Hobbes’s objection was immediately taken up by Filmer, and has been repeated ever since . the writers I have been considering were concerned , we are told , with the liberty of cities , not the liberty of individual citizens . But this contention fails to come to grips with the structure of the neo – roman theory of liberty . While it is true that these writers take the idea of free states as their point of departure , they do so in part because of a radical thesis they wish to advance about the concept of individual liberty . Their thesis – to put it is as bluntly as possible – is that it is only possible to be free in a free state.