The object of this research is gentleness, a construct maybe not treated enough in the literature, but just in the area of the so called Positive Psychology. And precisely from his representative Martin Seligman, the inspiration for the construction of a questionnaire and of a specific hypothesis has been born, including the use of a precise terminology. In general terms, maybe the most interesting result lies in the fact of having found a correlation between the various items, therefore between (...) the various constructs, in accordance with the idea of gentleness proposed as a synergy of “quality”. This idea has also been supported from recent research in which has emerged a very tight bond between optimism and a particular character trait that is extroversion. Being placed at a higher, transcendental level, the “gift of oneself” could become the “jump of quality” to fulfil ourselves in the relation with the other. (shrink)

The visibility of environmental problems and the increasing awareness of associated consequences have made environmental issues salient in Zambia. The purpose of this study was to investigate correlations between the social and psychological influences affecting college students in Zambia, and the behaviours perceived by them to be appropriately environmentally friendly. The underlying social and psychological factors that would determine individuals' attitudinal responses toward appropriate environmental behaviour were assessed. The study attempted to measure behavioural tendencies towards environmental conservation. Behaviour involving energy (...) and water conservation (EW) was consistently rated as the most important, and appropriate category of environmental behaviour, whereas social and political action (SP) was viewed as the least favourable behaviour according to the respondents in Zambia. The respondents who were older in the graduate level of the study and had frequently contact with environmental education activities and courses were more likely to hold positive behavioural tendencies toward environmental conservation in general. (shrink)

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Liberty is perhaps the most praised of all social ideals. Rare is the modern political movement which has not inscribed "liberty," ...

This new volume is of exceptional value to scholars because of the editors’ success in placing the work in its philosophical context. The introduction provides the reader with a synopsis of British Idealism and a context for understanding this thinker. For example, since Bosanquet thought his beliefs almost identical to Green’s, it is useful to have the editors pointing out that Green pressed Bosanquet to publish them, implying that Green knew otherwise. Similarly, Bosanquet’s defense of economic individualism earns the editors’ (...) description as “communitarian,” hardly what one would expect of a devotee of positive liberty. (shrink)

This new volume is of exceptional value to scholars because of the editors’ success in placing the work in its philosophical context. The introduction provides the reader with a synopsis of British Idealism and a context for understanding this thinker. For example, since Bosanquet thought his beliefs almost identical to Green’s, it is useful to have the editors pointing out that Green pressed Bosanquet to publish them, implying that Green knew otherwise. Similarly, Bosanquet’s defense of economic individualism earns the editors’ (...) description as “communitarian,” hardly what one would expect of a devotee of positive liberty. (shrink)

The title of this interesting study may be misleading; Crocker's subject is not Rousseau's or Hegel's conception of liberty considered in contradistinction to, say, Locke's or J. S. Mill's. The philosophy of Positive Liberty is strictly English-speaking and its intention is to argue against those within the Lockean tradition who would claim that personal liberty can only be limited by deliberate human action. Crocker is in full agreement with his opponents in holding that passion or irrationality (...) is in no way an obstacle to liberty, but he wants to persuade negative libertarians that disabilities like poverty, powerlessness, physical handicap, and manipulative information management are conditions as seriously preventive of liberty as are forcible coercion and legal prohibition. His argument is that increasing liberty requires maximizing the range and desirability of opportunities and choices rather than simply minimizing deliberate or overt restraint. The consequence for political philosophy of this position, which Crocker calls left-libertarian, is that a social commitment to personal liberty may require extensive and costly positive redistributive policies. According to Crocker, positive liberty is not a new conception of liberty, but rather a novel and more inclusive sense of the obstacles to freedom: "the emphasis shifts from the constraints to the alternatives and such matters as their range and desirability. The absence of interference by other persons appears as but one feature of liberty among several". (shrink)

In the jurisprudence of constitutional courts around the world, there is an emerging trend towards an autonomy-based understanding of constitutional rights: increasingly, rights are interpreted as being about enabling people to live autonomous lives, rather than disabling the state in certain ways. This article investigates the conception of autonomy employed by courts by presenting two candidates and examining which of them explains the current practice of constitutional rights law better. The first, labelled the excluded reasons conception of autonomy, claims that (...) a person’s autonomy is violated if he is treated on the basis of certain impermissible—in particular, moralistic or paternalistic—reasons. It is concluded that, while this is a coherent understanding of autonomy, it cannot explain many of the rights that are widely accepted today. The second, the protected interests conception, argues that a person has autonomy interests in controlling certain domains of her life, and offers a scale on which the importance of the various autonomy interests can be assessed. The article demonstrates that this conception is coherent and adequately explains the current practice. The final section briefly explores some implications of this result for a comprehensive reconstructive theory of constitutional rights. (shrink)

