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)

In his popular film An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim 2006), Al Gore identifies anthropogenic climate change as the most menacing threat to the future of life on Earth, and he describes that threat specifically as a moral problem: an uninhabitable planetary environment would be an immoral outcome of human behavior. That outcome must be avoided which means, he argues, that a low-carbon trajectory for future human development must be charted without delay. His call-to-action then advocates, among many other things, fast-tracking clean (...) energy technologies and galvanizing the necessary international political will to get climate change under control. Gore is quite correct to identify climate change as an .. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The paper challenges the general perception that the positive–negative freedom discourse privileges negative liberty. It demonstrates that Constant and Berlin’s dual freedom conceptual scheme contains the blueprint of a modern concept of positive freedom and it reveals the nature of negative freedom in an entirely new light. Constant’s ancient and modern liberties have many similarities with Berlin’s two concepts of freedom – positive and negative. The paper shows that these similarities warrant a parallel study and allow us to examine (...) the relation between the two sides of the freedom dichotomy by using the compound terms modern/negative and ancient/positive freedom. It is argued that understanding the relation between the two freedoms depends on accepting ancient/positive liberty as practiced by the participants of modern revolutions. Then we can see why this freedom can both violate and complement modern/negative freedom. The paper argues that the combined tension and mutual dependency of the two freedoms can be explained by tapping into a metaphysical study of human agency, where metaphysics is understood as conceptualisation of moral experience. This helps demonstrate why Constant’s modern liberty and Berlin’s negative liberty rely on satisfaction as a key category reflecting individuals’ capacity for subjective judgement. (shrink)