4.1 Introduction
Gerald MacCallum (1967) defined liberty as a triadic concept — the freedom of an individual X, from an obstacle A, to do B. In other words, X is not restrained by A from doing B.
MacCallum argued it was misleading to divide theorists into advocates of negative or positive liberty since all three terms are used by both camps. However, the two conceptions can still be differentiated by the contrasting emphasis they place on A or B:
- Negative liberty: B denotes an infinite set of possible actions; A (restraints) is narrowly defined — sometimes only intentionally imposed physical barriers, more frequently also including laws.
- Positive liberty: B is not infinite — not every action counts as free (e.g., selling oneself into slavery is not freedom); A (restraints) is defined much more widely to include not only physical barriers and laws but also incapacities — lack of material or psychic resources.
General Critiques of Liberty
Marxist-derived criticism: The freedom of some has historically required the domination of others — freedom of male Greek and American citizens depended on the unfreedom of slaves; men’s freedom is based on the domination of women; freedom of rich Northern nations results from control over poorer Southern nations. General principle (Bauman, 1988): “the freedom of some makes the dependence of others both necessary and profitable; while the unfreedom of one part makes the freedom of another possible.” If freedom means the freedom to subjugate others, it has no normative value.
Foucauldian criticism (Discipline and Punish): Modernity has expanded not only coercive state apparatuses but also regulatory institutions (schools, bureaucracies) that extend citizens’ subjection, not their freedom. Existing emancipatory traditions were merely masks hiding this hidden domination.
Feminist criticism: Prevailing theories of freedom are infected with a masculine bias — conceptualised solely on the basis of male experience, they ignore a large part of women’s activities. (N.J. Hirschmann, 1989): defining freedom as absence of restraints as “the hallmark of humanity provides another means of asserting women’s non-human status.”
These critiques did not result in the rejection of liberty — opposition movements worldwide continue to struggle in its name. The task for theorists is to formulate a conception of freedom that meets all three objections.
Beyond the Negative/Positive Divide
Recent discussions no longer simply defend one camp. Instead they question the internal structures of both conceptions and seek to replace them with an alternative.
- Against negative liberty: by starting from an individual with given desires and defining freedom as non-interference with those preferences, it fails to examine whether the formation of those preferences is itself autonomous given existing social circumstances.
- Against positive liberty: while it correctly goes beyond non-interference and analyses the formation of selfhood, it formulates autonomous selfhood as “an act largely independent of any social context” (P. Patton, 1989) — a criticism particularly applicable to Kant.
Contemporary theorists argue for four social conditions of freedom:
- Publicly guaranteed protection of certain areas of life from physical and legal impediments.
- Social provision of resources — income, education, health.
- One’s cultural context being valued in the society one lives in — underlies demands for cultural rights; individuals are not equally free in societies where cultures are unequally valued.
- Some notion of collective freedom — more than the right to vote or free expression; the freedom of some must be made dependent on the freedom of others, to counter the objection that freedom always means the freedom of some to dominate others.
4.2 Negative Liberty
Isaiah Berlin
The classic defence of negative liberty — “Two Concepts of Liberty” (first published 1958).
Berlin: “not being interfered with by others. The wider the area of non-interference, the wider my freedom.” (Berlin, 1969)
This echoes Hobbes (Leviathan): liberty is the absence of “external impediments.” For Hobbes, “a free man, is he, that in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to.”
- In the state of nature, absence of civil law should mean more freedom — but every individual acts as an external impediment to another’s freedom.
- The sovereign’s laws ensure citizens are free from interference from one another.
- Hobbes saw no contradiction between the laws of an absolute sovereign and his subjects’ liberty — what mattered was not whether the subject had a say in the laws, but whether the sovereign left as large an area of life as possible unregulated.
Berlin makes the same point: negative liberty “is principally concerned with the area of control, not with its source… there is no necessary connection between individual liberty and democratic rule. The answer to the question ‘Who governs me?’ is logically distinct from the question ‘How far does government interfere with me?'” (Berlin, 1968)
Freedom vs. Ability (Hobbes)
Hobbes distinguished liberty from power/ability: a stone lying still or a man bedridden by sickness lacks the power to move, not the liberty. Most negative liberty theorists echo this distinction but disagree on when a condition constitutes lack of ability vs. lack of liberty.
Berlin’s position on poverty: if a man is too poor to afford something on which there is no legal ban (a loaf of bread, a journey around the world), and this poverty results from “other human beings having made arrangements” whereby some lack resources while others have abundance — the poor man is not unable but unfree to buy bread. “The criterion of oppression is the part that I believe to be played by other human beings, directly or indirectly, with or without the intention of doing so, in frustrating my wishes.”
By contrast, Hillel Steiner argues only physically intentional barriers can make a person unfree — showing the wide range of views even among negative liberty advocates.
John Stuart Mill
On Liberty (1859) — another classical defence of negative liberty.
Mill’s principle: “the sole end for which mankind are warranted… in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection… the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” His own good — physical or moral — is not a sufficient warrant.
- Mill drew a line between self-regarding and other-regarding action.
- In three specific areas — thought and its expression (oral and written), taste and pursuits, and combination/association — society has no justification for interference except to prevent direct material harm to others.
- “No society in which these liberties are not, on the whole, respected, is free, whatever may be its form of government.”
Mill’s broader goal: the improvement of mankind. Individual liberty is the essential means to this improvement — “the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many possible independent centres of improvement as there are individuals.” Human faculties — perception, judgement, mental activity, moral preference — are exercised only in making choices. Without liberty, these faculties atrophy.
