Across the world, from liberals to conservatives, from revolutionaries to Hollywood movies, freedom is held up as the central perhaps key political goal. Many have proposed definitions. But there is no agreement. And the harder we look the more elusive and unknown freedom becomes. Lenin wrote, 'when there is freedom, there will be no state'. But Burke argued you can only ever have freedom in a state. Voltaire claimed that a person 'is free at the moment he wishes to be'. Yet for Arendt, thinking about freedom was a 'hopeless enterprise'. But is anyone ever free? Are we free of our upbringing, our circumstances, our cultural prejudices, our species perspective?
If we are unable to determine what it is to be free, should we stop appealing to it as a political goal? Or should we accept it as a rhetorical device to encourage others to adopt our outlook? Or does freedom remain an essential aim to escape the limitations imposed on us by forces out of our control?