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Human Freedom in Relation to Society Essay

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Introduction

How society defines human freedom, the other social categories that may be affected by human freedom, how society has changed in regard to human freedom, conclusion; how society can improve human freedom.

The nature of human freedom entails the totality of man’s whole life. Human freedom has to do with the freedom of one’s will, which is the freedom of man to choose and act by following his path through life freely by exercising his ‘freedom’) (Morrison, 1997). But this perspective has not been without much debate and controversy by both philosophers and theologians.

The purpose of this paper intends to look at the concept of human freedom in relation to the society. In this regard, this paper seeks to investigate how society defines human freedom? What other social categories are affected (directly or indirectly) by human freedom? How society has evolved in regard to human freedom? And what can be done to improve human freedom?

Human freedom has largely been defined in terms of the absence of external factors that may limit a person’s free will such as deportations and dictatorships by rulers among other factors.

But it is also thought that human freedom does not necessarily rely on external constraints, for instance some philosophers have argued against the concept of ‘free will’, by saying that man is only a victim of ‘his own being’ (Morrison, 1997)). In other words, that the very nature of man, his instincts, for instance, limits his ‘freedom’; that every now and then he has to answer to his nature.

But Rousseau refutes the argument that man unreservedly answers to his instincts as he argues that unlike animals, man can override his instincts (Morrison, 1997). For example, one may forgo a meal while playing a video game in spite of being hungry. This is an appendage of a philosophical debate as to whether individual ‘freedom’ really exist pe se.

The argument is that one’s choices affect the people in the world in which he lives as much as the behaviors of those around him affect him/her. Thus, no person can claim ‘freedom’ that is free of the society in which they live given that the society defines and influences to an extent man’s freedom and the scope of that freedom.

The term ‘society’ already implies a group of people, in this case, it refers to people including organizations living under mutual agreement: explicit (such as legal law) or implicit (such as ethical & moral law) (Fermi, 2004). Each of these members of society is obliged to live by the components of that mutual agreement.

Society, therefore, is bigger than the individual as it overrides the instinctual response of the individual, who is then expected to practice a certain degree of reservation in meeting his/her needs in such a way that one is able to abide by the acceptable standards of the society.

So far the United Nations has attempted to create a set of laws that can be used to govern the whole human society although the micro-societies (states, for instance) play the main role in defining the scope of human freedom. The definition of human freedom varies depending on the defining culture and political ideology such as Nazism, Socialism, fascism, Communism and Conservatism (Fermi, 2004).

Unfortunately, it is not possible to say which one of these variants of human freedom is the right one (Fermi, 2004) as they all work in their own respective ways to define the concept of freedom.

But this is not to say that, in a society, the individual ceases to exist. The individual is still protected under the natural law, which champions the individual’s basic human rights and liberty; this in fact, forms the core of democracy in the world today.

Limitless freedom, it is argued, is untenable in a society that is peaceful and orderly, still when it comes to the law, some of the democratic rights are limited. Liberty, in its entirety (civil, natural, personal, and political liberties) when defined under the law carries with it certain limits.

That as much as an individual has these rights and liberties, one can only go as far as the law permits, and since the law is defined by the political nature of a specific society, it can be argued that the law while it champions human freedom, equally restricts it as well.

Human freedom seems to be the central social issue and the other social aspects are either a reflection or an extension of human freedom. As we have seen so far, human freedom is defined by the prevailing political circumstances which further define the legal framework that is adopted.

Depending on the relationship between state and religion (for instance, the unification of religion and the state as in Iran and separation of the two as was the case in Ibrahim’s Tunisia) individual’s freedom is affected in one way or another.

Hinduism, for instance through its belief in the caste system, would seek to justify poverty for certain people and thereby hinder social mobility. Additionally, societies in which women are seen as nothing more than caretakers of families would hinder their access to formal education which impacts on their freedom.

Like any other social aspect, how human freedom is regarded in any society has evolved. It can largely be argued that struggle for human freedom has changed from an individual’s materialistic wishes to a more global approach to freedom for minority groups.

For example, feminism is fighting for women’s rights of choice, formal education, job opportunities, from domestic violence and female genital mutilation among other rights. Currently, there is an increasing recognition and empowerment of disabled people; these, among other activities are a reflection of the global call for democracy which requires the acknowledgement and respect of all humans and their fundamental rights.

This is attributed to technological changes, group behavior, social conflict, social trade-offs and global interdependence among others. All these have contributed to the globalization of the world which has increased the call for a certain degree of homogeneity in social behavior as the culture of nations has come to mean transformation of other nations as well in regard to human freedom.

There is need for further research on how to improve human freedom; in this regard motivational psychologists can help by diagnosing problems, setting moderate goals and applying the relevant behavioral technology to promote and research the concept of human freedom further.

This has worked in certain places for instance, there’s evidence that motivational technology has helped control certain serious diseases, facilitate compensatory education, provide channels for assessing the benefits of higher education, facilitates effective management of complex initiatives and has contributed in raising the living standards of the poor (McClelland, 1978). Besides these, there are also other means of improving human freedom which can be implemented.

Fermi, F. (2004). Freedom and the Human Being . Web.

McClelland, D., (1978). Managing Motivation to Expand Human Freedom. American Psychologist , 33 (3), pp. 201-210.

Morrison, J., (1997). What is Human Freedom . Web.

• Noncompliance with the Blood Transfusion Documentation Process in the Coronary Care Unit
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• Case Analysis Article “Shall We Dance?”
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• Social Classes and Class Structure
• Max Weber: Economic History, Theory of Bureaucracy, and Politics as a Vocation
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• Emile Durkheim and His Philosophy
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Question of the Month

What is freedom, each answer below receives a book. apologies to the entrants not included..

Freedom is the power of a sentient being to exercise its will. Desiring a particular outcome, people bend their thoughts and their efforts toward realizing it – toward a goal. Their capacity to work towards their goal is their freedom. The perfect expression of freedom would be found in someone who, having an unerring idea of what is good, and a similarly unerring idea of how to realize it, then experienced no impediment to pursuing it. This perfect level of freedom might be experienced by a supreme God, or by a Buddha. Personal, internal impairments to freedom manifest mainly as ignorance of what is good, or of the means to attaining it, while external impairments include physical and cultural obstacles to its realization. The bigger and more numerous these impairments are, the lower the level of freedom.

The internal impairments are the most significant. To someone who has a clear understanding of what is good and how to achieve it, the external constraints are comparatively minor. This is illustrated in the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom, an old slave who has no political (that is, external) liberty, endures injustice and hardship, while his owners enjoy lives of comparative ease. But, though he does sometimes feel sadness and discouragement at the injustices inflicted on himself and others, as a Christian he remains convinced that the real bondage in life consists in sin. So he would not trade places with his masters if it required renouncing his faith and living as they do. To take another angle, the central teaching of the Buddha is liberation from suffering – a freedom which surely all sentient beings desire. The reason we don’t have it yet, he says, is our ignorance . From the Buddhist point of view, even Uncle Tom is ignorant in this sense, although he is still far ahead of his supposed owners.

To become free, then, we must first seek knowledge of the way things really are, and then put ourselves into the correct relationship with that knowledge.

Paul Vitols, North Vancouver, B.C.

Let’s look at this question through three lenses: ethical, metaphysical, and political.

Ethically, according to Epicurus, freedom is not ‘fulfilling all desires’, but instead, being free from vain, unnecessary, or addictive desires. The addict is enslaved even when he obtains his drug; but the virtuous person is free because she doesn’t even desire the drug. Freedom is when the anger, anxiety, greed, hatred, and unnecessary desires drop away in the presence of what’s beloved or sacred. This means that the greatest freedom is ‘freedom from’ something, not ‘freedom to’ do something. (These two types of freedoms correspond to Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ types of freedom.)

Metaphysically – as concerning free will – the key may be understanding how human choice can be caused but not determined . In the case of free will, freedom emerges from, but is not reducible to, the activity of the brain. In ways we do not yet understand, humans sometimes have the ability to look over and choose between competing paths. When it comes to consciousness and free will, I trust my introspection that both exist more than I trust the supposedly ‘scientific’ worldviews which have no room for either.

As for politics, the most important freedom is freedom of speech. We need this for truth, good thinking, tolerance, open-mindedness, humility, self-confidence, love, and humor. We discover truth only when we are free to explore alternative ideas. We think well only when people are free to give us feedback. We develop the virtues of tolerance and open-mindedness only when we are free to hear disagreeable ideas. We develop humility when our ideas are tested in a free public arena, while self-confidence arises from those ideas that survive these tests. We love only in freedom as we learn to love others in spite of their ideas, not because of them. And we can laugh deeply only where there is freedom to potentially offend. “Give me freedom or give me death!” is not actually a choice, for we are all dead without freedom.

Paul Stearns, Blinn College, Georgia

There are many kinds of freedom – positive, negative, political, social, etc – but I think that most people would say that generally speaking, freedom is the ability to do what one wants. However, what if what one wants is constrained by external factors, such as alcohol, drugs, or torture? We might also add internal impediments, such as extraordinary emotion, and maybe genetic factors. In these cases, we say that one’s will is not completely free. This view is philosophically called ‘soft determinism’, but it is compatible with having a limited free will.

One interpretation of physical science pushes the idea of constrained will to the ultimate, to complete impotence. This view is often called ‘hard determinism’, and is incompatible with free will. In this view, everyone’s choosing is constrained absolutely by causal physical laws. No one is ever free to choose, this position says, because no one could have willed anything other than what she does will. Hard determinism requires that higher levels of organization above atoms do not add new laws of causation to the strictly physical, but that idea is just a conjecture.

A third view, called ‘indeterminism’, depends on the idea that not all events have a cause. Any uncaused event would seem to just happen. But that won’t do it for freedom. If I make a choice, I want to say that is my choice, not that it happened at random: I made it; I caused it. But how could that be possible?

I would answer that if what I will is the product of my reasoning , then I am the cause, and moreover, that my reasoning is distinct from the causal physical laws of nature. At this point, I have left indeterminism and returned to soft determinism, but with a new perspective. Reasoning raises us above hard determinism because hard determinism means events obeying one set of laws – the physical ones – while reasoning means obeying another set: the laws of logic. This process is subject to human error, and the inputs to it may sometimes be garbage; but amazingly, we often get it right! Our freedom is limited in various further ways; but our ability to choose through reasoning is enough to raise us above being the ludicrous, pathetic, epiphenomenal puppets of hard determinism.

John Talley, Rutherfordton, North Carolina

Freedom can be considered metaphysically and morally. To be free metaphysically means to have some control over one’s thoughts and decisions. One is not reduced to reacting to outside causes. To be free morally means to have the ability to live according to moral standards – to produce some good, and to attain some virtue. Moral freedom means that we can aspire to what is morally good, or resist what is good. As such, the moral life needs an objective standard by which to measure which actions are good and which are bad.

If hard determinism is true then we have no control over our thought and decisions. Rather, everything is explicable in terms of matter, energy, time, and natural laws, and we are but a small part of the cosmic system, which does not have us in mind, and which cannot give freedom. Some determinists, such as Sam Harris, admit as much. Others try to ignore this idea and its amoral implications, since they are so counterintuitive. They call themselves ‘compatibilists’. But if determinism is true, moral freedom disappears for at least two reasons. Firstly, morality requires the metaphysical freedom that determinism rules out. If a child throws a rock through a window, we scold the child, not the rock, because the former had a choice while the latter did not. Ascribing real moral guilt in criminal cases also requires metaphysical freedom, for the same reason. Secondly, if determinism, or even naturalism, is true, there is no objective good that we should pursue. Naturalism is the idea that there is nothing beyond the natural world – no realm of objective values, virtues, and duties, for instance. But if this is true, then there’s no objective good to freely choose. All is reduced to natural properties, which have no moral value. Morality dissolves away into chemistry and conditioning.

Since metaphysical freedom exists (we know this because we experience choosing) and moral freedom is possible (since some moral goals are objectively good), we need a worldview which allows both kinds of freedom. It must accept that human beings are able to transcend the causal confines of the material cosmos. It must also grant humans the ability to act with respect to objective moral values. Judeo-Christian theism is one worldview which fulfils these needs, given its claim that humans are free moral agents who answer to (God’s) objective moral standards.

Douglas Groothuis, Professor of Philosophy, Denver Seminary

According to Hannah Arendt, thinking about freedom is a hopeless enterprise, since one cannot conceive of freedom without immediately being caught in a contradiction. This is that we are free and hence responsible, but inner freedom (free will) cannot fully develop from the natural principles of causality. In the physical world, everything happens according to necessity governed by causality. So, assuming that we are entirely material beings governed by the laws of physics, it is impossible to even consider the idea of human freedom. To say that we are free beings, by contrast, automatically assumes that we are a free cause – that is, we’re able to cause something with our will that is itself without cause in the physical world! This idea of ‘transcendental will’, first introduced by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), says that free will must be non-physical in order to operate – in other words, not part of the causal system of the physical world. Yet even this doesn’t fully address the issue of freedom. In order for freedom to have any meaning, one has to also act through something in the external world, thereby interrupting a necessary, physical, chain of causes. However, to act is to use a fundamentally different faculty than the one we use to think with. Thought cannot extend itself to the realm of action. This gap between action and thought – a gap through which freedom cannot pass – reveals that it is impossible to have a theoretical grasp of freedom! So all in all, the traditional understanding of free will is an incoherent conception.

Actually, politics and law both assume freedom to be a self-evident truth, especially in a modern liberal democracy. Indeed, the very evidence of human freedom, the tangible transformation that happens in the material world due to our ideas, flows best from our collective action in this public realm.

