## 1. Two Concepts of Liberty



Imagine you are driving a car through town, and you come to a fork in
the road. You turn left, but no one was forcing you to go one way or
the other. Next you come to a crossroads. You turn right, but no one
was preventing you from going left or straight on. There is no traffic
to speak of and there are no diversions or police roadblocks. So you
seem, as a driver, to be completely free. But this picture of your
situation might change quite dramatically if we consider that the
reason you went left and then right is that you're addicted to
cigarettes and you're desperate to get to the tobacconists
before it closes. Rather than *driving*, you feel you are
*being driven*, as your urge to smoke leads you uncontrollably
to turn the wheel first to the left and then to the right. Moreover,
you're perfectly aware that your turning right at the crossroads
means you'll probably miss a train that was to take you to an
appointment you care about very much. You long to be free of this
irrational desire that is not only threatening your longevity but is
also stopping you right now from doing what you think you ought to be
doing.



This story gives us two contrasting ways of thinking of liberty. On
the one hand, one can think of liberty as the absence of obstacles
external to the agent. You are free if no one is stopping you from
doing whatever you might want to do. In the above story you appear, in
this sense, to be free. On the other hand, one can think of liberty as
the presence of control on the part of the agent. To be free, you must
be self-determined, which is to say that you must be able to control
your own destiny in your own interests. In the above story you appear,
in this sense, to be unfree: you are not in control of your own
destiny, as you are failing to control a passion that you yourself
would rather be rid of and which is preventing you from realizing what
you recognize to be your true interests. One might say that while on
the first view liberty is simply about how many doors are open to the
agent, on the second view it is more about going through the right
doors for the right reasons.



In a famous essay first published in 1958, Isaiah Berlin called these
two concepts of liberty negative and positive respectively (Berlin
 1969).[1]
 The reason for using these labels is that in the first case liberty
seems to be a mere *absence* of something (i.e. of obstacles,
barriers, constraints or interference from others), whereas in the
second case it seems to require the *presence* of something
(i.e. of control, self-mastery, self-determination or
self-realization). In Berlin's words, we use the negative
concept of liberty in attempting to answer the question "What is
the area within which the subject -- a person or group of persons
-- is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be,
without interference by other persons?", whereas we use the
positive concept in attempting to answer the question "What, or
who, is the source of control or interference that can determine
someone to do, or be, this rather than that?" (1969, pp.
121-22).



It is useful to think of the difference between the two concepts in
terms of the difference between factors that are external and factors
that are internal to the agent. While theorists of negative freedom
are primarily interested in the degree to which individuals or groups
suffer interference from external bodies, theorists of positive
freedom are more attentive to the internal factors affecting the
degree to which individuals or groups act autonomously. Given this
difference, one might be tempted to think that a political philosopher
should concentrate exclusively on negative freedom, a concern with
positive freedom being more relevant to psychology or individual
morality than to political and social institutions. This, however,
would be premature, for among the most hotly debated issues in
political philosophy are the following: *Is* the positive
concept of freedom a political concept? Can individuals or groups
achieve positive freedom through political action? Is it possible for
the state to promote the positive freedom of citizens on their behalf?
And if so, is it desirable for the state to do so? The classic texts
in the history of western political thought are divided over how these
questions should be answered: theorists in the classical liberal
tradition, like Benjamin Constant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Herbert
Spencer, and J.S. Mill, are typically classed as answering
'no' and therefore as defending a negative concept of
political freedom; theorists that are critical of this tradition, like
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx and T.H. Green, are
typically classed as answering 'yes' and as defending a
positive concept of political freedom.



In its political form, positive freedom has often been thought of as
necessarily achieved through a collectivity. Perhaps the clearest case
is that of 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'. 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. The welfare state has sometimes been defended on
this basis, as has the idea of a universal basic income. The negative
concept of freedom, on the other hand, is most commonly assumed in
liberal defences of the constitutional liberties typical of
liberal-democratic societies, such as freedom of movement, freedom of
religion, and freedom of speech, and in arguments against paternalist
or moralist state intervention. It is also often invoked in defences
of the right to private property. This said, some philosophers have
contested the claim that private property necessarily enhances
negative liberty (Cohen 1995, 2006), and still others have tried to
show that negative liberty can ground a form of egalitarianism
(Steiner 1994).



After Berlin, the most widely cited and best developed analyses of the
negative concept of liberty include Hayek (1960), Day (1971),
Oppenheim (1981), Miller (1983) and Steiner (1994). Among the most
prominent contemporary analyses of the positive concept of liberty are
Milne (1968), Gibbs (1976), C. Taylor (1979) and Christman (1991,
2005).


## 2. The Paradox of Positive Liberty



Many liberals, including Berlin, have suggested that the positive
concept of liberty carries with it a danger of authoritarianism.
Consider the fate of a permanent and oppressed minority. Because the
members of this minority participate in a democratic process
characterized by majority rule, they might be said to be free on the
grounds that they are members of a society exercising self-control
over its own affairs. But they are oppressed, and so are surely
unfree. Moreover, it is not necessary to see a society as democratic
in order to see it as self-controlled; one might instead adopt an
organic conception of society, according to which the collectivity is
to be thought of as a living organism, and one might believe that this
organism will only act rationally, will only be in control of itself,
when its various parts are brought into line with some rational plan
devised by its wise governors (who, to extend the metaphor, might be
thought of as the organism's brain). In this case, even the
majority might be oppressed in the name of liberty.



