essay about political freedom

‘Freedom’ Means Something Different to Liberals and Conservatives. Here’s How the Definition Split—And Why That Still Matters

W e tend to think of freedom as an emancipatory ideal—and with good reason. Throughout history, the desire to be free inspired countless marginalized groups to challenge the rule of political and economic elites. Liberty was the watchword of the Atlantic revolutionaries who, at the end of the 18th century, toppled autocratic kings, arrogant elites and ( in Haiti ) slaveholders, thus putting an end to the Old Regime. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Black civil rights activists and feminists fought for the expansion of democracy in the name of freedom, while populists and progressives struggled to put an end to the economic domination of workers.

While these groups had different objectives and ambitions, sometimes putting them at odds with one another, they all agreed that their main goal—freedom—required enhancing the people’s voice in government. When the late Rep. John Lewis called on Americans to “let freedom ring” , he was drawing on this tradition.

But there is another side to the story of freedom as well. Over the past 250 years, the cry for liberty has also been used by conservatives to defend elite interests. In their view, true freedom is not about collective control over government; it consists in the private enjoyment of one’s life and goods. From this perspective, preserving freedom has little to do with making government accountable to the people. Democratically elected majorities, conservatives point out, pose just as much, or even more of a threat to personal security and individual right—especially the right to property—as rapacious kings or greedy elites. This means that freedom can best be preserved by institutions that curb the power of those majorities, or simply by shrinking the sphere of government as much as possible.

This particular way of thinking about freedom was pioneered in the late 18th century by the defenders of the Old Regime. From the 1770s onward, as revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic rebelled in the name of liberty, a flood of pamphlets, treatises and newspaper articles appeared with titles such as Some Observations On Liberty , Civil Liberty Asserted or On the Liberty of the Citizen . Their authors vehemently denied that the Atlantic Revolutions would bring greater freedom. As, for instance, the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson—a staunch opponent of the American Revolution—explained, liberty consisted in the “security of our rights.” And from that perspective, the American colonists already were free, even though they lacked control over the way in which they were governed. As British subjects, they enjoyed “more security than was ever before enjoyed by any people.” This meant that the colonists’ liberty was best preserved by maintaining the status quo; their attempts to govern themselves could only end in anarchy and mob rule.

Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter

In the course of the 19th century this view became widespread among European elites, who continued to vehemently oppose the advent of democracy. Benjamin Constant, one of Europe’s most celebrated political thinkers, rejected the example of the French revolutionaries, arguing that they had confused liberty with “participation in collective power.” Instead, freedom-lovers should look to the British constitution, where hierarchies were firmly entrenched. Here, Constant claimed, freedom, understood as “peaceful enjoyment and private independence,” was perfectly secure—even though less than five percent of British adults could vote. The Hungarian politician Józseph Eötvös, among many others, agreed. Writing in the wake of the brutally suppressed revolutions that rose against several European monarchies in 1848, he complained that the insurgents, battling for manhood suffrage, had confused liberty with “the principle of the people’s supremacy.” But such confusion could only lead to democratic despotism. True liberty—defined by Eötvös as respect for “well-earned rights”—could best be achieved by limiting state power as much as possible, not by democratization.

In the U.S., conservatives were likewise eager to claim that they, and they alone, were the true defenders of freedom. In the 1790s, some of the more extreme Federalists tried to counter the democratic gains of the preceding decade in the name of liberty. In the view of the staunch Federalist Noah Webster, for instance, it was a mistake to think that “to obtain liberty, and establish a free government, nothing was necessary but to get rid of kings, nobles, and priests.” To preserve true freedom—which Webster defined as the peaceful enjoyment of one’s life and property—popular power instead needed to be curbed, preferably by reserving the Senate for the wealthy. Yet such views were slower to gain traction in the United States than in Europe. To Webster’s dismay, overall, his contemporaries believed that freedom could best be preserved by extending democracy rather than by restricting popular control over government.

