Conceptualizing Politics

1.   Concepts of liberty
Some sixty years after first entering the philosophical stage through Isaiah Berlin’s 
inaugural lecture at Oxford University, the odd couple negative and positive liberty 
still represents the most usual, though not necessarily the best approach to this field. 
I call them an odd couple in as much as the two poles seem at times to merge into 
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LIBERTY, EQUALITY AND RIGHTS

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160  Ethics and politics
one another, while at other times they look like irreconcilable extremes, making 
people doubtful about the wisdom of their distinction.
Negative liberty is easily understood as freedom from – while its twin comes 
with a different preposition: freedom to. Freedom from what? From interference 
within our own realm of action, is the plain answer. Interference can come from 
two sources: other persons in their private capacity or from public authorities. 
Other private persons could be the neighbours who are so noisy that they deprive 
me of sleep, thus interfering in my life activities; or they can be the owners of 
a heavily polluting plant that deprives me of clean air, thus interfering with my 
health. My liberty is, in these cases, protected by the ordinary (case or statutory) 
law of the country and the courts. Constitutional law instead is expected to protect 
my liberty against interference by public authority overpassing its competence and 
unlawfully limiting my freedom of speech or movement or ownership; on this level 
a dispute, whether or not my basic liberties have been violated, can come before 
a constitutional court, granted we are considering a country governed under the 
rule of law. In countries in which the rule of law is infringed upon, or nearly non-
existent, interference or rather oppression by the ruling leader or bureaucracy or 
party threatens negative liberty on a daily basis, and the ‘fight for freedom’ is truly a 
fight for it. On the whole, the philosophy of negative liberty answers the question: 
how much government should we accept? This is a typical modern question, as room for 
it was opened first by Christianity, in particular by Augustine, then by the Lutheran 
Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment – disparate that these doc-
trines may have been, they shared a focus on subjectivity and interiority, the venture 
point from which government and politics are to be assessed.
Coming back to the conceptual level, it is clear that interference is a notion that 
needs differentiation: lawful and unlawful interference for example are opposite 
rather than different, while liberty is a concept that seeks qualification. It is indeed 
clear that unlimited liberty for all (as lack of both external constraints set by the 
law and internal prohibitions stemming from internalised norms) would unleash 
Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes, make the state of nature perpetual and civil 
coexistence impossible. Liberty must be limited, but by the force of what princi-
ple? We can exercise our liberty – is a first answer – only as far as its effects do not 
interfere with others’ liberty, as the noisy neighbour or the polluting plant owner 
do with their behaviour. This reciprocity is the pillar not just of civilised relations 
among private people, but also of the range of state intervention in the field of 
those relationships: as long as they do not harm each other, the state should refrain 
from interfering in the web of relationships among them, and only step in for the 
sake of civil peace or the orderly execution of contracts, lest conflicts lead to pri-
vate violence and revenge. This is not as uncontested as it may seem to be: it is easy 
to acknowledge the principle, but recognising the harm done and making public 
authorities act on this has, in many cases, required a long period of discussion and 
struggle. So was the case with polluting plants, or with the noxious interference of 
the excessive workday length on the workers’ health in early capitalism, or more 
recently in sweatshops located in developing countries. More regulations and more 

