…okay, I’m not really providing an overview of freedom and justice in the English-speaking world over the last two centuries (sorry!). But back to the text analysis I and students did of the Malheur occupation last week, and linking it with conceptual analysis of justice movements we’ll be doing this week, I decided to take a quick look at these two Big Words using Google Ngram Viewer; the result is below.
So, what you see here is the relative proportion of use of these two words in the books Google has indexed (see here for methodological options/details). Interestingly, use of the word “justice” has declined over the years, which may provoke helpful questions contemporary justice movements could ask as to the history of justice and changes in its formulation/application over time. The word “freedom” has grown slightly in usage, with two conspicuous bumps, one possibly the result of global political events in the late 1940s and the other in the relatively unrelated political events of the 1960s.
…but of course, all these are guesses: this chart should provoke questions, not provide answers.