But by the end of the 19th century, conservative attempts to reclaim the concept of freedom did catch on. The abolition of slavery, rapid industrialization and mass migration from Europe expanded the agricultural and industrial working classes exponentially, as well as giving them greater political agency. This fueled increasing anxiety about popular government among American elites, who now began to claim that “mass democracy” posed a major threat to liberty, notably the right to property. Francis Parkman, scion of a powerful Boston family, was just one of a growing number of statesmen who raised doubts about the wisdom of universal suffrage, as “the masses of the nation … want equality more than they want liberty.”

William Graham Sumner, an influential Yale professor, likewise spoke for many when he warned of the advent of a new, democratic kind of despotism—a danger that could best be avoided by restricting the sphere of government as much as possible. “ Laissez faire ,” or, in blunt English, “mind your own business,” Sumner concluded, was “the doctrine of liberty.”

Being alert to this history can help us to understand why, today, people can use the same word—“freedom”—to mean two very different things. When conservative politicians like Rand Paul and advocacy groups FreedomWorks or the Federalist Society talk about their love of liberty, they usually mean something very different from civil rights activists like John Lewis—and from the revolutionaries, abolitionists and feminists in whose footsteps Lewis walked. Instead, they are channeling 19th century conservatives like Francis Parkman and William Graham Sumner, who believed that freedom is about protecting property rights—if need be, by obstructing democracy. Hundreds of years later, those two competing views of freedom remain largely unreconcilable.

Annelien de Dijn is the author of Freedom: An Unruly History , available now from Harvard University Press.

More Must-Reads From TIME

• Jane Fonda Champions Climate Action for Every Generation
• Passengers Are Flying up to 30 Hours to See Four Minutes of the Eclipse
• Biden’s Campaign Is In Trouble. Will the Turnaround Plan Work?
• Essay: The Complicated Dread of Early Spring
• Why Walking Isn’t Enough When It Comes to Exercise
• The Financial Influencers Women Actually Want to Listen To
• The Best TV Shows to Watch on Peacock
• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Contact us at [email protected]

You May Also Like

A nation must think before it acts.

• America and the West
• Middle East
• National Security
• Central Asia
• China & Taiwan
• Expert Commentary
• Directory of Scholars
• Press Contact
• Upcoming Events
• People, Politics, and Prose
• Briefings, Booktalks, and Conversations
• The Benjamin Franklin Award
• Event and Lecture Archive
• Intern Corner
• Simulations
• Our Mission
• Board of Trustees
• Board of Advisors
• Research Programs
• Audited Financials
• PA Certificate of Charitable Registration
• Become a Partner
• Corporate Partnership Program

Freedom: The History of an Idea

• J. Rufus Fears
• June 6, 2007

We live in a moment that is as critical for freedom as the American Revolution, the American Civil War, or the days following Pearl Harbor. In each of those moments, America moved the cause of freedom forward. In the Revolution, we declared our independence from the greatest empire of the day, fought for and won that independence, and then went on to establish a constitution that still gives us liberty under law more than two hundred years later. In the Civil War, we removed the great moral wrong of slavery. After Pearl Harbor, we shouldered the burden of World War II and the subsequent Cold War.

Sept. 11 represents a time just as critical in the history of the freedom. As we judge the generations of the American Revolution, the Civil War, or Pearl Harbor by their heroic response, so we shall be judged. We are engaged in what I believe is a noble crusade to bring freedom to the world. But that crusade is faltering now, in part because we have failed to ask some very fundamental questions.

This essay is intended to ask the most fundamental of those questions: Is freedom a universal human value, which all people in all times and places desire?

History of Freedom

Our foreign policy since the time of Woodrow Wilson has been based in the belief that freedom is a universal value, one that is wanted by all people in all times. But why, if freedom is a universal value, has the history of the world been one of tyranny, misery, and oppression?

Socrates taught that our first task in any discussion is to define our terms. Thus, the starting point here is identifying what we mean by freedom. We never disagree, Socrates tells us, about empirical questions; it is about values that we disagree. No value is more charged with meaning than that of freedom.

If we carefully examine the ideal and reality of freedom throughout the ages, we come to the conclusion that what we call “freedom” is, in fact, an ideal that consists of three component ideals: (1) national freedom; (2) political freedom; and (3) individual freedom.