Shinyoung Choi, Centreville, Virginia

“I will slay the children I have borne!” are the words of Medea in Euripides’ play of that name. Medea takes vengeance on her husband Jason for betraying her for another woman, by murdering her own children and Jason’s new wife. The tragedy of this drama relates well to the question of human freedom. Medea showed by her actions that she was free to do things which by their nature would normally be assumed to be outside the realm of possibility. Having the ability to choose one thing over another on the basis of desire is what Immanuel Kant dismissively called ‘the Idea of Freedom’. Kant, though, asserts a different definition of freedom. He formulated a positive conception of freedom as the free capacity for choice that characterizes the essence of being human. However, the radical nature of this freedom implies that we are free even to choose the option of being free or unfree.

Kant argued of freedom that “insofar as it is not restrained under certain rules, it is the most terrible thing there could be.” Instead, to realize its true potential value, freedom must be ‘consistent with itself’. That is to say, my use of freedom must be consistent with everyone else’s use of their freedom. This law of consistency is established by reason, since reason requires consistency in its ideas. Indeed, Kant argues that an action is truly free only if it is motivated by reason alone. This ability to be motivated by reason alone Kant called ‘the autonomy of the will’. If, on the other hand, we choose to subjugate our reason to our desires and passions, we become slaves to our animalistic instincts and are not acting freely. So, by this argument, freedom is the ability to be governed by reason to act in accordance with and for the sake of the law of freedom . Thus, freedom is not what we want to do, but what we ought to do. Should we ignore the laws of nature, we would cease to exist as natural beings; but should we ignore our reason and disobey the law of freedom, we would cease to be human beings.

Medea, just like all human beings, had freedom of choice. She chose to make her reason the slave of her passion for revenge, and thus lost her true freedom. I believe that the real tragedy is not in that we as human beings have the freedom of choice, but that we freely choose to be unfree. Without true freedom, we lose our humanity and bring suffering on ourselves – as illustrated in this and all the other tragedies of drama and of history.

Nella Leontieva, Sydney

In an article I read just after Christmas, but which was first published in 1974, the science fiction author Ursula Le Guin says “To be free, after all, is not to be undisciplined.” Two weeks later, by chance I came across a quotation, apparently from Aristotle: “Through discipline comes freedom.” Both statements struck me as intuitively obvious, to the extent that to the question ‘What is Freedom?’ I would answer ‘Freedom is discipline’. However, I cannot ground this approach further except in the existentialist sense, in which sense I would say it is fundamental.

How can this inversion of freedom be justified? Broadly, freedom is the ability to choose. But no-one, or nothing, can choose in isolation – there are always constraints. How much freedom somebody actually has boils down to the nature of these constraints and how the individual deals with them. Constraints impose to varying degrees the requirement for an individual to discipline their choices. For example, a person might be constrained by a political system, and discipline themselves to act circumspectly within the confines of that system. They might consider that they physically have the freedom to act otherwise, such as to take part in a demonstration, but are constrained by other priorities. For example, they need to keep their job in order to feed their children, so that they choose not to use that freedom. Such an individual may still regard themselves as having freedom in other contexts, and ultimately may always regard their mind as free. Nothing external can constrain what one thinks: freedom concerns what we do with those thoughts.

Lindsay Dannatt, Amesbury, Wiltshire

Freedom is being able to attempt to do what we desire to do, with reasonable knowledge, which no-one can or will obstruct us from achieving through an arbitrary exercise of their will .

To clarify this, let me distinguish between usual and unusual desires. The usual ones are desires that anyone can reasonably expect to be satisfied as part of everyday life, while the unusual are desires no-one can expect to be satisfied. Examples of a usual desire include wanting to buy groceries from a shop, or wanting to earn enough money to pay your bills, while an example of an unusual desire is wanting to headline the Glastonbury Festival. Although it’s certainly the case that people might prevent me from achieving that goal through an arbitrary exercise of their will, it is not at all guaranteed that a lack of this impediment will result in my achieving the goal. We cannot claim a lack of freedom on the basis that our unusual desires go unsatisfied. Meanwhile, it is almost certainly guaranteed that I can shop for groceries if no-one else attempts to stop me through arbitrary actions.

An arbitrary act is an act carried out according to no concrete or explicit set of rules applicable to all. A person might invent their own rules and act according to them, but this is still arbitrary because their act is not mediated by a set of rules applicable to all. On these same lines, a person in a dictatorship is not free, because although there may be a set of rules ostensibly applicable to all, the application of these rules is at the discretion of the political leader or government. Contrariwise, a person can experience a just law as unfair and feel that their freedom is decreased when in fact the full freedom of all depends on that law. For example, a law against vandalism may be experienced by some political activists as unfair, or even unjust, but it applies equally to everyone. If this latter condition is not met, people are not free.

Let me add that we cannot define freedom as ‘the absence of constraint or interference’, since we cannot know that interference isn’t taking place. We can conceive of hard-to-see manipulative systems which evade even our most careful investigation. And their non-existence is equally imperceptible to us.

Alastair Gray, Brighton

Freedom is an amalgam of dreams, strivings, and controlled premeditated actions which yield repeatable demonstrable successes in the world . There is collective freedom and individual freedom . I’ll only consider individual freedom here, but with minimal tweaking this concept could apply to collective freedom, too.

Every baby is born with at least one freedom – the ability to find, suckle at, and leave the breast. Other actions are doable, but are ragged and out of control. Over time more freedom is achieved. How does that happen? First, through crying, cooing, smiling, the newborn learns to communicate. First word, first step, first bike ride – all are major freedom breakthroughs. All are building blocks to future successes.

Let a dot on a page represent a specific individual and a closed line immediately about the dot represent a fence, limiting freedom. Freedom is a push upon this fence. A newly gained freedom forces the fence to back even further away from the dot, expanding the area enclosed about the individual. This area depicts the accumulated freedoms gained in life. The shape is random, not circular, since it is governed by the diversity and complexity of the individual’s successes. If Spanish is not learned, freedom to use Spanish was not gained. But if freedom with the violin is gained, that freedom would force the fence to retreat, adding a ‘violin-shaped’ bulge of freedom. The broader the skill, the wider the bulge. The greater the complexity, the deeper the bulge.

The fence limiting each individual’s freedom is unique. Its struts consist of the individual’s DNA, location, historical time frame, the community morays, the laws of the land, and any barrier which inhibits the individual’s goals. At an individual’s maximum sustained effort to be free from their constraints, the fence becomes razor wire. Continued sustained effort at the edge, without breaking through or expanding one’s territory, leaves the individual shattered, bleeding, and possibly broken.

Years fly, in time the hair greys or is lost, along with the greying of memory and other mental and physical abilities. Freedom weakens. Strength to hold back the fence’s elasticity weakens as well. So begins freedom’s loss in a step-by-step retreat.

Bob Preston, Winnipeg, Manitoba

Freedom is an illusion. “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. But man is not so much condemned to be free as condemned to bear the consequences of his choices and to take responsibility for his actions. This is not freedom . Freedom differs from free will. We do have choice , no matter what; but it is very questionable whether choosing between several unattractive options corresponds with actual freedom . Freedom would be the situation in which our choices, made through our free will, have no substantial consequences, which, say, limit our choices. This is impossible.

Man has a free will, but that does not make him ultimately free. On the contrary, our choices are mainly driven by survival in a competitive environment. Moreover, as long as people live with others, their freedom is limited by morals, laws, obligations and responsibilities – and that’s in countries where human rights are being respected. So all the freedoms we experience or aspire to are relative: freedom of opinion, freedom of action, freedom to choose a career, residence, or partner. Every choice necessarily leads to a commitment, and thus to obligations and responsibilities. These in turn lead to limitations; but also to meaning. The relative freedom to make a positive contribution to the world gives life meaning, and that is what man ultimately seeks.

Caroline Deforche, Lichtervelde, Belgium

Freedom? Bah, humbug! When humanity goes extinct, there will be no such thing as freedom. In the meantime, it is never more than a minimized concession from a grudging status quo. When it comes to dealing with each other, we are wrenching, scraping, clutching, covetous creatures, hard as a flint from which no generous fire glows. The problem with discerning this general truth is, not everyone is paid enough to be as true to human nature as merchant bankers, and society bludgeons the rest of us with rules that determine who does the squeezing in any given social structure – be it a family, a club, a company, or the state.

If this perspective seems to be a pessimistic denial of the ‘human spirit’, consider slavery and serfdom: both are means of squeezing others that their given society’s status quo condones. And, moreover, both states still exist, on the fringes – proving how little stands between humanity and savagery. The moral alternatives demand faith in the dubious artifice of absolute references: God(s), Ancestors, Equality, the Greater Good… However, if your preferred moral reference is at odds with the status quo’s, then you will feel you’re being denied your ‘freedom’.

So, freedom depends on the status quo, which, in turn, depends on whichever monoliths justify it. Absolute monarchies have often derived their power from the supposed will of God. Here there can be no freedom – just loyalty . Communism bases its moral claim on monolithic Equality, where the equal individuals cannot themselves be trusted with something as lethal as freedom, so it is held back by the Party. Capitalism says the squeezing should be done by those who succeed at accumulating economic spoils, and their attendant cast of amoral deal-brokers. Which is all fine. No system is perfect; and freedom is whatever exception you can wrench back from an unfavourable status quo. To win freedom, you must either negotiate or revolt. In turn, a successful status quo adapts to the ever-changing dynamics of who holds the power, and the will, to squeeze others. So freedom is a spectral illusion. If you’re lucky, you might catch a glimpse of it; but then it’s gone, wrenched back out of your feeble grasp.

Andrew Wrigley, York

As sky, so too water As air, so swims the silver cloud As body, so too the human mind is free To act to love to live to dream to be As circumstance reflects serendipity ‘I am the architect of my own destiny’ So say Sartre, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty. This strange friend and foe: freedom Is mine, is me A mind to mirror to will to learn to choose For as living erodes all roads and thee ‘You are the architect of your own history’ So say the existentialists in a Paris café, For freedom, like sky, cloud, rain, and air Is what it means to be. Yes, thinkers, dreamers, disbelievers This is freedom: At any moment we can change our course Outrun contingency, outwit facticity Petition our thrownness to let us be For we are the architects of our own lives. This is the meaning of being free.

Bianca Laleh, Totnes, Devon

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Freedom — Freedom is Life: The Essence of Human Existence

Freedom is Life: The Essence of Human Existence

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Published: Sep 7, 2023

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The intrinsic value of freedom, freedom in societal and political contexts, the responsibility of freedom, challenges to freedom.

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Positive and Negative Liberty

Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.

The idea of distinguishing between a negative and a positive sense of the term ‘liberty’ goes back at least to Kant, and was examined and defended in depth by Isaiah Berlin in the 1950s and ’60s. Discussions about positive and negative liberty normally take place within the context of political and social philosophy. They are distinct from, though sometimes related to, philosophical discussions about free will . Work on the nature of positive liberty often overlaps, however, with work on the nature of autonomy .

As Berlin showed, negative and positive liberty are not merely two distinct kinds of liberty; they can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single political ideal. Since few people claim to be against liberty, the way this term is interpreted and defined can have important political implications. Political liberalism tends to presuppose a negative definition of liberty: liberals generally claim that if one favors individual liberty one should place strong limitations on the activities of the state. Critics of liberalism often contest this implication by contesting the negative definition of liberty: they argue that the pursuit of liberty understood as self-realization or as self-determination (whether of the individual or of the collectivity) can require state intervention of a kind not normally allowed by liberals.

Many authors prefer to talk of positive and negative freedom . This is only a difference of style, and the terms ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ are normally used interchangeably by political and social philosophers. Although some attempts have been made to distinguish between liberty and freedom (Pitkin 1988; Williams 2001; Dworkin 2011), generally speaking these have not caught on. Neither can they be translated into other European languages, which contain only the one term, of either Latin or Germanic origin (e.g. liberté, Freiheit), where English contains both.

1. Two Concepts of Liberty

2. the paradox of positive liberty, 3.1 positive liberty as content-neutral, 3.2 republican liberty, 4. one concept of liberty: freedom as a triadic relation, 5. the analysis of constraints: their types and their sources, 6. the concept of overall freedom, 7. is the distinction still useful, introductory works, other works, other internet resources, related entries.

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).

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?

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).

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?

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.

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; Kristjánsson 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 Kristjánsson 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).

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; Côté 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.

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.

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number 59 • Spring 2024

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Freedom and the Human Person

Peter augustine lawler & richard reinsch.

F or friends of liberty, the early 21st century has been a confusing time. We are living through a period of rapid and perhaps unprecedented social and economic change, and our established ways of thinking about public questions have not been serving us well. Regaining our balance will require us to open our eyes to the simultaneously disturbing and encouraging trends before us. But perhaps more than that, we are both required and have the opportunity to reflect anew on who we are as free and relational persons. We can and must think more deeply about the contents of a fully human life, as knowing who we are is an indispensable prelude to figuring out what to do to sustain the future of personal and political liberty.

Some of our most familiar political and intellectual categories, adapted to suit 20th-century debates, now cause us to fall into a simpleminded individualism that we cannot really believe. Too many conservatives, for instance, persist in the tired distinction between individual freedom and collectivism. That unrealistic bifurcation helped discredit the communist or fascist reduction of the particular person to nothing but an expendable cog in a machine, plugging away in pursuit of some glorious paradise to come at the end of History. But today that distinction too often ends up placing in the same repulsive category any understanding of the person as a relational part of a larger whole — of a country, family, church, or even nature. It thus causes conservatives to dismiss what students of humanity from Aristotle to today's evolutionary psychologists know to be true: that we social animals are "hardwired" by instinct to find meaning in serving personal causes greater than ourselves, and that reconciling freedom with personal significance is only possible in a relational context that is less about rights than about duties.

