ABSTRACT Isaiah Berlin’s criticisms of positive liberty are often read as mere artefacts of his Cold War context. But are they good criticisms? This article evaluates Berlin’s three main worries about positive liberty—the inner-citadel worry, the moralization worry, and the tyranny worry. I find that while they may be reasonable worries to have about any concept of liberty, they are not compelling criticisms of positive liberty in particular.

This study compares Philip Pettit’s account of freedom to Hegelian accounts. Both share the key insight that characterizes the tradition of republicanism from the Ancients to Rousseau: to be subordinated to the will of particular others is to be unfree. They both also hold that relations to others, relations of recognition, are in various ways directly constitutive of freedom, and in different ways enabling conditions of freedom. The republican ideal of non-domination can thus be fruitfully understood in light of the (...) Hegelian structure of ‘being at one with oneself (Beisichsein) in another’. However, while the Hegelian view converges with Pettit on non-domination and recognition, their comprehensive theories of freedom are based on radically different metaphysics. One key difference concerns the relationship between freedom and nature, and there is a further difference between Pettit’s (ahistorical) idea of the concept dependence of freedom, and the Hegelian (historical) idea of the conception dependence of freedom. -/- Keywords: Pettit; Hegel; freedom; non-domination; mutual recognition; republicanism; ‘being at one with oneself’; social freedom. (shrink)

Democratic deliberation places the burden of self‐governance on its citizens to provide mutual justifying reasons (Gutmann & Thompson, 1996). This article concerns the limiting effect that group identity has on the efficacy of democratic deliberation for equality in education. Under conditions of a powerful majority, deliberation can be repressive and discriminatory. Issues of white flight and race‐based admissions serve to illustrate the bias of which deliberation is capable when it fails to substantively take group identity into account. As forms of (...) Gilbert's (1994) plural subjects, identity group members holding the group identity can experience agency as the freedom to believe together with members of their group. I argue that attending to how group members acquire group beliefs through trust is a reasonable accommodation of group identity in deliberation. (shrink)

The article responds to an influential critique of the view that there is a conceptual distinction between kinds of liberty. The critique in question began with Gerald MacCallum Jr’s famous argument that liberty is a single concept that has a triadic structure between agent, constraint, and end. Against this view, the article argues that the triadic structure offered by MacCallum is unable to conceptualize a particular distinct understanding of liberty. Following Charles Taylor, the article defends the view that there is (...) a distinct ‘exercise-concept’ of liberty that the triadic structure cannot account for. In support of this claim, the article contests a recent argument that an exercise-concept of liberty can be conceptualized in terms of the triadic structure. The article argues that the triadic framework can only conceptualize an exercise-concept of liberty at the cost of abandoning the substance of that framework. To defend this, the article explains that the triadic structure and an exercise-concept are basically conceptually distinct in virtue of the fact that the former embodies a ‘static’ concept, whereas the latter embodies a ‘dynamic’ one. To complete the argument that an exercise-concept is a distinct concept of liberty, the article articulates a common theme that unifies both the triadic structure and an exercise-concept as concepts of liberty. (shrink)

This article argues that Hayek employed a neo-Roman concept of liberty. It will show that Hayek’s definition of liberty conforms to that provided by Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner, respectively the chief theorist and leading historian of the neo-Roman concept. It will go on to demonstrate how the genealogy of liberty Hayek provides is also the same as that offered by Pettit and Skinner. This is important, as the neo-Roman concept is not regarded, either by Hayek or by neo-republicans led (...) by Pettit, as a product of political theory. Instead it is viewed as underpinning a historical tradition. Hayek’s self-conscious association with this tradition reinforces the article’s prior claim that Hayek’s conceptual writing on liberty is neo-Roman. Finally, the article considers how the neo-Roman nature of Hayek’s work complicates the historical narrative and political claims the neo-republicans make for the neo-Roman concept. It concludes that it is open to use by another, very different, political tradition: free market liberalism. (shrink)

This article argues that Hayek employed a neo-Roman concept of liberty. It will show that Hayek’s definition of liberty conforms to that provided by Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner, respectively...

Isaiah Berlin distinguished between negative liberty, which is freedom from external coercion, and positive liberty, the freedom to master oneself. But the schema is too simple. Adam Smith thought that God had harmoniously arranged the world in such a way that the freedom provided by our negative liberty tended to redound to the public good. Mill, worried about the deleterious effects of public ignorance, accorded elites a prominent role in ensuring that negative liberty would lead to positive results. More recently, (...) libertarian paternalists, such as Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, have argued that research on biases and heuristics demonstrates the need for psychologically informed elites to direct negative liberty toward positive ends by crafting better ?choice contexts.? In these thinkers one can discern a third version of liberty, where negative liberty is not an end in itself but a means, however insufficient, to positive outcomes. (shrink)

This essay proposes a bifurcation within the concept of moderation in early modern Europe. To draw this out it reconstructs an “encounter” between two citizens of the scholarly Republic of Letters in the years around 1700—Lodovico Antonio Muratori and Jean Le Clerc—and the concept of moderation each maintained. It proposes that the former maintained an ideal of moderation which was “hard” principally about self-regulation, while the latter maintained an ideal of moderation which was “soft” and principally about (religious) toleration. It (...) then attaches this “encounter” to an analogous conflict between uses of moderation in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. It concludes by proposing that this bifurcation, while occurring within scholarly and theological debates, has enduring significance for our interpretation of the Enlightenment, and for the passage of political moderation into the modern world. (shrink)

Various quantitative analyses have stressed the connection between lower socioeconomic status (SES) and low political participation. The general argument behind these studies was that since political participation is crucial for democracy, and since low SES compromises political participation, liberal democratic governments cannot afford such a compromise. This paper argues that presenting political participation as a democratic value, corresponding to a ‘positive’ right, places the implied argumentation of such studies in a potential conflict with classical liberalism and its contemporary ‘successors’, emphasizing (...) ‘negative’ rights alone. However, the tension can be reconciled by employing the political thought of John Locke, one of the forefathers of classical liberalism. Thus, the paper illuminates a strong bond in Locke’s thought between democratic political participation and liberal natural rights. In fact, I argue that it is precisely his advocacy of liberal rights that leads to a conception of political participation, converging with democratic theory and redistributive policies. (shrink)

This article examines the perceived conflict between freedom and sustainability, proposing that a qualitative understanding of freedom can integrate liberal and ecological interests. It critiques the notion of quantitative freedom, focused on maximizing individual choices without considering their content or purpose, for ignoring essential aspects such as the rights of future generations and ecological sustainability. In contrast, it argues that qualitative freedom, which values options based on their contribution to human autonomy and dignity, offers a more comprehensive solution. This perspective (...) prioritizes options that promote the freedom of all, including future generations, and suggests that some restrictions may be necessary to enhance sustainable life opportunities. The conclusion asserts that qualitative freedom should precede the quantitative consideration of options, allowing sustainability policies to be viewed not as limitations on freedom but as qualitative improvements that ensure better opportunities for all, both now and in the future. (shrink)