moderate, and leave a man the most valuable of his private rights,” wrote Priestley, “it is of no consequence how many, or how few persons are employed in the administration.”³

For Priestley, the reason why modern European governments were superior to ancient ones had in fact very little to do with their forms and all to do with the extent of their power, the security of persons and properties, and the certainty and uniformity of administration—in sum, a higher degree of individual liberty under the rule of law.

Determining the proper boundaries of government is very difficult, he acknowledged. In general, experience and experiments were the surest guide. But Priestley was clear that the general rule must be that “the civil magistracy [should] take as little upon its hands as possible, and never to interfere, without the greatest caution.”⁴ That counsel resembles the presumption of liberty we associate with Adam Smith.

Priestley was convinced that improvement generally depends on civil liberty. “A man has but a poor encouragement to bestow labour and expense upon a piece of ground, in which he has no secure property,” he argued, “and when neither himself, nor his prosperity, will, probably, ever derive any permanent advantage from it.” Priestley suggested that the poor were generally safer in despotic states than property owners, since they were less of a threat to the sovereign. But even the poorest have ambitions, “and the moment that a man thinks of rendering himself in any respect conspicuous, for his wealth, his knowledge, or influence of any kind, he begins to be in danger.”⁵ Priestley thus cautioned that government’s unique power to coerce could be abused.

In relation to civil liberty, Priestley focused on two key areas of application: education and religious liberty. In education, Priestley vehemently opposed the Spartan “code” proposed by the Anglican minister John Brown, most famous for An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757). Priestley, in Thoughts on Civil Liberty (1765), believed that Brown made his position clear by praising Sparta’s approach to education. As Priestley commented:

To Priestley, Brown’s praise of Spartan education seemed palpably misguided. In opposition, Priestley wanted “to show the inconvenience of establishing, by law, any plan of education whatever.”⁶ He agreed with Brown about the importance of education but thought it obvious that “the various character of the Athenians was certainly preferable to the uniform character of the Spartans.”⁷

Priestley’s first objection to a uniform “code” in education was practical. In education as in all arts, success depends on the “opportunity of making the most experiments and trials, and in which there are the greatest number and variety of persons employed in making them.”⁸ Homogenization through state involvement could hardly lead to better educational standards. Indeed, education labored under too many legal restraints already, according to Priestley.

But his most fundamental argument was that state education would be “prejudicial to the great ends of civil society,” which is “the happiness of the members of it, in the perfect and undisturbed enjoyment of the more important of our natural rights.” Of all enjoyments in life, “domestic relations are the most constant and copious.” For Priestley, the state deciding over the education of someone’s children would be as detrimental to happiness as selecting their spouse. “If there be any natural rights which ought not to be sacrificed to the ends of civil society,” Priestley wrote, “it is even more natural to look for these rights among those which respect a man’s children, than among those which respect himself; because nature has generally made them dearer to him than himself.”⁹

The question of education was bound up with religion. As a Protestant Dissenter and Unitarian minister, it was a subject close to his heart. How could the state, whose powers concerned only this life, pretend to have powers over the future life, he asked?

Pennsylvania had flourished more than other American settlements, Priestley argued, because of its capacious religious freedom. And he was certain that there were more atheists in Italy and Spain than in Britain, where religion was promoted by toleration rather than persecution.

But, foremost, it was a question of principle. Priestley recognized that religion had a civil function. But the general rule was that the state should only interfere when it could do so beneficially. And he believed that the state-​church alliance was fundamentally at odds with Christianity: “Christianity, by being a more spiritual and moral constitution than any other form of religion that ever appeared in the world, requires men to think and act for themselves more accurately than any other.”¹⁰

In the process of criticizing Brown, Priestley made a defense of free speech:

Brown disagreed and argued that atheists could not be tolerated. Though an enemy of atheism, Priestley regarded such a move as a slippery slope, as he thought that “it will ever be impossible to distinguish, to general satisfaction, between those [opinions] which may be tolerated, and those which may not. No two men living, were they questioned strictly, would give the same list of such fundamentals.”¹²

Priestley warned that the restrictions on freedom of thought and conscience proposed by Brown could have grave consequences: “The care he [Brown] would take to shackle men’s minds, in the first formation of their thinking powers, and to check their exertion when they were formed, would, I apprehend, put an effectual stop to all the noble improvements of which society is capable.”¹³ In short, timidity was incompatible with free enquiry, and censorship would make future discoveries impossible. Like John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century, Priestley was committed to the view that truth’s prospects rise with people’s freedom to communicate their opinions.

The defense of civil liberty was Priestley’s primary concern. He argued explicitly that the happiness of the people did not require a state of perfect political liberty. Extreme political liberty was indeed only possible in small states; perhaps even the city states of Greek antiquity had been too large for direct democracy. Moreover, this form of ancient republicanism was not only unpracticable but also harmful since it would seek to violently impose equality on diverse populations. Besides, in the modern world, large states would easily impose on neighboring small states. In modern commercial states, Priestley was clear that political liberty must always be more limited, and this was a good thing.

But his attachment to civil liberty made him an ardent advocate for political liberty as well. The chief benefit of political liberty—for instance, in the shape of voting—was that it acted as the “chief guard” of civil liberty, he argued. In theory, as long as the people retained their civil rights and the laws remained the same, they “would find no difference” if a country’s political constitution would be transformed into an absolute monarchy. But the problem was that those rights would be insecure if there were “no guard for their civil liberty,” as the people would lose control over future legislation.¹⁴

Priestley, like Constant, made a powerful case for why classical liberals should not neglect the importance of political liberty. If not an end in itself, political liberty should be understood and valued as a means to protect civil liberty. And if we know its true purpose, perhaps we are more likely to exercise it wisely.

As Priestley would emphasize in a later work, Lectures on History and General Policy (1788), it is therefore in everyone’s interest to have as much political liberty as is compatible with civil liberty. “A man who is sensible that he is at the disposal of others,” wrote Priestley, “over whose conduct he has no sort of control, has always some unknown evil to dread.”¹⁵