60 Global Ethics for Leadership
such natural rights “have always been formulated negatively, with refer-
ence to restrictions to be overcome. When these restrictions have been
overcome they represent a positive content of what we call for the time
being our liberties.”^23
This means that experiences of the lack of freedom and the struggles
to overcome them lead to new interpretations of freedom and new en-
deavours to enshrine them in law. The struggle to abolish slavery is the
prototype of this historical process.^24 The consciousness of freedom as a
value with a binding character for human life and for the shaping of hu-
man life in common is thus generated by what the sociologist Hans Joas
describes as an “interplay between suffering and the power to create
value [...] the struggle for religious freedom in the eighteenth century,
the struggle to abolish slavery in the nineteenth century, and the fight
against the return of the Holocaust in the twentieth century - without
these contexts, it is impossible to explain the gradual articulation and
institutionalization of these values.”^25
Insofar as the history of freedom may be traced through such a pro-
cess of the formation of values, there is a shift in the relationship be-
tween negative and positive freedom. This constitutes a far-reaching
corrective to the claim that negative freedom lacks content, while only
positive freedom draws on positive content.^26 Demands for freedom
usually gain their specific content from experiences of the denial of free
23
George Herbert Mead. "Natural Rights and the Theory of the Political Institu-
tion", Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 12 (1915): 141-
155 (147) URL https://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Mead/
pubs/Mead_1915a.html 24
25 Cf. Orlando Patterson, Freedom, (New York: Basic Books, 1991).^
Hans Joas, "Der Wert der Freiheit und die Erfahrung der Unfreiheit", in
Heinrich Bedford-Strohm et al (eds) Freiheit verantworten. Festschrift für W.
Huber, (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2002), 446-455 (451);
cf. idem., Die Entstehung der Werte, (Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp, 1997); (ET
Huber, 26 Ethics, translated by Brian McNeill, 3).
On this approach see Michael Theunissen, Freiheit und Schuld– Freiheit und
Sünde, in Bedford-Strohm, Freiheit verantworten, 343 -356 (346).