Summary This article presents a comparative analysis of the concepts of totalitarian democracy and positive liberty in the work of Jacob Leib Talmon and Isaiah Berlin. Its main purpose is to show that a combined analysis of Talmon and Berlin's biographical relationship and their individual texts demonstrates that Talmon's idea of totalitarian democracy may have had a greater influence on Berlin's notion of positive liberty than Berlin seems to have ever acknowledged. The article first summarises the (...) intellectual and biographical relationships that tied these two authors together in a personal friendship and an intellectual fellowship that lasted for more than three decades. In the second part, the insights drawn from the investigation of the authors' intellectual and biographical relationships are linked to an analysis of their texts, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy and Two Concepts of Liberty. Finally, in the third part of the article, three crucial aspects of Talmon's definition of totalitarian democracy are considered: the interpretation of the Enlightenment and Rousseau's thought, the view of the French revolution, and the possible impact each of these has on subsequent Marxist and socialist reflection, to see how they are addressed in Berlin's idea of positive liberty. (shrink)

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.

The concept of personal autonomy is central to discussions about democratic rights, personal freedom and individualism in the marketplace. This book, first published in 1986, discusses the concept of personal autonomy in all its facets. It charts historically the discussion of the concept by political thinkers and relates the concept of the autonomy of the individual to the related discussion in political thought about the autonomy of states. It argues that defining personal autonomy as freedom to act without external constraints (...) is too narrow and emphasises instead that personal autonomy implies individual self-determination in accordance with a chosen plan of life. It discusses the nature of personal autonomy and explores the circumstances in which it ought to be restricted. In particular, it argues the need to restrict the economic autonomy of the individual in order to promote the value of community. (shrink)

Many of those critical of traditional liberalism have focused on the notion of freedom at the center of that approach, namely the (negative) idea of liberty as the absence of interferences with action. Building a plausible and normatively acceptable positive alternative, however, has faced numerous criticisms and challenges. In this paper I discuss what such critics of liberalism sec; as the; limitations of the traditional negative notion and sketch the core components of a positive alternative. Specifically I (...) suggest that the dimensions of liberty should contain the positive elements of capabilities and agent authenticity. After laying out the core of these ideas I briefly defend them against standard objections. In doing so, I argue that such a positive notion is necessary to capture the dominance of the language of freedom in contexts of resistance and struggle in the actual, non-ideal, world. (shrink)

In ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, Berlin wavered between two readings of the concept of positive liberty. In the first one, ‘positive liberty’ is a distinct concept, different from that of ‘negative liberty’. Those who advocate liberty in the negative sense and those who advocate it in the positive sense do not disagree on which interpretation of the same thing – ‘liberty’ – is the correct one; they speak about different things. Both (...) defend valid ideals, although those ideals may not be simultaneously achievable. In the second reading, negative and positive liberty are competing interpretations of the same concept, the defenders of negative liberty being involved in a substantive disagreement with the advocates of positive liberty on what the same term – ‘liberty’ – really means. On this understanding, negative and positive liberty cannot both be valid ideals: one of them (negative liberty) is a genuine value, the other (positive liberty) being nothing but the perversion of it. My article aims to uncover the roots of this ambiguity in unresolved difficulties in Berlin’s account of the history of the ideas of negative and positive liberty and, more importantly, in his conception of value pluralism. (shrink)

This book argues that the distinction between positive and negative freedom remains highly pertinent today, despite having fallen out of fashion in the late twentieth century. It proposes a new reading of this distinction for the twenty-first century, building on the work of Constant, Green and Berlin who led the historical development of these ideas. The author defends the idea that freedom is a dynamic interaction between two inseparable, yet sometimes fundamentally, opposed positive and negative concepts - the (...) yin and yang of freedom. Positive freedom is achieved when one succeeds in doing what is right, while negative freedom is achieved when one is able to advance one's wellbeing. In an environment of culture wars, resurging populism and challenge to progressive liberal values, recognising the duality of freedom can help us better understand the political dilemmas we face and point the way forward. The book analyses the duality of freedom in more philosophical depth than previous studies and places it within the context of both historical and contemporary political thinking. It will be of interest to students and scholars of liberalism and political theory. (shrink)

L.T.Hobhouse's concept of liberty--the concept at the heart of new liberalism--is based on T.H. Green's positive freedom. However, this paper demonstrates that the former has its own distinct nature and can be usefully defined as 'liberty as welfare'. In a context of renewed interest in the link between liberty and ability/personal development, scholars have looked back to Green's positive liberty. But the complex nature of latter has led to scholarly disagreement about its definitive features. (...) The paper argues that Hobhouse's liberty has achieved what neither of Green's two liberties, juristic and true (or positive), have: accommodate concerns with personal development and social justice in a 'primary' concept of freedom. It is demonstrated that only Green's positive freedom, as opposed to his juristic freedom, internalises commitment to development and social justice, but for a number of reasons reviewed in the paper, it is not a primary concept. The first section of the paper examines and criticises Green's dismissal of juristic freedom and outlines the ways in which this concept could have been more viable. The second section demonstrates how Hobhouse's liberty achieves what Green's juristic freedom could have but did not--accommodate personal development and social justice in a concept of liberty that remains an opportunity concept. (shrink)

The distinction between negative and positive liberty remains a standard approach to the idea of freedom in contemporary political theory. In Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty, Maria Dimova-...