National freedom is freedom from foreign control. This is the most basic concept of freedom. It is the desire of a nation, ethnic group, or a tribe to rule itself. It is national self-determination.

Political freedom is the freedom to vote, hold office, and pass laws. It is the ideal of “consent of the governed.”

Individual freedom is a complex of values. In its most basic form individual freedom is the freedom to live as you choose as long as you harm no one else, Each nation, each epoch in history, perhaps each individual, may define this ideal of individual freedom in different terms. In its noblest of expressions, individual freedom is enshrined in our Bill of Rights. It is freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, economic freedom, and freedom to choose your life style.

In the United States, we tend to assume that these three ideals of freedom always go together. That is wrong. History proves that these three component ideals of freedom in no way must be mutually inclusive.

You can have national freedom without political or individual freedom; Iraq under Saddam Hussein and North   Korea are examples. In fact, this national freedom, this desire for independence, is the most basic of all human freedoms. It has frequently been the justification for some of the most terrible tyrannies in history: Nazi Germany had national freedom but denied individual and political freedom in the name of this national freedom.

It is quite possible to have political and national freedom but not individual freedom. Ancient Sparta had national and political freedom, but none of the individual freedoms we expect today.

The Roman Empire represents two centuries that brought peace and prosperity to the world by extinguishing national and political freedom, but in which individual freedom flourished as it never had.

From the Declaration of Independence to the First World War, the history of our own country provides a dramatic example of the separation of these three component ideals of freedom. After 1776, the United States had national freedom. Adult white males also had political and individual freedom. White women had a considerable degree of individual freedom but no political liberty until 1920 and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Until after the Civil War, African-Americans possessed neither political nor individual freedom. In 1857 the Supreme Court formally ruled that African-Americans did not have the right to individual or political freedom. The soldiers of the Confederacy fought valiantly for their political, individual, and national freedom while defending their right to deny individual and political liberty to a considerable proportion of their population.  

Thus, clearly, throughout history, these three components ideals of freedom have not been mutually inclusive.

Had we learned this lesson of history, Americans might have avoided crucial mistakes in our recent foreign policy in the Middle East.

History demonstrates that one of the most basic human feelings is the desire for national freedom. You may hate your government, but if someone invades you, you may very well fight in defense of your country. Napoleon learned this in Spain. History should have taught us to be skeptical of the claim that we would be welcomed as liberators in Iraq.

A second lesson of history we should have pondered is that freedom is not a universal value. Great civilizations have risen and fallen without any clear concept of freedom. Egypt—the civilization that built the pyramids, that created astronomy and medicine, did not even have a word for freedom. Everything was under the power of the pharaoh, who was god on earth. Ancient Mesopotamia had a word for freedom, but that word had the connotation of liberties. It was something that the all-powerful king gave to you, like exemption from taxes, and that he could also capriciously take away from you.

In fact, it can be argued that the Middle East, from the time of the pyramids down until today, has had no real concept of freedom.

Russia from the time of Rurik, the first Viking chieftain of Russia in the ninth century, down to Vladimir Putin, has never developed clear ideas of political and individual freedom. Thus we should not have been surprised when the Russian Revolution led not to freedom but to Stalin and one of the bloodiest despotisms in history.

China has no tradition of political or individual freedom. The noble teachings of Confucius are all about order, not freedom.

In fact, the very beginning of civilizations in the Middle East around 3000 BCE and in China around 1700 BCE represented the choice of security over freedom. Civilization began with the decision to give up any freedom in order to have the security of a well regulated economy under a king. Time and again throughout history people have chosen the perceived benefits of security over the awesome responsibilities of freedom.

History thus teaches that freedom is not a universal value. Our Founders knew and acted upon the lessons of history. The Founders, unlike us, thought historically. They used the lessons of the past to make decisions in the present and to plan for the future. They understood that tyranny and the lust for power, not freedom, is the great motivating force of human action and of history. But the Founders also believed that the United States could chart a unique course in history

Our country does have a unique legacy of freedom. That is both a cause for hope and a caution as to whether our unique ideals of freedom can be transplanted to the rest of the world. For in the U.S. we have achieved a unique balance of national, political, and individual freedom.

