Concept Of Liberty Research Articles

Ulighed for alle - Ulighedspersepktiver i neoliberalismen fra 1930'erne til i dag

By exploring the ways in which inequality has been represented in neoliberal ideology and how neoliberal views of inequality have changed, this article illuminates some essential discrepancies and contradictory beliefs in the neoliberal thought collective. The paper argues that the views of inequality underwent fundamental changes from the early neoliberals of the interwar period to the later neoliberals of the post-War era. These changes are in part understood by different conceptions of liberty, the relation between the state and the market, and beliefs about the public interest. The early neoliberals problematized the relation between inequality andpower, which they saw as a potential threat to the credibility of the fundamental freedom rights upholding the democratic society. This changed with the late neoli-berals, for whom inequality became a value in itself, connected to liberal notions of competition, diversity, and progress. Inequality was now to be celebrated, repre-sented, and measured as a sign of the free society and the well-functioning market.

Republican Liberty As Liberty within Rights

What is the relationship between republican liberty and rights? The received view is that although rights play an important role in republican theory, non-domination is conceptually distinct from rights enjoyment; like liberty as non-interference, republican liberty is a stand-alone conception of liberty that we can understand and perhaps even promote without invoking rights at all. I argue that this is a confusion, one that has left our view of republican liberty, and indeed the entire liberty debate, substantially out of focus. Republican liberty is not, like liberty as non-interference, an account of liberty that is conceptually independent of rights and which may (or may not) stand in relationships of varying importance to rights. To the contrary, republican liberty just is liberty within rights; to enjoy all of one’s rights is to enjoy full non-domination, and to enjoy full non-domination is to enjoy all of one’s rights. Rights enjoyment, we may say, is necessary and sufficient for republican liberty. It is necessary for republican liberty because there is no way to specify the range within which independence from others’ unconstrained wills matters without specifying particular rights that people may claim against one another. And it is sufficient for republican liberty because to enjoy a right is to possess securely a valid claim against one or more other people, where security is a function of institutional sanctions sufficient to dissuade others from violating that right. Thus, ‘R is a right and so requires entrenchment against others’ arbitrary power’ adds nothing to ‘R is a right.’ Once it becomes clear that republican liberty is liberty within rights, the liberty debate reappears as a contest that is fundamentally about whether there is conceptual daylight between liberty and rights.

Adam Smith: Radical Neo-Roman and Moderate Realist

AbstractThere is long-standing disagreement about how radical Adam Smith should be taken to be. Recently, Jonathan Israel’s work on the enlightenment situates Smith as a moderate enlightenment thinker. This article challenges that assessment. Smith sees aristocrats as largely devoid of competence, wisdom, and virtue and thinks they do not wield significant political power in commercial societies. He is also highly critical of their economic power; and uses a neo-Roman concept of liberty to provide a powerful critique of slavery and feudalism. In so doing, he extends discussions of liberty and focuses them on economic relations in ways that prefigure labour republicanism. Finally, I show how these more radical commitments can be reconciled with his moderate proposals for political reform through his epistemology and realist anti-utopianism. These are aspects of Smith’s thought that are essential for understanding it correctly and have much to teach us today.

Two Cheers for “Two Concepts”: Isaiah Berlin’s Skeptical, Tragic Liberalism

ABSTRACT Returning to Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” offers a defense of liberal democracy that can help us come to terms with its limits, as well as the implicit tradeoffs that are an inescapable feature of politics in a liberal democracy. While critics of Berlin are right to note his neglect of Enlightenment constitutionalism, his skeptical liberalism is illuminated by comparative constitutional law, where we see how different constitutional regimes balance different values—such as democracy, liberty, and equality—in different ways that are attuned to the particulars of place and history that both Berlin and critics of liberalism insist are so important.

