Repensar a liberdade dos modernos

: a relação do paradigma das duas liberdades de Benjamin Constant com a história da liberdade de Lord Acton

Abstract

"Political liberty is the most powerful, most energetic way of refinement that the Heavens have granted us". This project proposes to investigate the thought of two founding fathers of liberalism, Benjamin Constant and Lord Acton, so as to understand the roots of liberty in the West. The western quest for civil liberty, which leads to liberalism, prompts the question that Isaiah Berlin asked on his essay “Two Concepts of Liberty”, which remains indispensable: “What made the protection of individual liberty so sacred”? What distinguishes us as westerners, liberty and its history, is something that should be deeply ingrained in our collective memory. In fact, only the self-awareness of a people has the strength to keep the defense of liberty alive, that “precious gift which the Heavens gave to man”. Lord Acton suggests the existence of an inaugural moment of civil liberty. Acton further thinks that he concept of liberty was born twenty centuries ago, and not in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, with liberalism. In other words, negative liberty would not be a product of modernity, but the “delicate fruit of a mature civilization”. This thesis wishes to show that liberty, as Constant affirmed, underwent a significant conceptual shift. However, the turning point could have happened 2000 years ago, with the dawn of a new cultural reality, as Acton suggests, and not 200 years ago, with the liberal revolutions. As a corollary, this Masters dissertation aims to answer the following question: What is the relationship between the paradigm of the two liberties and the History of Liberty?

Date of Award	15 Oct 2021
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	José Tomaz Castello Branco (Supervisor)