Four Ways Freedom Has Been Understood

“In this brief article, my final for the year, I will discuss four different ways freedom has been conceived of in the European philosophical tradition.”

Introduction

Freedom, it has been said, is not free. This is eminently true, as countless religious figures and philosophers have observed. Whether one agrees with the liberal contention that freedom is one of, if not the, foundational moral and political principle to which we should commit ourselves, there is no denying the allure and appeal of liberty as a mobilizing idea. Everyone from conservative traditionalists to radical Marxists swears by it. Benjamin Constant and Leo Strauss have defined epochs in Euro-American history by distinguishing between the liberties of the ancients and the liberties of the moderns. Yet what freedom is remains deeply unclear and is often subject to intense debate and even entrenched political antagonisms. For many conservative traditionalists, the permissiveness of the contemporary era cannot be understood as genuine freedom since it constitutes a debased kind of subordination to unvirtuous and even animalistic passions. Likewise, socialists have been saying since the 19th century that the kind of freedom offered by a stratified capitalist society amounts to equal liberty for the poor and rich to sleep under bridges should they choose not to work.

In this brief article, my final for the year, I will discuss four different ways freedom has been conceived of in the European philosophical tradition. It draws some inspiration from my recent book A Critical Legal Conception of Liberalism and Liberal Rights in that I think both conservative and liberal societies have fallen into the error of privileging some forms of freedom over others. A truly just society would seek to find the best balance between all four; of course, though, we must recognize that the crooked timber of humanity will never permit anything truly straight to be made.

Negative Freedom

Drawing on Isaiah Berlin’s seminal essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” the first conception we can invoke is negative freedom. This is the conception most associated with the classical liberal tradition, ranging from Locke onwards. Negative freedom is—simply put—non-coercion by external actors. We are free to the extent that we are left alone and not compelled through force (or the threat of force) to undertake actions we did not choose. Perhaps the most famous espousal of this view was given by J.S. Mill in his essay On Liberty, where he poetically proclaimed that “over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”