Liberty, and the distinction between negative and positive liberty

Introduction

Liberty or freedom is the ability of people to make their own choices and act on them. The question asks what it means and how its two main concepts, negative and positive, differ.

Meaning of liberty

In its simplest sense freedom is the absence of external constraints: a person is free when not subject to coercion and able to make independent decisions. Constraints come from more than one direction. Social hierarchy is one: a caste order that decides whom a person may eat with or which trade she may follow restricts her as surely as a law. Deep economic inequality is another, since a family that cannot pay for a daughter's college is not free to send her there. And there is the oldest source, force and domination, including laws through which rulers impose their will on the ruled and back it with coercion; a regime that forbids a people to print newspapers in their own language is the plainest case. But freedom is not only the removal of obstacles. It also has a positive side: enlarging people's capacity to express themselves and to develop what they are capable of. Since nobody who lives among others can be free of every restriction, the question that matters is not whether there are constraints but which of them can be justified and which should go.

Negative and positive liberty

Negative liberty is freedom from: it marks out a protected zone, the minimum area of non-interference, which no outside authority may enter and within which a person shapes her own life and character as she chooses; the case for such a zone is that a dignified human life is impossible without some space free of other people's obstruction. It answers the question over what area am I the master?. Its tradition (Hobbes, Locke, Bentham and Mill are the usual names) wants the area as large as is compatible with the stability of society: Hobbes located freedom where the law is silent, Locke held that law rightly confined to protecting each person from others enlarges liberty, and the English line from Bentham and the Mills took each person to be the best judge of his own interest.

Positive liberty is freedom to: it answers the question who governs me? with I govern myself. It looks at the social conditions a person needs in order to grow, in the way a young cricketer needs a pitch, a coach and time to practise and not merely the absence of a ban on playing. Those conditions are access to education, enough material means to be free of poverty and unemployment, and a voice in the making of the laws. Its tradition runs from Rousseau, Hegel and Marx to Gandhi and Aurobindo. The difference in outlook is basic: the negative view guards a boundary and asks nothing more of society, while the positive view holds that freedom is achieved within society, not outside it, and so asks that society be arranged to enable it.

Relation. The two generally go together and support each other, but they can come apart: tyrants have justified their rule by invoking arguments of positive liberty.

Difference between the two

Conclusion

Negative and positive liberty are two ways of looking at one value. NCERT's own summary is that freedom has both aspects, the absence of external constraints and the existence of conditions in which people can develop their talents, and a free society is one that enables all its members to develop their potential with a minimum of social constraint.