Relation to others· Power and justice
Positive liberty
Axis: Political liberty — What is it to be politically free?
To be free is to govern oneself: to be master of one's desires and, as a citizen, to share in making the laws one obeys. Liberty is not merely being left alone, but being the author of one's life and one's city.
Philosophers 2
Hegelexplicit
To be free is not to follow one's caprice: the arbitrary will (Willkür) that chooses among given desires does not produce their content; it is only an apparent freedom, the freedom of the void that, in politics, turns into the frenzy of destruction. True freedom is the will that wills itself and finds itself at home in the other: it is fulfilled in rational institutions, not against them.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Introduction §§4-29 (§5 the freedom of the void, §15 Willkür)
Rousseauexplicit
Liberty is not the absence of hindrance or the right to do anything, but obedience to the law one has prescribed to oneself: a positive liberty, the autonomy of the citizen. Civil man exchanges his natural independence for moral liberty, the only kind that truly makes him master of himself. This is why whoever refuses to obey the , Rousseau writes in a formidable phrase, shall be « forced to be free ».
Rousseau, The Social Contract, I, 7-8
Argument
- One can be under no constraint and yet be led from start to finish: by impulses, by fashion, by opinion. No one would call such a person self-governing.
- What they lack is not a larger space but self-mastery: acting on reasons and rules they recognize as their own upon examination.
- The same demand holds in the city, where there are common rules in any case: whoever takes no part in shaping them undergoes them as an alien will, however lightly they weigh.
- Taking part in making the laws, not to press one's own interest but to seek with others a rule good for all (the ), changes the nature of obedience: to obey a law one has prescribed to oneself is no longer to obey another.
Therefore Free is the one who authors, rather than merely receives, the rules they follow, in their life as in their city.
See the pageObjectionAttacks the position
- , in the versions the objection targets, distinguishes two wills in each of us: the one we express, and a "true" (rational, higher) will that ought to rule.
- Once these two wills can diverge, someone must say where the true one lies: and nothing prevents a third party, party, state, or majority, from declaring itself a better judge of it than I am.
- Coercing my expressed will then no longer counts as oppression but as liberation: 's formula, he will be forced to be free, coined for obedience to the , stops being a paradox and becomes a program in other hands.
- A definition of liberty that allows coercion to be described as liberation has lost what any conception of liberty must keep: that my actual will counts.
Therefore Liberty as the rule of the "true self" opens the door to a tyranny exercised in freedom's name: any definition of this type bears the burden of showing what blocks that slope, and until it does, it cannot serve as a definition, whatever the worth of the ideal of autonomy.
See the page- PrescriptivePolitical & legalFreed against one's will
From seatbelt laws to compulsory schooling to the addict weaned off against their will: can coercion make a person free? And if my "true" will can be invoked against the will I actually express, who decides which one is me?
benevolent coercion - DescriptiveFree from the law, or free through the law?
Every law takes something from what I may do; where laws fall silent, I do as I please. Yet without law the weak are at the mercy of the strong, and a people gives itself laws precisely to be free. Does law limit freedom, protect it, or constitute it?
the law - DescriptiveTaking part, or being left in peace
One age placed freedom in sharing public power, another in the quiet enjoyment of private life. If the moderns desert the assembly to cultivate their independence, do they hand over the very guarantee of that independence?
the city