In Search of the Decent Society: Isaiah Berlin and Raymond Aron on Liberty

ABSTRACT Jeremy Waldron has argued that Berlin ignored the importance of institutions and constitutions and worked with an impoverished conception of social and political design. Political structures, legal and political institutions, constitutional design, mechanisms of representation and the rule of law: all this remained untouched by Berlin, who seemed, in Waldron’s opinion, largely uninterested in the actual political institutions of liberal society. In this essay, I argue that what may be missing in Berlin—close and sustained attention to, and interest in, institutions and social context—can be found in the works of his prominent contemporary, Raymond Aron (1905-1983), who also wrote about liberty during the Cold War. As such, Aron’s An Essay on Liberty can and should be read as a complement to Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.”

What (If Anything) Is Wrong with Positive Liberty?

ABSTRACT Isaiah Berlin’s criticisms of positive liberty are often read as mere artefacts of his Cold War context. But are they good criticisms? This article evaluates Berlin’s three main worries about positive liberty—the inner-citadel worry, the moralization worry, and the tyranny worry. I find that while they may be reasonable worries to have about any concept of liberty, they are not compelling criticisms of positive liberty in particular.

Beyond the Cold War: Isaiah Berlin for the Twenty-First Century

ABSTRACT Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” is clearly set within a Cold War context. However, its framework of ideas is also applicable to a range of twenty-first century social and political issues. First, Berlin’s “inversion thesis” concerning liberty captures a salient pattern of thought in radical Islamism. Second, his understanding of the power of belonging and recognition bears significantly on the rise of authoritarian nationalism and populism. Third, his value pluralism implies a critique of global neoliberalism and support for egalitarian liberalism or social democracy. Thus, Berlin’s framework provides us with a set of useful tools for understanding and responding to some of the most urgent political problems that trouble us now. But this framework has limitations and needs to be supplemented by thinking that goes beyond Berlin.

The Philosophy of Freedom and the History of Art: An Interdisciplinary View

This article investigates the relationship between the philosophy of freedom and the history of art. It maintains that contemplating the two fields together is productive and necessary in understanding some of the compelling interdisciplinary aspects at work in both arenas. Isaiah Berlin’s seminal Two Concepts of Liberty (1958) acts as a touchstone, as the essay establishes the historical and political grounds for uniting the two fields, with other thinkers contributing to the analysis. The ideas discussed correlate the history of art as a narrative of creativity and freedom with art’s political function as it pertains to the positive–negative liberty perspective. These two forces offer a fecund way of thinking about freedom and the arts co-terminally. This essay argues that the creative motivations embedded in the history of art are intimately linked to political motivations, which it is claimed tie the two subjects together both historically and philosophically.

Capability as ‘Samarthya’ and ‘Sakshamta’: exonerating the discourse on justice

ABSTRACT This research paper will commence with an attempt to bifurcate the traditional theories of justice from its modern counterparts. Under the former category, works of the Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle will be analysed. The modern theories, on the other hand, would comprise of the utilitarian metric of Jeremy Bentham and J. S. Mill along with Rawls’ difference principle and justice as fairness and would further bring out the differences in theories and approaches in general. In contrast to all this, the last few sections of this paper will be dedicated to Amartya Sen’s approach to freedom, equality and justice and the reasons it provided for being a better metric for evaluating social justice as compared to former archaic alternative conceptualizations. It will try to determine the authenticity of the differentiation between ‘transcendental institutionalism’ and ‘realization-focused comparison paradigms’, the attributes or focal variables of the capability approach and its linkage to public reason, development and deliberative democracy. Thus, the paper will try to map the linear progression of the concept of justice along with its kindred concepts of liberty and equality and how this eventually resulted in the conceptualization of capability as ‘Samarthya’ and ‘Sakshamta’.

Normative economics without preferences

This paper explains how the ideas in my book The Community of Advantage fit into the broad landscapes of normative and behavioural economics. My approach to normative issues deviates significantly from the mainstream position of behavioural economics. These deviations reflect the fact that I have worked at the interface of economics and philosophy for even longer than I have been a behavioural economist. Much of my work as a philosophical economist has been concerned with concepts of liberty and opportunity. I explain how these investigations have influenced my understanding of the normative implications of the findings of behavioural economics.