The same simpleminded individualism leaves us unsure about how to approach the difficulties of the modern American economy. Given the complicated challenges posed by globalization, the fading away of the middle class, the breakdown of the family among the poor, the growing economic distance separating our "cognitive elite" from the decreasingly "marginally productive" ordinary American, and the indisputable need to trim our entitlements in order to save them (for a while), our ways of speaking about responsibility, work, mobility, and opportunity seem increasingly out of touch.

Everyone knows that success in the marketplace requires skills and habits that are usually acquired through good schools, strong families, active citizenship, and even solicitous and judgmental churches. Those relational institutions, however, are threatened, in different ways, by the unmediated effects of both the market and big, impersonal government. We also know that most people find that worthy lives are shaped by both love and work, and that the flourishing of love and work are interdependent. We even know that love and work are both limits on government, even as we know that middle-class Americans who have good jobs, strong families, and "church homes" are also our best citizens.

What we really know should point our political life in rather definite directions. Does our familiar political vocabulary provide us what we need to articulate those directions? Or does it confuse us more in this already confusing time? We have every reason to wonder whether even conservative Americans have access to a plausible account of the reality of our personhood, an account that could serve as the foundation of a public philosophy that would properly limit and direct a sustainable political life for free persons. What we lack most is an authentically empirical theory adequate to the complexities of American life in our time.

The natural inclination of any conservative is to seek out such a theory in our deep and diverse tradition of liberty, rather than invent one out of whole cloth. And if our search is guided by a sense of how our changing circumstances require us to reflect on the relational character of the human person, our tradition will not disappoint. But we have no choice but to look beyond the most familiar fixtures of that tradition toward some neglected American theorists of liberty who have highlighted the shortcomings of an overly individualistic understanding of American life. Complacently excessive individualism is the opiate of the American "public intellectuals" of our time.

One neglected resource in correcting for that excess is America's most original and deepest 19th-century thinker: Orestes Brownson. Author of The American Republic (published in 1865) and of much more, Brownson explained that our country's "providential constitution" is deeper and more comprehensively compelling than the Lockean theorizing of Jefferson and other leading founders and framers. Our framers, who built for the ages as great statesmen do, drew from all the sources that history, philosophy, political precedent, religion, and the rest of our civilized tradition had given them. It is because they built as statesmen, and not as abstract theorists, that they built better than they knew .

For Brownson, to think clearly about both our Constitution and about particular human beings means avoiding the excesses of thinking too universally (or abstractly) or too particularly (or selfishly). It requires finding a mean between the two extremes of American political thought. On one side, Americans properly appropriate the truthful dogma of human equality, and remembering that all persons equally possess rights is what directs us away from the excessive concern for particularity that characterized aristocratic Southerners in Brownson's time, with all their secessionist, racist, and even pagan impulses. But at the opposite extreme, humanitarians and their abstract egalitarianism — like some transcendentalist, pantheist Northerners in Brownson's time — have divorced the theory of equality from its properly personal theological context. What remains is an empty universalism that overvalues the possibilities for redemption in political reform and denies the truth about personal being, and therefore about personal rights. As the Yankee Brownson acknowledged, despite their many faults, the Southerners were right to defend the particularity of relational individuality; they claimed to know and love real persons and so to have no need for any interest in abstract "humanitarianism."

The American, constitutional mean between abstract universalism and tribal secessionism, according to Brownson, is a limited political unity of citizens who know they are also more than and less than citizens. All of us equally are shaped by natural, personal imperatives having to do with flourishing as material, political, and spiritual beings. When we forget any of the three, we fall into trouble. The material being is concerned with the personal subsistence of himself and his family. The political being is concerned with the common good shared by citizens in a "territorial democracy" in a particular part of the world. The spiritual being is concerned with discovering his relational duties to his loving personal Creator and sharing that personal news with his fellow creatures through the church.

The fully human being attends to all three parts of who he is as a free and relational person born to know, love, and die. He doesn't regard himself as less than he really is by thinking of himself as only a producer and consumer or only a citizen, and he doesn't think of himself as more than he is by confusing his limited and dutiful freedom with the unlimited freedom of God.

This full account of who each of us is means that the economy, the family, and the church aren't to be politicized. True theology is "catholic" in the sense of not being the exclusive preserve of a particular political community or merely "civil theology." This full account of the person's relational responsibilities also means that the political community is for more than serving the selfish needs of particular persons; politics doesn't exist for the sake of economics. Thus loyalty to your country is a real and indispensable virtue — one, Brownson says, particularly lacking in any country too obsessed with rights. What raises the country above the tribe is that this loyalty is to a genuinely common good, a real conception of justice. The American Constitution, Brownson explains, reconciles "liberty with law, and law with liberty" through the devoted affirmation of mediating constitutional principles such as self-government, federalism, the separation of powers, and religious freedom.

Rightly understood, we can see in Brownson's idea of law and liberty a theoretical justification for an enduring practice of American liberty that affirms a constitutional order that "secures at once the authority of the public and the freedom of the individual — the sovereignty of the people without social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy. In other words, its mission is to bring out in its life the dialectic union of authority and liberty, of the natural rights of man and those of society."

Brownson, at the very least, can help today's Americans to think seriously about the complex interplay between political and economic liberties and the relational life of creatures and citizens. It is that kind of thinking that the friends of liberty require if they are to overcome the confusion that defines our time.

PERSONHOOD AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

To see how Brownson might help us think about some contemporary challenges, we can begin by looking more closely at the features of America's current political economy, keeping in mind his view of the whole truth about the free and relational person.

When they think about economics, many conservatives and libertarians focus almost exclusively on the injustice and counter-productivity of constraints on the freedom of entrepreneurs, "job creators," and members of our cognitive elite. But this perspective is flat and one-dimensional. It fails to consider the legitimate fears of a larger cross-section of our working and middle classes. Many members of the middle class — people who run small businesses, do skilled manual labor, and make up "middle management" — feel less and less secure these days, and with good reason. The various "safety nets" that cushioned workers and their families from market competition are eroding: Unions and various forms of tenure are toast, as are employer and employee loyalty, pensions, and, for many ordinary jobs, even benefits. Some people celebrate the new birth of freedom in which all employees become independent contractors, selling their flexible skills to whoever needs them at the moment. But others talk about the sinking — meaning the decreasing productivity and status — of members of the middle class, especially but not only the bottom half of the middle class. Their skills are worth less than ever, and so even when they work hard they make less and less. Given their inability to find jobs that accord them at least the dignity of providing for those they love (as unionized factory jobs did half a century ago), they sometimes decide that work just isn't worth it.

Economic inequality is rapidly increasing, and candid libertarian futurists like George Mason University law professor Tyler Cowen acknowledge that this trend will continue. But our libertarians are right that inequality by itself hardly undermines the case for liberty. A prosperous free country is a place where everyone is becoming better off, although some, because of their hard work and natural gifts, are finding far more success than others. Libertarians often point to the progress of technology as benefitting us all. And thanks to technological development and the global competitive marketplace, productivity has increased. But wages have stagnated, and many Americans don't see the democratic benefits of the progress of economic liberty.

Meanwhile, our entitlement programs are costing us more, and we can't afford to fund them as we now do for much longer. In this respect, progressives have mostly become "conservatives" in the precise sense, defending the benefits status quo and often in ways that are misleading or downright dishonest. President Obama lied to many Americans when he said that they could keep the health plans they had, and he misled Americans when he campaigned on the promise that entitlement reform could be avoided. In both cases, he was offering an impossible level of stability. James Capretta, among others, has shown that the future of our entitlement system is imperiled less by our culture of dependency than by our huge demographic transformation. We have too many old people and not enough young and productive ones. So we're stuck saying that the old need to become more productive — and to some limited extent they can be, given improving health and longevity. The truth is, however, that not all that much can be expected from such remediation.

The primary cause of our entitlement crisis is less the culture of dependency than evolving individualism. While the millennial lifestyle is often discussed as the proof of our society's increasing individualism, evidence is also abundant among the elderly. People are living longer because they are more attentive, as concerned individuals, to the risk factors that imperil their existence. And they are having fewer children, at least in part because they view generating replacements (out of love) as imposing intolerable burdens on their autonomous and productive lives. There is a connection, of course, between this individualism and dependency: As relational institutions like marriage and churches atrophy, government often ends up stepping in to fill the void. That's one reason why single women, and especially single mothers, tend to vote Democratic while married women tend to vote Republican.

The impending entitlement implosion will make it hard for the elderly to experience their techno-gift of unprecedented longevity as they should — as a genuine new birth of freedom. We could say they'll just have to rely more on their families, as their grandparents did in the midst of the Depression. But the disintegration of our relational institutions — including, of course, the intergenerational bonds of family — is reflected in the fact that one of our fastest growing demographic categories is men over 65 without any close connections to a spouse or children. Part of the new birth of freedom has been the explosion of divorce among parents whose children are finally out of the house. With so many years left, why not be responsive to every aspect of one's quality of life?

All in all, many of our most promising and troubling economic and cultural changes can be traced to an increasingly individualistic philosophy of living. The more consistently individualistic ethic is deeply linked, of course, to the fact that we live in a world in which children are growing rarer and in which marriage is becoming a whimsical lifestyle option rooted solely in feeling in love. Europe is becoming post-political, post-religious, and post-familial, as political philosopher Pierre Manent has observed, and he sees this as a form of progress that is based on hatred of bodies or those relational constraints we necessarily have as social beings born to love and die. And our country, truth to tell, is not that much different now. The libertarian notions that citizenship is just another word for "rent-seeking" and that national borders are nothing but arbitrary barriers to the uninhibited flourishing of the global marketplace are becoming mainstream. Certainly many libertarians and many of our "role models" in Silicon Valley are also easily seduced by the transhumanist impulse that we can live a sempiternal existence as conscious machines.

From this liberationist perspective, it is easy to define social progress as the growing understanding of Americans — men and women, gay and straight — as equally free to determine their personal identities independently of religious and political oppression. Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy has been advancing that view for more than two decades, and his outlook is increasingly dominant. Women are free, as Kennedy (with two other justices) said in the plurality opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, not to understand themselves as mothers and to be unfettered political and economic actors just like men. Gays, Kennedy added in Lawrence v. Texas a decade later, are free to determine what relational autonomy means for themselves, just like straights. Despite government regulation and NSA intrusiveness, these are clearly the best of times to be a free individual.

As determinants of success, race and inherited social status are being replaced by inherited intelligence, the capacity for self-discipline and hard work, the willingness to defer gratification for a bigger payoff later, and (perhaps above all) technical education and skills. As the Cato Institute's Brink Lindsey understands it, the successful knowledge worker has a quick-study capacity for abstract (or deracinated) and conceptual (or impersonal) thought, a readiness to process complexity by relating to machines and to people in terms of productive roles and interests. As Tyler Cowen believes, those who are getting more productive and so deservedly wealthier can either work easily with "genius machines" or manage and market those nerds who work so well with the machines. Meanwhile, most Americans are becoming less marginally productive and so "deserve" their stagnant or declining status and wealth.

The result is that America is more of a meritocracy based on productivity than ever. Cowen informs us in his provocative 2013 book, Average Is Over , that America is dividing into two increasingly distant economic classes. Average means "middle class" — what Marx called the petite bourgeoisie, or small business owners, skilled laborers, middle management, and the like. Cowen concedes much to Marxism by saying that the techno-progress of capitalism means that America is no longer a middle-class country — that is, a country where most of the features of life are shared in common by the overwhelming majority of citizens.

But Cowen seems blind to how much will be lost in the cause of freedom should his prognostications come true. America's middle-class orientation inspired its citizens to better themselves by working freely for high levels of income. It is what made Americans uniquely hostile to socialism. This perspective has also made Americans quite judgmental about work and its place in our welfare system. This middle-class view even made us compassionate enough to fund a safety net of entitlements for the "working poor" and those — such as children and the disabled — genuinely unable to care for themselves. Cowen speculates that the safety nets will almost disappear as the classes become so distant from each other that the fabulously rich will resist doing anything much for the seemingly unproductive poor with whom they share little in common.

Who can deny that social mobility is on the decline, as Charles Murray, for one, has explained? The argument that blames the failing members of the lower middle class for their envious lack of virtue, however, might have less and less explanatory value. And if Murray is right about "assortative mating," then the rich are not only getting richer, they're getting smarter, too — and so less and less like most Americans. The real democratic remedies for envy are shared citizenship and shared opportunity, but both are diminishing. And the noblest remedy for envy, of course, is satisfaction with what you have, which is hard to achieve if you don't have or are losing what it takes to live a dignified relational life.

Envy is also mitigated by the perception that those who have wealth and power deserve what they have — that they are not only good people, but use what they have to display their virtue. But one overlooked disadvantage of the new cognitive or industrious and rational elite is that the virtues that make possible their superiority are the opposite of paternalistic and do not tie them to the lower classes. The aristocracies of old, as Alexis de Tocqueville explains, justified their privileges through their honorable and charitable concern for those for whom they thought of themselves as responsible. They thought they deserved their money and property, which they often did not earn, because they knew how to use them with generosity and class.

Today's Silicon Valley elite thinks of its contribution to society in terms of innovative and creative forms of productivity, and its relationship to ordinary people in terms of manipulation and control. Libertarians complain about NSA surveillance, but of greater importance is the "big data" (generated in the service of unimaginably huge profits) yielded by the ability of Google and Facebook to capture the intimate details of our lives by monitoring our online activity. Some Silicon Valley billionaires give lots of money away to worthy causes, of course, but they don't connect their productive activity to any concern for its effects on its consumers.

