REPUBLICAN LIBERTY:

Herbert Spencer's starting premise, as stated time and again in Social Statics, is, "Every man has freedom to do as he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man" (p. 95). He argues that whether the starting point is a belief in God and God's purpose for man, or whether we rely, instead, on our reason and reflection on the nature and desire of any and all men, the conclusion that we can readily reach is that the purpose of all of us is wanting the achievement of happiness. Which one of us as normal human beings do not want to be happy?

But the pursuit of happiness, he says, requires the exercise of our mental and physical faculties, and to do so, each of us must be at liberty to decide upon the ends that may move us closer to that happiness and the best means as we see them to try to approach that end. Only individuals possessing the greatest latitude to act as they peacefully wish can ever have the chance to fulfill some aspect of that element in our human make-up that cries out to be happier than we may be. 

If each of us is to have the freedom to pursue that happiness, this requires seeing a boundary beyond which anyone of us may not go, and that is an abridgement of every other individual's right and liberty to do the same. This demands, as Spencer says, "that each man shall have the greatest freedom compatible with the like freedom of all others" (pp. 75-76). Or as Spencer more clearly explains his view of man in society:

Liberty of action being the first essential to exercise of faculties, and therefore the first essential of happiness; and the liberty of each limited by the like liberty of all being the form which this first essential assumes when applied to many instead of to one, it follows that this liberty of each, limited by the like liberty of all, is the rule of conformity with which society must be organized. Freedom being the prerequisite to normal life for the individual, equal freedom becomes the prerequisite to normal life in society. And . . . this law of equal freedom is the primary law of right relationships between man and man . . .(p.79)

From this starting point, Spencer proceeds to explain the how and the why of each individual's right to his life and personal liberty, to his right to private property peacefully acquired in a setting of respecting each's equal freedom, and how this includes the right of free association and exchange for mutual betterment and pursuit of happiness in a way that violates the equal freedom of none, and improves the chances of each. 

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