Positive liberty - Wikipedia Positive liberty From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigation Jump to search Part of a series on Liberalism History Age of Enlightenment List of liberal theorists (contributions to liberal theory) Ideas Civil and political rights Cultural liberalism Democracy Democratic capitalism Economic freedom Economic liberalism Egalitarianism Free market Free trade Freedom of the press Freedom of religion Freedom of speech Gender equality Harm principle Internationalism Laissez-faire Liberty Market economy Natural and legal rights Negative/positive liberty Non-aggression Principle Open society Permissive society Private property Rule of law Secularism Separation of church and state Social contract Welfare state Schools of thought Anarcho-capitalism Classical liberalism Radical liberalism Left-libertarianism Geolibertarianism Right-libertarianism Conservative liberalism Democratic liberalism Green liberalism Liberal autocracy Liberal Catholicism Liberal conservatism Liberal feminism Equity feminism Liberal internationalism Liberal nationalism Liberal socialism Social democracy Muscular liberalism Neoliberalism National liberalism Ordoliberalism Radical centrism Religious liberalism Christian Islamic Jewish Secular liberalism Social liberalism Technoliberalism Third Way Whiggism People Acton Alain Alberdi Alembert Arnold Aron Badawi Barante Bastiat Bentham Berlin Beveridge Bobbio Brentano Bright Broglie Burke Čapek Cassirer Chicherin Chu Chydenius Clinton Cobden Collingdood Condorcet Constant Croce Cuoco Dahrendorf Decy Dewey Dickens Diderot Dongsun Dunoyer Dworkin Einaudi Emerson Eötvös Flach Friedman Galbraith Garrison George Gladstone Gobetti Gomes Gray Green Gu Guizot Hayek Herbert Hobbes Hobhouse Hobson Holbach Hu Humboldt Jefferson Jubani Kant Kelsen Kemal Keynes Korais Korwin-Mikke Kymlicka Lamartine Larra Lecky Li Lincoln Locke Lufti Macaulay Madariaga Madison Martineau Masani Michelet Mill (father) Mill (son) Milton Mises Molteno Mommsen Money Montalembert Montesquieu Mora Mouffe Naoroji Naumann Nozick Nussbaum Obama Ohlin Ortega Paine Paton Popper Price Priestley Prieto Quesnay Qin Ramírez Rathenau Rawls Raz Renan Renouvier Renzi Ricardo Röpke Rorthy Rosmini Rosselli Rousseau Ruggiero Sarmiento Say Sen Earl of Shaftesbury Shklar Sidney Sieyès Şinasi Sismondi Smith Soto Polar Spencer Spinoza Staël Sumner Tahtawi Tao Thierry Thorbecke Thoreau Tocqueville Tracy Troeltsch Turgot Villemain Voltaire Ward Weber Wollstonecraft Zambrano Organizations Africa Liberal Network Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party Arab Liberal Federation Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats European Democratic Party European Liberal Youth European Party for Individual Liberty International Alliance of Libertarian Parties International Federation of Liberal Youth Liberal International Liberal Network for Latin America Liberal parties Liberal South East European Network Regional variants Europe Latin America Albania Armenia Australia Austria Belgium Bolivia Brazil Bulgaria Canada China Chile Colombia Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech lands Denmark Ecuador Egypt Estonia Finland France Georgia Germany Greece Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Iran Israel Italy Japan Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Macedonia Mexico Moldova Montenegro Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Nigeria Norway Panama Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Romania Russia Senegal Serbia Slovakia Slovenia Spain South Africa South Korea Sweden Switzerland Thailand Tunisia Turkey Ukraine United Kingdom United States Arizona School Classical Modern Uruguay Venezuela Zimbabwe Related topics Bias in academia Bias in the media  Liberalism portal  Politics portal v t e Positive liberty is the possession of the capacity to act upon one's free will, as opposed to negative liberty, which is freedom from external restraint on one's actions.[1] A concept of positive liberty may also include freedom from internal constraints.[2] The concepts of structure and agency are central to the concept of positive liberty because in order to be free, a person should be free from inhibitions of the social structure in carrying out their free will. Structurally, classism, sexism, ageism, ableism and racism can inhibit a person's freedom. As positive liberty is primarily concerned with the possession of sociological agency, it is enhanced by the ability of citizens to participate in government and have their voices, interests, and concerns recognized and acted upon. Isaiah Berlin's essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" (1958) is typically acknowledged as the first to explicitly draw the distinction between positive and negative liberty.