Liberties, rights, public policies and water fluoridation.

ABSTRACTOBJECTIVE To discuss the negative and positive concepts of liberty and postulate its interdependent and complementary relationship in the evaluation of public policy intersectoral actions, taking water fluoridation as a case.METHOD To describe scopes and limits regarding 1950s Isaiah Berlin’s distinction, showing its validity in facing the harmful effects of an uncontrolled market economy and an autocratic political regime.RESULTS Both the rights that protect citizens against a powerful state and the rights that protect the state against powerful citizens were equally acknowledged as crucial.CONCLUSION We argued that, in a context in which negative and positive liberties are balanced, regulatory policies have double meaning. Thus, there should be a balance between the establishment of necessary rules for social protection and limits for them not to violate individuals’ rights.

Reconstructing Liberty, Equality, and Marriage: The Missing Nineteenth Amendment Argument

The social movement that led to adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment sought not only women’s right to vote but also the end to a system of marriage law based on coverture. Under coverture, married women were deprived of property and contract rights and were de jure subservient to their husbands. Coverture also provided the predicate for denial of the vote. The model voter was the independent yeoman or worker able to express his own interests in a democratic system. Women were thought to be properly confined to the domestic sphere and dependent on their husbands, who were presumed to vote on behalf of all household members. On this understanding, coverture and the state functioned as interlocking systems of governance. The nineteenth century Women’s Rights Movement was a campaign to reshape American democracy; eliminating coverture and extending full citizenship rights to women were necessary to achieve that goal. To use a phrase that we now associate with same-sex couples, it was the nation’s first marriage equality movement. Adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment marked a new social under-standing that constitutional principles and democratic norms must apply to women’s role in marriage as well as to women as citizens. The movement began by articulating a concept of collective liberty, which grew out of experiences in the anti-slavery movement and which expanded on the Founders’ more individualist concept of liberty in the Declaration of Independence. After the Civil War, the equality discourse of the Reconstruction Amendments and the rejection of women’s demands for the vote by both Congress and the Supreme Court reshaped the dominant theme of women’s rights efforts into a campaign for equality. The refusal by federal lawmakers to address women’s issues left them no recourse except to lobby state legislators, which women’s groups undertook on both suffrage and marriage law. But the diffuse, localized nature of family law presented insuperable barriers to ending coverture in one pre-emptive action. The Nineteenth Amendment reflects these dual goals in its text and sub-text. The former prohibits denial of the vote based on sex, and the latter, by enabling women’s full participation in political life, rebuts the heart of the rationale for coverture: that women’s role in society lay solely in the domestic sphere of home and marriage. Failure to understand the centrality of marriage-law reform to the social and political meaning of the Nineteenth Amendment has impoverished the constitutional grounding for contemporary challenges to the legal regulation of marriage, including the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. In Obergefell, which prohibited the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage, the Court missed an opportunity to draw on the history and meaning of the Amendment to frame the issue as implicating dual systems of governance, both of which must be bound by constitutional principles. Instead, the Court described marriage as a largely prepolitical realm of private, idealized relations. The opinion of the Court failed to comprehend the extent to which marriage today continues to function as an institution of the state and a zone of governance, no longer because of coverture but because it is foundational to the privatization of collective responsibility that is embedded in the nation’s primary systems of social insurance.

