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| 1944 publication |
Once it is fully understood that there are no natural harmonies and equilibria of power in history, as there are in nature, and that advancing civilization tends to accentuate, rather than diminish, such disproportions of power as exist in even primitive communities, it must become apparent that property rights become instruments of injustice.
Crucial, then, to any understanding of revolutions in the modern age is that the idea of freedom and the experience of a new beginning should coincide.
Being able to depart for where we will is the prototypal gesture of being free, as limitation of freedom of movement has from time immemorial been the precondition for enslavement. Freedom of movement is also the indispensable condition for action, and it is in action that men primarily experience freedom in the world. When men are deprived of the public space—which is constituted by acting together and then fills of its own accord with the events and stories that develop into history—they retreat into their freedom of thought.
Since the greatness, but also the perplexity, of all laws in free societies is that they only indicate what one should not do, and never what one should do, political action and historical movement in constitutional government remain free and unpredictable, conforming to, but never inspired by, its essence.
