This chapter focuses on Hugo Grotius and the light he sheds on the relation between metaphysical debates about the freedom of the will and political debates about freedom.

This chapter explores the usefulness of neo-Roman liberty – to live free from subjection, deference, and vulnerability to the arbitrary will of others – for our contemporary philosophical debates about human rights. For eighteenth-century republicans such as Wollstonecraft and Price, liberty understood in this way was conceptually linked to rights of humanity, but that link has been severed. Starting from a sense of perplexity about the disengagement between 'republican' liberty and human rights and the curious inability of mainstream human rights philosophy to deal with major political challenges, neo-Roman liberty is used here to push human rights philosophy onto more radically egalitarian terrain. The critique focuses on the naturalistic bias in human rights thinking, a misunderstanding of international human rights law, a tendency to focus on event-based 'local' principles of justice, and a reluctance to challenge structural causes of injustice. The contention is that Skinner’s neo-Roman liberty serves to establish two important normative premises for a human rights philosophy with more bite: human rights should offer the strongest protection for those who are most vulnerable to socio-economic and political marginalisation, and that objects of human rights should be conceptualised in terms of open-ended goals of justice, predicated on a commitment to structural equality.

This chapter examines Milton’s discourses of liberty, slavery, and hierarchy in order to test Quentin Skinner’s claim that the theory of neo-Roman liberty is positively and intrinsically connected with equality. Neo-Roman liberty was an important element in Milton’s political arguments, as was the terminology of slavery which was used to encapsulate the absence of that freedom from domination. However, neo-Roman liberty for Milton is less aptly defined as freedom from the will of another than as freedom from arbitrary domination. Milton’s commitment to the existence of rightful hierarchies, and to the Aristotelian principle that the superior should rule the inferior, meant that many (whether wives, servants, actual slaves, or inferior or wicked citizens) could not appeal to the principle of neo-Roman liberty to free them from subjection to another, as that subjection was rightful rather than arbitrary. Milton’s emphasis on free will and virtue meant that expected hierarchies might be disrupted by exceptional virtue or vice, but these exceptions caused a certain dissonance in Milton’s texts, and his use of the language of slavery and subjection was not entirely consistent.