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Liberty (as a political concept, from Wikipedia)
Religion: Speech and Thought.
Liberty is a concept of political philosophy that identifies the condition to which an
individual has the right to act according to his or her own will.
In feudal times, a liberty was an area of allodial land in which regalian rights had
been waived.
Individualist and classical liberal conceptions of liberty relate to the freedom of the individual
from outside compulsion or coercion.
Social liberal conceptions of liberty relate freedom to social structure and agency.
Philosophy:
I see her face everywhere I go. On the streets, and even at the picture show.
Have you see her? Tell me. HAVE you seen her?
Opinions on what constitute liberty can vary widely, but can be generally classified as
positive liberty and negative liberty.
Positive liberty asserts that freedom is found in a person's ability to have agency, particularly
in the sense of having the power and resources to carry out their own will, without being
inhibited by the structural inhibitions from society ,such as racism, classism, sexism,
or governance.
In the negative sense, one is considered free to the extent to which no person interferes
with his or her activity.
According to Thomas Hobbes, "a free man is he that... is not hindered to do what he hath
the will to do."
John Stuart Mill, in his work, On Liberty, was the first to recognize the difference
between liberty as the freedom to act and liberty as the absence of coercion.
In his book, Two Concepts of Liberty, Isaiah Berlin formally framed the differences between
these two perspectives as the distinction between two opposite concepts of liberty:
positive and negative.
The latter designates a negative condition in which an individual is protected from tyranny
and the arbitrary exercise of authority, while the former refers to having the means or opportunity,
rather than the lack of restraint, to do things.
Mill offered insight into the notions of soft tyranny and mutual liberty with his harm principle.
It can be seen as important to understand these concepts when discussing liberty, since
they all represent little pieces of the greater puzzle known as freedom.
In a philosophical sense, it can be said that morality must supersede tyranny in any legitimate
form of government.
Otherwise, people are left with a societal system rooted in backwardness, disorder, and
regression.
The Statue of Liberty, donated to the US by France, is an artistic personification of
this concept.
The concept of negative liberty has several noteworthy aspects.
First, negative liberty defines a realm or "zone" of freedom (in the "silence of law").
In Berlin's words, "Liberty in the negative sense involves an answer to the question 'What
is the area within which the subject - a person or group - is or should be left to do or be
what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons."
Some philosophers have disagreed on the extent of this realm, while accepting the main point
that liberty defines that realm in which one may act unobstructed by others.
Second, the restriction on the freedom to act implicit in negative liberty is imposed
by a person or persons and not due to causes such as nature, lack, or incapacity.
Helvetius expresses this point clearly: "The free man is the man who is not in irons, nor
imprisoned in a gaol, nor terrorized like a slave by the fear of punishment. It is not
lack of freedom not to fly like an eagle or swim like a whale."
The dichotomy of positive and negative Liberty is considered specious by political philosophers
in traditions such as socialism, social democracy, libertarian socialism, and Marxism.
Some of them argue that positive and negative liberty are indistinguishable in practice,
while others claim that one kind of liberty cannot exist independently of the other.
A common argument is that the preservation of negative liberty requires positive action
on the part of the government or society to prevent some individuals from taking away
the liberty of others.
A socialist, liberal and progressive defines liberty as being connected to the reasonably
equitable distribution of wealth, arguing that the unrestrained concentration of wealth
(the means of production) into only a few hands negates Liberty.
In other words, without relatively equal ownership, the subsequent concentration of power and
influence into a small portion of the population inevitably results in the domination of the
wealthy and the subjugation of the poor.
Thus, freedom and material equality are seen as intrinsically connected.
On the other hand, the classical liberal argues that wealth cannot be evenly distributed without
force being used against individuals, which reduces individual liberty.