Liberty is the quality individuals have to control their own actions. Different concepts of liberty articulate the relationship of individuals to society in different ways. Some concepts relate to life under a social contract, existence in an imagined state of nature, and therefore define the active exercise of freedom and rights essential to liberty in corresponding ways. Understanding liberty involves how we imagine, and structure, individual's roles and responsibilities in society in terms of free will and determinism, which involves the larger domain of metaphysics.

Classical liberal concepts of liberty typically consist of freedoms of individuals from outside compulsion or coercion, also known as negative liberty. This conception of liberty, which coincides with the libertarian point-of-view, suggests that people should, must, and ought to behave according to their own free will, and take responsibility for their actions. In contrast, social liberal conceptions of liberty (positive liberty) place an emphasis upon social structure and agency and is therefore directed toward ensuring egalitarianism. In feudal societies, a "liberty" was an area of allodial land where the rights of the ruler or monarch were waived.

Liberty is a historically controversial philosophy. One understanding of liberty asserts that freedom is found in a person's ability to exercise agency, particularly in the sense of one having the freedom to choose what authorities one will submit to agency with in exchange for rights derived from that authority to develop resources to carry out their own will, without being inhibited; Social Contract. According to Thomas Hobbes, for example, "a free man is he that... is not hindered to do what he hath the will to do."

However, John Locke rejected that definition of liberty. While not specifically mentioning Hobbes, he attacks Sir Robert Filmer who had the same definition. According to Locke:

John Stuart Mill, in his work, On Liberty, was the first to recognize the difference between liberty as the freedom to act and liberty as the absence of coercion.[2] In his book, Two Concepts of Liberty, Isaiah Berlin formally framed the differences between these two perspectives as the distinction between two opposite concepts of liberty: positive liberty and negative liberty. The latter designates a negative condition in which an individual is protected from tyranny and the arbitrary exercise of authority, while the former refers to having the means or opportunity, rather than the lack of restraint, to do things.

Mill offered insight into the notions of soft tyranny and mutual liberty with his harm principle.[3] It can be seen as important to understand these concepts when discussing liberty since they all represent little pieces of the greater puzzle known as freedom. In a philosophical sense, it can be said that morality must supersede tyranny in any legitimate form of government. Otherwise, people are left with a societal system rooted in backwardness, disorder, and regression.

The concept of negative liberty has several noteworthy aspects. First, negative liberty defines a realm or "zone" of freedom (in the "silence of law"). In Berlin's words, "Liberty in the negative sense involves an answer to the question 'What is the area within which the subjecta person or group of personsis or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons." Some philosophers disagree on the extent of this realm, while accepting the main point that liberty defines the realm in which one may act unobstructed by others. Second, the restriction (on the freedom to act) implicit in negative liberty is imposed by a person or persons and not due to causes such as nature, lack, or incapacity. Helvetius expresses this point clearly: "The free man is the man who is not in irons, nor imprisoned in a gaol (jail), nor terrorized like a slave by the fear of punishment... it is not lack of freedom not to fly like an eagle or swim like a whale."

The dichotomy of positive and negative liberty is considered specious by political philosophers in traditions such as socialism, social democracy, libertarian socialism, and Marxism[citation needed]. Some of them argue that positive and negative liberty are indistinguishable in practice, while others claim that one kind of liberty cannot exist independently of the other. A common argument is that the preservation of negative liberty requires positive action on the part of the government or society to prevent some individuals from taking away the liberty of others.

In 1980, Gerald MacCallum argued that proponents of positive and negative liberty converge on a single definition of liberty, but simply have different approaches in establishing it. According to MacCallum, freedom is a triadic relationship: "x is/is not free from y to do/not to do or become/not become z". In this way, rather than defining liberty in terms of two separate paradigms, positive and negative liberty, he defined liberty as a single, complete formula.

The question is whether this formula fully captures what positive liberty means. Positive liberty, understood as internal forces that determine how a person must act"[4] is saying more than 'x is free to do z.' One is free when one becomes the ideal of oneself, which includes MacCallum's triadic relation; but the latter alone is insufficient to fully capture what positive liberty means.[citation needed]

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Liberty - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia