Is this Liberty?

Liberty can become a language of freedom while functioning as a defense of domination.

Is This Liberty? How Hegemonic Liberty Leads to Fascism examines what happens when the idea of liberty is defined primarily through the freedom of dominant groups to preserve power, hierarchy, property, status, and social control.

Zoë Roberts explores how political movements can invoke freedom while restricting the freedom of others, turning liberty into a selective political principle rather than a universal one. The book traces the relationship between hegemonic power, exclusion, inequality, political identity, institutional control, and authoritarian development, asking how appeals to freedom can coexist with expanding coercion and unequal citizenship.

At the center of the book is a critical distinction: liberty is not only a question of whether government restrains individuals. It is also a question of who possesses meaningful freedom, whose power is protected, and whose autonomy can be sacrificed to preserve an existing order.

When freedom becomes the privilege of some to dominate others, the language of liberty can begin to protect the very structures that make authoritarian politics possible.

The question is not simply whether a society values liberty.

It is whose liberty the system is built to defend.