The original character of Silicon Valley was a joyful combination of productivity with a kind of bohemian self-fulfillment — hippies and other nonconformist misfits who found creative satisfaction through their work. That's the image still projected by the "Googleplex," the corporate headquarters of Google. And certainly Silicon Valley embraces the social liberationism of the 1960s and the general cause of "diversity." But it turns out that techno-creativity is no more easy going than other forms of entrepreneurial productivity. Techno-creativity — or ingenious invention — has always been at the core of modern liberty and prosperity, and it is in Silicon Valley that we see how such invention can be deployed on an almost inconceivably grand scale to transform, liberate, and constrain the ways in which we all live. Members of our cognitive elite merely exercise a new form of power resulting from their intellectual labor.

Libertarian futurists like Cowen and Lindsey sometimes write as if the whole point of this remarkable techno-progress — the victory of capitalism in the form of the creative power of "human capital" — is to combine the emancipatory spirit of the hippies' 1960s with the optimistic spirit of liberty in the service of individual productivity of Ronald Reagan's 1980s. Cowen says that "the light at the end of the tunnel" is the coming of a world in which we will have plenty of everything and all the time in the world to play enjoyable games. Lindsey writes that Marx's view of communism was wrong in only one respect: In order to live in a world of bohemian enjoyment, we will need to remain productive.

THE PERSISTENCE OF THE PERSON

Despite these displays of unprecedented individualism and the musings of libertarian futurists, however, there is plenty of evidence that our relational natures persist and will not be satisfied with techno-progress devoid of interpersonal responsibility.

Marriage and parenting may be disappearing in large parts of sophisticated Europe and Japan, but they are certainly not fading among our high achievers. Not only are they marrying; their marriages are stable and involve a shared commitment to the raising of children. Parenthood, of course, cannot quite be called either productive (or paid) work or personal enjoyment. It is a third and more natural category, one Marx could never integrate into his description of unobsessive self-fulfillment at history's end. Today's sophisticated parents, for that reason, are actually conservatives when it comes to parental responsibilities.

Their de facto affirmation of marriage highlights the emotional shortcomings of being merely a productive and consuming individual, of being bourgeois and bohemian. Marriage and children move us from thinking about our individual freedom and productivity and toward thinking about the blessings of being embodied and being in love with beings with bodies. There may be nothing more personal and relational than parenting.

Parenting is serious and deliberate in our cognitive-elite families (whose kids are now surging ahead of the rest of society by virtue of both nature and nurture), while it is generally getting worse among most Americans. Although ordinary Americans may have more traditional "family values" than our sophisticates, they seem less and less capable of acting on them. Their families are getting more pathological, with more single moms, deadbeat dads, and dependence on the government.

To counteract these distressing trends, many libertarians and conservatives stress that public policy should attenuate inequality by preparing as many people as possible for the demands of productive work. This mindset is what drives the federal government's involvement in the Common Core education standards and its efforts to make students "college and career ready." Politicians and policymakers have put forward reforms to maximize choice and accountability in education. There have also been proposals for deregulatory and tax-cutting efforts meant to encourage entrepreneurship and job growth, along with other efforts to facilitate upward mobility and wealth creation.

While not disagreeing entirely with this sort of conventional economic analysis, others on the right (a group coming to be known as "reform conservatives") articulate proposals that focus on facilitating the relational lives of members of our middle class. Tax reform should focus on relief for families and the self-employed. The reformers also emphasize mending — not ending or declaring unconstitutional — the entitlement programs that form a genuine "safety net" and do not serve primarily as a disincentive to work. They insistently remind us that both big government and Silicon Valley's big data and big technology threaten the small, relational organizations that ordinary people depend upon to find meaning. Families, churches, neighborhoods, and communities provide people with opportunities to be more than productive individuals, and so more than parts of someone else's script.

This kind of conservatism is also skeptical of the claims that the key to improving ordinary life is simply increasing productivity, and that there is a clear connection between productivity and job creation in our high-tech era. The jobless recovery has been great for those who own stock and other capital and worthless or worse for those who don't. The percentage of Americans who own stock is on the decline, and that fact alone suggests a bit about the proletarianization of the middle class.

Still, a conservative attuned to Brownson's whole, relational person must be highly skeptical of any form of reductionist determinism — either Marxist or libertarian — that confidently predicts the inevitability of the dwindling of the middle class into nothing. That confidence is offensive to the aspirations of free men and women to control their own dignified destiny. A "conservative personalism" similarly rejects the techno-determinist conceit that the arc of our progress is inevitably in the direction of more individual liberty, more money, and more fun. Technological development is a wonderful revelation of human freedom and surely irreversible, but it is also, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, a profound trial of our free will.

FREEDOM AND RELIGION

It is through free will that we subordinate the technological "how" to the personal "why." This project points us to the ground of our freedom and necessarily prompts the question of its purpose. It therefore returns us to our personal and relational religious heritage. When it comes to religion especially, the current condition of our liberty is confusing.

Freedom of religion is good for political life, insofar as political action can be limited to matters that don't require the controversial shaping of souls or intrusions into the realm of conscience. But freedom of religion, Alexis de Tocqueville explained, is especially good for religion, as it gives churches the ability to sustain their independence as bodies of thought and action resisting the skeptical, materialistic, and even freedom-denying or passively fatalistic excesses of democracy.

Religion, Tocqueville reminds us, is actually a limit on the freedom of the isolated, self-obsessed individual. The loves and demands it places upon us draw us out of ourselves. Our personal and social duties become magnified in their importance to us. So it is through religion that Americans gain a sense of common morality and common duties, and through religion that Americans grow confident of the equality of all unique and irreplaceable creatures under God. It is through religion that Americans have come to believe that universal education should be more than techno-vocational, because each of us is more than a merely productive being with interests.

Some Americans today celebrate the freeing of the individual from the dogmatic constraints of religious morality and the liberation of personal lives — even spiritual lives — from the constraints of church. Certainly we can no longer say that Americans are bound by a common religious morality when it comes, say, to marriage and the family. And our Supreme Court has led the way in affirming "relational autonomy," or the individual's choice about how to construct his free personal identity. A nation that has recently become very pro-choice when it comes to contraception, divorce, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage has certainly achieved a new birth of freedom from religion in public life. And more and more Americans — although still a fairly small minority — agree with our "new atheists" that "religion poisons everything" and that almost all of the repressive pathologies that have distorted the world can be traced back to religious authority. We can say that Americans are freer than ever from the intrusive influence of churches as organized bodies of thought and action.

But observant religious believers — those who actually deeply identify with religious institutions as sources of personal and relational authority — say we actually have less religious freedom than ever. There is less respect for the teaching authority of the church as a source of the moral guidance that is especially necessary in a democracy — a form of guidance that also limits the authority of government and the market. We no longer seem to be in agreement that the free exercise of religion is freedom for religion and not merely freedom of private conscience. So the Obamacare contraceptive mandate intrudes on the freedom of the church to be an authoritative body for believers. Indeed, the emerging consensus is that a church's opinions on abortion and marriage are to be dismissed as unreasonable and, if contrary to the prevailing view of rights, no different from the views of racists and other moral idiots. So the display of liberty that is genuine religious diversity is now an offense against "diversity" in the corporate-bureaucratic sense.

Our religious identity is not a political creation, nor is it a wholly privatized or isolated experience of conscience. Religious liberty, as Brownson reminds us, creates room for church as an organized body of thought and action. It is how we relational persons become most open to the truth about who we are. That is not to say that the church, properly understood, asks for more from the state than the recognition that free and relational persons may voluntarily submit to its corporate authority. As Brownson says, all the church needs from government is freedom to evangelize or to shape souls, and our Constitution accords the churches this autonomy.

The trends just described, some critics of American culture contend, show that our Lockean and founding-era idea of liberty (as it has unfolded over history) has always been deeply hostile to the freedom of church as church. As a consequence, genuinely faithful Catholics, for instance, have to oppose themselves to the civilizational wrecking ball that is the American idea of liberty. The situation of Catholics in America, they say, is becoming more and more like the situation of dissidents under communism: Persecution for one's faith is just around the corner. These Catholic critics — like Alasdair MacIntyre and Patrick Deneen — now favor a political order more directly concerned with privileging virtue over liberty or directing liberty with virtue. They add that the position of the Church in America is so weak, in part, because so many Catholics have been seduced by the proposition that being a good Catholic can be compatible with being a good American — an idea that is impossible if, like MacIntyre and Deneen, you see being a good American as equivalent to being the free individual that Locke describes. These "traditionalist" Catholic critics are more and more certain that they have little to be grateful for — and so little to be loyal to — in America. From a political point of view, they have become secessionists, opposing their religious duty to the civic spirit.

But there are also serious Catholics, and other moral and social conservatives, who believe in using Lockean or libertarian means for non-libertarian ends. By this they mean that our economic and political liberty can only be affirmed as good for those who deploy their liberty in the service of purposeful, relational lives. Every human being, in truth, is a free economic actor, a citizen, someone's child (and maybe someone's parent), and a creature of God. Political activity should largely be about protecting and expanding the space for religious institutions, home schooling, and genuinely countercultural or religious ways of life that will allow people to live out their full relational identities.

These more hopeful conservatives have in mind a compromise that would reject, in light of recent experience, the notion that our churches can combine their charitable functions with the welfare state without undermining their singular missions. But their compromise would insist that those missions can be pursued within the confines of American life. The way to deal with the contraceptive mandate, for instance, would be to get government as far as possible out of the insurance business, and to make the institutional churches in general less dependent on government funding and regulation. In a different way, these libertarian non-libertarians are secessionists too. They want to recover the distinction between a modest public realm and an expansive private realm.

AN AMERICAN THEORY OF LIBERTY

In the spirit (and close to the letter) of Brownson, we should conclude by trying to reconcile both our churches and our libertarians to our country's civilizing mission. To do this, we have to see the limits of the abstract principles with which we conservatives often tend to define America's founding and its public life. Our political arrangements have always been a compromise between such principles and the complex, relational character of the free human person. As James Stoner argues: 

To be true to the spirit of the Declaration means, from my perspective, not that we are bound to the most radical reading of its most abstract truth, but that we ought to recover the spirited aspiration to self-government that gave the American Revolution its force and its justification. Rather than look to an unelected judiciary for the formulation of our ideals — or to the liberal philosophers who want to rule through them — we should neither shy away from free debate on important social questions nor demand that every consensus work out its derivation from first things in order to count.

It took a French Catholic priest, Father Raymond-Leopold Bruckberger (chaplain to the French Resistance in World War II) to reveal America to itself, or to remind America that its legacy begins with men locked in dry political argument. Bruckberger's book Image of America (published in America in 1959) beautifully accounts for our Declaration of Independence and its mixture of natural theology (in its second paragraph) with the providential God (featured in the last section). Bruckberger observes that the Continental Congress, while not rejecting Jefferson's deistic formulation of "Nature's God" in the document's opening, inserts toward the end two descriptions of God as a creator and judge, as a personal God.

The truth is, Bruckberger observes, "that Congress and Jefferson had different concepts of God" and that they held to "two profoundly different philosophies." Jefferson and the reigning Lockean philosophy of the day held to an impersonal, past-tense God, more of a "what" than a "who." But the fundamentally Christian (and specifically Calvinist, more often than not) members of Congress thought of God as a personal, present-tense, relational "who." It is the Christian contribution to the founding compromise that made the God of nature personal, judgmental, relational, and providential (and so loving).

The living, giving God of the Bible is what secures, more than Jefferson's Lockean contributions, our faith in the irreducible personal significance of each one of us. Without that faith, there would be no accounting fully for Lincoln's claim that America is, more than anything else, all about dedication to the proposition that all men are created equal. Without it, we would find it all too easy to account for the contradiction between Jefferson's moving words about the ways our race-based slavery did violence to men and women with rights and his indifference to taking even modest risks to bring American slavery to a timely end. Living under the God who cares for us all is the foundation of a multidimensional, relational country in which men and women are more than citizens but citizens still. On many levels they are called to freely care for one another as well as to respect each person's freedom as a being made in the image of God.

"The greatest luck of all for the Declaration," Bruckberger claims, "was precisely the divergence and compromise between the Puritan tradition and what Jefferson wrote." The Declaration cast in a strictly Puritan mold would have produced theocratic offenses against our true freedom as citizens and creatures. Alternatively, "[h]ad it been written from the standpoint of the lax philosophy of the day it would have been a-religious, if not actually offensive to Christians." From a genuinely American point of view, understanding free persons as only un-relational bearers of rights — or as producers and consumers or free individuals and nothing more — really is a "lax philosophy" that reduces each of us to less than what we are.

The Declaration, by combining these views about who each of us is, provides the "philosophy that most manifests the equality of all men in their natural and supernatural dignity," Bruckberger concludes. It is a document at the foundation of a tradition that truthfully relies on appeals to both Lockean and Christian understandings of who we are as free and equal beings, reconciling individual freedom with political and religious devotion and personal sacrifice on behalf of our fellow citizens and creatures.

We can say, as John Courtney Murray did in the spirit of Brownson, that the Founders built "better than they knew." They were statesmen who did not think as abstract theorists, choosing instead to engage in prudential compromise in the interest of national unity. Jefferson, for example, thought the congress's amendments to his Declaration mangled its intention, but he accommodated them with dignity. Such statesmanship reconciled universality and particularity on multiple levels. The universalism of Jefferson was from one view too abstract and from another too particular and selfish. The egalitarian theological universalism of the Puritans was too intrusively personal, and so it ridiculously and tyrannically clamped down on the particular person's freedom. But it was also personal and relational, and so it affirmed the unique irreplaceability of every particular creature.

There is no direct matrix of translation from the founding insight concerning equal personal and relational liberty under God to concrete policy realms. But that insight does suggest that the spirit of prudential compromise ought to pervade our deliberations regarding the family, entitlements, abortion, religious liberty, taxation, and regulation, and our efforts to reconcile citizenship and civic spirit with the globalizing imperatives of the marketplace. Today's factional divisions are not so different from those of the founding generation, and we might even say that a true conservative both instinctively and prudentially searches for the mean between fundamentalism and libertarianism — or even between liberalism and libertarianism. The goal must be always to do justice to the full and complicated truth about who we are.

