Concept Of Liberty Research Articles

Exploring the evolution of the concept of liberty in the U.S. presidential inaugurals

Abstract As daily news unveils, fundamental human values such as equality and liberty can be expressed through various terms influenced by multiple factors, reaching significant levels of disparity, ambiguity and controversy, particularly in specific socio-political contexts. This article employs advanced corpus analysis tools to examine the lexical and semantic configuration of the “right to liberty” as expressed in the U.S. Declaration of Independence and as North American presidents have transmitted it throughout their presidential inaugural addresses. The corpus of speeches is analyzed diachronically to identify the prevalent terms, connotations, and associated semantic categories and observe their differences and evolution. This research provides a comprehensive understanding of the concept of liberty in this context and highlights its startling malleability in American politics.

LIBERTY AS NON-DOMINATION: THE CONTRIBUTION OF PHILIP PETTIT AND THE DEBATE WITH HIS CRITICS

This paper explores Philip Pettit's concept of liberty as non-domination, a significant contribution to contemporary political theory emphasizing freedom from arbitrary power rather than merely the absence of interference. In an increasingly plural and complex world, there is a pressing need for a broader understanding of liberty that addresses the political adversities faced by diverse societies. Pettit’s theory provides a robust framework for assessing political freedom by proposing that true liberty entails the absence of domination, supported by democratic mechanisms that disperse and make power accountable. The primary objective of this text is to analyze Pettit’s complete works alongside contributions from ten prominent commentators and debaters, examining the strengths and potential shortcomings of his theory. The analysis aims to demonstrate how Pettit’s concept of non-domination can be superior to other notions of liberty or how integrating different perspectives might reinforce his ideas. Methodologically, the paper conducts a thorough examination of Pettit's seminal works. It includes critical analysis from scholars like Quentin Skinner, Richard Dagger, and Cécile Laborde. Each author's agreement or disagreement with Pettit is analyzed in detail, providing a comprehensive view of the ongoing discourse. In conclusion, Pettit's concept of liberty as non-domination proves to be a compelling framework for understanding and advancing political freedom. This approach necessitates transparency, accountability, and participation within democratic institutions, ensuring liberty is safeguarded against both existing and potential forms of arbitrary power. Through this detailed examination, the paper underscores the relevance and applicability of Pettit's ideas in addressing contemporary political challenges.

Binswanger versus Freud: apontamentos críticos para o lugar da psicanálise na problemática da daseinanálise em Foucault

This paper aims to critically present the phenomenological analysis, or Daseinanalysis, as it appears in texts of Foucault from the 50’s and 60’s based in what we call Daseinanalysis problematics. To do so we aim to recollect critically the insufficiencies of psychoanalysis and as far as possible Husserl stands towards the problem disposed along Foucault’s texts on the matter, so as the human being bringing some Binswanger’s commenters as well, whose lines are used by the French philosopher to criticize psychoanalysis. We conclude showing that though Foucault endorses Binswanger’s critics towards a supposed biological reductionism in Freud’s work he assumes surreptitiously a determined kind of metaphysics and heteronomy by Binswangers’ concept of liberty.

Discrimination, freedom of expression and two concepts of liberty: Assessing European legislation criminalizing hate speech

AbstractHate speech has been linked to categorization, stereotyping and discrimination challenges. Moreover, it presents an intersection of criminal law, criminology, philosophy of law and psychology. The authors analyse discrimination and freedom of expression in the legal framework of the European Union and in the practice of the European Court of Human Rights. They apply Berlin's two concepts of liberty, namely positive and negative liberty, to research the nature of European jurisprudence and the selected legislative frameworks. The choice between conceptions of essential moral and political values, such as positive and negative liberty, has an enduring meaning. It is a part of the human being and our thoughts and feelings about our identity. Such a choice may be why questions about the most appropriate regulation of the crime under consideration have a special place in the public discourse.

Algorithmic Transparency, Manipulation, and Two Concepts of Liberty

As more decisions are made by automated algorithmic systems, the transparency of these systems has come under scrutiny. While such transparency is typically seen as beneficial, there is a also a critical, Foucauldian account of it. From this perspective, worries have recently been articulated that algorithmic transparency can be used for manipulation, as part of a disciplinary power structure. Klenk (Philosophy & Technology 36, 79, 2023) recently argued that such manipulation should not be understood as exploitation of vulnerable victims, but rather as indifference to whether the information provided enhances decision-making by revealing reasons. This short commentary on Klenk uses Berlin’s (1958) two concepts of liberty to further illuminate the concept of transparency as manipulation, finding alignment between positive liberty and the critical account.