We have never been conquered; we simply cannot imagine what it would be to be under the rule of a foreigner. Our experience is very different from that of France, for example, or Germany.

We take political freedom for granted. We have regular elections no matter what the circumstances. In 1864, in the midst of the greatest war in our history, we held elections. The Europeans wondered after 9/11 what would happen to America; we went ahead with another election. In a way it is a good thing we are so secure in this freedom that we take it for granted. With that comes our deep love of the Constitution. Of course, Americans may not know what is in the Constitution, but they know it is good and resent any effort to tamper with it.

As to individual freedom, where could one have so much of it, including the basic freedom to create a better life for yourself and your children? People clamor to get into America, because individual freedom opens up a whole new world.

So how did we come to this unique legacy of freedom? Again, history is our guide. Our American legacy of freedom is the product of a unique confluence of five historical currents.

First, there is the legacy of the Old Testament, the idea that we are a nation chosen by God to bear the ark of the liberties to the world. Our Founders believed that deeply. Abraham Lincoln believed it deeply. Franklin Roosevelt believed it.

The second current comes from classical Greece and Rome. The legacy of Greece and Rome is the very basic one of self-government, consent of the governed. The kings of Babylon were chosen by God, Saul was chosen by God. The pharaoh was God on earth. But in Greece and Rome, men said “We are free to govern ourselves under laws that we give ourselves.”

Thirdly, Christianity took the idea of Natural Law from Greece and Rome and turned it into the belief that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The freedom that for the Greeks and Romans had been limited to the citizens of Athens or Rome now became a universal proclamation under Christianity.

Fourthly, England gave us the notion that government is under the law, no matter how powerful that government is. In the Watergate hearings, Sen. Herman Talmadge (D-Ga.) quoted the old saying that “the wind and rain might enter the cottage of a poor Englishman, but the king in all his majesty may not.” The law governs the king himself, and our Congress, senators, and president. As Harry Truman said, any time an American president gets too big for his britches, the people put him back in his place.

Fifthly, there is the contribution of the frontier. From the very beginning, America has been about the frontier. It is what led men and women to Jamestown and Plymouth. The frontier was the vast, seemingly endless land stretching before us. The frontier meant equality of opportunity. Even the best ideals of Greece or Rome or England could never flourish, because they were always cramped. But here there was land and the ability to start over again. This mattered more than all the ancient hatreds and class frictions that had existed under the old world. We cannot understand why Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats speak the same language but kill each other. Their hatreds have been festering for centuries, but here they pass away. That has been the unique gift of the frontier.

The existence of these elements in other nations and civilizations only underscores the uniqueness of the American experience of freedom. Russia has the tradition of Greece and Rome, Christianity, the tradition of the Old Testament; and it has a frontier. But it lacks that English sense of government under the law. So the frontier in Russia becomes the home of the gulag. Latin America has the tradition of Christianity and the Old Testament, and of Greece and Rome, and of the frontier. But Spain lacked the powerful English concept that government is under the law. Thus Latin America, despite its industrious and intelligent population and its natural resources, has never developed a stable basis for political and individual freedom.

Our heritage of freedom has been forged in war and hardship as well as in prosperity. Our national independence was proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. Name another nation in history founded on principles. An Italian or German will say you are an Italian or German because you speak Italian or German. Traditionally, you were born an Englishman; you were geographical accident. But in America we have said from the start that everyone can come here from wherever they wish. They can speak whatever language is their mother tongue and practice whatever religion they want. They become an American by adopting our principles.

The principles proclaimed in 1776 are the noblest of all principles: we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with the unalienable right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The proclamation of these ideals in the Declaration of Independence is based on the belief in absolute right and absolute wrong. You can deny that today. We seem to have a society that believes there is no such thing as truth. Ethics is all a matter of circumstances. But the Founders believed in eternal truths, valid in all places and all times. And they believed that governments are instituted among men to achieve those goals. That is the purpose of government. And if a government does not fulfill those goals, you have not only the right but the duty to overthrow it.