"Civilization," as Murray's fellow Catholic scholar Thomas Gilby put it, "is formed by men locked together in argument." Our Declaration and Constitution, properly understood, sustain "the deliberate sense of the community" as a body capable of self-government, open to the truth about who each of us is, and glorying in its inheritance of the multifaceted and genuinely providential Western constitutional tradition given to America. As Solzhenitsyn memorably reminded us, our hopes for political and technological progress are both chastened and directed by the enduring truth that the one true human progress is made over the course of each particular human life toward a kind of personal and relational perfection in wisdom and virtue — progress that comes through responsibly and courageously and lovingly acting in light of what we cannot help but know about who we are. From this view, the unprecedented challenges to — as well as opportunities for — living as purposeful beings found in our technological world should be understood as gifts to be used well or badly according to our free wills. The challenges of our time are especially confusing because they so readily detach us from our traditional and relational institutions and sources of guidance. The first step toward making sense of them — toward finding our true place in the world — is recovering through deliberation and, often, compromise the truth about who each of us is as a free and relational person.

Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor of Government at Berry College and executive editor of  Perspectives on Political Science .

Richard Reinsch is a fellow at Liberty Fund and the editor of the Library of Law and Liberty.

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The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy and The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus

Heidegger, Martin, The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler, Continuum, 2002, 216pp, $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 0826459242. Heidegger, Martin, The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, trans. Ted Sadler, Continuum, 2002, 252pp, $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 0826459226.

Reviewed by William McNeill, DePaul University

The appearance in English of two of Heidegger’s most important Freiburg lecture courses from the early 1930s— The Essence of Human Freedom, from summer semester 1930, and The Essence of Truth , delivered in winter semester 1931/32—marks a major and significant contribution to the accessibility of this pivotal period of Heidegger’s thought for the English-speaking world. Together, these courses document the inseparability of Heidegger’s thought from a critical and ongoing dialogue with the philosophical tradition. They serve at once to illuminate texts of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, to clarify the significance and stance of Heidegger’s own thinking, and to display Heidegger’s unique and meticulous pedagogical style. Although both volumes have been available in German since the 1980s ( The Essence of Human Freedom was published in 1982, The Essence of Truth in 1988), they have been largely ignored by Heidegger scholarship outside of Germany. Their publication in English is a welcome event.

The first volume, The Essence of Human Freedom, presents itself as an introduction to philosophy as a whole by way of what appears to be just one particular, regional question: that of human freedom. And yet, Heidegger suggests, the distinction of philosophical questioning perhaps lies in the fact that it always reveals the whole in and through—and only in and through—the unfolding of particular questions. This does not, however, mean that in philosophizing we simply broaden our field of view in order better to situate and understand our particular theme—in regard to the question of freedom, for example, also taking God and world into our view as that in relation to which freedom (as negative freedom, freedom from…) is situated. It means, rather, a concern with the whole that “goes to our own roots,” that challenges us in the very grounds of our being. Taking his lead from Kant’s understanding of practical freedom, as ultimately grounded in transcendental freedom, Heidegger quickly moves from Kant’s understanding of freedom in terms of causality to argue that causality at once directs us back to the phenomenon of movement in general, which, as a fundamental determination of beings that varies in accordance with the kind of beings involved, directs us toward the question of beings as such—of “what beings in their breadth and depth actually are”—and thus to the “leading question” ( Leitfrage ) of philosophy: ti to on, what are beings? (German 31/translation, 23).

From here, Heidegger suggests that this question, while raised by Plato and Aristotle, was nevertheless not genuinely or radically unfolded by them; thus, it is our prerogative, he states, but also our responsibility, “to become the murderers of our forefathers,” and indeed to succumb to such a fate ourselves: “Only then, can we arrive at the problematic in which they immediately existed, but precisely for this reason were not able to work through to final transparency .” (37/27). What follows is an extensive excursus (of some 50 pages) inquiring into the multiple meanings of being in Aristotle, starting from the basic Greek word for being, ousia , and culminating in an important interpretation of Metaphysics IX, 10, where Heidegger argues that Aristotle’s understanding of the most proper being of what properly is (beings proper) as being true ( to on alethes as kuriotaton on ), that is, as the deconcealment of what presents itself in sheer presence, not only constitutes an integral part of Metaphysics IX (contrary to what some commentators have suggested), but contains “the keystone of Book IX, which itself is the center of the entire Metaphysics .” (107/75). And yet, Heidegger notes, this chapter also documents something of the growing exclusion of the possibility of untruth from truth: the sheer unhiddenness of something straightforwardly ( haplos ) or simply given, apprehended by nous , of itself excludes any possibility of distortion or error, of apprehending what is given as something other than itself.

Following a very brief discussion of the culmination of this Greek understanding of being as sheer presence in Hegel, Heidegger, reverting to the problematic of Being and Time , suggests not only that the fundamental Greek understanding of being as presence “receives its illumination” from time itself, but that the leading question of philosophy (what are beings?) must be transformed into the fundamental or grounding question ( Grundfrage ), “i.e, into the question which inquires into the ‘and’ of being and time and thus into the ground of both .” (116/81). In little more than ten condensed, yet incredibly compelling pages, Heidegger then seeks to show that this ground, which lies “prior even to being and time” and constitutes “the ground of the possibility of existence, the root of being and time,” is nothing other than freedom. Freedom, however, is no longer to be understood as a property of man; at most the converse is the case: “man as a possibility of freedom,” freedom as the “awesome’ ( ungeheuerliche ) ground wherein the disclosure or deconcealment of beings as such and as a whole occurs. (133–35/93–94). These pivotal pages of the book not only retrieve in a transformed manner Heidegger’s analyses of time from 1924 through 1930, but also show Heidegger attempting to take a further, decisive step along the path opened up by The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, the important lecture course delivered in winter semester 1929–30.

In a somewhat surprising turn, Heidegger, rather than further developing the radical perspective just opened up, turns back to a consideration of freedom in Kant, and the last hundred pages of the course are devoted to this task. Heidegger, while intimating a series of complicated questions that lie ahead, deliberately chooses another path, one “which forces us into constant dialogue with the philosophers, in particular with Kant,” who was “the first to see the problem of freedom in its most radical philosophical consequences” (136–37/95). The entire analysis of Kant’s understanding of freedom, however, is situated under the question of whether freedom is a problem of causality (as in Kant), or whether, conversely, causality is a problem of freedom; of whether, indeed, freedom demands to be conceived more radically than in terms of causality at all. In the closing pages of the course, Heidegger argues that this is indeed the case, and that causality is grounded in freedom, not vice-versa. Here, Heidegger seeks to move beyond the Kantian perspective, which, he argues, fails to adequately interrogate the ontological character of the possibility and actuality of freedom. Freedom in a more primordial sense, he indicates, entails an “originary self-binding” that lies prior to the distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge and comportment.

The second volume, The Essence of Truth , presents a careful, step-by-step exegesis of two central arguments from Plato’s dialogues. The first, an analysis of the allegory of the cave from Book VII of the Republic , seeks to return to the original Greek experience of aletheia (truth) as “unhiddenness” or “unconcealment,” a sense of aletheia that Heidegger shows is a precondition for understanding truth as propositional correctness. The analysis of the allegory follows the different stages of the occurrence of truth as gradations of unhiddenness and of the prisoners’ relation to what becomes unhidden or revealed at each stage. In interpreting the central themes of the allegory—themes such as the progressive liberation of the prisoners; their turning toward the light; the essence of the ideas; the idea of the Good; the philosopher as liberator; the essence of paideia ; and the fate of philosophizing—Heidegger, however, not only reads the allegory as a testament to the original power of unhiddenness in Greek existence, but also as an indication of the waning of this fundamental experience, such that Plato does not, in the allegory, ask concerning the essence of unhiddenness as such: “Plato equates the unhidden with what is (beings), in such a way that the question of unhiddenness as such does not come to life.” (German 123–24; translation, 89). That this is so, Heidegger argues, is evidenced by the fact that Plato fails to ask about the essence of hiddenness, as that from which unhiddenness must be wrested. Thus, the theme of unhiddenness has an ambiguous status in the allegory: “For Plato, therefore, unhiddenness is a theme, and at the same time not a theme. Because this is the situation with regard to un- hiddenness, an explicit clarification of the hiddenness of beings does not eventuate. But just this neglect of the question of hiddenness as such is the decisive indication of the already beginning ineffectiveness of un hiddenness in the strict sense… . For the unhiddenness of beings is precisely wrested from hiddenness, i.e., it is obtained in struggle against the latter.” (125/90-91).

From here, mindful of this failure to inquire into the essence of hiddenness and, as a consequence, into the essence of unhiddenness as such, Heidegger moves to the second dialogue of interest, namely the Theaetetus , for which he makes a striking claim: This dialogue, he claims, represents “that stretch of the road of the question concerning untruth which, for the first and last time in the history of philosophy, Plato actually trod …” (129/93). Here, in his analysis of the Theaetetus , Heidegger takes us through the various stages of the argument that unfolds from Theaetetus’ initial answer to what constitutes knowledge ( episteme ), namely, aisthesis , or sense-perception, to the problem of how wrong opinion ( pseudes doxa ) is possible. Heidegger’s interpretation shows not only how falsity and—as an apparent consequence—truth come to be conceived as uncorrectness and correctness of the propositional statement respectively (entailing both a shift away from the original experience of unhiddenness and a shift in the understanding of doxa ), but also how truth and untruth thereby come to be viewed as mutually exclusive, contrary to the insight that lies close at hand in the cave-allegory, but is not taken up by Plato himself: namely, that “ unhiddenness … in itself is simultaneously, and indeed essentially, hiddenness; a truth to whose essence there belongs un-truth.” (321/227). Yet Heidegger’s readings should not be seen as simply an indictment of Plato’s thought: not only do they succeed magnificently in bringing out the experiential and, one might say, phenomenological, basis of Plato’s thought—breathing new life into these dialogues; Heideggr’s insights into the essence of truth as unconcealment (being) are also ever mindful of the implications for his own “question of being.” As he notes toward the close of this volume: “Untruth belongs to the primordial essence of truth as the unhiddenness of being, i.e., to the inner possibility of truth. The question of being is thus thoroughly ambiguous —it is a question of the deepest truth and at the same time it is on the edge of, and in the zone of, the deepest untruth.” (322/228)

Each of these two volumes makes an important contribution to our understanding of the development of Heidegger’s own thinking as in constant dialogue with the philosophical tradition. They illuminate not only the philosophers he engages, but the metamorphoses of Heidegger’s own thinking of being as well. Anyone seeking to understand the shifting ground of Heidegger’s thinking of being and time from the late 1920s through the early 1930s will have to study The Essence of Human Freedom; those who are of the opinion that Heidegger has little or nothing to say about the phenomenon of the human body need to study the analyses of Platonic eros, sense-perception, bodily dispersion, and desire from The Essence of Truth. The translator has done a very fine job overall: the translations convey the sense of Heidegger’s difficult prose in a very readable and generally accurate manner. A few errors or inaccuracies that I discovered serve as a reminder that one should always consult the German when undertaking careful study: in The Essence of Human Freedom, the term existenziellen is rendered as “existential” (instead of “existentiell”) at one critical point (136/94); in On the Essence of Truth , “authentic” is at one point used to translate both eigenen and eigentlichen (238/170) although the two are quite distinct for Heidegger, eigenen really meaning “own”: thus, in this particular context, one’s own self could very well be at stake without one necessarily being authentic; in another place in the same volume, “hiddenness” appears instead of “unhiddenness” for Unverborgenheit (322/228)).

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Essay on Human Rights: Samples in 500 and 1500

• Updated on  
• Dec 9, 2023

Essay writing is an integral part of the school curriculum and various academic and competitive exams like IELTS , TOEFL , SAT , UPSC , etc. It is designed to test your command of the English language and how well you can gather your thoughts and present them in a structure with a flow. To master your ability to write an essay, you must read as much as possible and practise on any given topic. This blog brings you a detailed guide on how to write an essay on Human Rights , with useful essay samples on Human rights.

This Blog Includes:

The basic human rights, 200 words essay on human rights, 500 words essay on human rights, 500+ words essay on human rights in india, 1500 words essay on human rights, importance of human rights, essay on human rights pdf.

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What are Human Rights

Human rights mark everyone as free and equal, irrespective of age, gender, caste, creed, religion and nationality. The United Nations adopted human rights in light of the atrocities people faced during the Second World War. On the 10th of December 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Its adoption led to the recognition of human rights as the foundation for freedom, justice and peace for every individual. Although it’s not legally binding, most nations have incorporated these human rights into their constitutions and domestic legal frameworks. Human rights safeguard us from discrimination and guarantee that our most basic needs are protected.

Did you know that the 10th of December is celebrated as Human Rights Day ?

Before we move on to the essays on human rights, let’s check out the basics of what they are.

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Here is a 200-word short sample essay on basic Human Rights.

Human rights are a set of rights given to every human being regardless of their gender, caste, creed, religion, nation, location or economic status. These are said to be moral principles that illustrate certain standards of human behaviour. Protected by law , these rights are applicable everywhere and at any time. Basic human rights include the right to life, right to a fair trial, right to remedy by a competent tribunal, right to liberty and personal security, right to own property, right to education, right of peaceful assembly and association, right to marriage and family, right to nationality and freedom to change it, freedom of speech, freedom from discrimination, freedom from slavery, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of movement, right of opinion and information, right to adequate living standard and freedom from interference with privacy, family, home and correspondence.

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Check out this 500-word long essay on Human Rights.