Such justifications of oppression in the name of liberty are no mere
products of the liberal imagination, for there are notorious
historical examples of their endorsement by authoritarian political
leaders. Berlin, himself a liberal and writing during the cold war,
was clearly moved by the way in which the apparently noble ideal of
freedom as self-mastery or self-realization had been twisted and
distorted by the totalitarian dictators of the twentieth century
-- most notably those of the Soviet Union -- so as to claim
that they, rather than the liberal West, were the true champions of
freedom. The slippery slope towards this paradoxical conclusion
begins, according to Berlin, with the idea of a divided self. To
illustrate: the smoker in our story provides a clear example of a
divided self, for she is both a self that desires to get to an
appointment and a self that desires to get to the tobacconists, and
these two desires are in conflict. We can now enrich this story in a
plausible way by adding that one of these selves -- the keeper of
appointments -- is superior to the other: the self that is a
keeper of appointments is thus a 'higher' self, and the
self that is a smoker is a 'lower' self. The higher self
is the rational, reflecting self, the self that is capable of moral
action and of taking responsibility for what she does. This is the
true self, for rational reflection and moral responsibility are the
features of humans that mark them off from other animals. The lower
self, on the other hand, is the self of the passions, of unreflecting
desires and irrational impulses. One is free, then, when one's
higher, rational self is in control and one is not a slave to
one's passions or to one's merely empirical self. The next
step down the slippery slope consists in pointing out that some
individuals are more rational than others, and can therefore know best
what is in their and others' rational interests. This allows
them to say that by forcing people less rational than themselves to do
the rational thing and thus to realize their true selves, they are in
fact liberating them from their merely empirical desires.
Occasionally, Berlin says, the defender of positive freedom will take
an additional step that consists in conceiving of the self as wider
than the individual and as represented by an organic social whole
-- "a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society
of the living and the dead and the yet unborn". The true
interests of the individual are to be identified with the interests of
this whole, and individuals can and should be coerced into fulfilling
these interests, for they would not resist coercion if they were as
rational and wise as their coercers. "Once I take this
view", Berlin says, "I am in a position to ignore the
actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture in the
name, and on behalf, of their 'real' selves, in the secure
knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man ... must be identical
with his freedom" (Berlin 1969, pp. 132-33).



Those in the negative camp try to cut off this line of reasoning at
the first step, by denying that there is any necessary relation
between one's freedom and one's desires. Since one is free
to the extent that one is externally unprevented from doing things,
they say, one can be free to do what one does not desire to do. If
being free meant being unprevented from realizing one's desires,
then one could, again paradoxically, reduce one's unfreedom by
coming to desire fewer of the things one is unfree to do. One could
become free simply by contenting oneself with one's situation. A
perfectly contented slave is perfectly free to realize all of her
desires. Nevertheless, we tend to think of slavery as the opposite of
freedom. More generally, freedom is not to be confused with happiness,
for in logical terms there is nothing to stop a free person from being
unhappy or an unfree person from being happy. The happy person might
*feel* free, but whether they *are* free is another
matter (Day, 1970). Negative theorists of freedom therefore tend to
say not that having freedom means being unprevented from doing as one
desires, but that it means being unprevented from doing whatever one
might desire to do (Steiner 1994. Cf. Van Parijs 1995; Sugden
2006).



Some theorists of positive freedom bite the bullet and say that the
contented slave is indeed free -- that in order to be free the
individual must learn, not so much to dominate certain merely
empirical desires, but to rid herself of them. She must, in other
words, remove as many of her desires as possible. As Berlin puts it,
if I have a wounded leg 'there are two methods of freeing myself
from pain. One is to heal the wound. But if the cure is too difficult
or uncertain, there is another method. I can get rid of the wound by
cutting off my leg' (1969, pp. 135-36). This is the
strategy of liberation adopted by ascetics, stoics and Buddhist sages.
It involves a 'retreat into an inner citadel' -- a
soul or a purely noumenal self -- in which the individual is
immune to any outside forces. But this state, even if it can be
achieved, is not one that liberals would want to call one of freedom,
for it again risks masking important forms of oppression. It is, after
all, often in coming to terms with excessive external limitations in
society that individuals retreat into themselves, pretending to
themselves that they do not really desire the worldly goods or
pleasures they have been denied. Moreover, the removal of desires may
also be an effect of outside forces, such as brainwashing, which we
should hardly want to call a realization of freedom.



Because the concept of negative freedom concentrates on the external
sphere in which individuals interact, it seems to provide a better
guarantee against the dangers of paternalism and authoritarianism
perceived by Berlin. To promote negative freedom is to promote the
existence of a sphere of action within which the individual is
sovereign, and within which she can pursue her own projects subject
only to the constraint that she respect the spheres of others.
Humboldt and Mill, both advocates of negative freedom, compared the
development of an individual to that of a plant: individuals, like
plants, must be allowed to grow, in the sense of developing their own
faculties to the full and according to their own inner logic. Personal
growth is something that cannot be imposed from without, but must come
from within the individual.


## 3. Two Attempts to Create a Third Way



Critics, however, have objected that the ideal described by Humboldt
and Mill looks much more like a positive concept of liberty than a
negative one. Positive liberty consists, they say, in exactly this
growth of the individual: the free individual is one that develops,
determines and changes her own desires and interests autonomously and
from within. This is not liberty as the mere absence of obstacles, but
liberty as autonomy or self-realization. Why should the mere absence
of state interference be thought to guarantee such growth? Is there
not some third way between the extremes of totalitarianism and the
minimal state of the classical liberals -- some non-paternalist,
non-authoritarian means by which positive liberty in the above sense
can be actively promoted?


### 3.1 Positive Liberty as Content-neutral



Much of the more recent work on positive liberty has been motivated by
a dissatisfaction with the ideal of negative liberty combined with an
awareness of the possible abuses of the positive concept so forcefully
exposed by Berlin. John Christman (1991, 2005, 2009, 2013), for
example, has argued that positive liberty concerns the *ways*
in which desires are formed -- whether as a result of rational
reflection on all the options available, or as a result of pressure,
manipulation or ignorance. What it does not regard, he says, is the
*content* of an individual's desires. The promotion of
positive freedom need not therefore involve the claim that there is
only one right answer to the question of how a person should live, nor
need it allow, or even be compatible with, a society forcing its
members into given patterns of behavior. Take the example of a Muslim
woman who claims to espouse the fundamentalist doctrines generally
followed by her family and the community in which she lives. On
Christman's account, this person is positively unfree if her
desire to conform was somehow oppressively imposed upon her through
indoctrination, manipulation or deceit. She is positively free, on the
other hand, if she arrived at her desire to conform while aware of
other reasonable options and she weighed and assessed these other
options rationally. Even if this woman seems to have a preference for
subservient behavior, there is nothing necessarily freedom-enhancing
or freedom-restricting about her having the desires she has, since
freedom regards not the content of these desires but their mode of
formation. On this view, forcing her to do certain things rather than
others can never make her more free, and Berlin's paradox of
positive freedom would seem to have been avoided.