Constructing liberty and equality – political, not juridical

ABSTRACT When offering constructions of political values, it is common to generally strive for unity, i.e., to aim at principled definitions and the reduction of normative conflict. In this article, by contrast, I argue that we should aim to construct broad and conflicting concepts of the central liberal democratic values of liberty and equality. Taking my cue from an under-appreciated debate between Ronald Dworkin and Bernard Williams, I suggest that the demand for unity derives its appeal from a juridical model of political value construction, which assumes the unified perspective of public decision-making. But while this model may be apt for constructing institutional rights, the construction of the political values liberty and equality had better operate according to a political model, which focuses on the perspective of citizens that live in a relationship of political opposition. Not only is there no demand for unity from that perspective, but there is a positive demand for political plurality: we need to draw on broad and conflicting concepts of liberty and equality if we are to respect the claims of fellow citizens with whom we have value-based political disagreements.

Schooling Milton: Materialism and Social Ontology in Milton’s Educational Prose

ABSTRACT Scholars have explained Milton’s curriculum within the history of ideas but have given much less attention to the relationship between Milton’s experience as an educator and the development of his imagination, theology, and political commitments. This article argues that Milton’s monistic understanding of body and spirit, which played a prominent role two decades later in Paradise Lost and Christian Doctrine, emerged when he was a London schoolmaster in the 1640s. Drawing from writings on the social ontology of habit, the article demonstrates that the materialist orientation of these later masterpieces plays a prominent role in Milton’s earlier writings on social institutions, Of Education, The Reason of Church-Government, and Areopagitica. The social ontology of habit, as it appears in the works of both ancient and modern philosophers, challenges how we understand Milton’s conception of liberty and reveals his early monistic vision of collective life in the postmonarchical English republic.

No Such Thing as Free Speech? Performativity, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in the UK

AbstractThe relationship between academic freedom and freedom of speech features prominently in public and political discussions concerning the role of universities in Western liberal democracies. Recently, these debates have attracted increased attention, owing in part to media framing of a ‘free speech crisis’, especially in UK and US universities. One type of response is to regulate academic expression through legislation, such as the UK’s 2023 Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. This article offers a critical analysis of the assumptions concerning the performativity of speech in this kind of legal intervention. It extends Judith Butler’s discussion of the concept of ‘harmful speech’ as reported by Butler (Excitable speech: a politics of the performative, Routledge Classics, London, 1997) to conceptualize speech-acts as performative not only when it comes to populations, but also when it comes to institutions. Reconceptualizing universities as producing as well as being constituted by speech-acts, the article argues that the effects of free speech legislation need to be considered in the context of the transformation of universities and other political actors (including governments and student unions) in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. It argues that legal enforcement of free speech at universities further obscures the distinction between negative and positive liberties identified by Isaiah Berlin (Two Concepts of Liberty, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1958), and considers this shift as part of the reconfiguration of political ontology in late modernity.

Paternalism and Liberty/Autonomy as Dialectically Related Concepts

Following a seminal definition by Gerald Dworkin, paternalism comprises interventions which interfere with the liberty or autonomy of a person, lack the concerned person’s consent and are conducted with benevolent intention. In a paper titled “The Concept of Paternalism” Dominik Düber advises abstaining from applying the notions of liberty and autonomy in a conceptual analysis of paternalism in order to avoid conceptual confusion and moral preconception regarding paternalism. In the present paper, I will argue to the contrary that both the concept and justification of paternalism depend dialectically on the notions of liberty and autonomy, respectively. The concept of paternalism alters its structure and meaning according to these notions. Likewise, the legal and ethical evaluation of particular instances of paternalism depend on the related concepts of liberty and autonomy.

Where Is Utopia in a Time of Disaster and Catastrophe?

In search of new literary voices that might present an answer to Amitav Ghosh’s 2016 lament on the failure of contemporary literary fiction to find forms that adequately express the multiple challenges of the Anthropocene, I came across a review of Allegra Hyde’s debut novel in the Los Angeles Times. The novel’s title, Eleutheria, was suggestive enough to pique my interest: etymologically, it evokes the concepts of liberty and freedom; geographically, it calls to mind the small island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas that was colonized in the late 1640s by a group of English Puritans known as the Eleutheran Adventurers. Add to this that Willa Marks, the novel’s narrator-protagonist, is a twenty-two-year-old member of Generation Z, the same generation as the students we teach these days, and Eleutheria (2022) becomes a worthy candidate for an American Studies syllabus. What kind of narrative tapestry was the author able to weave out of the materials of history, climate change, and a young generation’s growing frustration with the ecological and political state of the world? I was ready to discuss these and similar questions with a group of students in a seminar on Anglophone Literature in the Anthropocene during the summer semester 2023. Serendipitously, the son of an American colleague and long-time friend studied with Allegra Hyde at Oberlin College, where she is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing. He suggested that she might be willing to discuss her novel with a group of German students. When I issued the invitation to join us digitally for one session, she accepted. I interviewed Hyde, who is also the author of two short story collections – Of This New World (2016) and The Last Catastrophe (2023)– a few days later. The following text is the transcript of that conversation. It has been edited for readability.

