Liberty is a
concept of
political philosophy and identifies the condition in which an
individual has the right to act according to his or her own
will. In feudal times, a liberty was an area of allodial land in which regalian rights had been waived.
Individualist and
classical liberal conceptions of liberty relate to the freedom of the individual from outside compulsion or
coercion.
Philosophy
Opinions on what constitute liberty can vary widely, but can be generally classified as
positive liberty and
negative liberty. Positive liberty asserts that freedom is the ability of society to achieve an end. For example,
Puritans such as
Cotton Mather often referred to liberty in their writings, but focused on the liberty from
sin (e.g. sexual urges) even at the expense of liberty from the
government. In the negative sense, one is considered free to the extent to which no person interferes with his or her activity. According to
Thomas Hobbes, for example, "a free man is he that... is not hindered to do what he hath the will to do."
thumb|145px|right|John Stuart Mill.
John Stuart Mill, in his work,
On Liberty, was the first to recognize the difference between liberty as the freedom to act and liberty as the absence of coercion. In his book,
Two Concepts of Liberty,
Isaiah Berlin formally framed the differences between these two perspectives as the distinction between two opposite concepts of liberty:
positive liberty and
negative liberty. The latter designates a negative condition in which an individual is protected from
tyranny and the
arbitrary exercise of
authority, while the former refers to having the means or opportunity, rather than the lack of restraint, to do things.
Mill offered insight into the notions of
soft tyranny and
mutual liberty with his
harm principle. It can be seen as important to understand these concepts when discussing liberty since they all represent little pieces of the greater puzzle known as
freedom. In a philosophical sense, it can be said that
morality must supersede
tyranny in any legitimate form of
government. Otherwise, people are left with a societal
system rooted in
backwardness,
disorder, and
regression.
The concept of negative liberty has several noteworthy aspects. First, negative liberty defines a realm or "zone" of freedom (in the "silence of
law"). In Berlin's words, "liberty in the negative sense involves an answer to the question 'What is the area within which the subject -- a person or group of persons -- is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons." Some philosophers have disagreed on the extent of this realm while accepting the main point that liberty defines that realm in which one may act unobstructed by others. Second, the restriction (on the freedom to act) implicit in negative liberty is imposed by a person or persons and not due to causes such as nature, lack, or incapacity.
Helvetius expresses this point clearly: "The free man is the man who is not in irons, nor imprisoned in a gaol (jail), nor terrorized like a slave by the fear of punishment... it is not lack of freedom not to fly like an eagle or swim like a whale."
The dichotomy of positive and negative liberty is considered specious by political philosophers in traditions such as
socialism,
social democracy,
libertarian socialism, and
Marxism. Some of them argue that positive and negative liberty are indistinguishable in practice, while others claim that one kind of liberty cannot exist independently of the other. A common argument is that the preservation of negative liberty requires positive action on the part of the government or society to prevent some individuals from taking away the liberty of others.
A socialist defines liberty as being connected to the reasonably equitable distribution of wealth, arguing that the unrestrained concentration of wealth (the means of production) into only a few hands negates liberty. In other words, without relatively equal ownership, the subsequent concentration of power and influence into a small portion of the population inevitably results in the
domination of the wealthy and the subjugation of the poor. Thus, freedom and material equality are seen as intrinsically connected. On the other hand, the classical liberal argues that wealth cannot be evenly distributed without force being used against individuals which reduces individual liberty.
Freedom as a triadic relation
In 1967, Gerald MacCallum argued that proponents of positive and negative liberty converge on a single definition of liberty, but simply have different approaches in establishing it. According to McCallum, freedom is a triadic relationship: "x is/is not free from y to do/not to do or become/not become z". In this way, rather than defining liberty in terms of two separate paradigms, positive and negative liberty, he defined liberty as a single, complete formula.
The question is whether this formula fully captures what positive liberty means. Positive liberty, understood as "internal forces which determine how a person shall act"
[ Miller, David, 'Introduction', in Miller, ed., Liberty, 1991] is saying more than 'x is free to do z.' One is free when one
becomes the ideal of oneself, which includes MacCallum's triadic relation; but the latter alone is insufficient to fully capture what positive liberty means.
Liberty and political thought
Meaning of Liberty
The first known use of the word
freedom in a political context dates back to the 24th century BC, in a text describing the restoration of social and economic liberty in
Lagash, a
Sumerian city-state.
Urukagina, the king of
Lagash, established the first known legal code to protect citizens from the rich and powerful. Known as a great reformer, Urukagina established laws that forbade compelling the sale of
property and required the charges against the accused to be stated before any man accused of a crime could be punished. This is the first known example of any form of
due process in the history of humanity.
