Even for a nation obsessed with the concept of “freedom” — or perhaps it would be better to say, concepts, not all of them easily reconciled, some of them utterly incommensurable — the prominence it was given during the recent Democratic National Convention was arresting.

It was as though the Democratic Party vaulted the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush alike — both of which used “freedom” as a mantra, a talisman, a point of vital differentiation over against communism and terrorism — and return to the muscular wartime rhetoric of Franklin Roosevelt, with his vision of domestic or civic freedom.

But are these competing visions of freedom not doomed to remain in an untenable tension without a mediating or underlying conception of freedom’s nature and limits?