Negative and positive liberty; the arguments for positive liberty

Introduction

The notion of liberty has two dimensions in political theory, a negative and a positive. The question asks for both and for the arguments in favour of the positive.

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.

Arguments for positive liberty

1. Freedom needs enabling conditions. Freedom is not only the absence of constraint but the expansion of the ability of people to express themselves and develop their potential. A person who is hungry, unemployed or uneducated is formally free but cannot use the freedom.
2. Constraints come from society, not only rulers. Social inequality such as caste and extreme economic inequality limit freedom as surely as laws; Subhas Chandra Bose's idea of freedom included equal distribution of wealth and abolition of caste barriers.
3. Freedom is exercised in society. Positive liberty recognises that one is free only in society, not outside it, and so tries to make society such that it enables the individual's development.
4. Self-government and participation. It requires that persons have the opportunity to take part in decision-making so that laws reflect their choices; this links it with democracy, which NCERT calls an important means of protecting freedom.
5. Capacity to choose is built. The capacity to make choices, weigh options and take responsibility has to be built through education and the cultivation of judgement; this is a task for institutions.
6. Indian experience. Swaraj meant rule over the self and self-realisation, not only the absence of foreign rule.

Qualification. The risk in the positive idea is that authorities claim to know what people really want and justify coercion; NCERT says tyrants have used its arguments. The safeguard is to pair positive liberty with protected rights and reasonable restrictions only.

Conclusion

The case for positive liberty is that freedom without conditions is formal; its answer to the dangers of paternalism is a rights-based framework, so that the two concepts operate together.