The Idea of Freedom in America: A Renegotiated Promise

The security guard at Logan Airport tapped the tiny American flag pin on my jacket and waved me through without looking at my passport. I was seventeen, returning from visiting relatives in Seoul, and that pin—bought for two dollars at a Boston gift shop—seemed to carry more weight than my birth certificate. Freedom in America, I realized that day, is less an abstract principle than a bargaining chip: something we claim, test, and occasionally revoke depending on who is asking for it.

Through my three years studying political science at Boston University, I have watched this country wrestle with what freedom actually means, and I have come to believe that American freedom is not a single idea but a constantly renegotiated promise that expands for some while contracting for others.

I grew up hearing two contradictory stories about American freedom. My parents, who immigrated in the 1990s, described freedom as the ability to open a business without bribing officials, to criticize the government without disappearing, to choose our own careers. My high school history teacher, Mr. Cardoso, taught us that American freedom meant the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the steady march toward equality. Neither version prepared me for my first political theory seminar, where Professor Chen assigned us Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty" and asked whether freedom meant being left alone or having the power to act. I wrote in my notes: "Which one is the American kind?" She wrote back: "Both, neither, and it depends who you ask."

The version of freedom that dominates American mythology is what Berlin called negative liberty: the absence of interference. This is the freedom in our founding documents, the right to speak without censorship, to worship without persecution, to own property without seizure. It is the freedom my roommate Claudia invokes when she argues against seatbelt laws, and the freedom that Second Amendment advocates cite when they resist gun restrictions. In my Constitutional Law class last semester, we spent four weeks on cases where this kind of freedom clashed with public safety: should the state require vaccinations, ban hate speech, or regulate polluters? Each case forced us to admit that total absence of interference is impossible because one person's freedom to act becomes another person's constraint. When a factory freely dumps chemicals into a river, it restricts the freedom of everyone downstream to drink clean water.

The kind of freedom less discussed in American politics is positive liberty: the actual power to shape your own life. A person who is technically free to attend college but cannot afford it, who is legally free to vote but has no polling place nearby, who is nominally free to quit a job but will lose health insurance, experiences freedom as a brittle shell around an empty space. I saw this distinction clearly during my internship last summer at a community legal aid clinic in Dorchester. A client named Mrs. Toussaint came in because her landlord had ignored a broken heater for three months. She was free to leave, but where would she go when average rent in Boston requires three times her income? She was free to sue, but who would represent her when she worked two jobs? The attorney I shadowed filed a complaint and told me afterward that rights without resources are just words on paper.

Critics of this broader view of freedom argue that it leads to government overreach, that demanding the state provide healthcare, education, or housing transforms freedom into entitlement. My friend Tyler, an economics major, insists that real freedom requires only a level playing field and that individuals must then compete fairly for success. He has a point: if freedom means the government must guarantee outcomes, where does the responsibility end? But his argument assumes the playing field was ever level, which ignores the centuries when laws explicitly restricted where Black Americans could live, work, or learn, when women could not open bank accounts, when immigration quotas barred entire nationalities. Freedom, in the American context, has always included the question of whether the state should correct past unfreedom or simply stop adding new restrictions.

What strikes me now, finishing my junior year, is that Americans rarely agree on what freedom means because we rarely agree on what unfreedom looks like. To some, mask mandates during the pandemic were tyranny; to others, the freedom to infect your neighbors was violence. To some, affirmative action restricts freedom by considering race; to others, it expands freedom by dismantling barriers. I no longer expect a single definition that will satisfy everyone. Instead, I watch how we argue about it: whose freedom counts as urgent, whose gets delayed, and who decides. The idea of American freedom is not a monument we inherit but a sentence we keep rewriting, and the most honest thing I can say is that I am still learning to read whose pen holds more ink.

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