A helpful approach to defining freedom was
offered by Sir Isaiah Berlin in his piece “Two Concepts
of Liberty” (1957), which divides freedom into nega-
tive and positive freedom. Negative freedom is the
individual’s freedom from some obstacle (slavery,
bondage, prison, legal, moral or cultural restraint) to
free movement. Freedom, then, is the absence of
external control. The liberty of movement, action,
thought, impulse, passion, and so on, without some-
one, institution, culture, or law saying “you can’t do
that.” Such unrestricted freedom characterizes
Thomas HOBBES’s vision of the STATE OF NATURE, which
leads to competition, conflict, and self-destruction.
Positive freedom is the individual’s freedom tosome
accomplishment or substantive achievement. So, the
freedom to be well educated or to have a job or wealth
or medical care is positive freedom. An example of
these contrasting views of liberty might be between
the economic systems of CAPITALISM (or free enter-
prise) and SOCIALISM(or a planned economy). In the
capitalist United States, anyone is free to start a busi-
ness, but there is no guarantee he or she will succeed
or become wealthy; no law prohibits you from trying,
but society doesn’t provide substantive support. In the
socialist former SOVIET UNION, by contrast, individuals
were forbidden from starting private businesses (that
is, denied negative freedom) but were guaranteed
employment, housing, health care, and retirement by
the STAT E(so they had positive freedom). The negative
freedom system claims that economic freedom, intel-
lectual and religious, actually leads to substantive
abundance of PROPERTY, knowledge, or goodness. The
positive freedom view claims that only results-ori-
ented liberty is true freedom.
Various major political thinkers have approached
the subject of political freedom in different ways.
PLATO’s Republicsees individual freedom best realized
in the knowledge of and training of one’s innate capac-
ities and their use in the service of the whole society.
Thus one’s freedom must be strictly ordered and
directed to the good of the just state. Purely individual
freedom leads to frustration and delusion. Only the
disciplined, well-educated person is truly free. An
undisciplined individual freedom (as in DEMOCRACY)
produces unhappy, foolish people and unjust govern-
ment. Freedom, as a concept, is relatively unimportant
for the CLASSICALthinkers, who regard VIRTUE, JUSTICE,
and harmony as more significant. ARISTOTLEdiscusses
freedom in substantive terms of the Greek citizen
being free by rising above “mere” economic (animal)
existence to rational, ethical (human) activity. Real
freedom is the realization of one’s human telos, or
potential, in fully developed reason, speech, and moral
choice and action. This requires much education,
modeling, and participation in the public realm. For
the CHRISTIANthinkers, St. Paul, St. AUGUSTINEand St.
Thomas AQUINAS(as well as, later, John CALVIN, Martin
LUTHER, and John WINTHROP), a person’s natural liberty
is prone to evil (murder, theft, adultery, etc.) because
human nature is sinful. Obedience to God’s will pro-
duces true freedom or “the liberty where with Christ
hath made us free.” So, Christian liberty involves
escaping the bondage or slavery of sin through faith in
Jesus Christ and the transformation of the individual
through the Holy Spirit. This freedom is internal and
can exist even in oppressive political social circum-
stances. The government should protect “moral lib-
erty” (the right to do good) but not “natural liberty”
(to individual sinful preferences).
John LOCKE, the archetypical modern British LIB-
ERAL, declares that people are “free, equal, and inde-
pendent.” This human freedom to follow one’s
economic, religious, and social interest is not, for
Locke, “license” to do whatever one wants but is con-
strained by the law of nature, which reason tells you is
to never use your freedom to harm anyone else’s rights
to life, liberty, or property. For Locke, reasonable peo-
ple restrain their freedom so as not to hurt others in
their lives, health, liberty, or possessions; that is, indi-
vidual freedom is not to kill, steal, or enslave. The
state is established to punish those (criminals) who do
not respect the RIGHTSof others and therefore abuse
their freedom.
ROUSSEAU, the French liberal, sees freedom in the
positive social sense: Freedom is “obeying laws one
has had a part in making.” This collectivist GENERAL
WILLconception of freedom goes into MARXISMand FAS-
CISM—freedom as obedience to the totality or state.
BURKEcriticizes this notion of liberty as alternately
licentious and barbaric; his liberty is within historic
British TRADITIONS.
John Stuart MILLapplies British liberalism to the free-
dom of the mind. His arguments for intellectual liberty
(in On Liberty) against custom and convention include
these: (1) A new or controversial viewpoint may be
true, and suppressing it will rob humanity of useful
truth; (2) even if the obnoxious view is false, the defeat-
ing of it by truth will strengthen the correct view. The
best society, for Mill, will be full of such critical thinkers
and tolerant social liberty of conscience and intellect.114 freedom