On the Dante Home-Page, we've seen Barbara Reynolds' views on Dorothy Sayers:

      The declaration of war on 3 September 1939 awakened her to the importance of harnessing intellectual vitality in the service of freedom. This is a vision which I now perceive to be one of her most important legacies and of still urgent relevance to us today.

Freedom? Individualism? How do these ideals survive in a World Government? Where is Dante in this, considering the type(s) of government he promoted? Is Dante a fascist? What did he mean in Hell, Canto 1:132 "Lead on, that I may free my wandering feet"? Is Dante simply finding a 'Golden Mean' between the Disorder of radical Freedom on the one hand, and the Disorder of human-based tyranny on the other? Or is Dante's poem really about ending Chaos good and/or bad, and ending the Freedom to have 'wandering feet', by advocating World Empire? Does Dante's argument lead to the sacrifice of freedom and individualism on the altar of security? Or does it go further? Are Freedom and Individualism actually hostile to the themes so very precious to Dante? My preciousssss......  What is precious to Dante?

         We've seen the topic of freedom from Classical Greece through the Germanic contribution into the High Middle Ages.  Acton summed up the ideas that Christian Empire means a political state with serious checks and balances as well as a moral compass when he wrote, "by promoting the Christian religion he was tying one of his hands, and surrendering the prerogative of the Caesars." (For example, Dante's worldview would not see a leader who dallied in the photocopy room with a willing partner as reasons for impeachment, while he would see a leader taking us into, and keep us in, an unjust war as grounds not only for an impeachmentm but also a place in hell!)  John Acton took this spiritual/moral restriction on human-based tyranny further when he wrote,

But when Christ said: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's," those words, spoken on His last visit to the Temple, three days before His death, gave to the civil power, under the protection of conscience, a sacredness it had never enjoyed, and bounds it had never acknowledged; and they were the repudiation of absolutism and the inauguration of Freedom.

In other words, "bounds" of a moral system dedicated to above all: 1.) Love of God and neighbor (and all people are neighbors) ; 2.) Peace (among all people and inside each person); 3.) that godly balance scale of mercy and justice. 4.) spiritual, not material, goals.  Also, a "sacredness" that empowers and propels a government that meets these criteria in a genuine and observable way.    

     Please keep in mind what most people forget (if they ever knew): Classical formulations of freedom are not ours: Brutus called it "Libertas" when he ended Caesar's tyranny -- in the hope of returning Rome to the tyranny of its Republic  (As did John Wilkes Booth....). Socrates drank the hemlock because his own loyalty to concept of individualism bowing before the interests of the state and the ultimate power of even the state's (wrongful) conception of justice. Socrates, remember, argued that far from being guilty, he should have been rewarded! Yet he drank the hemlock even though his friends were there to spring him from the slam.  It may be in classical times that "man is the measure of all things", but not of ALL things great and small: the state trumped it; ideals like justice and loyalty trumped it; arete trumped it in Odysseus' story and courage trumped it in Achilles' story. Certainly fate and the state trumped it in Aeneas' story, as Dido discovered that dismal day.

       From Acton to Sidney Painter et alia, the Germanic reality of freedom was autonomy -- freedom of the individual from encroaching government, groups, rules, customs that suffocate -- a freedom decided upon and upheld by individuals themselves. It was a freedom unheard of beforehand, but not trumpeted by the English and U.S. Bill of Rights. It was a freedom that was worth fighting over in the American Revolution, and as we read of Dorothy Sayers, fighting over again and again as tyranny threatened. But has freedom come full-circle as the freedom of one to have needs met (everything from Social Security and graduated income tax and the States' Rights Debate) and now itself is restricted and trumped by others' needs? Does the "needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.... or the one? (wondered Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise).  Re-read the material on Freedom and Individualism because the background is important.

        We've wrestled with definition and development of these ideals. We've debated our own freedoms -- present and/or lacking. How does Dante fit into this discussion? Has he planted some land mines in terms of freedom? For a mightily problematic example, in Par 3:85, what did Dante mean with that line: "His will is our peace" --???