The Dworkin–Williams debate: Liberty, conceptual integrity, and tragic conflict in politics

AbstractBernard Williams articulated his later political philosophy notably in response to Ronald Dworkin, who, striving for coherence or integrity among our political concepts, sought to immunize the concepts of liberty and equality against conflict. Williams, doubtful that we either could or should eliminate the conflict, resisted the pursuit of conceptual integrity. Here, I reconstruct this Dworkin–Williams debate with an eye to drawing out ideas of ongoing philosophical and political importance. The debate not only exemplifies Williams's political realism and its connection to his critique of the morality system. It also illustrates the virtues and hazards of contemporary efforts to ameliorate or engineer our concepts; it indicates what political philosophy might look to in appraising political concepts; it adverts to the different needs these concepts have to meet if they are to sustain a politics of pluralism, deal with polarization, and secure the consent of those who end up on the losing side of political decisions; and it presents us with two starkly contrasting conceptions of politics itself, of the place of political values within it, and of our prospects of reducing the uncomfortably conflictual character of those values through philosophy.

The Influence of Renaissance Thought on Martin Luther’s View of Liberty

Abstract Scholars have long acknowledged the substantial influence of the Renaissance movement on Luther’s Reformation. However, due to the absence of comprehensive studies on Luther’s contexts, a thorough and detailed analysis of this influence in Luther’s thought and writings has been hindered. The aforementioned circumstance has resulted in the overall disregard of this contribution in the history of Western philosophy. This paper aims to analyze the distinct impact of Renaissance ideology on the evolution of Luther’s concept of liberty. The first section will discuss the background of Luther’s reform movement and the fundamental place of the humanist concept of liberty in its impact on the destruction of the religious power of the Catholic Church. The second section will examine the significant role played by humanists, such as Erasmus, in shaping Luther’s liberal ideas during his early years. The third section will examine how Luther’s understanding of liberty was developed through his polemical exchanges with Erasmus and other thinkers. This process ultimately resulted in Luther’s distinctive and paradoxical conception of freedom, which highlights Luther’s and humanists’ historical influence on the independence, emancipation, and autonomy of the individual personality in their age. The fourth section will examine the influence of Luther’s paradoxical ontological theory on the development of Western intellectual history. Additionally, it will address the misinterpretation of this intellectual history lineage by the mainstream of Western intellectual history that occurred concurrently. Finally, in the twentieth century, the revival of Luther’s thought, which was gradually revitalized by Heidegger, Karl Barth, and other contemporary scholars, also highlights the significant influence of Renaissance thought on Luther’s theory and the whole history of Western thought.

Potentia eximia & Excellentia facultatum: the relation between liberty and power from the Leviathan to De Homine

ABSTRACT Hobbes redefines his conception of liberty in the Leviathan as the absence of external impediments to motion. Power, on the other hand, refers to the body’s intrinsic dimension, that is, to the faculties possessed by each individual. There thus appears to be a clear distinction between liberty and power in Hobbes’ political philosophy. Taking into consideration Hobbes’ Latin works, however, in which he uses two different terms to refer to power: at times potestas and others potentia, such a distinction may need to be revisited. As we will argue, there is a marked relation between liberty and power when considering human sociability. In this way, the aim of the article is to discuss Hobbes’ conception of power, through the pages of the Leviathan and De Homine, trying to clarify its complex, even ambiguous relation with his conception of liberty.

On the liberties of the ancients: licentiousness, equal rights, and the rule of law

ABSTRACT In this article, we discuss Greek and Roman conceptions of liberty. The supposedly ‘neo-Roman’ view of liberty as non-domination is really derived from negative Greek models, we argue, while Roman authors devised an alternative understanding of liberty that rested on the equality of legal rights. In this ‘paleo-Roman’ model, as long as the law was the same for all, you were free; whether or not you participated in making the law was not a constitutive feature of liberty. In essence, this Roman theory was a theory of freedom as the rule of law and the guarantee of equal rights, especially due process rights. For this Roman concept of ‘legal liberty,’ as we call it, political participation was neither necessary nor sufficient. Theorized by Cicero and historicized by Livy, the Roman understanding of freedom flourished in early-modern times, proving important to paradigmatic republican authors such as Machiavelli and Rousseau as well as to Hobbes, whose work we discuss as a helpful point of comparison.

