In 1819, the Franco-Swiss philosopher Benjamin Constant published one of the most widely read texts in the history of political thought, *On the Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns*, whose main ideas would be taken up again in 1958 by Sir Isaiah Berlin in *Two Conceptions of Liberty*. According to Constant, the liberty of the ancients was an eminently positive liberty, a “liberty to,” above all to participate in public affairs, in the life of the polis or the forum, while the liberty of the moderns is fundamentally a negative liberty, a “liberty from,” especially the condition of being free from any kind of coercion or violence.