Take the Liberty

“Take the Liberty” sounds iconoclastic, like the words take and liberty cancel each other out.

In our parlance today, saying you took the liberty means that you undertook some kind of action without asking permission, but where it would have been customary to ask first. There’s a kind of baked-in assumption that you’re doing the person a favor here by not wasting their time and just doing whatever it is, and that the person you would have asked would have approved anyway, so you’re doing them the favor of not asking them.

The funny thing is that liberty can be taken away, and it’s not at all like doing the person a favor. In any nation in the entire world, if a person is convicted of a crime, they are subject to lose certain liberties. The state will just take the liberty right away from you.

Another person can take your liberty from you, too, and they can do it in a way that’s not at all a favor to you. For millennia, slavers took away all conceivable liberty from individuals, and t…