As we mark the 25th anniversary this year of the defeat of communism, there are new questions about the unity of liberties. In the 1980s, when in the Gdansk shipyard the workers began to rattle the cage of communism, they demanded economic liberties (free trade unions), personal liberties (speech, the press), political liberties (democracy), legal liberties (against the police state) and religious liberty (the strikers insisted upon public worship in the shipyard itself).
In continuity with older revolutions and even older political philosophy, the liberties demanded were thought to be all of a piece. Liberty was not divisible, it was thought and often said. Today that question is is up for debate.
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