"The thinkers of the Enlightenment reached back to the classical era for the Roman Republican ideal of "libertas" because they sought a foundation for civil society apart from royalty and religion. Jefferson, laying out the bases for the 13 colonies' rebellion against the British crown, included it in his celebrated triad "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" -- a more ringing variation of Locke's "life, liberty and property" -- plucking the word from the orderly garden of the 18th-century philosophers and planting it in wild American soil.

But it fell to John Stuart Mill, in his densely lucid essay "On Liberty" to give the concept of liberty the shape and scope by which we recognize it today. If the word "liberty" now conjures a vision of unchained minds more than an image of unfettered possessions, we have Mill's persuasive prose to thank. "On Liberty" widened the Victorian liberal conception of freedom from the realm of economics to that of the intellect and the spirit, and no one has ever been able to force it back into the dismal science's bottle."
[Salon.com]

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