Balancing Freedom: Exploring Positive and Negative Liberties
The terms liberty and freedom are used interchangeably by political and social philosophers, generally speaking, they are realistically the same word. This is positive and negative freedom essay where will be an attempt to outline and assess the central features of positive and negative liberty.
The term freedom is widely used in political thinking, however, different academics disciplines use the term in different ways. For example, the term freedom in philosophy is seen as a property of the will, in sociology freedom stands for social relations and in political theory, freedom is treated as an ethical ideal. This shows that the words have a very deep root and overall the idea of differentiating between negative and positive liberty goes back at least to Kant, his theories and ideas were later backed up by Isaiah Berlin in the 1950s and 1960s.
Negative liberty or freedom can be described as the absence of any barriers, constraints, or obstacles. It is the idea that one is free to the extent that they are not blocked or stopped by another person. On the other hand, positive freedom can be described as the chance of acting, or the reality of acting, to undertake responsibility for one's life and understand one's central purposes. Here comes the idea of self- governing and where one is facing anxiety or other factors that may influence one’s decision. While negative freedom is generally credited to singular specialists, positive freedom is some of the time ascribed to collectivises, or people considered principally as individuals from given collectivises. In his work, Berlin shows that positive and negative liberty are not just different kinds of liberty, but they can be seen as rivals; opposing understandings of a single political ideal. Isaiah Berlin first published an essay in 1958, called these two concepts of liberty negative and positive respectively, which was first presented as a talk to students in oxford university
Berlin expresses negative freedom as freedom from external constraints and interference, negative freedom primary concern would be ensuring that there are no unwanted, unwarranted interventions into one’s life against one's will. He specifically says there must be a certain area of personal freedom which must not be violated under any circumstances. Berlin makes a distinction between one’s ability and freedom to do something. For example, I’m not able to play in the football league but no law or anyone is stopping me from doing it.
A lot of liberal thinkers such as Berlin have suggested that the concept of positive freedom brings with it a danged of authoritarianism. Berlin himself was a liberal writer during the cold war and was able to see and comprehend the way totalitarian dictator of the twentieth century were able to twist the noble idea of freedom as self-mastery and self-realisation. According to Berlin, this idea begins with the idea of a divided self, followed by pointing out how some individuals are more rational than others. Those that are more rational know best what is in the best rational interest of themselves and others which are less rational. This permits them to state that by constraining individuals less discerning than themselves to do the same thing and accordingly to understand their actual selves, they are in certainty freeing them from their just exact wants. Incidentally, Berlin says, those supporting of positive freedom will make an extra stride that comprises in thinking about the self as more extensive than the individual and as spoken to by a natural social entirety. We can link Berlin’s work to later work by Hobbes ‘Leviathan’ where Hobbes describes liberty as a missing impediment, Hobbes described impediments to the right of nature as the liberty of people to do whatever they judge to be the most conducive to self- preservation.
To conclude, Berlin was seen as one of the most important thinkers as for positive and negative liberty, his work encouraged and challenged other political thinkers to express their opinion and either back up Berlin or challenge his political thought. Berlin is still used in today’s society and continues to be challenged as one of the key thinkers regarding positive and negative freedom, Berlin did not argue the rejection of positive liberty, but he saw it as an important human value among many which were necessary to any free society. Berlin argued that as long as positive liberty is identified with the autonomy of individuals and not the goals and desires of individuals, positive liberty is the vision of liberty that is genuine and valuable. Berlin forcefully exposes the possible abuses of positive liberty in his work and influences much more recent works.