Like Urukagina, most ancient freedoms focused on
negative liberty, protecting the less fortunate from harassment or imposition. Other ancient legal codes, such as the
Code of Hammurabi, similarly forbade compulsion in economic matters, like the sale of land, and made it clear that when a rich man murders a poor one, it is still murder. Still, these codes relied on a certain virtuousness of kings and ministers, which was far from reliable.
In the
Persian Empire, citizens of all
religions and
ethnic groups were given the same rights and had the same
freedom of religion, women had the same rights as men, and
slavery was abolished. All the palaces of the kings of Persia were built by paid workers in an era where slaves typically did such work.
In the
Maurya Empire of
ancient India, citizens of all religions and ethnic groups had rights to
freedom,
tolerance, and
equality. The need for tolerance on an
egalitarian basis can be found in the
Edicts of
Ashoka the Great, which emphasize the importance of tolerance in public policy by the government. The slaughter or capture of
prisoners of war was also condemned by Ashoka. Slavery was also non-existent in ancient India.
Roman law also embraced certain limited forms of liberty, even under the rule of the Roman Emperors. However, these liberties were accorded only to
Roman citizens. Still, the Roman citizen enjoyed a combination of positive liberty (the right to a trial, a right of appeal, law and contract enforcement) and negative liberty (unhindered right to contract and the right to not be tortured). Many of the liberties enjoyed under Roman law endured through the Middle Ages, but were enjoyed solely by the
nobility, never by the common man. The idea of unalienable and universal liberties had to wait until the Age of Enlightenment.
In
Chinese, freedom is written 自由(ziyou). 自(zi) is the character for self, and 由(you) is the character to follow, with an additional connotation of reason. Liberty thus implies a necessary connection between individualism and a rational duty.
Social contract
thumb|Right|Eugène Delacroix - La liberté guidant le peuple (1830)
In
French Liberty. British Slavery (1792),
James Gillray caricatured French "liberty" as the opportunity to starve, and British "slavery" as bloated complaints about taxation.
The
social contract theory, invented by
Hobbes,
John Locke and
Rousseau, were among the first to provide a political classification of
rights, in particular through the notion of
sovereignty and of
natural rights. The thinkers of the
Enlightenment reasoned the assertion that
law governed both heavenly and human affairs, and that law gave the
king his power, rather than the king's power giving force to law. The
divine right of kings was thus opposed to the
sovereign's unchecked
auctoritas. This conception of law would find its culmination in
Montesquieu's thought. The conception of law as a relationship between individuals, rather than families, came to the fore, and with it the increasing focus on
individual liberty as a fundamental reality, given by "
Nature and
Nature's God," which, in the
ideal state, would be as expansive as possible. The Enlightenment created then, among other ideas,
liberty: that is, of a free individual being most free within the context of a state which provides stability of the laws. Later, more radical philosophies such as
socialism articulated themselves in the course of the
French Revolution and in the 19th century.
Modern perspectives
The modern conceptions of
democracy, whether
representative democracies or other types of democracies, are all found on the
Rousseauist idea of
popular sovereignty. However,
liberalism distinguishes itsef from
socialism and communism in that it advocates for a form of
representative democracy, while socialism claims to work for a
direct democracy.
Liberalism is a
political current embracing several historical and present-day ideologies that claim defence of individual liberty as the purpose of government. Two main strands are apparent, although both are founded on an
individualist ideology. In continental Europe the term usually refers to
economic liberalism, that is the right of individual to contract, trade and operate in a market free of constraint. In the United States it often refers to
social liberalism, including the right to dissent from orthodox tenets or established authorities in political or religious matters. Both are core political issues, and highly contentious. In the United States Supreme Court decision
Griswold v. Connecticut, Justice
William O. Douglas argued that liberties relating to personal relationships,such as marriage, have a unique primacy of place in the hierarchy of freedoms. Professor Jacob M. Appel has summarized this principle as follows:
A school of thought popular among US
libertarians holds that there is no tenable distinction between the two sorts of liberty -- that they are, indeed, one and the same, to be protected (or opposed) together. In the context of U.S.
constitutional law, for example, they point out that the constitution twice lists "life, liberty, and property" without making any distinctions within that troika.
Anarcho-Individualists, such as
Max Stirner, demanded the utmost respect for the liberty of the individual. From a very similar perspective from North America,
primitivists like
John Zerzan proclaimed that
civilization not just the state (as in socialist thought) would need to be abolished to foster liberty. Some in the US see protecting the ideal of liberty as a
conservative policy, because this would conform to the spirit of individual liberty that they consider is at the heart of the American constitution. Some think liberty is almost synonymous with
democracy, at least in one sense of that word, while others see conflicts or even opposition between the two concepts, with democracy being nothing more than the tyranny of the majority.
Liberty Canon
See also