This more 'procedural' account of positive liberty allows
us to point to kinds of internal constraint that seem too fall off the
radar if we adopt only negative concept. For example, some radical
political theorists believe it can help us to make sense of forms of
oppression and structural injustice that cannot be traced to overt
acts of prevention or coercion. On the one hand, in agreement with
Berlin, we should recognize the dangers of that come with promoting
the values or interests of a person's 'true self' in
opposition to what they manifestly desire. Thus, the procedural
account avoids all reference to a 'true self'. On the
other, we should recognize that people's *actual* selves
are inevitably formed in a social context and that their values and
senses of identity (for example, in terms of gender or race or
nationality) are shaped by cultural influences. In this sense, the
self is 'socially constructed', and this social
construction can itself occur in oppressive ways. The challenge, then,
is to show how a person's values can be thus shaped but without
the kind of oppressive imposition or manipulation that comes not only
from political coercion but also, more subtly, from practices or
institutions that stigmatize or marginalize certain identities or that
attach costs to the endorsement of values deviating from acceptable
norms, for these kinds of imposition or manipulation can be just
another way of promoting a substantive ideal of the self. And this was
exactly the danger against which Berlin was warning, except that the
danger is less visible and can be created unintentionally (Christman
2013, 2015, 2021; Hirschmann 2003, 2013; Coole 2013).



While this theory of positive freedom undoubtedly provides a tool for
criticizing the limiting effects of certain practices and institutions
in contemporary liberal societies, it remains to be seen what kinds of
political action can be pursued in order to promote content-neutral
positive liberty without encroaching on any individual's
rightful sphere of negative liberty. Thus, the potential conflict
between the two ideals of negative and positive freedom might survive
Christman's alternative analysis, albeit in a milder form. Even
if we rule out coercing individuals into specific patterns of
behavior, a state interested in promoting content-neutral positive
liberty might still have considerable space for intervention aimed at
'public enlightenment', perhaps subsidizing some kinds of
activities (in order to encourage a plurality of genuine options) and
financing such intervention through taxation. Liberals might criticize
this kind of intervention on anti-paternalist grounds, objecting that
such measures will require the state to use resources in ways that the
supposedly heteronomous individuals, if left to themselves, might have
chosen to spend in other ways. In other words, even in its
content-neutral form, the ideal of positive freedom might still
conflict with the liberal idea of respect for persons, one
interpretation of which involves viewing individuals from the outside
and taking their choices at face value. From a liberal point of view,
the blindness to internal constraints can be intentional (Carter
2011a). Some liberals will make an exception to this restriction on
state intervention in the case of the education of children, in such a
way as to provide for the active cultivation of open minds and
rational reflection. Even here, however, other liberals will object
that the right to negative liberty includes the right to decide how
one's children should be educated.



Is it necessary to refer to internal constraints in order to make
sense of the phenomena of oppression and structural injustice? Some
might contest this view, or say that it is true only up to a point,
for there are at least two reasons for thinking that the oppressed are
lacking in negative liberty. First, while Berlin himself equated
economic and social disadvantages with natural disabilities, claiming
that neither represented constraints on negative liberty but only on
personal abilities, many theorists of negative liberty disagree: if I
lack the money to buy a jacket from a clothes shop, then any attempt
on my part to carry away the jacket is likely to meet with preventive
actions or punishment on the part of the shop keeper or the agents of
the state. This is a case of interpersonal interference, not merely of
personal inability. In the normal circumstances of a market economy,
purchasing power is indeed a very reliable indicator of how far other
people will stop you from doing certain things if you try. It is
therefore strongly correlated with degrees of negative freedom (Cohen
1995, 2011; Waldron 1993; Carter 2007; Grant 2013). Thus, while the
promotion of content-neutral positive liberty might imply the transfer
of certain kinds of resources to members of disadvantaged groups, the
same might be true of the promotion of negative liberty. Second, the
negative concept of freedom can be applied directly to disadvantaged
groups as well as to their individual members. Some social structures
may be such as to tolerate the liberation of only a limited number of
members of a given group. G.A. Cohen famously focused on the case
proletarians who can escape their condition by successfully setting up
a business of their own though a mixture of hard work and luck. In
such cases, while each individual member of the disadvantaged group
might be negatively free in the sense of being unprevented from
choosing the path of liberation, the freedom of the individual is
conditional on the unfreedom of the majority of the rest of the group,
since not all can escape in this way. Each individual member of the
class therefore partakes in a form of collective negative unfreedom
(Cohen 1988, 2006; for discussion see Mason 1996; Hindricks 2008;
Grant 2013; Schmidt 2020).


