Another striking instance of a similar confusion is offered by the contemporary use of the word “democracy” in several countries and by different people. This word belongs to the language of politics and of the history of political institutions. Now it belongs also to ordinary language, and this is the reason why a great deal of misunderstanding arises at present among people using the same word with completely different meanings—say, the man in the street in America and the political rulers in Russia.
I would suggest that a special reason why the meanings of half-technical words tend to be confused is that within technical languages (such as that of politics) the meaning of these words was originally connected with other technical words that often have not been introduced into ordinary language for the simple reason that they could not be translated easily or at all. Thus, applications that gave an unequivocal meaning to the original use of a word have been lost.
“Democracy,” for instance, was a term belonging to the language of politics in Greece at the time of Pericles. We cannot understand its meaning without referring to such technical terms as polis, demos, ecclesia, isonomia, and so on, just as we cannot understand the meaning of contemporary Swiss “democracy” without referring to such technical terms as Landsgemeinde, referendum, etc. We notice that words like ecclesia, polis, Landsgemeinde, and referendum are usually quoted in other languages without being translated because there are no satisfactory words for that purpose.
Lacking their original connection with technical words, half-technical or nontechnical terms often go adrift in ordinary language. Their meaning can change according to the people using them, although their sound is always the same. To make matters worse, several meanings of the same word may prove mutually incompatible in some respects, and this is a continual source not only of misunderstandings, but also of verbal disputes or worse.
Political and economic affairs are the main victims of this semantic confusion, when, for instance, several types of behavior implied by different meanings of the same word prove to be mutually incompatible and attempts are made to grant them all a place in the same legal and political system.
I do not say that this confusion, which is one of the most obvious characteristics of the history of the countries of the West at the present time, is semantic only, but it is also semantic. Men such as Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek have pointed out on several occasions the necessity of removing semantic confusions, not only for economists but for political scientists as well. It is a very important task for learned people to collaborate in the elimination of semantic confusion in the language of politics no less than in that of economics. Of course, this confusion, as Professor Mises frankly recognizes, is not always fortuitous, but corresponds in several instances to certain mischievous plans on the part of those who try to exploit the familiar sound of favorite words like “democracy” in order to convince others to adopt new forms of behavior.2 But this is probably not the only explanation of a complex phenomenon that manifests itself all over the world.
I am reminded of what Leibniz once said about the way our civilization is threatened by the fact that after the invention of the printing press too many books might be written and diffused and too few would be actually read by each individual, with the probable result that the world could be plunged into a new era of barbarism.
As a matter of fact, many writers, chiefly philosophers, have contributed much to semantic confusion. Some of them have used words taken from ordinary language and given them odd meanings. In many cases they never bothered to state what they actually meant by using a word, or they gave rather arbitrary definitions that were at variance with those in the dictionaries, but that were accepted by readers and disciples. This practice has contributed, at least to some extent, to the confusion of the meanings accepted in ordinary language.
In many cases these definitions, purportedly more accurate and profound than the usual ones, were simply presented as the result of an inquiry about the nature of the mysterious “thing” that the writers wanted to define. Because of the connections between ethical and political subjects, on the one hand, and between economic and ethical subjects, on the other, some philosophers contributed, consciously or not, to an increase in the huge stock of semantic confusion and to the contradictions between the meanings of words in the ordinary language of today.
All that I have said on this topic applies as well to the word “freedom” and to its Latin synonym “liberty,” and to certain derivative terms such as “liberal” and “liberalism.”
It is not possible to point to a material “thing” when we refer to “freedom” in ordinary language or in the technical languages of economics and of politics to which this word belongs. Moreover, this word has different meanings according to the historical environments in which it has been used in both ordinary language and the technical languages of politics and of economics. We cannot understand, for example, the meaning of the Latin term libertas without making reference to such technical terms of the Roman language of politics as res publica or jus civitatis or to some other technical terms like manus (which designated the power of the patres familias over their wives, children, slaves, land, chattels, and so on) or manumissio, which designated the legal act—or rather the legal ceremony—by which a slave changed his status and became libertus. On the other hand, we cannot understand the meaning of “freedom” in the language of politics of modern England without referring to such other technical terms as habeas corpus or the rule of law, which have never been translated, so far as I know, into exactly corresponding words in other languages.
Regardless of its technical implications, the word “freedom” entered very early into the ordinary languages of Western countries. This implied sooner or later a disconnection of the word itself from several technical terms belonging to the legal or to the political language of these countries. Finally, in the past hundred years the word “freedom” seems to have begun to float unanchored (as a contemporary author might say). Semantic changes have been introduced at will by a number of different people in different places. Many new meanings have been proposed by philosophers that are at variance with the meanings already accepted in the ordinary languages of the West. Shrewd people have tried to exploit the favorable connotations of this word in order to persuade others to change their corresponding ways of behaving into new and even contrary ones. Confusions arose whose number and gravity have increased as the various uses of the word “freedom” in philosophy, economics, politics, morality, and so on, have become more numerous and serious.
The very word free, to take a trivial example, in its use in ordinary English, may or may not correspond to the French word libre or to the Italian libero. Of course, the Italians and the French attach to this word several meanings that correspond to the English and the American ones, such as when it is said that the American Negro became “free”—that is, was no longer in bondage—after the Civil War. However, neither the French nor the Italians ever use libre or libero in the same way as the English and the Americans use “free” to mean, for instance, that something is gratuitous.
It has become usual, especially in modern times, to speak of freedom as one of the basic principles of good political systems. The meaning of “freedom” as it is used to define or simply to name that principle is not at all the same in the ordinary language of each country. When, for instance, Colonel Nasser or the Algerian fellagha speak today of their “freedoms” or of the “freedom” of their countries, they are referring only, or also, to something that is completely different from what the Founding Fathers meant in the Declaration of Independence and in the first ten amendments to the American Constitution. Not all Americans are inclined to recognize this fact. I cannot agree with writers like Chester Bowles, who apparently maintains