Bracketing Liberty for the Public Health Cause

The idea of liberty, which falls within the broader concept of right, enjoys a paramount position in the present world order. Invariably, almost all the Nation-States have incorporated this natural and inalienable interest in their basic documents (mostly Constitutions) and has legally recognized and sanctified the same in its maximum possible extent. Liberty is a concept which has been discussed and developed by numerous legal philosophers over the ages, starting with Aristotle. However, it can be noted that the expansion of the horizons of the concept of liberty is constant and exponential in the latter half of the twentieth century. This is also fueled by the postmodernism idea of ‘deconstruction’ that has demolished many of the existing structures. Even then, liberty cannot be absolute and the limits of the same are to be carefully determined and the Nation-States appreciate this with extra care and caution. The grounds adopted by the Nation-States for curtailing liberty has been compartmentalised under a few general heads. However, recent times have witnessed the relevance of a less invoked reasoning for curtailing liberty, i.e., preservation of public health. It can be observed that the constant improvement of the concept of liberty was not much challenged by any serious restrictions on this scale in the recent past. This paper tries to analyse the reasonableness of the ground of “public health” as a tool for restricting liberty. The legality of restricting liberty and its manifestations on the blanket justification of preservation of public health is an important concern. In the present situation, with the outbreak of a pandemic, the Nation-States tries to justify the curtailment of liberty by pointing out the fact that there is an absence of precedence of a similar magnitude compelling the State to limit the liberty on a massive scale in terms of duration and location. The paper also examines the need for a comprehensive legislative platform with respect to the curtailment of liberty for similar future situations.

Le libertà delle città italiane nel tardo medioevo: qualche riflessione

La historia de la libertad en las ciudades italianas de fines de la Edad Media se enfrenta a una "gran narrativa" que interpreta la experiencia política de las ciudades con una tradición comunitaria como una experiencia extraordinaria de la libertad republicana, a partir de algunas convicciones sólidas: que las Comunas habían sido una expresión plena de la libertad de los ciudadanos, que la degeneración de las luchas entre facciones había llevado a su crisis, y que los regímenes señoriales habían marcado el final de la libertad allanando el camino para las invasiones extranjeras de finales del siglo XV. El paradigma central de la "gran narrativa de la libertad" es la identificación de las experiencias políticas de las ciudades italianas de tradición comunal con el sistema político republicano. Sin embargo, esta identificación parece ser una "comprensión previa" interpretativa que no se refleja en la documentación. Tenemos que volver a investigar el significado de las libertates en las ciudades italianas de finales de la Edad Media, sustrayendonos a una carga ideológica tan pesada, para comprender la variedad de los significados premodernos del concepto de libertad centrado principalmente en la reivincidación de libertad como ausencia de dependencia o un régimen político arbitrario. Metodológicamente se trata de comenzar de nuevo a partir del análisis de la documentación y de una exégesis afinada del lenguaje de las fuentes, que revela la extraordinaria variedad de significados y declinaciones asumidas por la noción de libertad en las ciudades italianas entre los siglos XII y XIV.

Ideological Freedom And Related Legal Wording

In practical discourse, we can find out legal wording that is associated with ideological freedom and applied interchangeably: freedom of thought, freedom of conscience and religious freedom. In this essay, our aim consists in determining which the proper use of each expression is. For this purpose, we have observed: how the concept of ideological freedom is established in some legal systems; how it can be differentiated from religious freedom clearly but not from freedom of conscience on account of a vague material scope of validity; and why these difficulties move from conceptual to legal areas. In order to propose a convenient use to the latter expressions, we draw on BERLIN’s two concepts of liberty.

Opposing Laws with Religious Reasons

Opposing Laws with Religious Reasons

Toward a Deeper Freedom: A Path Forward for America's Legal Left

Conservative jurists often stress “freedom,” while progressives highlight “equality.” This framing is not only misleading, but—if meant to appeal to the liberty-loving American psyche—strategically ineffective. This paper argues—from a purely strategic perspective—that progressive jurists sell themselves short. For, in truth, the freedom that some seemingly liberal jurists offer is a shallow freedom, an ersatz freedom—one where (as in the Lochner era) freedom from government meant vulnerability to economic exploitation. By recognizing that substantive due process protects a more robust form of freedom, what legal philosopher Roberto Unger calls “deep freedom,” progressive jurists might begin reclaiming a role in meaningfully preserving a more robust conception of liberty. Recent cases like Gary v. Whitmer suggest that the conflict between these two conceptions of freedom will mark jurisprudence for years to come.