4.3 Positive Liberty
Positive liberty advocates are more ambitious than negative liberty advocates — they seek to enlarge the area of self-determined action as much as possible. They do this in two ways.
First Way: Including Internal Restraints
Rousseau (The Social Contract): being a slave to one’s desires or passions is the very opposite of freedom. Desires are heteronomous — they come from the environment or upbringing. To give in to one’s desires is structurally similar to giving in to another’s wishes. True freedom requires consciously and rationally choosing to fulfil only those wants one recognises as genuinely one’s own. “The impulse of mere appetite is slavery, while obedience to a self-prescribed law is liberty.”
Kant: actions that are merely the product of brute nature working through one — blindly following prompted desires — cannot count as free. To be free, one must select amongst one’s desires according to a rational principle one has oneself endorsed.
Second Way: Democratic Mechanisms
Freedom is not merely the absence of laws but living under self-made laws — so the emphasis is on having a voice in framing all the laws one lives under.
Rousseau’s civil freedom: freedom entails not only self-determined wants but also participation in framing the laws under which one lives. There is no form of government compatible with freedom other than democracy. Legislation framed collectively by the people according to the general will acts as a means of each individual being in control over his or her desires — collectively made laws become a form of freedom, not a constraint on it.
Contrast: in Hobbes, the sovereign’s laws increase freedom by preventing interference from others. In Rousseau, collectively made laws are themselves a form of freedom.
T.H. Green
“Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract” (1881) — important advocate of positive liberty after Rousseau.
Green: “We do not mean merely freedom from restraint or compulsion… We do not mean a freedom that can be enjoyed by one man or one set of men at the cost of a loss of freedom to others… we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying, and that, too, something that we do or enjoy in common with others… the ideal of true freedom is the maximum of power for all members of human society alike to make the best of themselves.”
Both Mill and Green agreed that the value of liberty lies in allowing individuals to “make the best of themselves” — but disagreed on the definition of liberty itself. This is the central unresolved tension: agreement on the value of liberty does not necessarily produce agreement on its meaning.
4.4 Recent Debates on Liberty
Feminist Perspectives on Liberty
O. Patterson (1991): “Freedom began its long journey in the Western consciousness as a woman’s value.” Women constituted the first slaves in late 9th–8th century BC Greece — during warfare between aristocratic clans, male prisoners were killed while women were enslaved. As the first slaves, women were the first to conceive of and value freedom as the antithesis of slavery.
Patterson identifies a distinctly women’s conception of personal freedom — different from Western negative liberty: ancient women “were never satisfied with a purely negative view of personal freedom, not only because they recognised its potential nihilism and moral vacuity but because they could see how an emasculated negative liberty easily sublated into liberty as power over others.” For enslaved women, freedom was not domination of others’ will but a state to be shared with others — freedom as love, as being restored to kin and family.
Psychoanalytic Feminist Theory (post-1960s)
Research on the differential impact of mother-dominated parenting on boys and girls:
- The mother (primary caretaker) represents the entire object world to all infants; the earliest relationship determines a child’s stance toward itself and others.
- Infants pass through phases: symbiosis, separation, and individuation — experienced differently by male and female infants in patriarchal culture.
- Mothers more readily encourage separation and individuation in sons while being less willing to give up the symbiotic phase with daughters.
- Little boys learn to fear their primary identification with their mother because male identity is defined as not being female — leading to denial of attachment and relationship as part of masculine identity formation.
- Adult male result: perception of all relationships as threatening; sense of freedom as the absence of the (m)other.
- Conclusion: it is misguided to conceptualise autonomy or freedom as requiring the absence of others. Autonomy develops in interaction with other selves — freedom must be conceptualised in terms other than non-interference.
Carole Pateman
Pateman seeks to construct an alternative women’s conception of freedom, arguing most feminists failed to see that modern society is based not only on a social contract but also a sexual contract.
- The original contract created not just civil society but a patriarchal civil society — it was a contract between men to, among other things, “enjoy equal sexual access to women.”
- Result: “Men’s freedom and women’s subjection”; civil freedom remains a “masculine attribute” (Pateman, 1988).
- The original contract was simultaneously a social-sexual-slave contract — focusing only on its social aspect conceals why women cannot be free in a society based on it.
Pateman argues women’s freedom can be constructed only by abandoning the language of contract — which encourages the conception of individuals as having property in their person, and corollary views of freedom as independence (especially independence in the labour market).
Her alternative: “freedom as independence” should be transformed into “freedom as autonomy” — a freedom secured through the recognition of the interdependence of all citizens.
4.5 Summary (Key Takeaways)
- Liberty is a triadic concept (X, A, B) — negative and positive conceptions differ in how broadly they define A (restraints) and B (possible actions).
- Negative liberty (Hobbes, Berlin, Mill): freedom as non-interference; the area of non-interference is what matters, not the source of control.
- Positive liberty (Rousseau, Kant, Green): freedom as self-determined action under self-prescribed rational laws; includes internal restraints and democratic participation.
- Recent debates reject both traditional camps and focus on the social conditions of freedom — including cultural recognition and collective freedom.
- Feminist critiques challenge the masculine bias of both conceptions and propose freedom as autonomy grounded in social interdependence, not the absence of others.
- The idea of liberty as everyone’s birthright is the gift of modernity; an adequate conception of individual liberty must acknowledge, not ignore, social interdependence.
