Negative liberty (short note)

Negative liberty

Negative liberty is freedom as the absence of interference. Its aim is to mark out and protect a space where the individual cannot be touched, where he or she may do, be or become whatever is wished, without interference from any outside authority; the idea of this minimum area of non-interference admits that human nature and dignity need room to act unobstructed. It answers the question over what area am I the master?, and is the idea of freedom from.

Features. (1) The bigger the area of non-interference, the more the freedom, but how large it should be is always debated, subject to the stability of society. (2) It is a core principle of liberal thought: Mill's harm principle limits interference to preventing harm to others. (3) It measures a person's liberty by the area in which he or she is left alone, not by the quality of what is done there or the social conditions around it. (4) Freedom of expression belongs to this protected area.

Limits. It can be a thin freedom, because a person may be free from interference yet unable to act for want of education, income or security; critics, from T. H. Green onwards, say that poverty and unemployment hinder liberty as much as legal restraints, so positive liberty is needed to complete it. Its defenders reply that it does not forbid state help as such; it only denies that such help can be justified as increasing freedom. IGNOU reads Isaiah Berlin as trying to reconcile negative with positive liberty, while Hayek wanted liberty kept to its original meaning, the absence of restraint.