It is widely acknowledged that Isaiah Berlin’s seminal essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” has to a large extent set the tone and determined the content of the debates within political philosophy in the English-speaking world. Berlin maintains that the conceptual and institutional history of liberty can be understood in terms of the various responses to the logically distinct questions: “Who governs me?” and “How far does government interfere with me?”. In Berlin’s first question, the salient issue is whether (...) the valid authority to positively rule an individual resides within the individual herself or in some external person, social class, institution, empirical circumstance, or tradition. In contrast with the personal freedom to direct oneself, the second issue is concerned with liberating the individual from the coercion of others, especially the government, by limiting authority as such. Berlin dedicates much of his essay to demonstrating that the positive and negative concepts of liberty are not merely two sides of the same coin; rather, he argues that in human psychology and history these mark “two profoundly divergent and irreconcilable attitudes to the ends of life”. According to Berlin’s line of reasoning, to perceive the personal authority to rule oneself as one’s primary end requires a sacrifice of one’s negative liberty. Reciprocally, to make the limitation of authority and coercion in general one’s highest end demands that one relinquish some positive freedom. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that Isaiah Berlin’s seminal essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” has to a large extent set the tone and determined the content of the debates within political philosophy in the English-speaking world. Berlin maintains that the conceptual and institutional history of liberty can be understood in terms of the various responses to the logically distinct questions: “Who governs me?” and “How far does government interfere with me?”. In Berlin’s first question, the salient issue is whether (...) the valid authority to positively rule an individual resides within the individual herself or in some external person, social class, institution, empirical circumstance, or tradition. In contrast with the personal freedom to direct oneself, the second issue is concerned with liberating the individual from the coercion of others, especially the government, by limiting authority as such. Berlin dedicates much of his essay to demonstrating that the positive and negative concepts of liberty are not merely two sides of the same coin; rather, he argues that in human psychology and history these mark “two profoundly divergent and irreconcilable attitudes to the ends of life”. According to Berlin’s line of reasoning, to perceive the personal authority to rule oneself as one’s primary end requires a sacrifice of one’s negative liberty. Reciprocally, to make the limitation of authority and coercion in general one’s highest end demands that one relinquish some positive freedom. (shrink)

The concept of positive liberty includes both the regulative autonomy to do what we will and the constitutive autonomy to become what we will. However, the latter represents the full meaning of the idea. Liberty in this meaning is a creative power: we are most free in the positive sense when we give our defining constitutive rules to ourselves. The original conceptual model for liberty as creativity did not belong to classical Greek tradition but came (...) to us from Judaism. The religious idea of spontane- ous, supra-natural, existential self-sufficiency provided the template for the idea of positive liberty, often described explicitly as a god-like power, by writers including Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx. The value of creativity became secularized in modernity as a core belief in politics, morality and the arts. (shrink)

It is only those who do not understand our people, who believe our national life is entirely absorbed by material motives. We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things we want much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism. I cannot repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists.

In recent years, political theorists have increasingly turned their attention to the past in search of conceptual renovation in the present. While recourse to the past has been a recurring thread throughout the history of political thought, the overlapping concern of recent scholarship has been to revisit seemingly exhausted political concepts with the aim of repurposing them for contemporary political challenges and realities. The three edited collections under review – Positive Freedom, Perfektionismus der Autonomie and Rethinking Liberty Before (...) Liberalism – are distinguished by their thoughtful attempts at retrieving and politicizing the concepts of positive freedom, post-Kantian perfectionism, and neo-Roman liberty in contemporary political thought. These retrievals present promising avenues for theoretical innovation, along with the ever-present risk of diminishing interpretive returns. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that Shaftesbury’s thinking about liberty is best understood in terms of self-mastery. To examine his understanding of liberty, I turn to a painting that he commissioned on the ancient theme of the choice of Hercules and the notes that he prepared for the artist. Questions of human choice are also present in the so-called story of an amour, which addresses the difficulties of controlling human passions. Jaffro distinguishes three notions of (...) self-control that are present in the story of an amour. Although I agree with many aspects of Jaffro’s interpretation, I question his conclusion that self- control in the Stoic sense is best reserved for ‘moral heroes.’ I propose an alternative developmental interpretation, according to which all human beings are on an intellectual journey aimed at personal and moral improvement. My interpretation takes seriously that for Shaftesbury philosophy is meant to be practical and help improve our lives. I end by arguing that rather than trying to situate Shaftesbury’s concept of liberty within debates among compatibilists and incompatibilists it is more promising to understand it in terms of self- mastery and thus regard it as a version of positive liberty. (shrink)