### 3.2 Republican Liberty



Another increasingly influential group of philosophers has rejected
both the negative and the positive conception, claiming that liberty
is not merely the enjoyment of a sphere of non-interference but the
enjoyment of certain conditions in which such non-interference is
guaranteed (Pettit 1997, 2001, 2014; Skinner 1998, 2002; Weinstock and
Nadeau 2004; Laborde and Maynor 2008; Lovett 2010, forthcoming; Breen and
McBride 2015, List and Valentini 2016). These conditions may include
the presence of a democratic constitution and a series of safeguards
against a government wielding power arbitrarily, including popular
control and the separation of powers. As Berlin admits, on the negative
view, I am free even if I live in a dictatorship just as long as the
dictator happens, on a whim, not to interfere with me (see also Hayek
1960). There is no necessary connection between negative liberty and
any particular form of government. Is it not counterintuitive to say
that I can in theory be free even if I live in a dictatorship, or that
a slave can enjoy considerable liberty as long as the slave-owner is
compassionate and generous? Would my subjection to the arbitrary power
of a dictator or slave-owner not itself be sufficient to qualify me as
unfree? If it would be, then we should say that I am free only if I
live in a society with the kinds of political institutions that
guarantee the independence of each citizen from such arbitrary power.
Quentin Skinner has called this view of freedom
'neo-Roman', invoking ideas about freedom both of the
ancient Romans and of a number of Renaissance and early modern
writers. Philip Pettit has called the same view
'republican', and this label has generally prevailed in
the recent literature.



Republican freedom can be thought of as a kind of *status*: to
be a free person is to enjoy the rights and privileges attached to the
status of republican citizenship, whereas the paradigm of the unfree
person is the slave. Freedom is not simply a matter of
non-interference, for a slave may enjoy a great deal of
non-interference at the whim of her master. What makes her unfree is
her status, such that she is permanently *exposed* to
interference of any kind. Even if the slave enjoys non-interference,
she is, as Pettit puts it, 'dominated', because she is
permanently subject to the arbitrary power of her owner.



According to Pettit, then, republicans conceive of freedom not as
non-interference, as on the standard negative view, but as
'non-domination'. Non-domination is distinct from negative
freedom, he says, for two reasons. First, as we have seen, one can
enjoy non-interference without enjoying non-domination. Second, one
can enjoy non-domination while nevertheless being interfered with,
just as long as the interference in question is constrained to track
one's avowed interests thanks to republican power structures:
only arbitrary power is inimical to freedom, not power as such.



On the other hand, republican freedom is also distinct from positive
freedom as expounded and criticized by Berlin. First, republican
freedom does not consist in the activity of virtuous political
participation; rather, that participation is seen as instrumentally
related to freedom as non-domination. Secondly, the republican concept
of freedom cannot lead to anything like the oppressive consequences
feared by Berlin, because it has a commitment to non-domination and to
liberal-democratic institutions already built into it.



Pettit's idea of freedom as non domination has caught the
imagination of a great many political theorists over the last two
decades. One source of its popularity lies in the fact that it seems
to make sense of the phenomena of oppression and structural injustice
referred to above, but without necessarily relying on references to
internal constraints. It has been applied not only to relations of
domination between governments and citizens, but also to relations of
domination between employers and workers (Breen and McBride 2015),
between husbands and wives (Lovett forthcoming), and between able-bodied and
disabled people (De Wispelaere and Casassas 2014).



It remains to be seen, however, whether the republican concept of
freedom is ultimately distinguishable from the negative concept, or
whether republican writers on freedom have not simply provided good
arguments to the effect that negative freedom is best promoted, *on
balance and over time*, through certain kinds of political
institutions rather than others. While there is no necessary
connection between negative liberty and democratic government, there
may nevertheless be a strong empirical correlation between the two.
Ian Carter (1999, 2008), Matthew H. Kramer (2003, 2008), and Robert
Goodin and Frank Jackson (2007) have argued, along these lines, that
republican policies are best defended empirically on the basis of the
standard negative ideal of freedom, rather than on the basis of a
conceptual challenge to that ideal. An important premise in such an
argument is that the extent of a person's negative freedom is a
function not simply of how many single actions are prevented, but of
how many different *act-combinations* are prevented. On this
basis, people who can achieve their goals only by bowing and scraping
to their masters must be seen as less free, negatively, than people
who can achieve those goals unconditionally. Another important premise
is that the extent to which people are negatively free depends, in
part, on the *probability* with which they will be constrained
from performing future acts or act-combinations. People who are
subject to arbitrary power can be seen as less free in the negative
sense even if they do not actually suffer interference, because the
probability of their suffering constraints is always greater
(*ceteris paribus*, as a matter of empirical fact) than it
would be if they were not subject to that arbitrary power. Only this
greater probability, they say, can adequately explain republican
references to the 'fear', the 'sense of
exposure', and the 'precariousness' of the dominated
(for further discussion see Bruin 2009, Lang 2012, Shnayderman 2012,
Kirby 2016, Carter and Shnayderman 2019).



In reply to the above point about the relevance of probabilities,
republicans have insisted that freedom as non-domination is
nevertheless distinct from negative liberty because what matters for
an agent's freedom is the *impossibility* of others
interfering, not the mere *improbability* of their doing so.
Consider the example of gender relations with the context of marriage.
A husband might be kind and generous, or indeed have a strong sense of
egalitarian justice, and therefore be *extremely unlikely* ever
to deny his wife the same opportunities as he himself enjoys; but the
wife is still *dominated* if the structure of norms in her
society is such as to permit husbands to frustrate the choices of
their wives in numerous ways. If she lives in such a society, she is
still *subject to* the husband's power whether he likes
it or not. And whether the husband likes it or not, the wife's
subjection to his power will tend to influence how third parties treat
her - for example, in terms of offering employment opportunities.



Taken at face value, however, the requirement of impossibility of
interference seems over demanding, as it is never completely
impossible for others to constrain me. It is not impossible that I be
stabbed by someone as I walk down the street this afternoon. Indeed,
the possible world in which this event occurs is very close to the
actual world, even if the event is improbable in the actual world. If
the mere possibility of the stabbing makes me unfree to walk down the
street, then unfreedom is everywhere and the achievement of freedom is
itself virtually impossible. To avoid this worry, republicans have
qualified their impossibility requirement: for me to be free to walk
down the street, it must be impossible for others to stab me *with
impunity* (Pettit 2008a, 2008b; Skinner 2008). This qualification
makes the impossibility requirement more realistic. Nevertheless, the
qualification is open to objections. Is 'impunity' a
purely formal requirement, or should we say that no one can carry out
a street stabbing with impunity if, say, at least 70% of such
stabbings lead to prosecution? Even if 100% of such stabbings lead to
prosecution, there will still be some stabbings. Will they not be
sources of unfreedom for the victims?