Every person has dignity and value. One of the ways that we recognise the fundamental worth of every person is by acknowledging and respecting their human rights. Human rights are a set of principles concerned with equality and fairness. They recognise our freedom to make choices about our lives and develop our potential as human beings. They are about living a life free from fear, harassment or discrimination.

Human rights can broadly be defined as the basic rights that people worldwide have agreed are essential. These include the right to life, the right to a fair trial, freedom from torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to health, education and an adequate standard of living. These human rights are the same for all people everywhere – men and women, young and old, rich and poor, regardless of our background, where we live, what we think or believe. This basic property is what makes human rights’ universal’.

Human rights connect us all through a shared set of rights and responsibilities. People’s ability to enjoy their human rights depends on other people respecting those rights. This means that human rights involve responsibility and duties towards other people and the community. Individuals have a responsibility to ensure that they exercise their rights with consideration for the rights of others. For example, when someone uses their right to freedom of speech, they should do so without interfering with someone else’s right to privacy.

Governments have a particular responsibility to ensure that people can enjoy their rights. They must establish and maintain laws and services that enable people to enjoy a life in which their rights are respected and protected. For example, the right to education says that everyone is entitled to a good education. Therefore, governments must provide good quality education facilities and services to their people. If the government fails to respect or protect their basic human rights, people can take it into account.

Values of tolerance, equality and respect can help reduce friction within society. Putting human rights ideas into practice can help us create the kind of society we want to live in. There has been tremendous growth in how we think about and apply human rights ideas in recent decades. This growth has had many positive results – knowledge about human rights can empower individuals and offer solutions for specific problems.

Human rights are an important part of how people interact with others at all levels of society – in the family, the community, school, workplace, politics and international relations. Therefore, people everywhere must strive to understand what human rights are. When people better understand human rights, it is easier for them to promote justice and the well-being of society. 

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Here is a human rights essay focused on India.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. It has been rightly proclaimed in the American Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Created with certain unalienable rights….” Similarly, the Indian Constitution has ensured and enshrined Fundamental rights for all citizens irrespective of caste, creed, religion, colour, sex or nationality. These basic rights, commonly known as human rights, are recognised the world over as basic rights with which every individual is born.

In recognition of human rights, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was made on the 10th of December, 1948. This declaration is the basic instrument of human rights. Even though this declaration has no legal bindings and authority, it forms the basis of all laws on human rights. The necessity of formulating laws to protect human rights is now being felt all over the world. According to social thinkers, the issue of human rights became very important after World War II concluded. It is important for social stability both at the national and international levels. Wherever there is a breach of human rights, there is conflict at one level or the other.

Given the increasing importance of the subject, it becomes necessary that educational institutions recognise the subject of human rights as an independent discipline. The course contents and curriculum of the discipline of human rights may vary according to the nature and circumstances of a particular institution. Still, generally, it should include the rights of a child, rights of minorities, rights of the needy and the disabled, right to live, convention on women, trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation etc.

Since the formation of the United Nations , the promotion and protection of human rights have been its main focus. The United Nations has created a wide range of mechanisms for monitoring human rights violations. The conventional mechanisms include treaties and organisations, U.N. special reporters, representatives and experts and working groups. Asian countries like China argue in favour of collective rights. According to Chinese thinkers, European countries lay stress upon individual rights and values while Asian countries esteem collective rights and obligations to the family and society as a whole.

With the freedom movement the world over after World War II, the end of colonisation also ended the policy of apartheid and thereby the most aggressive violation of human rights. With the spread of education, women are asserting their rights. Women’s movements play an important role in spreading the message of human rights. They are fighting for their rights and supporting the struggle for human rights of other weaker and deprived sections like bonded labour, child labour, landless labour, unemployed persons, Dalits and elderly people.

Unfortunately, violation of human rights continues in most parts of the world. Ethnic cleansing and genocide can still be seen in several parts of the world. Large sections of the world population are deprived of the necessities of life i.e. food, shelter and security of life. Right to minimum basic needs viz. Work, health care, education and shelter are denied to them. These deprivations amount to the negation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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Check out this detailed 1500-word essay on human rights.

The human right to live and exist, the right to equality, including equality before the law, non-discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, and equality of opportunity in matters of employment, the right to freedom of speech and expression, assembly, association, movement, residence, the right to practice any profession or occupation, the right against exploitation, prohibiting all forms of forced labour, child labour and trafficking in human beings, the right to freedom of conscience, practice and propagation of religion and the right to legal remedies for enforcement of the above are basic human rights. These rights and freedoms are the very foundations of democracy.

Obviously, in a democracy, the people enjoy the maximum number of freedoms and rights. Besides these are political rights, which include the right to contest an election and vote freely for a candidate of one’s choice. Human rights are a benchmark of a developed and civilised society. But rights cannot exist in a vacuum. They have their corresponding duties. Rights and duties are the two aspects of the same coin.

Liberty never means license. Rights presuppose the rule of law, where everyone in the society follows a code of conduct and behaviour for the good of all. It is the sense of duty and tolerance that gives meaning to rights. Rights have their basis in the ‘live and let live’ principle. For example, my right to speech and expression involves my duty to allow others to enjoy the same freedom of speech and expression. Rights and duties are inextricably interlinked and interdependent. A perfect balance is to be maintained between the two. Whenever there is an imbalance, there is chaos.

A sense of tolerance, propriety and adjustment is a must to enjoy rights and freedom. Human life sans basic freedom and rights is meaningless. Freedom is the most precious possession without which life would become intolerable, a mere abject and slavish existence. In this context, Milton’s famous and oft-quoted lines from his Paradise Lost come to mind: “To reign is worth ambition though in hell/Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.”

However, liberty cannot survive without its corresponding obligations and duties. An individual is a part of society in which he enjoys certain rights and freedom only because of the fulfilment of certain duties and obligations towards others. Thus, freedom is based on mutual respect’s rights. A fine balance must be maintained between the two, or there will be anarchy and bloodshed. Therefore, human rights can best be preserved and protected in a society steeped in morality, discipline and social order.

Violation of human rights is most common in totalitarian and despotic states. In the theocratic states, there is much persecution, and violation in the name of religion and the minorities suffer the most. Even in democracies, there is widespread violation and infringement of human rights and freedom. The women, children and the weaker sections of society are victims of these transgressions and violence.

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights’ main concern is to protect and promote human rights and freedom in the world’s nations. In its various sessions held from time to time in Geneva, it adopts various measures to encourage worldwide observations of these basic human rights and freedom. It calls on its member states to furnish information regarding measures that comply with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights whenever there is a complaint of a violation of these rights. In addition, it reviews human rights situations in various countries and initiates remedial measures when required.

The U.N. Commission was much concerned and dismayed at the apartheid being practised in South Africa till recently. The Secretary-General then declared, “The United Nations cannot tolerate apartheid. It is a legalised system of racial discrimination, violating the most basic human rights in South Africa. It contradicts the letter and spirit of the United Nations Charter. That is why over the last forty years, my predecessors and I have urged the Government of South Africa to dismantle it.”

Now, although apartheid is no longer practised in that country, other forms of apartheid are being blatantly practised worldwide. For example, sex apartheid is most rampant. Women are subject to abuse and exploitation. They are not treated equally and get less pay than their male counterparts for the same jobs. In employment, promotions, possession of property etc., they are most discriminated against. Similarly, the rights of children are not observed properly. They are forced to work hard in very dangerous situations, sexually assaulted and exploited, sold and bonded for labour.

The Commission found that religious persecution, torture, summary executions without judicial trials, intolerance, slavery-like practices, kidnapping, political disappearance, etc., are being practised even in the so-called advanced countries and societies. The continued acts of extreme violence, terrorism and extremism in various parts of the world like Pakistan, India, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Somalia, Algeria, Lebanon, Chile, China, and Myanmar, etc., by the governments, terrorists, religious fundamentalists, and mafia outfits, etc., is a matter of grave concern for the entire human race.

Violation of freedom and rights by terrorist groups backed by states is one of the most difficult problems society faces. For example, Pakistan has been openly collaborating with various terrorist groups, indulging in extreme violence in India and other countries. In this regard the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva adopted a significant resolution, which was co-sponsored by India, focusing on gross violation of human rights perpetrated by state-backed terrorist groups.

The resolution expressed its solidarity with the victims of terrorism and proposed that a U.N. Fund for victims of terrorism be established soon. The Indian delegation recalled that according to the Vienna Declaration, terrorism is nothing but the destruction of human rights. It shows total disregard for the lives of innocent men, women and children. The delegation further argued that terrorism cannot be treated as a mere crime because it is systematic and widespread in its killing of civilians.

Violation of human rights, whether by states, terrorists, separatist groups, armed fundamentalists or extremists, is condemnable. Regardless of the motivation, such acts should be condemned categorically in all forms and manifestations, wherever and by whomever they are committed, as acts of aggression aimed at destroying human rights, fundamental freedom and democracy. The Indian delegation also underlined concerns about the growing connection between terrorist groups and the consequent commission of serious crimes. These include rape, torture, arson, looting, murder, kidnappings, blasts, and extortion, etc.

Violation of human rights and freedom gives rise to alienation, dissatisfaction, frustration and acts of terrorism. Governments run by ambitious and self-seeking people often use repressive measures and find violence and terror an effective means of control. However, state terrorism, violence, and human freedom transgressions are very dangerous strategies. This has been the background of all revolutions in the world. Whenever there is systematic and widespread state persecution and violation of human rights, rebellion and revolution have taken place. The French, American, Russian and Chinese Revolutions are glowing examples of human history.

The first war of India’s Independence in 1857 resulted from long and systematic oppression of the Indian masses. The rapidly increasing discontent, frustration and alienation with British rule gave rise to strong national feelings and demand for political privileges and rights. Ultimately the Indian people, under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, made the British leave India, setting the country free and independent.

Human rights and freedom ought to be preserved at all costs. Their curtailment degrades human life. The political needs of a country may reshape Human rights, but they should not be completely distorted. Tyranny, regimentation, etc., are inimical of humanity and should be resisted effectively and united. The sanctity of human values, freedom and rights must be preserved and protected. Human Rights Commissions should be established in all countries to take care of human freedom and rights. In cases of violation of human rights, affected individuals should be properly compensated, and it should be ensured that these do not take place in future.

These commissions can become effective instruments in percolating the sensitivity to human rights down to the lowest levels of governments and administrations. The formation of the National Human Rights Commission in October 1993 in India is commendable and should be followed by other countries.

Also Read: Law Courses in India

Human rights are of utmost importance to seek basic equality and human dignity. Human rights ensure that the basic needs of every human are met. They protect vulnerable groups from discrimination and abuse, allow people to stand up for themselves, and follow any religion without fear and give them the freedom to express their thoughts freely. In addition, they grant people access to basic education and equal work opportunities. Thus implementing these rights is crucial to ensure freedom, peace and safety.

Human Rights Day is annually celebrated on the 10th of December.

Human Rights Day is celebrated to commemorate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UNGA in 1948.

Some of the common Human Rights are the right to life and liberty, freedom of opinion and expression, freedom from slavery and torture and the right to work and education.

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Essay on Freedom

Students are often asked to write an essay on Freedom in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Freedom

Understanding freedom.

Freedom is a fundamental human right. It is the power to act, speak, or think without restraint. Freedom allows us to make choices and express ourselves.

The Importance of Freedom

Freedom is vital for personal development. It helps us discover who we are and encourages creativity and innovation. Without freedom, our world would lack diversity and progress.

Freedom with Responsibility

However, freedom comes with responsibility. We must respect others’ rights and freedoms. Misuse of freedom can lead to chaos and conflict. Therefore, it’s crucial to use freedom wisely.

Also check:

• 10 Lines on Freedom
• Paragraph on Freedom
• Speech on Freedom

250 Words Essay on Freedom

Freedom, a concept often taken for granted, is a cornerstone of modern civilization. It’s synonymous with autonomy, self-determination, and the capacity to make choices without coercion. Freedom, however, is not absolute; it’s a relative term, defined by societal norms, legal frameworks, and cultural contexts.

The Dialectics of Freedom

Freedom can be broadly categorized into two types: positive and negative. Negative freedom refers to the absence of external constraints, allowing individuals to act according to their will. In contrast, positive freedom is the ability to act in one’s best interest, which often requires societal support and resources. The dialectics of these two types of freedom form the crux of many political and philosophical debates.

Freedom and Responsibility

Freedom is inextricably linked with responsibility. Every choice made in freedom has consequences, and individuals must bear the responsibility for their actions. This interplay between freedom and responsibility is a key aspect of ethical and moral judgments.

Freedom in the Modern World

In the modern world, freedom is often associated with democratic rights and civil liberties. However, the rise of digital technology poses new challenges. Questions about data privacy, surveillance, and censorship have sparked debates about the boundaries of freedom in the digital age.

In conclusion, freedom is a complex and multifaceted concept. It’s a fundamental human right, yet its interpretation and application vary widely across different societies and contexts. Understanding the nuances of freedom helps us navigate the ethical and moral dilemmas of our time.

500 Words Essay on Freedom

Freedom, a concept deeply ingrained in human consciousness, is often perceived as the absence of restrictions and the ability to exercise one’s rights and powers at will. It is a fundamental right and the cornerstone of modern democratic societies. However, the concept of freedom is multifaceted, and its interpretation varies across different socio-cultural and political contexts.

The Philosophical Perspective

Philosophically, freedom is more than just the absence of constraints; it is about the ability to act according to one’s true nature and fulfill one’s potential. This perspective, known as positive freedom, contrasts with negative freedom, which focuses on the absence of external interference. The tension between these two interpretations of freedom has been a central theme in political philosophy.

