Liberty

RajNiti Short Notes

Liberty
● The concept of liberty captures a relationship between three terms: it refers to the
freedom of an individual X, from an obstacle A, to do B. In other words, Ms. X is not
restrained by A from doing B, or in the absence of restraint A, Ms. X is free to do B.
● Gerald MacCallum who offered us this understanding of the meaning of freedom,
argued that it was specious to want to divide analysts of liberty into advocates of
negative liberty or of positive liberty, since all theorists of liberty used these three
terms.
● The classic defense of negative liberty remains Isaiah Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of
Liberty’, first published in 1958. Berlin defined ‘being free’ as “not being interfered
with by others. The wider the area of non-interference, the wider my freedom”.
● One more advocate of Negative Liberty is Hillel Steiner, according to whom, only
physical barriers intentionally placed on someone’s action can allow that person to
claim that she is not free.
● Another classical defense of negative liberty was John Stuart Mill’s 1859 essay, On
Liberty.
● Mill divided human actions in self regarding and other regarding, and gave the state
absolute right to interfere in the case of other regarding actions because they could
break the "harm principle".
● However, Mill also argued that the principle of liberty brooked no interference with
the sphere of one’s self- regarding action. Discussing three specific areas - of thought
and its oral and written expression, of taste and pursuits, and of combination or
association with other individuals - Mill claimed that except to prevent ‘direct
material harm’ to others, society had no other justification for interfering with the
liberty of the individual in these areas.
● One of the first liberals to embrace the positive notion of liberty was T.H.Green
(1836-82), who defined freedom as the ability of people ‘to make the most and best of
themselves’.
● For Marxists, the individual is not separated from other individuals in society by
boundaries of autonomous spaces for the free exercise of choice. They are rather
bound together in mutual dependence. It is only in a society, which is free from the
selfish promotion of private interests that a state of freedom can exist. Freedom, thus,
cannot be achieved in a capitalist society.
● These views have been articulated in Friedrich Engel’s Anti-Duhring and Karl
Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
● Engels discusses the notion of freedom as a state of transition from necessity to
freedom. The state of necessity is defined by a situation in which the individual is
subjected to another’s will.
● In his work Manuscripts, Karl Marx avers that the capitalist society is dehumanizing.
It not only alienates the individual from his true self, it separates him from the

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creative influences of society. Marx proposes that it is only by transforming those

conditions in which alienation takes place, can freedom be restored. Thus, it was only
in a communist society where the means of production were socially owned, and each
member of society worked in cooperation with the other for the development of all,
that true freedom could be achieved.
● Marx described the true realm of freedom as ‘the development of freedom for its own
sake’.
● Milton Friedman, like Mill and Berlin was a liberal who in his work Capitalism and
Freedom developed a notion of liberty as a significant aspect of capitalist society.
● The freedom of exchange was an essential aspect of liberty. To promote this freedom,
Friedman required the state to give up its concern for welfare and social security and
devote itself to maintaining law and order, protecting property rights, implementing
contracts etc.
● In his work The Constitution of Liberty (1960), F.A.Hayek has propounded a theory
of liberty, which emphasizes the negative role of the state. For Hayek, a state of
liberty is achieved when the individual is not subject to the arbitrary will of another
individual.
● Another group of thinkers evidently influenced by the Marxist notion of freedom,
emphasized that liberty as practiced in modern capitalist societies breeds loneliness.
● Eric Fromm (1900-1980) explained that in modern societies aloofness was brought
about owing to the separation of the individual from his creative capacities and social
relations.
● Herbert Marcuse in his work One- Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of
Advanced Industrial Society (1968), also explored the nature of alienation in
capitalist societies. Marcuse asserts that the creative multidimensional capacities of
the individual get thwarted in capitalist societies. Man is able to express himself only
as a consumer constantly engaged in the satisfaction of his physical needs.
● The republican conception of political liberty aims to capture "Liberty as absence of
domination". It defines freedom as a sort of structural independence—as the
condition of not being subject to the arbitrary or uncontrolled power of a master.
Pettit and Skinner are key advocates of this stream.
● Amartya Sen upholds the capability approach for the realization of freedom. He says
that provision of social infrastructure such as education, health, employment might
not lead to a free individual.
● Feminist thinker Carol Pateman is a critic of contract based idea of freedom and
claims that women’s freedom can be constructed only by giving up the language of
contract. This language encourages a conception of individuals as having property in
their person, and its corollary is to see freedom as independence, specially the
independence of participating in the labour market. This resulted in “[m]en’s freedom
and women’s subjection”; civil freedom remains a “masculine attribute”
● Pateman continues this argument in a later piece, arguing that ‘freedom as
independence’ should be transformed into ‘freedom as autonomy’, a freedom that is
secured through the recognition of the interdependence of all citizens.

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Practice Questions
1. Isaiah Berlin argued that :
(A) The State can and should do more to reduce economic inequalities.
(B) The criminal justice system is an unacceptable infringement of freedom.
(C) Irrational people do not deserve freedom.
(D) 'Positive' conceptions of liberty represented a serious threat to freedom.

2. Consider the following set of political thinkers and their works :

A. J.S. Mill : On Liberty
B. Isaiah Berlin : Four Essays on Freedom
C. T.H. Green : Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligations
D. John Locke : Considerations on Representative Government
Which of the above are correctly matched ?
(A) A and B only
(B) A, C and D only
(C) A, B and C only
(D) A, B, C and D

3. Pettit's republican conception of freedom defines freedom as:

(A) The absence of interference
(B) The absence of domination
(C) The rule of the majority
(D) All of the above

4. Given below are two statements one labeled as Assertion A and the other labeled as
Reason R.
Assertion A : Liberty aims at the development of individuals.
Reason R : Freedom of thought and discussion is not the main theme of Liberty.

In light of the above statements, choose the correct answer from the options given
below
(A) Both A and R are correct and R is the correct explanation of A
(B) Both A and R are correct but R is not the correct explanation of A
(C) A is true, but R is false
(D) A is false, but R is true

5. Who defines ‘freedom as the private pursuit of the individual’ ?

(A) Hayek
(B) Hobbes
(C) Hegel
(D) Hobhouse
Answers: 1. (D), 2. (C), 3. (B), 4. (B), 5. (B)