More recently some republicans have sidelined the notion of impunity
of interference in favour of that of 'ignorability' of
interference (Ingham and Lovett 2019). I am free to make certain
choices if the structure of effective societal norms, whether legal or
customary, is such as to constrain the ability of anyone else to
frustrate those choices, to the point where the possibility of such
frustration, despite existing, is remote enough to be something I can
ignore. Once I can ignore that possibility, then the structure of
effective norms makes me safe by removing any sense of exposure to
interference. Defenders of the negative concept of liberty might
respond to this move by saying that the criterion of ignorability
looks very much like a criterion of trivially low probability: we
consider ourselves free to do *x* *to the extent that* the
system of enforced norms deters others' prevention of *x*
in such a way as to make that prevention improbable.



The jury is still out on whether republicans have successfully carved
out a third concept of freedom that is really distinct from those of
negative and positive liberty. This conceptual uncertainty need not
itself cast doubt on the distinctness and attractiveness of
republicanism as a set of political prescriptions. Rather, what it
leaves open is the question of the ultimate normative bases of those
prescriptions: is 'non-domination' something that
supervenes on certain configurations of negative freedom and
unfreedom, and therefore explainable in terms of such configurations,
or is it something truly distinct from those configurations?


## 4. One Concept of Liberty: Freedom as a Triadic Relation



The two sides identified by Berlin disagree over which of two
different concepts best captures the political ideal of
'liberty'. Does this fact not denote the presence of some
more basic *agreement* between the two sides? How, after all,
could they see their disagreement as one about the nature of liberty
if they did not think of themselves as in some sense *talking about
the same thing*? In an influential article, the American legal
philosopher Gerald MacCallum (1967) put forward the following answer:
there is in fact only one basic concept of freedom, on which both
sides in the debate *converge*. What the so-called negative and
positive theorists disagree about is how this single concept of
freedom should be interpreted. Indeed, in MacCallum's view,
there are a great many different possible interpretations of freedom,
and it is only Berlin's artificial dichotomy that has led us to
think in terms of there being two.



MacCallum defines the basic concept of freedom -- the concept on
which everyone agrees -- as follows: a subject, or agent, is free
from certain constraints, or preventing conditions, to do or become
certain things. Freedom is therefore a triadic relation -- that
is, a relation between *three things*: an agent, certain
preventing conditions, and certain doings or becomings of the agent.
Any statement about freedom or unfreedom can be translated into a
statement of the above form by specifying *what* is free or
unfree, *from* what it is free or unfree, and what it is free
or unfree *to do or become*. Any claim about the presence or
absence of freedom in a given situation will therefore make certain
assumptions about what counts as an agent, what counts as a constraint
or limitation on freedom, and what counts as a purpose that the agent
can be described as either free or unfree to carry out.



The definition of freedom as a triadic relation was first put forward
in the seminal work of Felix Oppenheim in the 1950s and 60s. Oppenheim
saw that an important meaning of 'freedom' in the context
of political and social philosophy was as a relation between two
agents and a particular (impeded or unimpeded) action. However,
Oppenheim's interpretation of freedom was an example of what
Berlin would call a negative concept. What MacCallum did was to
generalize this triadic structure so that it would cover all possible
claims about freedom, whether of the negative or the positive variety.
In MacCallum's framework, unlike in Oppenheim's, the
interpretation of each of the three variables is left open. In other
words, MacCallum's position is a meta-theoretical one: his is a
theory about the differences between theorists of freedom.



To illustrate MacCallum's point, let us return to the example of
the smoker driving to the tobacconists. In describing this person as
either free or unfree, we shall be making assumptions about each of
MacCallum's three variables. If we say that the driver is
*free*, what we shall probably mean is that an agent,
consisting in the driver's empirical self, is free from external
(physical or legal) obstacles to do whatever he or she might want to
do. If, on the other hand, we say that the driver is *unfree*,
what we shall probably mean is that an agent, consisting in a higher
or rational self, is made unfree by internal, psychological
constraints to carry out some rational, authentic or virtuous plan.
Notice that in both claims there is a negative element and a positive
element: each claim about freedom assumes *both* that freedom
is *freedom from* something (i.e., preventing conditions)
*and* that it is *freedom to* do or become something.
The dichotomy between 'freedom from' and 'freedom
to' is therefore a false one, and it is misleading to say that
those who see the driver as free employ a negative concept and those
who see the driver as unfree employ a positive one. What these two
camps differ over is the way in which one should interpret each of the
three variables in the triadic freedom-relation. More precisely, we
can see that what they differ over is the *extension* to be
assigned to each of the variables.



Thus, those whom Berlin places in the negative camp typically conceive
of the agent as having the same extension as that which it is
generally given in ordinary discourse: they tend to think of the agent
as an individual human being and as including all of the empirical
beliefs and desires of that individual. Those in the so-called
positive camp, on the other hand, often depart from the ordinary
notion, in one sense imagining the agent as more extensive than in the
ordinary notion, and in another sense imagining it as less extensive:
they think of the agent as having a greater extension than in ordinary
discourse in cases where they identify the agent's true desires
and aims with those of some collectivity of which she is a member; and
they think of the agent as having a lesser extension than in ordinary
discourse in cases where they identify the true agent with only a
subset of her empirical beliefs and desires -- i.e., with those
that are rational, authentic or virtuous. Secondly, those in
Berlin's positive camp tend to take a wider view of what counts
as a constraint on freedom than those in his negative camp: the set of
relevant obstacles is more extensive for the former than for the
latter, since negative theorists tend to count only external obstacles
as constraints on freedom, whereas positive theorists also allow that
one may be constrained by internal factors, such as irrational
desires, fears or ignorance. And thirdly, those in Berlin's
positive camp tend to take a narrower view of what counts as a purpose
one can be free to fulfill. The set of relevant purposes is less
extensive for them than for the negative theorists, for we have seen
that they tend to restrict the relevant set of actions or states to
those that are rational, authentic or virtuous, whereas those in the
negative camp tend to extend this variable so as to cover any action
or state the agent might desire.