The absolute truths of the Declaration of Independence are founded on a belief in God. God appears four times in the Declaration of Independence: “Nature’s God,” the “Creator,” “Supreme Judge of the world,” “Divine Providence.”

Thus our national freedom is founded on absolute truth and upon a belief in God. 

As the Declaration of Independence is the charter of our national freedom, so the Constitution is our charter of political freedom.

When that constitution was brought forth in Philadelphia, we were thirteen straggling republics along the eastern seaboard. If Benjamin Franklin or George Washington wanted to go somewhere, they went in the same way Cicero or Caesar did: they walked, rode, or sailed. If they wanted to communicate, they did it the same way Caesar or Cicero did. George Washington received inferior medical care to what a Roman gladiator got in the first century CE. And yet that same constitution gives us liberty under law and prosperity in a world of technology that Benjamin Franklin could not even have imagined and when we are superpower of the world. We should never take this extraordinary achievement for granted.

The American people in their wisdom would not ratify this constitution without the promise of a bill of rights. It seems to us extraordinary today that the first Congress kept its promise; and in short order set down and produced the Bill of Rights, which still guarantees these fundamental freedoms of individual liberty.

But there was still slavery, written into the Constitution. God is not mentioned once in the Constitution, but slavery was made the law of the land. To remove that wrong of slavery we fought the bloodiest war in our history, in which 623,026 Americans died. It produced men of great honor and integrity on both sides. It was finally resolved at Gettysburg.

When Abraham Lincoln went to Gettysburg to redefine our mission, he started with the Declaration of Independence. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” It was unique because it was dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. In one sentence he told Americans why they were fighting the war, to see whether any nation so conceived and dedicated could long endure. In all the rhetoric we had about Vietnam and all that we have heard about Iraq, we have not been told so simply why we were at war.

Lincoln then went on to state that this civil war was a challenge laid upon this nation by God. The more Lincoln grappled with why this terrible war had come, the more convinced he had become that it was sent by God to punish us for the fundamental wrong of slavery. He told Americans that we must resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain and that this nation under God should have a new birth of freedom. And that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.

So this war that had cost so many lives was resolved in a way that no other nation would have. The Confederates simply pledged their word not to take up arms and to go home. The reconciliation began. I think that too is unique in history.

With the Civil War we see the growth of democracy, the move towards extending the franchise to women, 18 year olds. They all become part of this political freedom.

This nation has continued in a unique course of freedom. In World War II we fought and won the war in the name of democratic freedom. We could have withdrawn the way we did after World War I. But we recognized that isolationism had been a mistake. So we shouldered the burden of the Cold War.

Now we have been called again, and the question is, will we find the leadership to tell us why this great challenge is there? Will we find the will to resolve this struggle? Will we find the understanding among ourselves to see the great task that, as Lincoln said, is still before us?

I speak to you not only the legacy of America, but of destiny. I believe that no people in history have ever been more magnanimous, generous, courageous, willing to forgive and forget, and willing to help the world than have the Americans. So after World War II, we raised Germany and Japan up. This remains our greatest foreign policy triumph. We took those two nations that had no long tradition of freedom and made them into viable, prosperous democracies.  

Today, because of the United States, more people throughout the world live in freedom than any time in history. If we are willing to accept the challenge, it may yet be our destiny to change the course of history and to establish freedom as a universal value.

Related Event

• Living Without Freedom

Find anything you save across the site in your account

How Lea Ypi Defines Freedom

By Han Zhang

In February, 2020, the Albanian-British philosopher Lea Ypi found herself in a closet trying to write a book about freedom. Ypi, who is a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, had just started a yearlong research fellowship in Berlin when the world went into lockdown. Libraries closed. Seminars were suspended. Unable to go outside, her three young children colonized the family’s apartment as their playground, and she retreated to her closet to work.

