The era of Modernity can definitely be called an era of freedom: from its inception liberty has been not just one of its important political concepts, but a prevailing language describing the political reality. Moreover, as shown in the article, several such “languages of liberty” can be defined, if not more. A cognitive-institutional approach – a method where the notional dimension of the concept is considered to be in an inextricable connection with the institutions that it generates – allows the author to identify a number of discourses to which the possession of liberty is prescribed, markedly different from each other in terms of teleology, their system of values, and social subject. For example, the English cognitive tradition of understanding liberty is statist, whereas French is anti-statist; the actor of English freedom is an individual, while French and German freedom belongs to the whole society. Trying to identify the functional “source code” of liberty, the author reviews its basic conceptions, finding out its links with basic types of corporations in broad meaning (governing corporation, which makes political decisions; corporations that produce norms and values, i.e. parliament, church, parties and other opinion-makers; and economic corporations, which produce goods and money), the process of resource and social capital exchange within the political system, the structure of social contracts, and other factors. In this context the “event of liberty” is, first of all, a change of a political system’s structure, where the previously dominating type of corporation is overturned, and its place is taken with acorporation of different type.