Federal Liberty – the seed of an idea?

‘The Swiss Reformed Protestants in the sixteenth century, following the Bible, defined liberty as federal (from the Latin foedus, meaning covenant) liberty (i.e., the liberty to live according to the terms of God’ s covenant with humanity entered into), rather than individual liberty as natural liberty.’

This quotation from Daniel J. Elazar’s article, ‘Communal Democracy and Liberal Democracy: An outside Friend’s Look at the Swiss Political Tradition’ in Publius, Vol. 23, No. 2, Communal and Individual Liberty in Swiss Federalism (Spring, 1993), pp. 3-18 (p. 13) links the theological concept of ‘covenant’ with the political concept of ‘liberty’ in a potentially fruitful way.

We tend to think of liberty exclusively in terms of the individual, and have learned to dismiss communal ideals as idealistic. But ideals are not necessarily unrealistic, and a communal form of liberty may well prove far more workable and sustaining than our bankrupt individualism, which in the light of the banking crisis and the disintegration of society, is clearly an unworkable idealism.

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