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An oft-repeated refrain since the September 11 terrorist attacks is that Americans must now choose between a robust national defense and their vital civil liberties. Security versus freedom: the underlying assumption is that the two can coexist only uneasily in times of national crisis. The loss of certain freedoms, so goes the prevailing wisdom, is the price that must be paid for additional security. Some are eager to make that exchange, while others consider the price too dear. Both sides, however, seem to agree that freedom and security are competing virtues, and that the expansion of one necessarily entails the contraction of the other.
This is not a new dichotomy. In 1759, Benjamin Franklin reminded his fellow colonists that "they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."1 For Franklin, liberty is the supreme good, and a people capable of surrendering its freedoms in exchange for security is not fit for self-governance, or even "safety." A century later, Abraham Lincoln appeared before Congress to justify his unilateral decision to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. "[A]re all the laws, but one," the president asked, "to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?"2 For Lincoln, the Great
Emancipator, liberty was an obstacle to the government's proper functioning and, worse, a threat to the government's very existence.
The dichotomy between freedom and security is not new, but it is false. For security and freedom are not rivals in the universe of possible goods; rather, they are interrelated, mutually reinforcing goods. Security is the very precondition of freedom. Edmund Burke teaches that civil liberties cannot exist unless a state exists to vindicate them: "[t]he only liberty I mean is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them."3 In the same way that an individual's moral right to property would be meaningless unless the government establishes courts of law in which those rights can be declared and enforced, so too Americans' civil liberties would be a nullity unless they are protected from those who seek to destroy our way of life.
If much post-September 11 commentary mistakenly casts security...