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تاريخ التسجيل : 26/10/2009
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 | |  Positive Liberty | |
Many liberals have been attracted to more ‘positive’ conceptions of liberty. Although Rousseau (1973 [1762]) seemed to advocate a positive conception of liberty, according to which one was free when one acted according to one's true will (the general will), the positive conception was best developed by the British neo-Hegelians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Thomas Hill Green and Bernard Bosanquet (2001 [1923]). Green acknowledged that “…it must be of course admitted that every usage of the term [i.e., ‘freedom’] to express anything but a social and political relation of one man to other involves a metaphor…It always implies…some exemption from compulsion by another…”(1986 [1895]: 229). Nevertheless, Green went on to claim that a person can be unfree if he is subject to an impulse or craving that cannot be controlled. Such a person, Green argued, is “…in the condition of a bondsman who is carrying out the will of another, not his own” (1986 [1895]: 228). Just as a slave is not doing what he reallywants to do, one who is, say, an alcoholic, is being led by a craving to look for satisfaction where it cannot, ultimately, be found.For Green, a person is free only if she is self-directed or autonomous. Running throughout liberal political theory is an ideal of a free person as one whose actions are in some sense her own.In this sense, positive liberty is an exercise-concept. One is free merely to the degree that one has effectively determined oneself and the shape of one's life (Taylor, 1979). Such a person is not subject to compulsions, critically reflects on her ideals and so does not unreflectively follow custom, and does not ignore her long-term interests for short-term pleasures. This ideal of freedom as autonomy has its roots not only in Rousseau's and Kant's political theory, but also in John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. And today it is a dominant strain in liberalism, as witnessed by the work of S.I. Benn (1988), Gerald Dworkin (1988), and Joseph Raz (1986); see also the essays in Christman and Anderson (2005).This Greenian, autonomy-based, conception of positive freedom is often run together with a very different notion of ‘positive’ freedom: freedom as effective power to act or to pursue one's ends. In the words of the British socialist R. H. Tawney, freedom thus understood is ‘the ability act’ (1931: 221; see also Gaus, 2000; ch. 5.) On this view of positive freedom, a person who is not prohibited from being a member of a Country Club but who is too poor to afford membership is not free to be a member: she does not have an effective power to act. Although the Greenian autonomy-based conception of positive freedom certainly had implications for the distribution of resources (education, for example, should be easily available so that all can develop their capacities), positive freedom qua effective power to act closely ties freedom to material resources. It was this conception of positive liberty that Hayek had in mind when he insisted that although “freedom and wealth are both good things…they still remain different” (1960: 17-18). 1.4 Republican LibertyAn older notion of liberty that has recently undergone resurgence is the republican, or neo-Roman, conception of liberty which has its roots in the writings of Cicero and Niccolo Machiavelli (1950 [1513]). According to Philip Pettit, - اقتباس :
- The contrary of the liber, or free, person in Roman, republican usage was the servus, or slave, and up to at least the beginning of the last century, the dominant connotation of freedom, emphasized in the long republican tradition, was not having to live in servitude to another: not being subject to the arbitrary power of another. (Pettit, 1996: 576)
On this view, the opposite of freedom is domination. An agent is said to be unfree if she is “subject to the potentially capricious will or the potentially idiosyncratic judgement of another” (Pettit, 1997: 5). The ideal liberty-protecting government, then, ensures that no agent, including itself, has arbitrary power over any citizen. The key method by which this is accomplished is through an equal disbursement of power. Each person has power that offsets the power of another to arbitrarily interfere with her activities (Pettit, 1997: 67).The republican conception of liberty is certainly distinct from both Greenian positive and negative conceptions. Unlike Greenian positive liberty, republican liberty is not primarily concerned with rational autonomy, realizing one's true nature, or becoming one's higher self. When all dominating power has been dispersed, republican theorists are generally silent about these goals (Larmore 2001). Unlike negative liberty, republican liberty is primarily focused upon “defenseless susceptibility to interference, rather than actual interference” (Pettit, 1996: 577). Thus, in contrast to the ordinary negative conception, on the republican conception the merepossibility of arbitrary interference appears to constitute a limitation of liberty. Republican liberty thus seems to involve a modal claim about the possibility of interference, and this is often cashed out in terms of complex counterfactual claims. It is not clear whether these claims can be adequately explicated (Gaus, 2003; cf. Larmore, 2004).Some republican theorists, such as Quentin Skinner (1998: 113), Maurizio Viroli (2002: 6) and Pettit (1997: 8-11), view republicanism as an alternative to liberalism. Insofar as republican liberty is seen as a basis for criticizing market liberty and market society, this is plausible (Gaus, 2003b). However, when liberalism is understood more expansively, and not so closely tied to either negative liberty or market society, republicanism becomes indistinguishable from liberalism (Ghosh, 2008; Rogers, 2008; Larmore, 2001; Dagger, 1997). | |
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