Freedom and Democracy

In the realm of politics, freedom is the bedrock of democracy. It ensures the right to express one’s opinions, to choose one’s leaders, and to live without fear of oppression. However, freedom in a democratic society is not absolute. It is balanced with the responsibility to respect the freedom and rights of others. This balance is often a source of conflict and debate, as societies grapple with the question of where to draw the line between individual freedom and collective responsibility.

Freedom and Human Rights

Freedom is also closely linked to human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations, recognizes freedom as a basic human right. It encompasses not only political and civil liberties but also economic, social, and cultural rights. However, the realization of these rights remains a challenge in many parts of the world, where freedom is curtailed by oppressive regimes, social inequalities, and cultural norms.

The Paradox of Freedom

While freedom is universally desired, it also presents a paradox. Absolute freedom can lead to anarchy, while too much restriction can result in oppression. Finding the right balance is crucial. Hence, freedom should not be seen as a license to do as one pleases, but rather as a responsibility to respect the freedom and rights of others.

Conclusion: The Future of Freedom

In conclusion, freedom is a complex and multifaceted concept. It is a fundamental human right, a cornerstone of democracy, and a philosophical concept that has been debated for centuries. As we move forward into the future, the quest for freedom continues. It is our responsibility to ensure that freedom, in all its forms, is respected and protected. The challenge lies not only in ensuring our own freedom but also in upholding the freedom of others, thereby contributing to a just and equitable world.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Free Trade
• Essay on Free Speech
• Essay on Free Healthcare

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

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Essay Papers Writing Online

Why the “freedom writers essay” is an inspiring tale of hope, empathy, and overcoming adversity.

Education has always been a paramount aspect of society, shaping individuals’ intellect and character. Within the vast realms of academia, written expressions have played a pivotal role in documenting and disseminating knowledge. Among these, the essays by Freedom Writers stand out as a testament to the importance of personal narratives and the transformative power they hold.

By delving into the multifaceted dimensions of human experiences, the essays penned by Freedom Writers captivate readers with their raw authenticity and emotional depth. These narratives showcase the indomitable spirit of individuals who have triumphed over adversity, providing invaluable insights into the human condition. Through their stories, we gain a profound understanding of the challenges faced by marginalized communities, shedding light on the systemic issues deeply ingrained in our society.

What makes the essays by Freedom Writers particularly significant is their ability to ignite a spark of empathy within readers. The vivid descriptions and heartfelt accounts shared in these personal narratives serve as a bridge, connecting individuals from diverse backgrounds and fostering a sense of understanding. As readers immerse themselves in these stories, they develop a heightened awareness of the struggles faced by others, ultimately cultivating a more inclusive and compassionate society.

The Inspiring Story of the Freedom Writers Essay

The Freedom Writers Essay tells a powerful and inspiring story of a group of students who were able to overcome adversity and find their own voices through the power of writing. This essay not only impacted the education system, but also touched the hearts of many individuals around the world.

Set in the early 1990s, the Freedom Writers Essay highlights the journey of a young teacher named Erin Gruwell and her diverse group of students in Long Beach, California. Faced with a challenging and often hostile environment, Gruwell used literature and writing as a platform to engage her students and help them express their own experiences and emotions.

Through the use of journals, the students were able to share their personal stories, struggles, and dreams. This essay not only became a therapeutic outlet for the students, but it also allowed them to see the power of their own voices. It gave them a sense of empowerment and hope that they could break free from the cycle of violence and poverty that surrounded them.

As their stories were shared through the Freedom Writers Essay, the impact reached far beyond the walls of their classroom. Their words resonated with people from all walks of life, who were able to see the universal themes of resilience, empathy, and the importance of education. The essay sparked a movement of hope and change, inspiring individuals and communities to work together towards a more inclusive and equitable education system.

The Freedom Writers Essay is a testament to the transformative power of education and the incredible potential of young minds. It serves as a reminder that everyone has a story to tell and that through the written word, we can create understanding, bridge divides, and inspire change.

In conclusion, the Freedom Writers Essay is not just a piece of writing, but a catalyst for change. It showcases the remarkable journey of a group of students who found solace and strength in their own stories. It reminds us of the importance of empowering young minds and providing them with the tools necessary to overcome obstacles and make a difference in the world.

Understanding the background and significance of the Freedom Writers essay

The Freedom Writers essay holds a notable history and plays a significant role in the field of education. This piece of writing carries a background rich with hardships, triumphs, and the power of individual expression.

Originating from the diary entries of a group of high school students known as the Freedom Writers, the essay documents their personal experiences, struggles, and remarkable growth. These students were part of a racially diverse and economically disadvantaged community, facing social issues including gang violence, racism, and poverty.

Despite the challenging circumstances, the Freedom Writers found solace and empowerment through writing. Their teacher, Erin Gruwell, recognized the potential of their stories and encouraged them to share their experiences through written form. She implemented a curriculum that encouraged self-expression, empathy, and critical thinking.

The significance of the Freedom Writers essay lies in its ability to shed light on the experiences of marginalized communities and bring attention to the importance of education as a means of empowerment. The essay serves as a powerful tool to inspire change, challenge social norms, and foster understanding among diverse populations.

By sharing their narratives, the students of the Freedom Writers not only found catharsis and personal growth, but also contributed to a larger discourse on the impact of education and the role of teachers in transforming lives. The essay serves as a reminder of the profound impact that storytelling and education can have on individuals and communities.

Learning from the Unique Teaching Methods in the Freedom Writers Essay

The Freedom Writers Essay presents a remarkable story of a teacher who uses unconventional teaching methods to make a positive impact on her students. By examining the strategies employed by the teacher in the essay, educators can learn valuable lessons that can enhance their own teaching practices. This section explores the unique teaching methods showcased in the Freedom Writers Essay and the potential benefits they can bring to the field of education.

Empowering student voice and promoting inclusivity: One of the key themes in the essay is the importance of giving students a platform to express their thoughts and experiences. The teacher in the Freedom Writers Essay encourages her students to share their stories through writing, empowering them to find their own voices and fostering a sense of inclusivity in the classroom. This approach teaches educators the significance of valuing and incorporating student perspectives, ultimately creating a more engaging and diverse learning environment.

Building relationships and trust: The teacher in the essay invests time and effort in building meaningful relationships with her students. Through personal connections, she is able to gain their trust and create a safe space for learning. This emphasis on building trust highlights the impact of positive teacher-student relationships on academic success. Educators can learn from this approach by understanding the importance of establishing a supportive and nurturing rapport with their students, which can enhance student engagement and motivation.

Using literature as a tool for empathy and understanding: The teacher in the Freedom Writers Essay introduces her students to literature that explores diverse perspectives and themes of resilience and social justice. By incorporating literature into her curriculum, she encourages her students to develop empathy and gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of others. This approach underscores the value of incorporating diverse and relevant texts into the classroom, enabling students to broaden their perspectives and foster critical thinking skills.

Fostering a sense of community and belonging: In the essay, the teacher creates a sense of community within her classroom by organizing activities that promote teamwork and collaboration. By fostering a supportive and inclusive learning environment, the teacher helps her students feel a sense of belonging and encourages them to support one another. This aspect of the teaching methods showcased in the Freedom Writers Essay reinforces the significance of collaborative learning and the sense of community in fostering academic growth and personal development.

Overall, the unique teaching methods presented in the Freedom Writers Essay serve as an inspiration for educators to think outside the box and explore innovative approaches to engage and empower their students. By incorporating elements such as student voice, building relationships, using literature for empathy, and fostering a sense of community, educators can create a transformative learning experience for their students, ultimately shaping them into critical thinkers and compassionate individuals.

Exploring the innovative approaches used by the Freedom Writers teacher

The Freedom Writers teacher employed a range of creative and groundbreaking methods to engage and educate their students, fostering a love for learning and empowering them to break the cycle of violence and poverty surrounding their lives. Through a combination of empathy, experiential learning, and personal storytelling, the teacher was able to connect with the students on a deep level and inspire them to overcome the obstacles they faced.

One of the innovative approaches utilized by the Freedom Writers teacher was the use of literature and writing as a means of communication and healing. By introducing the students to powerful works of literature that tackled relevant social issues, the teacher encouraged them to explore their own identities and experiences through writing. This not only facilitated self-expression but also fostered critical thinking and empathy, as the students were able to relate to the characters and themes in the literature.

The teacher also implemented a unique system of journal writing, where the students were given a safe and non-judgmental space to express their thoughts, emotions, and personal experiences. This practice not only helped the students develop their writing skills but also served as a therapeutic outlet, allowing them to process and reflect upon their own lives and the challenges they faced. By sharing and discussing their journal entries within the classroom, the students built a strong sense of community and support among themselves.

Another innovative strategy utilized by the Freedom Writers teacher was the integration of field trips and guest speakers into the curriculum. By exposing the students to different perspectives and experiences, the teacher broadened their horizons and challenged their preconceived notions. This experiential learning approach not only made the subjects more engaging and relatable but also encouraged the students to think critically and develop a greater understanding of the world around them.

In conclusion, the Freedom Writers teacher implemented a range of innovative and effective approaches to foster learning and personal growth among their students. Through the use of literature, writing, journaling, and experiential learning, the teacher created a supportive and empowering environment that allowed the students to overcome their adversities and become agents of change. These methods continue to inspire educators and highlight the importance of innovative teaching practices in creating a positive impact on students’ lives.

The Impact of the Freedom Writers Essay on Students’ Lives

The Freedom Writers Essay has had a profound impact on the lives of students who have been exposed to its powerful message. Through the personal stories and experiences shared in the essay, students are able to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and resilience that individuals can possess. The essay serves as a catalyst for personal growth, empathy, and a desire to make a positive difference in the world.

One of the key ways in which the Freedom Writers Essay impacts students’ lives is by breaking down barriers and promoting understanding. Through reading the essay, students are able to connect with the struggles and triumphs of individuals from diverse backgrounds. This fosters a sense of empathy and compassion, allowing students to see beyond their own experiences and appreciate the unique journeys of others.

In addition to promoting empathy, the Freedom Writers Essay also inspires students to take action. By showcasing the power of education and personal expression, the essay encourages students to use their voices to effect change in their communities. Students are empowered to stand up against injustice, advocate for those who are marginalized, and work towards creating a more inclusive and equitable society.

Furthermore, the essay serves as a reminder of the importance of perseverance in the face of adversity. Through the stories shared in the essay, students witness the determination and resilience of individuals who have overcome significant challenges. This inspires students to believe in their own ability to overcome obstacles and pursue their dreams, no matter the circumstances.

Overall, the impact of the Freedom Writers Essay on students’ lives is profound and far-reaching. It not only educates and enlightens, but also motivates and empowers. By exposing students to the power of storytelling and the potential for personal growth and social change, the essay equips them with the tools they need to become compassionate and engaged citizens of the world.

Examining the transformation experienced by the Freedom Writers students

The journey of the Freedom Writers students is a testament to the power of education and its transformative impact on young minds. Through their shared experiences, these students were able to overcome adversity, prejudice, and personal struggles to find their voices and take ownership of their education. This process of transformation not only shaped their individual lives but also had a ripple effect on their communities and the educational system as a whole.

The transformation experienced by the Freedom Writers students serves as a powerful reminder of the potential within every student, regardless of their background or circumstances. It highlights the importance of creating an inclusive and supportive educational environment that encourages self-expression, empathy, and a belief in one’s own abilities. By fostering a love for learning and empowering students to embrace their unique voices, education can become a catalyst for positive change, both within individuals and society as a whole.

Addressing Social Issues and Promoting Empathy through the Freedom Writers Essay

In today’s society, it is important to address social issues and promote empathy to create a more inclusive and harmonious world. One way to achieve this is through the powerful medium of the written word. The Freedom Writers Essay, a notable piece of literature, serves as a catalyst for addressing social issues and promoting empathy among students.

The Freedom Writers Essay showcases the experiences and struggles of students who have faced adversity, discrimination, and inequality. Through their personal narratives, these students shed light on the social issues that exist within our society, such as racism, poverty, and violence. By sharing their stories, they invite readers to step into their shoes and gain a deeper understanding of the challenges they face. This promotes empathy and encourages readers to take action to create a more equitable world.

Furthermore, the Freedom Writers Essay fosters a sense of community and unity among students. As they read and discuss the essay, students have the opportunity to engage in meaningful conversations about social issues, sharing their own perspectives and experiences. This dialogue allows them to challenge their beliefs, develop critical thinking skills, and broaden their horizons. By creating a safe space for open and honest discussions, the Freedom Writers Essay creates an environment where students can learn from one another and grow together.

In addition, the essay prompts students to reflect on their own privileges and biases. Through self-reflection, students can gain a better understanding of their own place in society and the role they can play in creating positive change. This reflection process helps students develop empathy for others and encourages them to become active agents of social justice.

In conclusion, the Freedom Writers Essay serves as a powerful tool for addressing social issues and promoting empathy among students. By sharing personal narratives, fostering dialogue, and prompting self-reflection, this essay encourages students to confront societal challenges head-on and take meaningful action. Through the power of the written word, the essay helps create a more inclusive and empathetic society.

Analyzing how the essay tackles significant societal issues and promotes empathy

In this section, we will examine how the essay addresses crucial problems in society and encourages a sense of understanding. The essay serves as a platform to shed light on important social issues and foster empathy among its readers.

The essay delves into the depths of societal problems, exploring topics such as racial discrimination, stereotyping, and the achievement gap in education. It presents these issues in a thought-provoking manner, prompting readers to reflect on the harsh realities faced by marginalized communities. Through personal anecdotes and experiences, the essay unveils the profound impact of these problems on individuals and society as a whole.

Furthermore, the essay emphasizes the significance of cultural understanding and empathy. It highlights the power of perspective and the importance of recognizing and challenging one’s own biases. The author’s account of their own transformation and ability to connect with their students serves as an inspiring example, urging readers to step outside their comfort zones and embrace diversity.

