What is Freedom?

This work is a collection of interviews on the topic of freedom from many of the world’s leading academic thinkers on the subject, as well as highly influential activists. The book contains twelve interviews and an introduction. The interviews are presented in a simple readable format intended for a general audience, each with a short introduction and suggested reading. The interviews are split into three sections; history, philosophy, and activism, covering what freedom has meant, how it can be defined, and what work it does in real-world political contestation respectively. One central theme of the work is how freedom’s meaning has changed and evolved over time and been contested both between and within political traditions. The book also explores contemporary alternatives to individual negative liberty, and considers freedom as a possible ideal to which activists can appeal. A final issue many of the interviews touch on is how different conceptions of freedom relate to different ideas about human nature and our relationship with history.

Positive Freedom

Freedom is widely regarded as a basic social and political value that is deeply connected to the ideals of democracy, equality, liberation, and social recognition. Many insist that freedom must include conditions that go beyond simple “negative” liberty understood as the absence of constraints; only if freedom includes other conditions such as the capability to act, mental and physical control of oneself, and social recognition by others will it deserve its place in the pantheon of basic social values. Positive Freedom is the first volume to examine the idea of positive liberty in detail and from multiple perspectives. With contributions from leading scholars in ethics and political theory, this collection includes both historical studies of the idea of positive freedom and discussions of its connection to important contemporary issues in social and political philosophy.

Institutional Religious Freedom in Full: What the Liberty of Religious Organizations Really Is and Why It an “Essential Service” to the Common Good

Should the freedom of churches and other religious institutions come down to little more than a grudging recognition that “what happens in the church, stays in the church”? In this article, I provide a more robust definition of what I call institutional religious freedom than a crabbed and merely negative understanding. In addition, I also go beyond a libertarian-style defense of institutional religious freedom as the ecclesiastical equivalent of the “right to be left alone” by suggesting a multitude of reasons why institutional religious freedom in a robust form deserves robust protection. Especially amidst exigent challenges such as the global COVID-19 pandemic, an anemic appeal to an ecclesiastical version of negative liberty on merely jurisdictional grounds will not be enough to defend religious organizations from an increasingly strong temptation and tendency on the part of political authorities—often acting on the basis of understandable intentions—to subject such organizations to sweeping interference even in the most internal matters. In contrast, the article offers an articulation of why both the internal and external freedoms of religious institutions require maximum deference if they are to offer their indispensable contributions—indeed, their “essential services”—to the shared public good in the United States and other countries throughout the world. Underscoring the external and public dimensions of institutional religious freedom, the article follows the work of law and religion scholar W. Cole Durham in that it analytically disaggregates the freedom of religious institutions into three indispensable components: “substantive”, or the right of self-definition; “vertical”, or the right of self-governance; and “horizontal”, or the right of self-directed outward expression and action.

LOST LEGACY OF “SOLIDARITY ”

The text is about “Solidarność” legacy and includes two types of liberty: negative and positive. Basic argument says, that “Solidarność” achieved historic success in a sphere of negative liberty, but they didn’t make it in positive sense, which was quickly forgotten after 1989. Positive liberty oblivion accompanied fears of former “Solidarność” leaders, who had taken the lead of system’s reformation, worried that NSZZ “Solidarność” upholding of workers interests will destroy done system’s changes too.

A theory of migration: the aspirations-capabilities framework

This paper elaborates an aspirations–capabilities framework to advance our understanding of human mobility as an intrinsic part of broader processes of social change. In order to achieve a more meaningful understanding of agency and structure in migration processes, this framework conceptualises migration as a function of aspirations and capabilities to migrate within given sets of perceived geographical opportunity structures. It distinguishes between the instrumental (means-to-an-end) and intrinsic (directly wellbeing-affecting) dimensions of human mobility. This yields a vision in which moving and staying are seen as complementary manifestations of migratory agency and in which human mobility is defined as people’s capability to choose where to live, including the option to stay, rather than as the act of moving or migrating itself. Drawing on Berlin’s concepts of positive and negative liberty (as manifestations of the widely varying structural conditions under which migration occurs) this paper conceptualises how macro-structural change shapes people’s migratory aspirations and capabilities. The resulting framework helps to understand the complex and often counter-intuitive ways in which processes of social transformation and ‘development’ shape patterns of migration and enable us to integrate the analysis of almost all forms of migratory mobility within one meta-conceptual framework.

Liberalism Untold Why A Genuine Liberal Thought Still Doesn’t Exist

From a political-philosophical standpoint, liberalism has its roots in its focus on individuals’ negative liberty, which entails the removal of any obstacle that might potentially hinder their actions. As Bobbio (1978) suggests, our agency can be limited at a social level by customary, legislative or moral norms. We can define the entirety of these norms as the nomos driving our day-to-day actions. Liberal thinkers usually argue that the state should regulate citizens’ lives as little as possible. From this perspective, they seem to be mostly concerned with setting people free from the invasive nomos of public institutions. However, is this political approach genuinely liberal? Based on the original, and thus genuine, meaning of the term nomos, the answer is no. A real safeguarding of negative liberty should be aimed at the removal of any nomos curtailing people’s independence, not just the nomos of the state. Within the context of the informal economy, for instance, poverty, marginality and precarious work have grown into veritable rules. When seen from this perspective, workers’ disadvantage is indeed a nomos regulating, restricting, and limiting individual agency. Why has liberalism failed to promote the removal of this kind of nomos that curtails people’s negative liberty with equal strength as that of the state? Is deregulation truly the solution to all the ills of the market? Should those who self-identify as liberals oppose or embrace a public nomos working against the spread of the nomos of job insecurity? This work claims that a genuinely liberal approach should be based on an etymological and broader understanding of the term nomos. It will also examine how private enterprises can favor the spread of this approach and safeguard workers’ negative liberty.

Positive Free Speech: A Democratic Freedom

This chapter explores the positive structural dimensions of the freedom of speech by using a democratic free speech rationale. While far from the only aspect of positive free speech, it offers a useful example of the freedom’s positive dimensions. The chapter focuses on legal conditions underlying public speech and their links to democratic constitutional arrangements. It outlines the general approach before drawing brief comparisons with two well-known US approaches to free speech and media freedom. The chapter then highlights two of the multiple ways in which ‘positive’ can be used in relation to free speech. Positive may concern positive freedom, the idea that freedom is not only a negative liberty but requires support or enablement. It can also be used in terms of a positive right, typically a legal right enforced through courts.