Rosen on Fried on Liberty

What is "freedom"?  What does it mean for freedom to be "authentic"?  What is the relationship between "freedom" and "liberty"?  And so on.  All questions of interest to those working to understand and expound "Catholic legal theory."  So, check out this review, by Gary Rosen, of Charles Fried's new book, "Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government".  Here's a bit:

As Fried sees it, the free development of individuals, choosing and judging by their own lights, must “come first” as a social and political priority. Much as we might talk about other public goals — virtue, equality, national glory — they all amount in the end to mere metaphors, especially as compared with the “rock-bottom, indigestible fact” of our “lonely individuality.” To capture this idea of personal liberty, and to give it some normative force, Fried asks us to imagine ourselves surrounded by a protective “bubble” of rights, carefully negotiating the terms of every relationship and attachment. This, he writes, is the “moral space” we inhabit, and no one may “trespass upon it” without wronging us. . . .

. . . Fried tends to press his philosophical claims too far, especially in asserting the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the sovereign individual. His hyperrational Mr. Bubble is a theorist’s fiction. No one’s life really takes shape so antiseptically, without unchosen attachments and the habits of mind imprinted by family, friends and nation.