[3][4] Contents 1 Overview 2 History 3 Examples 4 See also 5 References 6 Further reading Overview[edit] The word liberty can refer to many things, but Isaiah Berlin recognized two main types of liberty. Berlin described a statement such as "I am slave to no man" as one of negative liberty, that is, freedom from another individual's direct interference. He contrasted this with a Positive Freedom statement such as "I am my own master", which lays claim to a freedom to choose one's own pursuits in life.[citation needed] Charles Taylor sees Negative Freedom as an "opportunity-concept": one possesses Negative Freedom if one is not enslaved by external forces, and has equal access to a society's resources (regardless of how one decides to spend their time). Positive Freedom, says Taylor, is an "exercise-concept": possessing it might mean that one is not internally constrained; one must be able to act according to their highest self – according to reason. Suppose a rich and powerful actor is also a drug addict. This actor may possess a great deal of negative liberty, but very little Positive Liberty according to Taylor. By Taylor's definitions, Positive Freedom entails being in a mature state of decision making, free of internal or external restraints (e.g. weakness, fear, ignorance, etc.).[citation needed] History[edit] Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theory of freedom, according to which individual freedom is achieved through participation in the process whereby one's community exercises collective control over its own affairs in accordance with the "general will".[5] Some interpret The Social Contract to suggest that Rousseau believed that liberty was the power of individual citizens to act in the government to bring about changes; this is essentially the power for self-governance and democracy.[citation needed] Rousseau himself said, "the mere impulse to appetite is slavery, while obedience to law we prescribe ourselves is liberty."[6] For Rousseau, the passage from the state of nature to the civil state substitutes justice for instinct gives his actions the morality they had formerly lacked.[7] G. F. W. Hegel wrote in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (in the part in which he introduced the concept of the sphere of abstract right) that "duty is not a restriction on freedom, but only on freedom in the abstract" and that "duty is the attainment of our essence, the winning of positive freedom.[8] Examples[edit] In the description of positive liberty from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Put in the simplest terms, one might say that a democratic society is a free society because it is a self-determined society, and that a member of that society is free to the extent that he or she participates in its democratic process. But there are also individualist applications of the concept of positive freedom. For example, it is sometimes said that a government should aim actively to create the conditions necessary for individuals to be self-sufficient or to achieve self-realization.[5] In "Recovering the Social Contract", Ron Replogle made a metaphor that is helpful in understanding positive liberty. "Surely, it is no assault on my dignity as a person if you take my car keys, against my will, when I have had too much to drink. There is nothing paradoxical about making an agreement beforehand providing for paternalistic supervision in circumstances when our competence is open to doubt."[9] In this sense, positive liberty is the adherence to a set of rules agreed upon by all parties involved. Should the rules be altered, all parties involved must agree upon the changes. Therefore, positive liberty is a contractarian philosophy.[citation needed] However, Isaiah Berlin opposed any suggestion that paternalism and positive liberty could be equivalent.[10] He stated that positive liberty could only apply when the withdrawal of liberty from an individual was in pursuit of a choice that individual himself/herself made, not a general principle of society or any other person's opinion. In the case where a person removes a driver's car keys against their will because they have had too much to drink, this constitutes positive freedom only if the driver has made, of their own free will, an earlier decision not to drive drunk. Thus, by removing the keys, the other person facilitates this decision and ensures that it will be upheld in the face of paradoxical behaviour (i.e., drinking) by the driver. For the remover to remove the keys in the absence of such an expressed intent by the driver, because the remover feels that the driver ought not to drive drunk, is paternalism, and not positive freedom by Berlin's definition.