The Concept of Liberty - Essay Example

Other academicians have related life to exist in a state of nature under a social contract. Liberty is connoted into two major different kinds. Classical liberalists and individualists have conceptualized liberty as consisting of individual freedom outside coercion and compulsion, this is the kind of liberty known as Negative liberty. Whereas social liberalists conceptualize liberty with emphasis on social structure and agency, this is the second kind of liberty known as Positive liberty.

In summary, we basically have two kinds of liberty which are: positive liberty and negative liberty. Positive liberty explains that a person can find freedom in his ability to exercise agency, by having adequate power and resources to enable him to do his will without being misled by societal views such as sexism, structuralism and racism. Thomas Hobbes explains that's free man is he that….is not hindered to do what he hath the will to do `` Hobbes (235). John Stuart Mill was the first to recognize that there is a difference between liberty as freedom of action or to act and liberty as an absence of coercion.

According to Berlin (221), the difference between the two perspectives is opposite concepts of liberty; positive liberty and negative liberty where the latter manifested a negative condition of individual protection from tyranny as well as arbitrary exercise to authority. Whereas the former meant the ability to have means or opportunity other than to lack restraint of doing things or acting. The term negative liberty has different noteworthy aspects. Firstly; it defines zones or realms of freedom in the aspect of science (the science of law) Hobbes (197).

The distinguishing idea between the two kinds of liberty is traced back to Kant who examined it in the year the 1940s; he explained that the two kinds of liberty are not merely different but rivals. Positive liberty requires not only to refrain from acting but to affirmatively act, Kant explained that the two can be distinguished in labour markets where one can fire someone and require him to leave one workplace, but it's not possible for one to compel an employee to work even within contract time.

He added that positive liberty is theoretically unlimited whereas negative liberty is bounded to imply that the rights of an individual are bounded. According to John Stuart mill, the two kinds of liberty can be limited only by the self-preservation of society and individuals living in it. In a similar understanding, rightful liberty can be abridged or modified by law and hence laws abridging the natural rights of individual citizens should only be restrained through vigorous constructions within their narrow limits.

However, there have been critics of liberty; these opponents to liberty argued that there should be political order in the society composed of two authorities which are the authority of the government, and the sovereignty of the state. These should enact laws that dictate what individual person should do and what should not be done.