This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series The New Liberty, given by Ralph Daringdorf, was originally broadcast in 1974.

The elementary desire to be free is the force behind all liberties, old and new.

Indeed, there's little need to explain what this desire is, and some of us have found

out about it in ways which we will not forget. I can still see myself, pacing up and down my cell

in the prison of Frankfurt on Oda, in November 1944, I was 15 and a half at the time, clutching an almost blunt pencil,

which I had pinched when the Gestapo officer during my first interrogation had left the room,

and trying to write down all the Latin words which I could recollect from school on a piece

of brown paper which I had pulled from under the mattress of my bunk.

The youthful organization which had brought me into this predicament had been called somewhat

pretentiously Freedom Association of High School Boys of Germany, and it had combined childish

things, like wearing a yellow pin on the lapel, with more

serious matters, such as the distribution of fly sheets against the SS state, which had now caught

up with me. The concentration camp afterwards was a very different experience really. Dark mornings,

queuing an icy east wind for a bowl of watery soup, the brutal hanging of a Russian

prisoner who had stolen half a pound of margarine, slices of bread surreptitiously passed to a sick

or an old man, a lesson in solidarity, perhaps,

and above all, one in the sacredness of human lives.

But it was during the ten days of solitary confinement that an almost claustrophobic yearning

for freedom was bred, a visceral desire not to be hemmed in,

neither by the personal power of men nor by the anonymous power of organizations.

The force of liberty of the principles of a humane and open society may be equally strong, but it needs explanation,

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