by Lucius Trae

Created on: April 07, 2010

After Isaiah Berlin's essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" became popular, the study of "freedom" in political science has conceptualize freedom or "liberty" in terms of two different categories. Not all theorists accept these categories, but the concepts of negative freedom and positive freedom exist as popular themes in political writings.

Freedoms is important because of how it is defined. Negative freedom, for instance, involves the ability to be free from coercion or restraint. Libertarians and conservatives are often strong supporters negative liberty. If someone is free, they should be able to act as they please so long as their actions do not harm others. So if someone wants to spend their earnings on plastic ducks instead of helping the poor, they are entitled to do so. If society prevents them from acting as they wish, it is infringing on their negative freedom.

While the negative conception of views harm in terms of actions you perform, positive freedom takes into account how things apply to opportunities. If people are born into extreme poverty in a third world nation, they have negative liberty. However, they have very few options as to how they can live their life. They are not free to pursue their desires because they lack resources. Under this view, refusing to help others can be inappropriate. If we fail to help others have opportunities to succeed, we are harming them, so to speak. Most non-libertarians accept a viewpoint that considers both kinds of freedoms.

So is freedom overrated, then? Well it depends on what kind of freedom you're talking about. In America, there is a strong tendency for the media to refer to negative freedom as the only freedom. Many Europeans nations as well as most political theorists, however, do not have this view of freedom. So when your stereotypical person complaining about freedom appears, they often mean "negative freedom."

Is the ability to do what you wish without infringement overrated? If I want to speed while driving a transport truck that failed to meet safety specifications, I am not hurting anyone directly. Other people could easily stay off the roads. The problem is that we share the roads, and we need to put our freedom to drive speeding transports aside. Few people would want to do that, I suspect, but the existence of street car racing is a prime example. These people endanger lives and should be rightfully restricted. Some would advocate letting them build a private area for racing, but that's another

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