[10] Erich Fromm sees the distinction between the two types of freedom emerging alongside humanity's evolution away from the instinctual activity that characterizes lower animal forms. This aspect of freedom, he argues, "is here used not in its positive sense of 'freedom to' but in its negative sense of 'freedom from', namely freedom from instinctual determination of his actions."[11] For Fromm, freedom from animal instinct implicitly implies that survival now hinges on the necessity of charting one's own course. He relates this distinction to the biblical story of man's expulsion from Eden: Acting against God's orders means freeing himself from coercion, emerging from the unconscious existence of prehuman life to the level of man. Acting against the command of authority, committing a sin, is in its positive human aspect the first act of freedom. [...] he is free from the bondage of paradise, but he is not free to govern himself, to realize his individuality.[12] Positive freedom, Fromm maintains, comes through the actualization of individuality in balance with the separation from the whole: a "solidarity with all men", united not by instinctual or predetermined ties, but on the basis of a freedom founded on reason.[13] See also[edit] Mutual liberty Negative and positive rights Real freedom Rule according to higher law The Trap (TV documentary series) References[edit] ^ Berlin, Isaiah. Four Essays on Liberty. 1969. ^ Steven J. Heyman, "Positive and negative liberty." Chicago-Kent Law Review. 68 (1992): 81-90. online ^ Eric Nelson, "Liberty: One or Two Concepts Liberty: One Concept Too Many?." Political theory 33.1 (2005): 58-78. ^ Bruce Baum and Robert Nichols, (eds.), Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom: ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ 50 Years Later, (Routledge, 2013). ^ a b Carter, Ian. "Positive and Negative Liberty". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ^ Rousseau as quoted by Replogle, Ron. Recovering the Social Contract. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (1989), p. 105. ^ Michael Rosen, Jonathan Wolff, Catriona McKinnon (eds.), Political Thought, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 63. ^ George Klosko, History of Political Theory: An Introduction: Volume II: Modern (2nd ed.), Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 465: "we should note that Hegel's realization of the distance between his own and the traditional liberal conception of freedom, which he calls "abstract freedom," is clear in his embrace of positive freedom [in PR §149A]". ^ Replogle, Ron. Recovering the Social Contract. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (1989). p. 164. ^ a b "Open Learning – OpenLearn". Openlearn.open.ac.uk. Retrieved 2014-04-28. ^ Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1966), p. 26. ^ Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, pp. 27–28. ^ Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, p. 29. Further reading[edit] Machan, Tibor (2008). "Positive Liberty". In Hamowy, Ronald (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE; Cato Institute. pp. 383–85. doi:10.4135/9781412965811.n236. ISBN 978-1412965804. LCCN 2008009151. OCLC 750831024. Nicholas Dent, Rousseau, Routledge, 2005. v t e Liberty Concepts Cognitive liberty Moral responsibility Personification of Liberty Libertas Negative liberty Positive liberty Rights Self-ownership Social liberty Free will By type Academic Civil Economic Intellectual Morphological Political By right Assembly Association Choice Education Gun Information Life Movement Press Property Religion Public speech Thought Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Positive_liberty&oldid=995362064" Categories: Political concepts Social concepts Free will Rights Human rights concepts Hidden categories: All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from October 2019 Articles with unsourced statements from August 2010 Articles with unsourced statements from August 2008 Navigation menu Personal tools Not logged in Talk Contributions Create account Log in Namespaces Article Talk Variants Views Read Edit View history More Search Navigation Main page Contents Current events Random article About Wikipedia Contact us Donate Contribute Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file Tools What links here Related changes Upload file Special pages Permanent link Page information Cite this page Wikidata item Print/export Download as PDF Printable version Languages العربية Беларуская Català Deutsch Español فارسی Bahasa Indonesia עברית ქართული Bahasa Melayu Polski Português Română Русский Tagalog Українська 中文 Edit links This page was last edited on 20 December 2020, at 17:01 (UTC). 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