Freedom is widely regarded as a basic social and political value that is deeply connected to the ideals of democracy, equality, liberation, and social recognition. Many insist that freedom must include conditions that go beyond simple “negative” liberty understood as the absence of constraints; only if freedom includes other conditions such as the capability to act, mental and physical control of oneself, and social recognition by others will it deserve its place in the pantheon of basic social values. (...) class='Hi'>Positive Freedom is the first volume to examine the idea of positive liberty in detail and from multiple perspectives. With contributions from leading scholars in ethics and political theory, this collection includes both historical studies of the idea of positive freedom and discussions of its connection to important contemporary issues in social and political philosophy. (shrink)

Franke, in Philosophy & Technology, 37(1), 1–6, (2024), connects the recent debate about manipulative algorithmic transparency with the concerns about problematic pursuits of positive liberty. I argue that the indifference view of manipulative transparency is not aligned with positive liberty, contrary to Franke’s claim, and even if it is, it is not aligned with the risk that many have attributed to pursuits of positive liberty. Moreover, I suggest that Franke’s worry may generalise beyond the (...) manipulative transparency debate to AI ethics in general. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin's distinction between "negative" and "positive" concepts of liberty has recently been defended on new and interesting grounds. Proponents of this dichotomy used to equate positive liberty with "self-mastery "-the rule of our rational nature over ourpassions and impulses. However, Berlin's critics have made the case that this account does not employ a separate "concept" of liberty: although the constraints it envisions are internal, rather than external, forces, the freedom in question remains "negative" (freedom (...) is still seen as the absence of such impediments). Responding to this development, Berlin's defenders have increasingly tended to identify positive liberty with "self-realization." The argument is that such an account of freedom is genuinely "nonnegative," in that it does not refer to the absence of constraints on action. This essay argues that the claims made on behalf of "freedom as self-realization" cannot withstand scrutiny, and that they fail to isolate a coherent view of liberty that is distinguishable from the absence of constraint. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between “negative” and “positive” concepts of liberty has recently been defended on newand interesting grounds. Proponents of this dichotomy used to equate positive liberty with “self-mastery”—the rule of our rational nature over our passions and impulses. However, Berlin’s critics have made the case that this account does not employ a separate “ concept” of liberty: although the constraints it envisions are internal, rather than external, forces, the freedom in question remains “negative”. Responding (...) to this development, Berlin’s defenders have increasingly tended to identify positive liberty with “self-realization.” The argument is that such an account of freedom is genuinely “nonnegative,” in that it does not refer to the absence of constraints on action. This essay argues that the claims made on behalf of “freedom as self-realization” cannot withstand scrutiny, and that they fail to isolate a coherent viewof liberty that is distinguishable fromthe absence of constraint. (shrink)

This book takes the thinking of Quentin Skinner, Philip Pettit and J. G. A. Pocock on republican liberty and explores the way in which this idea of liberty can be used to illuminate educational practice. It argues that republican liberty is distinct from both positive and negative liberty, and its emphasis on liberty as non-dependency gives the concept of liberty a particularly critical role in contemporary society. Each chapter formulates and expounds the idea (...) that an empire of liberty requires the existence of what are termed 'liberty-bearing agents', and shows how education - with a particular emphasis on knowledge - is needed to foster the human powers which allow people to become liberty-bearing. It is also emphasised, however, that republican liberty is non-perfectionist and non-eudaimonic: the core values enshrined in an empire of liberty centre on non-dependency rather than the promulgation of a certain way of life. Drawing on prominent seventeenth century contract theorists, the link between liberty and authority is explained, suggesting that appropriate authoritative structures need to underpin the provision of education, and especially schooling, if educational practice devoted to the pursuit of liberty is to flourish. Liberty and Education will be of value to both educational theorists unfamiliar with republican theory, as well as republican theorists interested in how their theory might play out in education. It will also be of interest to researchers and students from the fields of politics and the philosophy of education. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, Philip Pettit has consistently argued for an understanding of “republican” liberty in terms of nondomination. Yet in his major published studies, he has almost nothing to say about markets, nor about the economy more generally. I contend that this is a seriously problematic omission, insofar as markets represent a major problem for republican views of freedom. In short: if freedom requires the absence of the mere possibility of arbitrary interference (as Pettit maintains), then the (...) widespread existence of markets indicates that on a republican view the vast majority of people in the world today exist in the dominated position of slaves. As a result, Pettit cannot adopt the “complacency” towards market transactions that he officially avows. But in turn, we ought to be highly skpetical that the republican account of freedom is a viable one. (shrink)