Ypi studies political definitions of freedom, and lockdown gave her ideas new weight. The privations of the early pandemic brought back memories of her childhood in Communist Albania. Ypi found some irony in the fact that, in Western Europe, the heartland of liberal democracy, individual autonomy was being restricted in the name of social good. The sense of impending transformation brought on by the pandemic reminded her of witnessing the fall of Communism in Albania as a child in the early nineteen-nineties. At moments of rupture like these, Ypi told me when we met earlier this year, “ideas of freedom and society are tested.” People began questioning the framework of their world, and the future, however briefly, seemed up for grabs. Ypi had intended to write a straightforward treatise on liberal and socialist concepts of political freedom. The cascade of memories set off by the pandemic changed her mind. She decided, instead, to write a memoir.

The next year, Ypi published “ Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History ,” an account of growing up in Albania during its bruising transition to a multiparty system. “Free” is the intellectual history that Ypi had envisioned, exploring the political traditions of liberalism and socialism, but it tests these ideas against twentieth-century history. The book is given shape by the collapse of the nearly five-decade-long period of Communist rule in Albania and the country’s first multi-party election, which took place in 1991. Like many post-Communist governments, the new Administration adopted a program of economic “shock therapy.” By 1997, when Ypi was in her last year of high school, the country was in a state of emergency. Schools closed; financial institutions went bankrupt; anger at government incompetence skyrocketed; amid the civil unrest, shootings were a daily occurrence. Protests gave way to street fighting, and estimates suggest that at least half a million weapons were looted from military depots.

In the early pages of “Free,” the child Ypi is innocent of the forces shaping her world. The point of view is deceptive: by the end of the book, the promises and disillusioning reality of both socialism and liberalism are laid bare. Since being published, “Free” has been translated into twenty-nine languages and become a best-seller in many countries, including the U.K., Germany, Iceland, Norway, and Spain. When I met with Ypi in a hotel lobby, in Orange County, where she was delivering a talk, she had just landed after days of events on the East Coast. (“The book simply exploded,” her Californian host told me.) Her blond hair was casually pinned, and she wore a green cotton top and black culottes with unfussy elegance. “I didn’t think that people were going to be immediately interested in Albania,” Ypi told me over a Niçoise salad. She ate with gusto and without pausing her animated speech. Perhaps, she speculated, the response to her book reflected deep anxieties about the state of the world. “You have these collective failures and attempts at collective renewals,” she said. She cited the pandemic, the climate crisis, and widespread political dysfunction. “We’re at the point where our institutions are not really sustainable. Something needs to be done, but we can’t quite find the strength to build alternatives.”

In Vivian Gornick’s 1977 book, “ The Romance of American Communism ,” Gornick complains of the “oppressive distance” that crept into the voices of many writers, including those who used to be Communists themselves, when they turned to the subject of Communism. Under the guise of objectivity, such writers, Gornick writes, operated with the patronizing assumption that the Communists “were infantile while we are mature; as though we would have known better while they were incapable of knowing better.” Ypi is the rare post-Communist writer who works through the wounded past of the project of socialism without reflexively dismissing her younger self’s sincere beliefs. Instead, she demands that her readers take the collective attempt of twentieth-century socialism seriously and see its failures and hopes as a mirror of our own. “People tend to think of liberalism and socialism as complete opposites. In fact, historically and philosophically, they are both attempts to think about freedom,” Ypi told me.

As a child, Ypi, an ardent Young Pioneer, was taught that she lived in the freest place on earth. Albanian Communist Party doctrine held that their country’s citizens were not only free of capitalist exploitation but practiced a purer form of socialism than their comrades in the Soviet Union and China, whose regimes the Albanian government dismissed as revisionist. Her day-to-day reality told a different story. In “Free,” she writes of how the adults around her spoke in coded language and exchanged meaningful glances; her childish utterances about forbidden subjects were sometimes met by her family’s censorious panic. Even everyday tasks required unusual stamina: lines to buy groceries were so long that-shopping for food could take a whole day. Material deprivation had a psychological impact. Ypi’s mother prized an empty Coca-Cola can so much that after it disappeared she accused a close friend of stealing it.

