Conceptualizing Politics

realisation as a process in which a better or authentic or spiritual Self determines the 
way to go, in opposition to its own lower levels such as those dominated by passions 
or shortsighted interests. As the individual problem of a split Self, this can be left 
to moral philosophy, but its translation into the political realm can become ugly. 
The French Jacobins wanted the people to learn how to live according to virtue, 
the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution or the Red Guards in China’s Cultural 
Revolution or the genocidal Khmer Rouges in the Cambodia of the 1970s wanted 
to strip ‘bourgeois’ layers of the populace of their corrupt and egoistic traits – often 
eliminating peoples and bad traits alike. The effects of the translation range from 
paternalism to totalitarianism and terror. The opposite of it is to make the frustrated 
needs and life plans of the underprivileged layers of society interact with each other 
and the political leadership, in a reciprocal learning process that leads to public poli-
cies effectively freeing the energy of those layers towards the attainment of better 

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Liberty, equality and rights  163
life conditions and more political participation – as the workers’ movement did in 
many countries, at best in Europe before the First and after the Second World War.
This is just a sketch of the complex relationship between negative and posi-
tive liberty. It is important to see their differences and not to let it bloat into an 
opposition or even dichotomy, in which the one pole rules out the presence of the 
other. Even interpreting positive liberty as the road to self-realisation, freedom from 
interference remains its presupposition, because self-realisation under guardianship, 
rather than autonomy, contradicts the very image of the Self, as this has developed 
in modern thought from the Renaissance’s ideal of ‘man’ through the journey of 
Selbstbewußtsein/self-consciousness towards modernity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of 
Spirit (Hegel 1807) down to important recent reconstructions of the Self ’s path 
(Habermas 1985; Taylor 1989).
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It only remains to note that, while this differentiated concept of liberty claims 
universal validity – wherever human rights and the rule of law are to be the founda-
tion of the political community, both domestic and international – its philosophical 
roots lie in Western culture and the primacy it gives to the individual, as mentioned 
above. Where harmony, social cohesion around the family, and the cultivation of 
traditions are seen as paramount values, as in the debate of the 1990s on ‘Asian 
values’, liberty is given little leeway, and an anti-individualistic collectivism prevails. 
This cannot but weaken the defence of democratic regimes and parties against the 
authoritarian trends of a capitalism that was imported without passing through 
a liberal and democratic phase allowing for free debate on its regulation and the 
protection of workers’ rights.