Liberty

Of central importance to liberalism – both as an economic and a political system – is the notion of liberty.  Liberal theorists, however, disagree as to the nature of liberty in liberal societies.

One formulation of liberty – the negative formulation – views liberty as, simply, the absence of external obstacles or constraints.  Isaiah Berlin, a well-known proponent of negative liberty describes the position as follows:

“I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind…it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act. You lack political liberty or freedom only if you are prevented from attaining a goal by other human beings” (Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” in Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford University Press, p.122).

This conception of liberty, although it clearly protects freedom in a broad range of cases, is not without its limits; and one conceptual difficulty with liberty is locating those limits.

Many hold the view that we arrive at the limits of liberty when our actions harm others.  John Stuart Mill proposed this position in what is commonly known as the ‘Harm Principle’:

“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.  His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.” (J.S. Mill, On Liberty).

Others argue for wider restraints on individual freedoms, claiming that freedom should also be restricted when one’s actions are offense or immoral.  The freedom to buy or produce pornography, for example, and the freedom to engage in prostitution, for another, are often held to be the kinds of offensive and immoral freedoms that should be restricted.

Apart from these various positions with respect to negative liberty, some liberal theorist have proposed a conception of positive liberty, claiming that the concept of negative liberty is inadequate.  Positive liberty takes freedom to be self-determination, or autonomy.    It is “the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes” (Ian Carter, “Positive and Negative Liberty,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, October 8 2007, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/).

In spite of the disagreement among theorists about the concept of liberty in liberal theory, liberty is widely held to be a fundamental value of modern Western society, and is vital to political and economic life as we know it.