After the transition to liberalism, Albanians were better off in some significant ways. They had extricated themselves from the restrictions of Communism. They no longer needed to perform fealty to Stalin and Enver Hoxha, who was the former Albanian Prime Minister, and started to talk about their religions again. But, in other ways, Albanians remained unfree. Without robust financial or political institutions, the country was at the mercy of the acutely under-regulated market economy put in place by its new government. Many people lost the bulk of their savings in pyramid schemes. Material poverty persisted. Well-paying jobs were hard to come by. A political candidate had to borrow Ypi’s father’s socks to finish off the respectable look he was going for.

Ypi’s parents had different views of freedom. Her mother, Doli, who was a secondary-school teacher, believed in an individualistic, libertarian kind of freedom. She watched the soap opera “Dynasty” to admire the interior decoration and attempted to style her hair in the fashion of Margaret Thatcher’s. She also styled her politics the Thatcherite way: to her, Ypi writes, “the world was a place where the natural struggle for survival could be resolved only by regulating private property.”

Ypi’s father, Zafo, had a more socially oriented vision of freedom. He was an engineer in forestry management and followed politics with great interest, often borrowing world events to narrate their lives. Ypi was born, in 1979, prematurely and had to stay in an incubator for months. At one point, her chance of survival was fifty per cent. Zafo joked, in reference to the hostage crisis in Iran, “About the same as the American diplomats in Tehran.” Zafo’s grandfather had briefly served as Prime Minister in the early nineteen-twenties, and Zafo’s father, a lawyer active in social-democratic circles, had been imprisoned by the Communist government for fifteen years. As a result of his family background, Zafo had been banned by the Party from studying math in university, but the experience didn’t poison his commitment to egalitarianism. He embraced international freedom struggles, enthusing over the news of the end of apartheid in South Africa, and was contemptuous of consumerism. When he saw a person begging for money, he would empty his pockets, telling his daughter that deprivation wasn’t a personal failing.

Soon after the country’s first multi-party election, in 1991, Zafo was laid off from his forestry job—the new Administration wasn’t prioritizing planting trees, and his office was set to be closed. After a long period of unemployment, he found work at the country’s largest port, which was soon to be partially privatized. As the general director, he struggled with the actions he was asked to take to keep the enterprise profitable. Firing workers and depriving them of their livelihoods shattered him more than being unemployed himself had. “Socialism had denied him the possibility to be who he wanted,” Ypi writes. “Capitalism was denying it to others.”

Doli weathered the transition to post-Communism more successfully than her husband had—she joined the Democratic Party of Albania and served as a leader of a national women’s association. She kept busy organizing reform campaigns and seeking restitution of her family’s properties—which had been confiscated by the Communists—in court. Unlike Zafo, Doli didn’t believe in people’s fundamental goodness. “That’s why she was convinced that socialism could never work, even under the best circumstances. It was against human nature,” Ypi writes. Reluctant to trust other people or the state, she preferred to take matters into her own hands and keep other people’s power to interfere in her life to a minimum. When a visiting French feminist activist asked Doli how she dealt with sexual harassment, she replied that she always carried a knife. As a young woman, she had to rely on hitchhiking to commute to teach at a remote village school. Once, a truck driver placed a hand on her thigh. She issued a warning: a tickle by the tip of the knife. Under Communism, Doli had the gumption to raise a flock of chicks in their bathroom in order to secure a reliable supply of eggs for her family. During the unrest of 1997, when Albania’s Democratic Party started to hand out guns for self-defense, she tried to convince her husband that they could use one. Zafo didn’t want a firearm at home, but she insisted that owning a gun could be a deterrent.

In “Free,” Ypi inclines more toward her father’s expansive, socially oriented view of freedom than her mother’s more narrowly individualistic one. But the true anchor of the book is her paternal grandmother, Nini, who helped to raise Ypi and who would scold her in French when she misbehaved. Nini grew up in extreme privilege—her uncle was a pasha in the Ottoman Empire, and she met her husband at the Albanian monarch King Zog’s wedding—but she lost everything early in life. After the Communists took power, in 1946, many of her family’s politically influential friends were killed, her husband was sent to prison, and she had to work in labor camps. Even when she was suffering from political persecution and people close to her were dying by execution or suicide, Nini remained convinced of her own moral agency. “Regardless of the changes of circumstances and the oppression around her, she thought she’d always been morally free to act in a responsible way,” Ypi said.

