This file is a short standalone political-economic essay. Sennholz’s central thesis is that freedom becomes “inscrutable” when the same word is used for two opposing principles: individual liberty against coercion, and collective political power exercised in the name of social provision. The essay opens with a stark anthropology of political life:
In every age and in every country, there are two kinds of people—the lovers of freedom and the devotees of power.
From this division Sennholz builds the whole structure of the essay. The “lovers of freedom” understand liberty as personal autonomy: movement, religion, political participation, and economic action within the equal rights of others. His first conceptual move is therefore definitional. Freedom is not primarily a mood, slogan, or distributive outcome; it is the absence of institutional restraint over persons and property.
Their most fundamental freedom of all is the personal freedom to move about, to come and go as they please without restraint.
The essay then surveys several historical dimensions of liberty. Religious freedom is presented as a hard-won settlement after Europe’s religious wars, later secured in the American constitutional order but, in Sennholz’s view, weakened by courts and public education when secularization becomes statism. Political freedom is treated as similarly modern and incomplete until constitutional amendments and civil-rights legislation extended voting rights. Economic freedom, however, is the most vulnerable: unlike voting or worship, it is constantly exposed to envy, redistribution, and the ambitions of political managers.
Economic freedom is an easy prey to political force. It is the first thing that is lost when tyranny advances.
The second half turns from classical liberty to its collectivist counterfeit. Sennholz argues that “devotees of power” also speak the language of freedom, but they mean the freedom of the nation, class, people, or state under leaders who claim to embody it. He links this semantic transformation to twentieth-century tyrannies, naming Hitler, Stalin, and Castro as examples of rulers who presented domination as national or social liberation.
All forms of tyranny build on some collectivistic notion of freedom.
His sharpest polemic is directed at the American welfare-state meaning of freedom: freedom from want, poverty, poor housing, ill health, and poor education. Sennholz traces this usage from Franklin Roosevelt through Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. The list is meant to show continuity rather than party difference: each administration adds another claim to the entitlement state. The conceptual move here is economic reduction. What appears as compassion or “freedom from” deprivation is, for Sennholz, a claim enforced through taxation.
All these "freedoms" rest on the power of democratic majorities to exact income and wealth from the productive members of society.
The essay’s relevance lies in this critique of democratic redistribution as a gradual erosion of liberty. Sennholz does not deny that poverty, illness, or poor housing are real evils; rather, he denies that a legal entitlement to remedy them can be called freedom without concealing coercion. His terse formulation rejects the state as a miraculous source of goods:
After all, government is no deus ex machina, no manna ex politia.
Thus the author’s core claim is not merely anti-welfare but anti-confusion: political language can turn dependence on state power into the appearance of emancipation. Entitlement, in this account, is not a new liberty but a legally sanctioned claim against another person’s earnings.
Every entitlement is a legal right to lay hands on someone else's income, every new call for more benefits a call for more appropriations.
The conclusion invokes Madison’s warning about “gradual and silent encroachments” to explain why freedom is lost less by open coup than by popular demand. Public opinion desires benefits; politicians flatter that desire; citizens trade older freedoms for promised securities. The final sentence compresses the essay’s tragic political psychology: many do not notice domination while they benefit from it, and tyranny is clearest to those who refuse compliance.
The evils of tyranny are seen and felt only by those who resist it.
Sennholz’s essay is therefore a compact libertarian argument about the corruption of political language. Its structure moves from definition, to historical freedoms, to collectivist distortions, to the welfare state, and finally to the psychology of submission. Its enduring point is that the word freedom can either limit power or sanctify it; the fate of liberty depends on keeping that distinction visible.
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