Liberalism
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and mind, each must respect the fact that every other individual enjoys an equal right to liberty. This has been expressed by John Rawls (see p. 39) in the principle that everyone is entitled to the widest possible liberty consistent with a like liberty for all. GREENS, particularly deep ecologists, treat freedom as the achievement of oneness, self- realization through the absorption of the personal ego into the ecosphere or universe. In contrast with political freedom, this is sometimes seen as ‘inner’ freedom, freedom as self-actualization. FUNDAMENTALISTS see freedom as essentially an inner or spiritual quality. Freedommeans conformity to the revealed will of God, spiritual fulfilment being associated with submission to religious authority. PERSPECTIVES ON . . . FREEDOM LIBERALS give priority to freedom as the supreme individualist value. While classical liberals support negative freedom, understood as the absence of constraints – or freedomof choice –modern liberals advocate positive freedom in the sense of personal development and human flourishing. CONSERVATIVES have traditionally endorsed a weak view of freedomas the willing recognition of duties and responsibilities, negative freedom posing a threat to the fabric of society. The New Right, however, endorses negative freedom in the economic sphere, freedom of choice in the marketplace. SOCIALISTS have generally understood freedom in positive terms to refer to self-fulfilment achieved through either free creative labour or cooperative social interaction. Social democrats have drawn close tomodern liberalism in treating freedom as the realization of individual potential. ANARCHISTS regard freedom as an absolute value, believing it to be irreconcilable with any form of political authority. Freedom is understood to mean the achievement of personal autonomy, not merely being ‘left alone’ but being rationally self-willed and self-directed. FASCISTS reject any form of individual liberty as a nonsense. ‘True’ freedom, in contrast, means unquestioning submission to the will of the leader and the absorption of the individual into the national community.
KEY FIGURE
JOHN STUART MILL (1806–73) A British philosopher, economist and politician, Mill’s varied and complex work straddles the divide between classical and modern forms of liberalism. His opposition to collectivist tendencies and traditions was firmly rooted in nineteenth-century principles, but his emphasis on the quality of individual life, reflected in a commitment to individuality, as well as his sympathy for causes such as female suffrage and workers’ cooperatives, looked forward to later developments. Mill’s major writings include On Liberty (1859), Utilitarianism (1861) and Considerations on Representative Government (1861).
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While liberals agree about the value of liberty, they have not always agreed about what it means for an individual to be ‘free’. In his ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ ([1958] 1969), Isaiah Berlin (see p. 240) distinguished between a ‘negative’ theory of liberty and a ‘positive’ one. Early or classical liberals have believed in negative freedom , in that freedom consists in each person being
Negative freedom: The absence of external restrictions or constraints on the individual, allowing freedom of choice.
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