Orlando Patterson, the Jamaican born sociologist who earned his PhD at the London School of Economics and holds a chair at Harvard, advances interesting ideas about the meaning of "freedom." Here he is in 1992 discussing his thesis with Brian Lamb.

In his book Freedom -- Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, Patterson explains in his preface:

[p. ix] No one would deny that today freedom stands unchallenged as the supreme value of the Western world. Philosophers debate its nature and meaning endlessly; it is the catchword of every politician, the secular gospel of our economic, "free enterprise" system, and the foundation of all our cultural activities. It is also the central value of Christianity: being redeemed, being freed by, and in, Christ, is the ultimate goal of all Christians....

This book examines how freedom became such a powerful value, and how such an extraordinary commitment to it came about. To those [p. x] who hold that freedom is a natural concept, something that all human beings, simply by being human, would naturally want, my objective may seem strange. Yet, there is nothing at all self-evident in the idea or, more properly, the high esteem in which we in the West hold freedom....

Indeed, non-Western peoples have thought so little about freedom that most human languages did not even process a word for the concept...

[p. xi] [T]his work attempts to answer four questions. First, how and why was freedom initially constructed as a social value? Second, how and why, after having been invented, did it emerge as the supreme value distinct from any number of other important values? Third, why did this rise to cultural supremacy happen only in the Western world, and for so many centuries remain confined to this civilization? Finally, having achieved preeminence, what forces maintained its status as the core value of Western civilization throughout the course of that history?...

[p. xii] The basic argument of this work is that freedom was generated from the experience of slavery....

[p. xiv] Almost every historian of ancient Greece has had something to say about the origin and development of some aspect and development of some aspect of freedom... Nearly all of these works, however, confine themselves to only one aspect of the rise of freedom in ancient Greece (by which is usually meant Athens), namely, democracy...

Patterson contends that our concept of freedom grew out of the personal and political dynamics between slaves, freedmen, freemen, and masters as they evolved in the Athenian state beginning in the late seventh century B. C. and, then later with the "more extraordinary spread" of slavery in the Roman Empire. This uniquely Western concept of freedom has three "constituent elements," two of which would cause us little pause.

Patterson identifies "civic freedom" as one element. It "is the capacity of adult members of a community to participate in its life and governance. A person feels free, in this sense, to the degree that he or she belongs to the community of birth, has a recognized place in it, and is involved in some way in its governance."

A second element is "personal freedom, [that which] gives a person the sense that one...is not being coerced or restrained by another person in doing something desired and...the conviction that one can do as one pleases within the limits of other person's desire to do the same."

There is a third element "which emerged in the west at about the same time as personal freedom [which] is what [Patterson] call[s] sovereignal freedom. This is simply the power to act as one pleases, regardless of the wishes of others...It may, indeed, be illogical and immoral to desire for oneself the absence of obstacles, only to be able to restrain others, but, it is a sociohistorical fact that human beings have always sought to do just that, and frequently have succeeded in doing so.... The idea that there is something wrong with this is one of the peculiar products of Enlightenment rationalism...."

...as true as the new serfdom might be, it can be undone in a flash with the right political determination. The crazy thing is that we are all enslaved by our own inability to reject the rules of the game we are playing. There is no scarcity of money. We could all be living rather well, except that we keep kowtowing to the powers that are holding the cash. What if we all stopped participating?

New Yorker:

Dividing women’s bodies into parts, politically, has only adversely affected women’s health. Planned Parenthood started offering cancer screenings in the early nineteen-sixties. At the time, the organization’s medical director, Mary Steichen Calderone, tried to convince the American Cancer Society to help pay for Pap smears, which can catch cervical cancer early, for poor women who came to Planned Parenthood clinics for contraception. The Cancer Society refused, not wanting to be affiliated with an organization that provided birth control at a time when, in many parts of the country, it was not only controversial—as it remains today—but also illegal. (It was only in 1965 that the Supreme Court ruled, in Griswold v. Connecticut, that contraception was protected under a Constitutional right to privacy.) “It was such a pity,” Calderone later said in an interview, “because here were these women going to be seen regularly, once a year or once every two years. They would have been ideal to give Pap smears to.”
The women’s-health movement, which began in the nineteen-seventies, tried to explain that women’s bodies are not parts, but bodies, and that health care for women must, at a minimum, meet the standards of health care for men. This week’s dissolution of a bond between the nation’s largest funder of breast-cancer research and one of the largest providers of women’s health services suggests just how dismally that effort has failed.

Literal parts. Not metaphorical parts.

The Iroquois "allow no kind of Superiority of one over the another, and banish all Servitude from their Territories." Their leaders "were regarded as servants of their people and were generally poorer than the common people, for they affect to give away and distribute all the presents of Plunder they get from their Treaties or War, so as to leave nothing for themselves."

So our Framers borrow "We the people" from the Iroquois, but it hardly meant the same thing since they "prevented political participation of the poor, women, and Native Americans". And, of course, approved slavery.

The Constitution according to Fresia, Wolin, and others was a document meant to make obedient servants and not people who had a part in the decision-making. The Framers idea of "freedom" is different than what we have been taught. Ya think?