On MacCallum's analysis, then, there is no simple dichotomy
between positive and negative liberty; rather, we should recognize
that there is a whole range of possible interpretations or
'conceptions' of the single concept of liberty. Indeed, as
MacCallum says and as Berlin seems implicitly to admit, a number of
classic authors cannot be placed unequivocally in one or the other of
the two camps. Locke, for example, is normally thought of as one of
the fathers or classical liberalism and therefore as a staunch
defender of the negative concept of freedom. He indeed states
explicitly that '[to be at] liberty is to be free from restraint
and violence from others'. But he also says that liberty is not
to be confused with 'license', and that "that ill
deserves the name of confinement which hedges us in only from bogs and
precipices" (*Second Treatise*, parags. 6 and 57). While
Locke gives an account of constraints on freedom that Berlin would
call negative, he seems to endorse an account of MacCallum's
third freedom-variable that Berlin would call positive, restricting
this variable to actions that are not immoral (liberty is not license)
and to those that are in the agent's own interests (I am not
unfree if prevented from falling into a bog). A number of contemporary
liberals or libertarians have provided or assumed definitions of
freedom that are similarly morally loaded (e.g. Nozick 1974; Rothbard
1982; Bader 2018). This would seem to confirm MacCallum's claim
that it is conceptually and historically misleading to divide
theorists into two camps -- a negative liberal one and a positive
non-liberal one.


## 5. The Analysis of Constraints: Their Types and Their Sources



To illustrate the range of interpretations of the concept of freedom
made available by MacCallum's analysis, let us now take a closer
look at his second variable -- that of constraints on
freedom.



Advocates of negative conceptions of freedom typically restrict the
range of obstacles that count as constraints on freedom to those that
are brought about by other agents. For theorists who conceive of
constraints on freedom in this way, I am unfree only to the extent
that *other people* prevent me from doing certain things. If I
am incapacitated by natural causes -- by a genetic handicap, say,
or by a virus or by certain climatic conditions -- I may be
rendered *unable* to do certain things, but I am not, for that
reason, rendered *unfree* to do them. Thus, if you lock me in
my house, I shall be both unable and unfree to leave. But if I am
unable to leave because I suffer from a debilitating illness or
because a snow drift has blocked my exit, I am nevertheless not
unfree, to leave. The reason such theorists give, for restricting the
set of relevant preventing conditions in this way, is that they see
unfreedom as a *social* relation -- a relation between
persons (see Oppenheim 1961; Miller 1983; Steiner 1983;
Kristjansson 1996; Kramer 2003; Morriss 2012; Shnayderman 2013;
Schmidt 2016). Unfreedom as mere inability is thought by such authors
to be more the concern of engineers and medics than of political and
social philosophers. (If I suffer from a natural or self-inflicted
inability to do something, should we to say that I remain
*free* to do it, or should we say that the inability removes my
freedom to do it while nevertheless not implying that I am
*un*free to do it? In the latter case, we shall be endorsing a
'trivalent' conception, according to which there are some
things that a person is neither free nor unfree to do. Kramer 2003
endorses a trivalent conception according to which freedom is
identified with ability and unfreedom is the prevention (by others) of
outcomes that the agent would otherwise be able to bring about.)



In attempting to distinguish between natural and social obstacles we
shall inevitably come across gray areas. An important example is that
of obstacles created by impersonal economic forces. Do economic
constraints like recession, poverty and unemployment merely
incapacitate people, or do they also render them unfree? Libertarians
and egalitarians have provided contrasting answers to this question by
appealing to different conceptions of constraints. Thus, one way of
answering the question is by taking an even more restrictive view of
what counts as a constraint on freedom, so that only a subset of the
set of obstacles brought about by other persons counts as a
restriction of freedom: those brought about *intentionally*. In
this case, impersonal economic forces, being brought about
unintentionally, do not restrict people's *freedom*, even
though they undoubtedly make many people *unable* to do many
things. This last view has been taken by a number of market-oriented
libertarians, including, most famously, Friedrich von Hayek (1960,
1982), according to whom freedom is the absence of coercion, where to
be coerced is to be subject to the arbitrary will of another. (Notice
the somewhat surprising similarity between this conception of freedom
and the republican conception discussed earlier, in section 3.2)
Critics of libertarianism, on the other hand, typically endorse a
broader conception of constraints on freedom that includes not only
intentionally imposed obstacles but also unintended obstacles for
which someone may nevertheless be held responsible (for Miller and
Kristjansson and Shnayderman this means *morally*
responsible; for Oppenheim and Kramer it means *causally*
responsible), or indeed obstacles created in any way whatsoever, so
that unfreedom comes to be identical to inability (see Crocker 1980;
Cohen 2011, pp. 193-97; Sen 1992; Van Parijs 1995; Garnett forthcoming).



This analysis of constraints helps to explain why socialists and
egalitarians have tended to claim that the poor in a capitalist
society are as such unfree, or that they are less free than the rich,
whereas libertarians have tended to claim that the poor in a
capitalist society are no less free than the rich. Egalitarians
typically (though do not always) assume a broader notion than
libertarians of what counts as a constraint on freedom. Although this
view does not necessarily imply what Berlin would call a positive
notion of freedom, egalitarians often call their own definition a
positive one, in order to convey the sense that freedom requires not
merely the absence of certain social relations of prevention but the
presence of abilities, or what Amartya Sen has influentially called
'capabilities' (Sen 1985, 1988, 1992; Nussbaum 2006,
2011). (Important exceptions to this egalitarian tendency to broaden
the relevant set of constraints include those who consider poverty to
indicate a lack of social freedom (see sec. 3.1, above). Steiner
(1994), grounds a left-libertarian theory of justice in the idea of an
equal distribution of social freedom, which he takes to imply an equal
distribution of resources.)



