Liberty

For other uses, see Liberty (disambiguation).

The Statue of Liberty is a popular icon of liberty

Liberty means the condition in which an individual has the ability to act following his or her own will and alternatively, achieve their potential, within the context of other words like political freedom. It is a term that has contested meanings.

Communism and socialism claim to have something defined as liberty for them because of their social equality ideals. Libertarians and classical liberals think communism is against Liberty because communism is most of the times against the individual basic rights (life, freedom and property).

Classical liberalism conceptions of liberty conceive mainly of the freedom of the individual from outside compulsion in terms of freedom from restraint and social liberalist perspective, on the other hand, highlights the need for social and economic equality, as in the power and resources to fulfill one's potential. As such, a social connects liberty (i.e. freedom) to the equal distribution of political power (i.e. democracy) in the sense of positive liberty. They argue that liberty without equality means the domination of the most powerful. Thus, freedom and democracy are seen as connected and ultimately, antagonistic.^[1][2][3][4]

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 not being forced to do something. Mill also sought to define the "nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual” and as such, he describes an inherent and continuous antagonism between liberty and authority and thus, the prevailing question becomes "how to make the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social control".^[5]

Types of freedom

There are mainly ten types of Freedom. They are:

• Freedom of association
• Freedom of belief

• Freedom of the press

• Freedom of religion
• Freedom from bondage and slavery
• Freedom of movement
• Freedom of education
• Freedom of marriage
• Freedom of rebellion
• The civil constitutions of each country have different definitions of the freedoms allowed to the citizens. It has been argued that any law and any government limits freedom, since it sets limits on what people may do.

Related pages

• Human rights
• Justice
• Constitutional economics
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• European Convention on Human Rights

References

1. Rawls, John 1996. Political liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
2. Rawls, John 1999. Law of peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
3. Rawls, John 1999. A theory of justice, revised edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
4. Rawls, John 2001. Justice as fairness: a restatement. Erin Kelly (ed). New York: Columbia University Press.
5. Mill J.S. 1869. "Chapter I: Introductory". In On Liberty