Posted on 09/19/2009 8:51:37 AM PDT by evilrooster
“but no.....it’s not.”
Yes, it is. Negative liberty underpins the entire system of Natural Rights that ennobled our Founders and underpinned our Constitution. The sort of rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights can be defined as freedom from interference from the government. Positive liberty, contrarywise, can be defined, and this is being kind, as freedom to participate in goverment. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin categorizes people like John Locke and Adam Smith as champions of negative liberty, and people like Hegel and Marx as champions of the opposite.
Then I suppose my argument is with Berlin. I cannot understand how freedom from interference from any outside entity can be construed as negative.
Oh my! That’s as obscene an image as I’ve ever seen posted on Free Republic.
“I cannot understand how freedom from interference from any outside entity can be construed as negative”
That must be because you take the word “negative” as meaning “bad,” when of course that isn’t always the case. For instance, getting negative results on an AIDS test is a good thing. We use the term “negative” to describe the rights contained in the first ten amendments of the Constitution as “negative” because they negate, or “cause to be ineffective or invalid” government power.
Going beyond Berlin, there are philosophers like Leo Strauss, who sees in all of modern philosophy—be it Locke, Rousseau, or Hegel—an unfortunate preference for negative liberty. Though he turns to classicism for a definition of what people ought to do, rather than what should not be done to them, Strauss doesn’t use the word “negative” as bad in itself. He uses it the same way Berlin, and everyone else, does.
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