We have seen that advocates of a negative conception of freedom tend
to count only obstacles that are external to the agent. Notice,
however, that the term 'external' is ambiguous in this
context, for it might be taken to refer either to the location of the
causal source of an obstacle or to the location of the obstacle
itself. Obstacles that count as 'internal' in terms of
their own location include psychological phenomena such as ignorance,
irrational desires, illusions and phobias. Such constraints can be
caused in various ways: for example, they might have a genetic origin,
or they might be brought about intentionally by others, as in the case
of brainwashing or manipulation. In the first case we have an internal
constraint brought about by natural causes, and in this sense
'internally'; in the second, an internal constraint
intentionally imposed by another human agent, and in this sense
'externally'.



More generally, we can now see that there are in fact two different
dimensions along which one's notion of a constraint might be
broader or narrower. A first dimension is that of the *source*
of a constraint -- in other words, what it is that brings about a
constraint on freedom. We have seen, for example, that some theorists
include as constraints on freedom only obstacles brought about by
human action, whereas others also include obstacles with a natural
origin. A second dimension is that of the *type* of constraint
involved, where constraint-types include the types of internal
constraint just mentioned, but also various types of constraint
located outside the agent, such as physical barriers that render an
action impossible, obstacles that render the performance of an action
more or less difficult, and costs attached to the performance of a
(more or less difficult) action. The two dimensions of type and source
are logically independent of one another. Given this independence, it
is theoretically possible to combine a narrow view of what counts as a
source of a constraint with a broad view of what types of obstacle
count as unfreedom-generating constraints, or *vice versa*. As
a result, it is not clear that theorists who are normally placed in
the 'negative' camp need deny the existence of internal
constraints on freedom (see Kramer 2003; Garnett 2007).



To illustrate the independence of the two dimensions of type and
source, consider the case of the unorthodox libertarian Hillel Steiner
(1974-5, 1994). On the one hand, Steiner has a much
*broader* view than Hayek of the possible *sources* of
constraints on freedom: he does not limit the set of such sources to
intentional human actions, but extends it to cover all kinds of human
cause, whether or not any humans intend such causes and whether or not
they can be held morally accountable for them, believing that any
restriction of such non-natural sources can only be an arbitrary
stipulation, usually arising from some more or less conscious
ideological bias. On the other hand, Steiner has an even
*narrower* view than Hayek about what *type* of obstacle
counts as a constraint on freedom: for Steiner, an agent only counts
as unfree to do something if it is *physically impossible* for
her to do that thing. Any extension of the constraint variable to
include other types of obstacle, such as the costs anticipated in
coercive threats, would, in his view, necessarily involve a reference
to the agent's desires, and we have seen (in sec. 2) that for
those liberals in the negative camp there is no necessary relation
between an agent's freedom and her desires. Consider the
coercive threat 'Your money or your life!'. This does not
make it impossible for you to refuse to hand over your money, only
much less desirable for you to do so. If you decide not to hand over
the money, you will suffer the cost of being killed. That
*will* count as a restriction of your freedom, because it will
render physically impossible a great number of actions on your part.
But it is not the issuing of the threat that creates this unfreedom,
and you are not unfree until the sanction (described in the threat) is
carried out. For this reason, Steiner excludes threats -- and
with them all other kinds of imposed costs -- from the set of
obstacles that count as freedom-restricting. This conception of
freedom derives from Hobbes (*Leviathan*, chs. 14 and 21), and
its defenders often call it the 'pure' negative conception
(M. Taylor 1982; Steiner 1994; Carter and Kramer 2008) to distinguish
it from those 'impure' negative conceptions that make at
least minimal references to the agent's beliefs, desires or
values.



Steiner's account of the relation between freedom and coercive
threats might be thought to have counterintuitive implications, even
from the liberal point of view. Many laws that are normally thought to
restrict negative freedom do not physically prevent people from doing
what is prohibited, but deter them from doing so by threatening
punishment. Are we to say, then, that these laws do not restrict the
negative freedom of those who obey them? A solution to this problem
may consist in saying that although a law against doing some action,
*x*, does not remove the freedom to do *x*, it
nevertheless renders physically impossible certain
*combinations* of actions that include doing *x* and
doing what would be precluded by the punishment. There is a
restriction of the person's *overall* negative freedom
-- i.e. a reduction in the overall number of act-combinations
available to her -- even though she does not lose the freedom to
do any specific thing taken in isolation (Carter 1999).


## 6. The Concept of Overall Freedom



The concept of overall freedom appears to play an important role both
in everyday discourse and in contemporary political philosophy. It is
only recently, however, that philosophers have stopped concentrating
exclusively on the meaning of a particular freedom -- the freedom
to do or become this or that particular thing -- and have started
asking whether we can also make sense of descriptive claims to the
effect that one person or society is freer than another, or of liberal
normative claims to the effect that freedom should be maximized or
that people should enjoy equal freedom or that they each have a right
to a certain minimum level of freedom. The literal meaningfulness of
such claims depends on the possibility of gauging degrees of overall
freedom, sometimes comparatively, sometimes absolutely.



Theorists disagree, however, about the importance of the notion of
overall freedom. For some libertarian and liberal egalitarian
theorists, freedom is valuable as such. This suggests that more
freedom is better than less (at least *ceteris paribus*), and
that freedom is one of those goods that a liberal society ought to
distribute in a certain way among individuals. For other liberal
theorists, like Ronald Dworkin (1977, 2011) and the later Rawls
(1991), freedom is not valuable as such, and all claims about maximal
or equal freedom ought to be interpreted not as literal references to
a scalar good called 'liberty' but as elliptical
references to the adequacy of lists of certain particular liberties,
or types of liberties, selected on the basis of values other than
liberty itself. Generally speaking, only the first group of theorists
finds the notion of overall freedom interesting.



