Eighteenth-century Anglo thought distinguished civil liberty from the natural liberty law restrains

Evidence

It was customary in the eighteenth century, even within the republican tradition, to distinguish proper, civil liberty from natural liberty: from the liberty that people would enjoy in the state of nature with which Hobbes and Locke had made people familiar (Blackstone

1978: 125-6). It would have been easy for most commonwealthmen to admit that law restrains and thereby reduces natural liberty, because natural liberty was not regarded as liberty proper; on the contrary, it was associated with something taken to be inimical to the realization of liberty proper: viz. licentiousness (Reid 1988: 34). The availability of the category of natural liberty, however, may have made things straightforward for those of a Hobbesian bent. It meant that they could argue their point of view by identifying liberty with natural liberty and by sidelining talk of civil liberty.

— Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 232

Categorization

• XREF: Anchors this book’s conceptual genealogy of liberty; connects to how the positive-negative liberty distinction (Berlin, Pettit) maps onto the civil-versus-natural one. — connects to: Eighteenth-century English thinkers held law as the source, not enemy, of civil liberty — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 214; Bentham claimed priority for defining liberty as absence of restraint — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 235