Jonathan Derbyshire
FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHTS
What Price Liberty? How Freedom Was Won and Is Being Lost
By Ben Wilson (Faber & Faber 480pp £14.99)

Exclusive from the Literary Review print edition. Subscribe now!

At the centre of St George's Circus, in a traffic-choked corner of south London close to the Elephant and Castle, stands an obelisk. On one side, and rather crammed in beneath the date the structure was built ('The XIth year of the reign of King George the Third'), is inscribed the name 'Brass Crosby Esquire/Lord Mayor'. Aside from a blue plaque affixed to Crosby's former home near Bromley in Kent, this is the only public commemoration of a man whom Ben Wilson describes in his splendid new book as a 'liberty-loving guerrilla' - one of a band of 'seedy adventurers' to whom we owe the civil liberties we enjoy today.

The fact that most of those who pass the obelisk on the Number 63 bus each day won't have heard of Crosby tells us, Wilson argues, something important about liberty in this country: about how it was achieved and about our attitudes towards it.

Brass Crosby merits a place in Wilson's pantheon of 'bloody-minded' heroes of British liberty for a provocation he colluded in with John Wilkes in 1770. Wilkes was an alderman of the City of London and Crosby Lord Mayor. The two men decided to test those provisions in the Bill of Rights protecting parliament from criticism by encouraging a printer based in the City to flout them.

When the Speaker sent the Serjeant at Arms to arrest the printer, Crosby had him arrested and ruled that the emissaries of the Commons had no jurisdiction within the Square Mile. Crosby was sent to the Tower of London for his trouble. His eventual release was met with public rejoicing, however, and, according to Wilson, parliament subsequently learned to ignore, or at least to endure, newspaper reports of its activities.

It is one of the many merits of What Price Liberty? that its author has excavated forgotten stories like Crosby's - and that of John Entick, a journalist who sued the King's Messengers when they raided his home in 1762 looking for evidence of seditious libel, prompting the Lord Chief Justice to rule that 'every invasion of property', even when committed with government sanction, 'is a trespass'.

For Wilson, the significance of such episodes is twofold. First, they remind us of the close connection in British history of what today we call 'civil liberties' with private property rights. Second, they show that, historically, such liberties have been arrived at in Britain inductively, read off from the experience of obscure and chippy individuals like Entick and Crosby, as opposed to being deduced from abstract principles.

In reading the history of political freedom in this way, as a story of uneven and laborious struggle rather than a serene and ineluctable convergence on a set of inalienable rights, Wilson is being decidedly un-Whiggish. For him, liberty in this country has always been hard won, the fruit not of some providential design but of what he describes as 'calculated provocation and opportunism'. And in this respect, Wilson is closer in temperament and method to Hume than he is to great Whig historians of liberty like Macaulay or Henry Hallam. For Hume, moral and political gains were always to be regarded as precarious and vulnerable - not only to despotic usurpation, but also to benign neglect or indifference.

This last point is particularly important for Wilson, who believes that we have become dangerously insouciant about our liberties, and clearly intends his book as an intervention in current political debates. He writes approvingly, for example, of David Davis's resignation from the Shadow Cabinet over the proposed extension of detention without charge to forty-two days, and observes, with some justification, that the debate over the Counter-Terrorism Bill was unhelpfully polarised as a choice between the rights of the individual on the one hand, and security on the other.

Wilson cites more than once Milton's famous line about people preferring 'bondage with ease' to 'strenuous liberty'. And this is a reminder that many of the struggles over liberty have been struggles over its meaning. For Milton, the word 'strenuous' referred to the nature of liberty itself, as well as to the way in which it was won.

Milton was writing in the 'civic republican' or 'neo-Roman' tradition, in which, as Wilson points out, 'freedom is given meaning by one's participation in the political life of the nation'. Republicans like Milton, and his contemporary James Harrington, valued 'strenuous' civic engagement over slothful apathy, and government through popular deliberation over deference to crown or state. Drawing on the work of intellectual historians such as J G A Pocock and Quentin Skinner, Wilson brings out very sharply the difference between this neo-Roman conception of civic participation and the idea of liberties as 'desiccated rights' bestowed by some benevolent authority or other.

Instead of the Whiggish story that the English have liked to tell themselves, in which 'liberty always triumphed in the end', Wilson tells a much more complicated tale of how, after the Restoration, the republican association of freedom with civic virtue gave way to what he calls 'licentious liberty' - an idea of liberty as consisting merely in the absence of external interference in the lives of individuals. As John Stuart Mill put it, by the middle of the eighteenth century the 'cry of the people was not "help us", "guide us" ... the cry was "let us alone".'

Republican freedom didn't disappear altogether, though: it crossed the Atlantic and ran like a red thread through the arguments of the American colonists. And for all that the word 'liberty' has been traduced in the intervening two centuries or more, the republican inheritance survives, not least in the rhetoric of President Obama, who won a historic victory in November with the promise of a politics of public participation and the common good.

Of course, redeeming that promise is another matter altogether - especially in countries like the US and Britain, where, Ben Wilson reminds us, an etiolated notion of 'economic liberty' has hollowed out the structures of 'meaningful participation and public service'.

Jonathan Derbyshire is writing a book about philosophy in Britain in the 1950s.