MODERN AGE WINTER 2016 The main lesson then, which we derive from the ancients, is that freedom when set against reason and virtue is self-negating. The individual or society given to an unrestrained license yields immediately to the despotism of the passions and eventually to the despotism of state-imposed constraints. The disorders of the soul beget disorders in the commonwealth, which eventually require greater measures of coercive power to keep them within bounds.28 True freedom is won and sustained by virtue. This insight of the classics occurs as well in the modern conservative tradition. As articulated by Edmund Burke: Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites. . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.29 Of course liberalism also echoes important values of the Western political tradition, such as freedom of thought and inquiry and bringing the power of the state under the restraint of law. Reengagement with the classical political tradition would mean not doing away with these values but integrating them into a broader and more coherent ethical structure. That the limited concept of freedom conceived as mere absence of constraint on the desires of the sovereign self has proved popular-and indeed had been raised to an absolute value-is unsurprising. It is evident that freedom as understood by the Greek philosophers is not easy but difficult; it requires an intense 80