Flikschuh, Katrin 
ORCID: 0000-0002-4585-6844
(2024)
Freedom.
In: Gaus, Gerald, D'Agostino, Fred and Muldoon, Ryan, (eds.)
The Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy.
Routledge, New York, NY, 564 - 573.
ISBN 9781032533452
Abstract
The post-WWII philosophical history of liberal freedom can be summed up as a theoretical development from two to one, and finally three concepts (or conceptions) of liberty, or freedom. The debate begins with Isaiah Berlin’s 1959 publication of “Two Concepts of Liberty,” comes to rest temporarily in Gerald MacCallum’s analysis of freedom as a “triadic concept,” and has more recently erupted into a dispute among descriptivists and republicans over the nature of negative freedom. This history is not old, nor is it especially original so far as contested substantive meanings go. One could read “Two Concepts” as offering little more than an (ideologically tainted) historical narrative of what we have come to mean by liberty, given what first “the ancients” and then “the moderns” meant by it. However, the abiding appeal of “Two Concepts” lies less in its wealth of historical reference points and more in its philosophical thesis, which is a version of the more general thesis that concepts denote objects, or, yet more generally, that (all) concepts have determinate content. On this view, it is possible to distinguish between correct and incorrect applications of the concept of liberty: in Berlin’s words, “everything is what it is; liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture.” Berlin’s view, both that the meaning of freedom is determinate and determinable and that the negative concept of liberty as non-interference offers the most promising point of departure for an accurate understanding of what freedom really means, continues to exert its influence on freedom theorists. It has not gone unchallenged. There have been numerous statements in support of positive freedom, including its account of freedom as an inner cognitive moral state associated with self-knowledge. Within mainstream liberal political philosophy, however, the most formidable early challenge came in the form of MacCallum’s contestation of Berlin’s distinction between two freedom concepts and MacCallum’s contrary claim that any complete freedom analysis must acknowledge negative and positive elements as constitutive aspects of one and the same concept. On this account, the positive element complements the negative: we are never merely free from interference but are always at the same time free to do (or become) particular things (or persons).
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | © 2025 selection and editorial matter, the editors; individual chapters, the contributors |
| Divisions: | Government |
| Subjects: | J Political Science > JA Political science (General) |
| Date Deposited: | 21 Nov 2024 14:33 |
| Last Modified: | 21 Nov 2024 17:24 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/126134 |
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