This comes from the commencement speech by Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University, to the graduating class at Hillsdale College. The speech is entitled, “Freedom and Its Counterfeit.” These are a couple excerpts from the speech I found particularly interesting.
"True freedom consists in the liberation of the human person from the shackles of ignorance, oppression and vice... What overcomes ignorance is knowledge, and the object of knowledge is truth - empirical, moral, spiritual.
"True freedom, the freedom that liberates, is grounded in truth and ordered to truth and, therefore, to virtue. A free person is enslaved neither to the sheer will of another nor to his own appetites and passions. A free person lives uprightly, fulfilling his obligations to family, community, nation and God. By contrast, a person given over to his appetites and passions, a person who scoffs at truth and chooses to live, whether openly or secretly, in defiance of the moral law is not free. He is simply a different kind of slave.
"The counterfeit of freedom consists in the idea of personal and communal liberation from morality, responsibility and truth. It is what our nation's founders expressly distinguished from liberty and condemned as 'license.' The so-called freedom celebrated today by so many... is simply the license to do whatever one pleases. This false conception of freedom - false because disordered, disordered because detached from moral truth and civic responsibility - shackles those in its grip no less powerfully than did the chattel slavery of old. Enslavement to one's own appetites and passions is no less brutal a from of bondage from being a slavery of the soul. It is no less tragic, indeed, it is in certain respects immeasurably more tragic, for being self-imposed.
"Counterfeit freedom is worse than fraudulent. It is the mortal enemy of the real thing. Counterfeit freedom can provide no rational account or defense of its own normative claims...
"But counterfeit freedom poses greater dangers still. As our founders warned, a people given over to license will be incapable of sustaining republican government. As our founders warned, a people given over to license will be incapable of sustaining a republican government. For republican government - government by the people - requires a people who are prepared to take responsibility for the common good, including the preservation of conditions of liberty.
"Listen... to President Fairfield.... at that ceremony on July 4th, 1853... 'Unrestrained freedom is anarchy. Restrained only by force and arms, is despotism; self-restrained is Republicanism...'
"The self-government that is the right of free men and women is truly a sacred trust."
