"The freedom of each individual can only be the freedom of all"
About this Quote
The line compresses a hard political and moral insight: freedom is not a private possession but a public condition. An individual can be secure in liberty only when the same guarantees hold for everyone. If some are excluded or subordinated, what remains is not freedom but privilege backed by force, and force can turn anywhere. The phrase can only be marks necessity: liberty that cannot be generalized collapses into domination.
Friedrich Durrenmatt arrives at this claim through a dramatic imagination preoccupied with systems, guilt, and the unintended consequences of power. His plays expose how institutions and collective pressures shape personal choices, puncturing the illusion of the lone, sovereign actor. In The Visit, a town trades its conscience for prosperity, and one man’s fate is decided not by justice but by the community’s hunger; the freedom of each proves inseparable from the ethics of all. In The Physicists, scientists who believe they can privately control dangerous knowledge are drawn into state and corporate machinery; the consequences of their choices spill outward, showing that individual intent cannot fence off communal risk.
Living through the wreckage of European war and the bureaucratic anxieties of the Cold War, the Swiss dramatist distrusted pure ideals untethered from institutions. Freedom, for him, demanded procedures, equality before the law, and transparency; the moment exceptions are carved out, arbitrariness spreads, and the rule withers. The line therefore rejects both collectivist erasure of the person and atomistic fantasies that overlook the social scaffolding of autonomy. Real liberty must be shareable without contradiction. If a freedom depends on someone else’s silencing, it is already a form of coercion that threatens the whole. Durrenmatt turns liberty into a universal test: whatever you claim for yourself, you must be ready to see extended to your neighbor, or you are not defending freedom at all, only the temporary advantage of power.
Friedrich Durrenmatt arrives at this claim through a dramatic imagination preoccupied with systems, guilt, and the unintended consequences of power. His plays expose how institutions and collective pressures shape personal choices, puncturing the illusion of the lone, sovereign actor. In The Visit, a town trades its conscience for prosperity, and one man’s fate is decided not by justice but by the community’s hunger; the freedom of each proves inseparable from the ethics of all. In The Physicists, scientists who believe they can privately control dangerous knowledge are drawn into state and corporate machinery; the consequences of their choices spill outward, showing that individual intent cannot fence off communal risk.
Living through the wreckage of European war and the bureaucratic anxieties of the Cold War, the Swiss dramatist distrusted pure ideals untethered from institutions. Freedom, for him, demanded procedures, equality before the law, and transparency; the moment exceptions are carved out, arbitrariness spreads, and the rule withers. The line therefore rejects both collectivist erasure of the person and atomistic fantasies that overlook the social scaffolding of autonomy. Real liberty must be shareable without contradiction. If a freedom depends on someone else’s silencing, it is already a form of coercion that threatens the whole. Durrenmatt turns liberty into a universal test: whatever you claim for yourself, you must be ready to see extended to your neighbor, or you are not defending freedom at all, only the temporary advantage of power.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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