The theoretical problems involved in measuring overall freedom include
that of how an agent's available actions are to be individuated,
counted and weighted, and that of comparing and weighting different
types (but not necessarily different sources) of constraints on
freedom (such as physical prevention, punishability, threats and
manipulation). How are we to make sense of the claim that the number
of options available to a person has increased? Should all options
count for the same in terms of degrees of freedom, or should they be
weighted according to their importance in terms of other values? If
the latter, does the notion of overall freedom really add anything of
substance to the idea that people should be granted those specific
freedoms that are valuable? Should the degree of variety among options
also count? And how are we to compare the unfreedom created by the
physical impossibility of an action with, say, the unfreedom created
by the difficulty or costliness or punishability of an action? It is
only by comparing these different kinds of actions and constraints
that we shall be in a position to compare individuals' overall
degrees of freedom. These problems have been addressed, with differing
degrees of optimism, not only by political philosophers (Steiner 1983;
Carter 1999; Kramer 2003; Garnett 2016; Cote 2020; Carter
and Steiner 2021) but also by social choice theorists interested in
finding a freedom-based alternative to the standard utilitarian or
'welfarist' framework that has tended to dominate their
discipline (e.g. Pattanaik and Xu 1991, 1998; Hees 2000; Sen 2002;
Sugden 1998, 2003, 2006; Bavetta 2004; Bavetta and Navarra 2012,
2014).



MacCallum's framework is particularly well suited to the
clarification of such issues. For this reason, theorists working on
the measurement of freedom tend not to refer a great deal to the
distinction between positive and negative freedom. This said, most of
them are concerned with freedom understood as the availability of
options. And the notion of freedom as the availability of options is
unequivocally negative in Berlin's sense at least where two
conditions are met: first, the source of unfreedom is limited to the
actions of other agents, so that natural or self-inflicted obstacles
are not seen as decreasing an agent's freedom; second, the
actions one is free or unfree to perform are weighted in some
value-neutral way, so that one is not seen as freer simply because the
options available to one are more valuable or conducive to one's
self-realization. Of the above-mentioned authors, only Steiner
embraces both conditions explicitly. Sen rejects both of them, despite
not endorsing anything like positive freedom in Berlin's
sense.


## 7. Is the Distinction Still Useful?



We began with a simple distinction between two concepts of liberty,
and have progressed from this to the recognition that liberty might be
defined in any number of ways, depending on how one interprets the
three variables of agent, constraints, and purposes. Despite the
utility of MacCallum's triadic formula and its strong influence
on analytic philosophers, however, Berlin's distinction remains
an important point of reference for discussions about the meaning and
value of political and social freedom. Are these continued references
to positive and negative freedom philosophically well-founded?



It might be claimed that MacCallum's framework is less than
wholly inclusive of the various possible conceptions of freedom. In
particular, it might be said, the concept of self-mastery or
self-direction implies a presence of control that is not captured by
MacCallum's explication of freedom as a triadic relation.
MacCallum's triadic relation indicates mere
*possibilities*. If one thinks of freedom as involving
self-direction, on the other hand, one has in mind an exercise-concept
of freedom as opposed to an opportunity-concept (this distinction
comes from C. Taylor 1979). If interpreted as an exercise concept,
freedom consists not merely in the *possibility* of doing
certain things (i.e. in the lack of constraints on doing them), but in
*actually doing* certain things in certain ways -- for
example, in realizing one's true self or in acting on the basis
of rational and well-informed decisions. The idea of freedom as the
absence of constraints on the realization of given ends might be
criticised as failing to capture this exercise concept of freedom, for
the latter concept makes no reference to the absence of
constraints.



However, this defence of the positive-negative distinction as
coinciding with the distinction between exercise- and
opportunity-concepts of freedom has been challenged by Eric Nelson
(2005). As Nelson points out, most of the theorists that are
traditionally located in the positive camp, such as Green or
Bosanquet, do not distinguish between freedom as the absence of
constraints and freedom as the doing or becoming of certain things.
For these theorists, freedom is the absence of any kind of constraint
whatsoever on the realization of one's true self (they adopt a
maximally extensive conception of constraints on freedom). The absence
of *all* factors that could prevent the action *x* is,
quite simply, equivalent to the realization of *x*. In other
words, if there really is *nothing* stopping me from doing
*x* -- if I possess all the means to do *x*, and I
have a desire to do *x*, and no desire, irrational or
otherwise, not to do *x* -- then I do *x*. An
equivalent way to characterize the difference between such positive
theorists and the so-called negative theorists of freedom lies in the
degree of specificity with which they describe *x*. For those
who adopt a narrow conception of constraints, *x* is described
with a low degree of specificity (*x* could be exemplified by
the realization of any of a large array of options); for those who
adopt a broad conception of constraints, *x* is described with
a high degree of specificity (*x* can only be exemplified by
the realization of a specific option, or of one of a small group of
options).



What perhaps remains of the distinction is a rough categorization of
the various interpretations of freedom that serves to indicate their
degree of fit with the classical liberal tradition. There is indeed a
certain family resemblance between the conceptions that are normally
seen as falling on one or the other side of Berlin's divide,
despite there being some uncertainty about which side to locate
certain particular conceptions. One of the decisive factors in
determining this family resemblance is the theorist's degree of
concern with the notion of the self. Those on the
'positive' side see questions about the nature and sources
of a person's beliefs, desires and values as relevant in
determining that person's freedom, whereas those on the
'negative' side, being more faithful to the classical
liberal tradition, tend to consider the raising of such questions as
in some way indicating a propensity to violate the agent's
dignity or integrity. One side takes a positive interest in the
agent's beliefs, desires and values, while the other recommends
that we avoid doing so.