Accountability, emergency and liberty during COVID-19 in the UK 2020–22

PurposeThe study explains why Parliamentarians in the United Kingdom (UK) focused on accountability through data during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as on how data could be used to improve the government’s response to the pandemic.Design/methodology/approachUnderstanding the implications of accountability for COVID-19 is crucial to understanding how governments should respond to future pandemics. This article provides an account of what a select committee in the UK thought were the essential elements of these accountability relationships. To do so, the authors use a neo-Roman concept of liberty to show how Parliamentary oversight of the pandemic for accountability was crucial to maintaining the liberty of citizens during the crisis and to identify what lessons need to be learnt for future crises.FindingsThe study shows that Parliamentarians were concerned that the UK government was not meeting its obligations to report openly about the COVID-19 pandemic to them. It shows that the government did make progress in reporting during the pandemic but further advancements need to be made in future for restrictions to be compatible with the protection of liberty.Research limitations/implicationsThe study extends the concept of neo-Roman liberty showing how it is relevant in an emergency situation and provides an account of why accountability is necessary for the preservation of liberty when the government uses emergency powers.Practical implicationsGovernments and Parliaments need to think about how they preserve liberty during crises through enhanced accountability mechanisms and the publication of data.Originality/valueThe study extends previous work on liberty and calculation, providing a theorisation of the role of numbers in the protection of liberty.

Preface: Shakespeare and Milton

Preface: Shakespeare and Milton

Pozitivno vs. negativno shvatanje slobode - političke implikacije

The subject of this paper is the analysis of the political implications of the distinction between positive and negative understanding of liberty. The author first explains the relevance of this topic within the framework of contemporary theoretical and political discussions. The starting point of this paper is Berlin's distinction between the concepts of positive and negative liberty. In the first part of the paper, the author will deal with the implications of this difference regarding the type of socio-political system and political culture. In this sense, the author will try showing the democratic concept of liberty is positive liberty, while the classical liberal understanding of liberty is negative. In other words, the relationship between positive and negative liberty reflects on the relationship between democracy and liberalism; this relationship implies possible compatibility, but also potential opposition. In the second part of the paper, the author deals with the implications of the difference between the two concepts of liberty concerning distinctive models of democracy. Referring to Riker's thesis, the author's goal is to show how a positive understanding of liberty leads to a populist model of democracy. On the other hand, a negative understanding leads to a liberal model. The difference between these models of democracy is also reflected in the attitude about whether democracy has instrumental or intrinsic value.

Play and liberty: A brief incursion into some ideological currents in the history of systems-oriented family therapy.

We reflect on family therapy and its history from two points of view, as an entity that becomes understood with the help of a twofold concept of a game, and a twofold concept of liberty. Systemic family therapy has always been comprehended with the help of game theory. Its development becomes more properly understood if we keep in mind that game itself is a dualistic concept entailing both a cultural and a logico-mathematical interpretation of a game. We show how cultural ethos has molded the ways how game metaphor have been implemented to systemic thinking. In the same manner we show how Isaiah Berlin's idea of two incompatible concepts of liberty helps to contextualize family therapy in a way that its connections to sociopolitical theories of liberty become obvious. We believe that we have been able to demonstrate, how this twofold recontextualisation enriches the understanding of the ideological history of the family therapy. We claim that our reflections imply that family therapy is essentially a dualistic endeavor, that in the amid of it is a rift that cannot become repaired but only contemplated, that integrity of family therapy requires that we preserve both conflictual views, and don't try to simplify situation by abandoning one or the other. As a result, our article intends to develop further and deepen the idea that is originally presnted in the article "Strategy and intervention or non-intervention: A matter of theory" by Harold Goolishian and Harlene Anderson.

The competition-democracy nexus unpacked—competition law, republican liberty, and democracy

Abstract The proposition that competitive markets and competition law promote democracy constitutes a fundamental normative prior, if not a foundational myth, of US and EU competition law. This article purports to unpack this notion of a competition-democracy nexus. It argues that the idea of a competition-democracy nexus can only be explained by the normative commitment to a specific understanding of liberty: namely, the republican concept of liberty as non-domination. On this basis, the article makes three contributions. First, on a conceptual level, it is the first to pin down a clear and theoretically consistent answer to the question of how competition and competition law further democracy. Second, on a historical level it traces how iterations of the ideal of republican liberty and the associated notion of a competition-democracy nexus shaped competition law in the US and Europe and why both disappeared from our modern competition law landscape. The third contribution is practical. The article sheds light on how the ideal of republican liberty and the competition-democracy nexus can be operationalised through concrete competition law tools and how they could inform ongoing debates on the future of competition law in light of the current challenges posed by the rise of industry concentration notably in digital markets. A revival of the idea of a competition-democracy nexus, the article concludes, must not inevitably conflict with a consumer-oriented competition policy, but requires a radical rethink of the role of competition law.

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE AND EXISTENTIAL LIBERTY

These days, numerous Sartre’s existential thoughts are still misunderstood. One of the reasons for this misunderstanding is that many authors have divided his life and thoughts into two parts. To understand the essence of Sartre’s conception of liberty, we cannot fail to clarify the interrelationship of his life and the content of his philosophy.