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Liberty, equality and rights  161
trials in courts became necessary in this way. This has led neoliberals to lament 
the excessive interference of the state in the free private management of indus-
tries. Workers and unions have not been as energetic in making clear that at stake 
was and is also their liberty to not have their health and life conditions interfered 
with by the industrialists’ less than responsible handling of noxious side effects or 
externalities of their business. This is not to justify all possible regulations issued 
by the public authority, since excessively detailed norms pretend too much (and 
can nonetheless hardly pre-figure all possible cases that may occur in the future) 
and successive negotiations between stakeholders can bring about more adequate 
solutions, once the principles are held firm. Administrative bodies have an innate 
tendency to overregulate, parliaments and governments are not sufficiently able and 
willing to correct this tendency, which can sometimes bring discredit to the prin-
ciples. In a word, negative liberties are built upon acts of abstention to interfere (to 
legislate, to regulate, to intervene coercively) by the state, whenever interference is 
not essential to the preservation of the polity as framework for the citizens’ peaceful 
coexistence – ne cives ad arma veniant/in order not to let citizens resort to arms, as 
the Romans said. This basic version of negative liberty is political liberalism’s own 
view, and can live regardless of what actor makes the law – whether a democratic 
parliament or an enlightened prince, as Kant still saw it.
A further, specifically democratic development considers interference by the 
state to be justified only if the citizens themselves have made the law by universal 
suffrage and representative government. This is an advanced (Rousseauian) version 
of negative liberty as autonomy.
1
 It opens up the question: is all democratic legisla-
tion, as such, respectful of our freedom? The liberal as well as the liberal-democratic 
answer is negative. Being passed by a democratic legislature does not guarantee the 
full preservation of freedom from interference; constitutional safeguards as enacted 
by constitutional courts and public opinion constitute a higher tribunal of liberty. 
This argument has analogy with the point made in Chapter 5, which held that so-
called substantial democracy can by no means replace formal democracy.
From a democratic and also a socialist point of view, the priority and irreplace-
able character of negative liberty has been criticised for noting that a person in a 
state or condition of poverty or destitution or illiteracy can draw no advantage 
from it because s/he is not able to make sense of her/his freedom of speech or 
right to vote, freedom from want being her/his first and foremost interest, which 
can be met not by having some formal rights recognised, but only by economic 
and social policies changing her/his life conditions. The truth contained in this 
criticism has been the presupposition for the shift from the liberal-democratic state 
to the liberal and social democracies of the mid twentieth century, whose present 
fiscal and financial crisis may therefore put at risk their attitude towards liberty as 
well. On the theoretical level, however, to say that negative liberties are nil with-
out social policies making them enjoyable is different from – and less founded 
than –  maintaining that those liberties remain essential as a principle, but need to 
be accompanied by conditions that make them effective. It must further be noted 
that freedom of speech, assembly and unionizing is the necessary condition for the 

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162  Ethics and politics
social rights of the weaker members of society to be protected – as the history of 
workers’ movements around the globe shows. By the way, ‘to be a necessary condi-
tion for’ is not identical with ‘to be instrumental to’: an instrumentalist justification 
of liberty would diminish and endanger it.
Some of these issues, such as democracy and the conditions for making liberty 
effective, lead us to liberty’s second version: positive liberty, or liberty to be or to 
become something. In other words, to build a family with a decent standard of liv-
ing, or to become a scientist, or to enter one’s own country’s Olympic team; in 
the political field, to build, along with others, a successful party or to make new 
legislation pass the parliamentary vote. It is the liberty to successfully develop one’s 
own life plan, be it individual or collective in nature. This entails some problematic 
aspects, as the history of doctrines on liberty shows.
First, if promoting positive liberty is regarded as something society or the polity owes 
to its members, institutions are charged with the obligation to provide the condi-
tions for life plans to be implemented. This is costly, the more those conditions are 
identified with policies enhancing the income of those interested – though there 
are other ways to act on the conditions, as we shall see in the equality section when 
speaking of equal opportunities. It can be as costly as to require raising heavily the 
level of public debt, to the detriment of future generations. Also, setting up a system 
of social rights, also known as entitlements, requires expanding the administrative 
apparatus and putting under its authority many aspects of the citizens’ private life, 
which at the end of the day may lead to intrusion and infringe on their negative 
freedom. This is not to say that developing one’s own positive liberty has well to 
remain in the hands of the individuals, according to their ability to score better 
than others in the social competition – as conservative liberalism would have it. 
Yet the public promotion of this liberty must carefully weigh the different interests 
at stake and find a balance between its own progressive intention and the perverse 
side effects. The first step is to discriminate between what can be acknowledged 
as a legitimate goal of self-realisation the state should contribute to (say, to go to 
university) and what it cannot (to be taught the art of origami).
Another doubt is linked to some doctrines of positive liberty that sees self-