By confronting and discussing these social issues head-on, the essay not only raises awareness but also calls for collective action. It encourages readers to become advocates for change and actively work towards creating a more inclusive and equitable society. The essay emphasizes the role of education in addressing these societal problems and the potential for growth and transformation it can bring.

In essence, the essay provides a platform to examine important societal problems and promotes empathy by humanizing the issues and encouraging readers to listen, understand, and work towards positive change.

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Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom

Other essays.

Divine sovereignty, which is that God exercises efficacious, universal, and loving control over all things, is compatible with human freedom in that humans are free to do what they want to do, although God is sovereign over our desires.

The sovereignty of God is the same as the lordship of God, for God is the sovereign over all of creation. The major components of God’s lordship are his control, authority, and presence. To discuss the sovereignty of God, though, is to focus particularly on the aspect of control, though this should not bracket God’s authority and gracious presence out of the discussion. The control that God exercises over all things is both efficacious and universal; there is not one thing outside of his control. This even extends to human sin and faith. However, people still remain free and God remains innocent of sin. This is because humans have the freedom to do whatever it is that they want, while their desires are in turn decided by their natures, situations, and, ultimately, God.

The term sovereignty is rarely found in recent translations of Scripture, but it represents an important biblical concept. A sovereign is a ruler, a king, a lord, and Scripture often refers to God as the one who rules over all. His most common proper name, Yahweh (see Ex. 3:14) is regularly translated Lord in the English Bible. And Lord, in turn, is found there over 7,000 times as a name of God and specifically as a name of Jesus Christ. So, to discuss the sovereignty of God is to discuss the lordship of God—that is, to discuss the Godness of God, the qualities that make him to be God.

The major components of the biblical concept of divine sovereignty or lordship are God’s control , authority , and presence (see John Frame, The Doctrine of God , 21–115). His control means that everything happens according to his plan and intention. Authority means that all his commands ought to be obeyed. Presence means that we encounter God’s control and authority in all our experience, so that we cannot escape from his justice or from his love.

When theologians discuss divine sovereignty and human freedom, however, they usually focus on only one of these three aspects of God’s sovereignty, what I have called his control. This aspect will be in focus in the remainder of this article, but we should keep in mind that God’s control over the world is only one aspect of his rule. When we consider only his control, we tend to forget that his rule is also gracious, gentle, intimate, covenantal, wise, good, and so on. God’s sovereignty is an exercise of all his divine attributes, not just his causal power.

God’s Sovereign Control

It is important to have a clear idea of God’s sovereign control of the world he has made. That control is a major part of the context in which God reveals himself to Israel as Yahweh, the Lord. That revelation comes to Israel when that nation is in slavery to Egypt. When he reveals his name to Moses, he promises a powerful deliverance:

But I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand. So I will stretch out my hand and strike Egypt with all the wonders that I will do in it; after that he will let you go. (Ex. 3:19–20)

I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. I will give it to you for a possession. I am the Lord.’” (Exo 6:7–8)

God shows Israel that he truly is the Lord by defeating the greatest totalitarian empire of the ancient world and by giving Israel a homeland in the land promised centuries before to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Nothing can defeat Israel’s sovereign. He will keep his promise, displaying incredible controlling power, or he is not the Lord.

God’s control is efficacious :

Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases. (Ps. 115:3)

Whatever the Lord pleases, he does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps. (Ps. 135:6)

The Lord of hosts has sworn: “As I have planned, so shall it be, and as I have purposed, so shall it stand, that I will break the Assyrian in my land, and on my mountains trample him underfoot; and his yoke shall depart from them, and his burden from their shoulder.” This is the purpose that is purposed concerning the whole earth, and this is the hand that is stretched out over all the nations. For the Lord of hosts has purposed, and who will annul it? His hand is stretched out, and who will turn it back? (Isa. 14:24–27)

Also henceforth I am he [Yahweh]; there is none who can deliver from my hand; I work, and who can turn it back?” (Isa .43:13)

…so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it. (Isa. 55:11)

‘The words of the holy one, the true one, who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens. (Rev. 3:7)

Not only is God’s control efficacious, it is also universal . It governs every event that takes place anywhere in the universe. Firstly, the events of the natural world come from his hand (Ps. 65:9–11, 135:6–7, 147:15–18, Matt. 5:45, 6:26–30, 10:29–30, Luke 12:4–7). Secondly, the details of human history come from God’s plan and his power. He determines where people of every nation will dwell (Acts 17:26). Thirdly, God determines the events of each individual human life (Ex. 21:12–13, 1 Sam. 2:6–7, Ps. 37:23–24, 139:13–16, Jer. 1:5, Eph. 1:4, James 4:13–16). Fourthly, God governs the free decisions we make (Prov. 16:9) including our attitudes toward others (Ex. 34:24, Judg. 7:22, Dan. 1:9, Ezra 6:22).

More problematically, God foreordains people’s sins (Ex. 4:4, 8, 21, 7:3, 13, 9:12, 10:1, 20, 27, Deut. 2:30, Josh. 11:18–20, 1 Sam. 2:25, 16:14, 1 Kings 22:20–23, 2 Chron. 25:20, Ps. 105:24, Isa. 6:9–10, 10:6, 63:17, Rom. 9:17–18, 11:7–8, 2 Cor. 2:15–16). But lastly, he is also the God of grace, who sovereignly ordains that people will come to faith and salvation :

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Eph. 2:4–10)

Therefore, salvation is God’s work from beginning to end, doing for us what we could never dream of doing for ourselves.

If we need any further evidence of the efficacy and universality of God’s sovereign control, here are passages that summarize the doctrine:

Who has spoken and it came to pass, unless the Lord has commanded it? 38 Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and bad come? (Lam. 3:37)

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. (Rom. 8:28)

In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will. (Eph. 1:11)

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” “Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. (Rom. 11:33)

Human Freedom

So the question posed by the title of this article is very pointed. Granted the overwhelming power of God’s sovereign control, its efficacy and universality, how can human freedom have any significance at all?

The term freedom has been taken in various senses. In our current discussion, two of these are particularly relevant: (1) compatibilism, which is the freedom to do what you want to do, and (2) libertarianism , which is the freedom to do the opposite of everything you choose to do. Compatibilism indicates that freedom is compatible with causation. Someone may force me to eat broccoli; but if that is something I want to do anyway, I do it freely in the compatibilist sense.  Alternatively, if you have libertarian freedom, your choices are in no sense caused or constrained, either by your nature, your experience, your history, your own desires, or God. Libertarianism is sometimes called “incompatibilism,” because it is inconsistent with necessity or determination. If someone forces me to eat broccoli, I am not free, in the libertarian sense, to eat it or not eat it. On a libertarian account, any kind of “forcing” removes freedom.

In ordinary life, when we talk about being “free,” we usually have the compatibilist sense in mind. I am free when I do what I want to do. Usually, when someone asks me if I am free, say, to walk across the street, I don’t have to analyze all sorts of questions about causal factors in order to answer the question. If I am able to do what I want to do, then I am free, and that’s all there is to it. In the Bible, human beings normally have this kind of freedom. God told Adam not to eat of the forbidden fruit, but Adam had the power to do what he wanted. In the end, he and Eve did the wrong thing, but they did it freely. God’s sovereignty didn’t prevent Adam from doing what he wanted to do.

Our earlier discussion shows, however, that according to the Bible human beings do not have libertarian freedom:  As we have seen, God ordains what we will choose to do, so he causes our choices. We are not free to choose the contrary of what he chooses for us to do. Scripture also teaches that the condition of our heart constrains our decisions, so there are no unconstrained human decisions, decisions that are free in the libertarian sense.

People sometimes think that we must have libertarian freedom, for how can we be morally responsible if God controls our choices? That is a difficult question. The ultimate answer is that moral responsibility is up to God to define. He is the moral arbiter of the universe. This is the exact question that comes up in Romans 9:

You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory—even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles? (Rom. 9:19–24)

This passage rules out any attempt to argue libertarian freedom as a basis of moral responsibility.

Nevertheless, we should remember that even this passage presupposes freedom in the compatibilist sense: God prepared the two kinds of vessels, each for their respective destiny. He made the honorable vessels so that they would appropriately receive honor, and vice versa. When a human being trusts in Christ, he does what he wants to do and therefore acts freely in the compatibilist sense. We know from that choice that God has prepared him beforehand to make that choice freely. That divine preparation is grace. The believer did not earn the right to receive that divine preparation. But he responds, as he must, by freely embracing Christ. Without that free choice of Christ, prepared beforehand by God himself, it is impossible for anyone to be saved.

Further Reading

• Benjamin B. Warfield, Biblical Doctrines
• Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority
• Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology
• D. A. Carson, Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility: Biblical Perspectives in Tension . See book summary here .
• J. I. Packer, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God
• John Frame, The Doctrine of God
• John Frame, No Other God: a Response to Open Theism
• John MacArthur, “ What is the Relationship Between Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility? ”
• Scott Christensen, What About Free Will? Reconciling Our Choices with Divine Sovereignty . See book summary here .
• Vern Poythress, Chance and the Sovereignty of God . See book review here .

This essay is part of the Concise Theology series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material. If you are interested in translating our content or are interested in joining our community of translators,  please reach out to us .

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54 famous freedom quotes to share on the 4th of July

Nearly 250 years ago, America's Founding Fathers made good on their dream of establishing one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

On July 4, 1776, they signed The Declaration of Independence, officially declaring the U.S. free from British rule, and we've been observing the anniversary ever since.

However you plan to celebrate the Fourth of July this year — whether it's by enjoying a local fireworks display or spending time with loved ones, take a moment to post or share one of these inspiring freedom quotes in honor of Independence Day.

In the collection below, you'll find famous quotes by luminaries such as George Washington, Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Frost, Bob Marley and other notable figures in history.

Use one as a Fourth of July caption for Instagram or jot one of these patriotic sayings in a greeting card to send to friends and relatives.

In fact, you can use these freedom quotes however you see fit, including simply reading them over in remembrance of the many sacrifices made by men and women to ensure that America continues to be the land of the free and home of brave .

Whatever you decide, these quotes are certain to have your heart beating red, white and blue on the Fourth of July and every day after.

Freedom Quotes

• “I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American!” — Daniel Webster
• “Liberty has been planted here; and the more it is attacked, the more it grows and flourishes.” — Samuel Sherwood
• “Who ever walked behind anyone to freedom? If we can’t go hand in hand, I don’t want to go.” — Hazel Scott
• “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” — Nathan Hale
• “This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.” — Elmer Davis
• “In the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.” — Barack Obama

• “Better to die fighting for freedom then be a prisoner all the days of your life.” ― Bob Marley
• “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” — Angela Davis
• “Doing what you like is freedom. Liking what you do is happiness.” ― Frank Tyger
• “May we think of freedom, not as the right to do as we please but as the opportunity to do what is right.” — Peter Marshall
• “Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.” — Jean-Paul Sartre
• “The secret of happiness is freedom, the secret of freedom is courage.” — Carrie Jones

• “You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.” — Robert Heinlein
• “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” — George Washington
• “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.” — James Baldwin
• “Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.” —John F. Kennedy
• “He who is brave is free.” — Lucius Annaeus Seneca
• “True patriotism springs from a belief in the dignity of the individual, freedom and equality not only for Americans but for all people on earth.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

• “Thought is free.” — William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”
• “One flag, one land, one heart, one hand, one nation, evermore!” — Oliver Wendell Holmes
• “This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” — Abraham Lincoln
• “Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.” — George Washington
• “Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.” — Albert Camus
• “Freedom lies in being bold.” ― Robert Frost
• “Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves.” ― Abraham Lincoln

• “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” ― George Orwell
• “We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.” ― William Faulkner, “Essays, Speeches & Public Letters”
• “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt
• “For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” ― Nelson Mandela
• “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.” ― Charlotte Brontë, “Jane Eyre”
• “And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: ‘We will not go quietly into the night!’”— President Thomas Whitmore, “Independence Day”

• “Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.” ― Mahatma Gandhi
• “I’ve found that there is always some beauty left — in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you. Look at these thing, then you find yourself again” ― Anne Frank, “The Diary of a Young Girl”
• “No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.” ― Paulo Coelho, “Eleven Minutes”
• “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” ― Audre Lorde
•  “Just living is not enough, one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.” — Hans Christian Andersen, “The Complete Fairy Tales”

• “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” ― Benjamin Franklin
• “A free bird leaps / on the back of the wind / and floats downstream / till the current ends / and dips his wing / in the orange sun rays / and dares to claim the sky.” ― Maya Angelou, “The Complete Collected Poems”
• “Freedom is something that dies unless it’s used.” ― Hunter S. Thompson
• “I have tasted freedom. I will not give up that which I have tasted.” — Harvey Milk
• “Nothing speaks so strongly of freedom as the fact that the descendants of those who went through great agony — which, thank Heaven, has passed away — have now full opportunities and can help celebrate my fifty years’ work for liberty.” ― Susan B. Anthony

• “She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom!” ― Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Scarlet Letter”
• “If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours.” — Noam Chomsky
• “Freely we serve, Because we freely love, as in our will To love or not; in this we stand or fall.” — John Milton, “Paradise Lost”
• “But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population.” — Albert Einstein
• “You never completely have your rights, one person, until you all have your rights.” — Marsha P. Johnson

•  “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.” ― Thomas Paine
• “All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.” ― Winston Churchill
• “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.
• “The function of freedom is to free someone else.” ― Toni Morrison

• “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” ― John Milton, “Areopagitica”
• “Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.” — Gloria Steinem
• “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” ― Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”
• “While we are contending for our own liberty, we should be very cautious not to violate the rights of conscience in others.” — George Washington

Sarah is a lifestyle and entertainment reporter for TODAY who covers holidays, celebrities and everything in between.

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