What does the Declaration of Independence mean by "liberty?"

0:06Liberty, that's another tricky one. These ideas looked so simple when we see them, equality, I know what that means. You know two equals two, that's what equality is. But we see that they have many different shades of meaning. Today, if I say Liberty, we invoke it to mean the same thing as freedom. Like I'm at liberty to get up and walk out of the room. Right now I have the liberty to go about my social and political life as I would like to. Liberty in the 1800s century, however, has a very precise and technical political meaning. What it simply means is the liberty to be able to exercise your political rights against the overweening tyranny of a monarch. It also means that you have the right to be represented at some level

1:02in your government. But it essentially means freedom from tyranny. They imagined it as being a very fragile ideal that tyranny was this big, powerful Green Monster or they're often took the form of a king. Liberty was this fragile entity that could easily be attacked by a tyrant. That is to say that they conceive of liberty not as a social quality, not as an individual quality, but as a political quality, which is the freedom from tyranny. They invoked it because they said that the British Parliament, by not representing the colonies in parliament, was taxing them without their representation and that was a form of tyranny. Liberty, again today, it's synonymous with freedom. We use the word liberty very promiscuously. It's liberty,

2:00this liberty that, but it's important to remember that in the 18th century it had a very precise political and rather technical meaning that then loosened up over the course of the 19th century.