Republicanismo e cristianismo: dilemas de uma relação problemática

Autores como Pocock, Skinner e Pettit têm revalorizado o republicanismo como tradição política fundamental na constituição do mundo moderno em contraste com a hegemonia da tradição liberal. Este trabalho pretende analisar aquela que tem sido caracterizada como uma relação das mais problemáticas e desafiadoras para os republicanos: a relação entre republicanismo e cristianismo. Argumentamos que a dificuldade na análise das relações entre republicanismo e cristianismo deriva das próprias dificuldades do projeto neorrepublicano em delimitar o republicanismo como tradição política específica. A superação de tais dilemas envolveria uma melhor qualificação da tradição republicana incluindo os temas da comunidade política como "comunidade universal", uma concepção não instrumental da vida pública e o reconhecimento de que a concepção da liberdade como não dominação implica que as instituições republicanas promovem determinados valores.

Never Get Out'A the Boat: Stenberg V. Carhart and the Future of American Law

In this short essay, haunting scenes from film Apocalypse Now serve as backdrop for an examination of Stenberg v. Carhart and meaning that this case holds for future of American law. The movie tells story of Captain Benjamin Willard, a special forces officer in Vietnam who travels up-river on a patrol in search of a renegade American colonel whom Willard has been ordered to terminate. The major thematic concerns of film are morality, violence, candor, and tenuous nature of civilization. Indeed, life on board boat, such as it is, represents civilization. This contrasts with jungle, which represents absence of moral order that makes social life possible. This absence allows for exercise of freedom without judgment. Thus, in one scene, viewer is warned that you should get out'a boat unless you are prepared to go way. In essay, we argue that in Stenberg v. Carhart Supreme Court got out'a boat and went all way. Stenberg held that a state may not ban procedure commonly known as partial birth abortion. Stated more bluntly, Court held that protection of law does not extend to a child in process of being born. Incredibly, humanity of victim of this procedure is never addressed in Court's opinion. Here Stenberg majority differs significantly from Court in Roe v. Wade, which appeared to struggle with the difficult question of when life begins. In Stenberg, Court knows that life at issue has already begun. Indeed, it is in process of being born. By licensing brutal killing of what is undeniably an innocent human being, Court turns its back on civilization and marches proudly into jungle. Plainly, law is an essential component of authentic civilization. Law as such must embody principle of equal concern and respect for every human being and principle of ordered liberty. The essay provides examples of how, since adoption of 14th Amendment, these principles have been at heart of American constitutional law. We argue that, with Stenberg, Court has abandoned concept of ordered liberty in favor of concept of liberty as license. Moreover, in adopting what it believes is a maximal conception of human freedom, Court has undermined very notion of equal concern and respect. Here we contrast abortion license with Court's treatment of right to free speech as well as its decisions concerning capital punishment. We conclude piece by arguing that if Court truly believes that benefits of constitutional personhood do not extend to a child in process of being born, then it is incumbent on Court to explain why this is so. Indeed, rule of law demands that Court explain its now unspoken criteria for constitutional personhood. The piece is especially timely given that three decisions striking down recent federal ban on partial birth abortion are now making their way to Supreme Court. Thus, Court is once again faced with choice of embracing authentic civilization or promoting barbarism under appearance of law.

How Abstract Liberty Relates to Private Property: A One-Page Outline

Libertarianism—and classical liberalism generally—presupposes (or entails) a specific, but implicit, conception of liberty. Imagine two lists of property-rights: one list is all those that are libertarian; the other list is all those that are not. What determines into which list a property-right is assigned? If libertarianism is really about liberty, then the determining factor must be whether the property-right fits what liberty is in a more abstract sense. It greatly clarifies matters to have an explicit theory of this presupposed conception of abstract liberty and how it relates to its practical application and morality. This can be distinguished into five stages.