As a scholar, she has come to see her grandmother’s focus on moral agency to be akin to the Kantian idea of freedom, a subject Ypi has been researching and teaching for more than a decade. Kantians like Ypi reflect on the distinction between “negative freedom”—a person’s preferences void of social context—and “positive freedom,” which involves making decisions based on reason, setting aside one’s immediate cravings. In America, “the land of the free” and “beacon of democracy,” people often think of freedom as an entitlement, not as something that must be realized and preserved in concert with others. At a talk in Chicago earlier this year, she reminded her audience that democracy is a “demanding ideal.” Our current system, she went on, “is not really democracy: we have constellations and configurations of interests that are very powerful . . . you have a world where strong states shape the fates of weaker states. You have countries where stronger citizens with more money shape the fates of weaker citizens.” When I met her, she told me, “I want to get away from this idea that, because you have an election, democracy is secure. It’s not a finish line.”

Ypi sees “an obvious discrepancy between the ideology of freedom and ideal freedom.” In the absence of the real thing, the word is often invoked as a license to disregard the well-being of others: to refuse to wear masks during a COVID surge; to flaunt civilian ownership of assault weapons at a time when mass shootings outnumber the days of the year; to voice anti-trans rhetoric that fuels real-world violence and suicides. Ypi has a refreshing insistence on the responsibility that freedom entails. “There’s a dimension of freedom that’s not just about satisfaction, but it’s about placing your desires in a moral context and in the context of relationship to other people, and saying, ‘Well, what makes sense for all of us?’ ” Ypi told me. In a 2019 article for the New Statesman , she echoed Plato’s warning, in “ The Republic ,” that the demagogue, the “man of the people” in thrall to his desires and whims, is a perennial threat to democracy. Failure to work toward the freedom of others, she pointed out, leaves the door open to populists like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump .

Ypi’s education in political philosophy began in 1997, when, aided by a scholarship, she arrived at the Sapienza University of Rome. At university, her housing was provided for, and the cafeteria meals were subsidized, but she lived on about a hundred dollars each month. If she wanted to cook, there was no budget to eat meat or fish regularly. Instead, she would buy pouches of powdered tomato soup. She still remembers walking by the chocolate aisle week after week, longing for a Côte d’Or bar. It was not in the budget. There was no one to tell her what to think or what to do, but, without money, life was full of constraints: she couldn’t afford to go to the movies, hang out with friends at bars, or take a German-language course.

Her classmates, fair-minded aspiring philosophers, often came from well-off families. Though they espoused left-wing political ideas of equality, “it was always about the problems of the world, outside of them,” Ypi said; their blindness to their own advantages and to Ypi’s deprivation was striking. “I really resented them. How do you not see that poverty is such a constraint on someone’s life?” she said. Before she left for college, she had promised her father not to study Marxism. But her experience of the forms of unfreedom that persisted in liberal societies eventually pushed her to reëngage with the tradition of socialism. During her pursuit of a Ph.D., she began to explore “the possibility of reconciling Kant and Marx” and their common ground in society’s search for freedom.

After Albania transitioned to liberalism, and people were free to leave, the country experienced an exodus of economic migrants seeking livable wages, but a better future didn’t exist for many of them. Some drowned during the journey at sea to Italy. Others, like Ypi’s childhood friend, whom she called Elona in “Free,” worked near a train station in Milan, trying to make a living through sex work after running away from home at thirteen years old. Back in 1991, in the spring, Albanians were warmly welcomed refugees. By that summer, they were shunned as “illegal immigrants.” “There was so much racism against Albanians in the nineties in Italy,” Ypi said. Once, on the train in Rome, she offered to carry a bag for an elderly woman, who thanked her and said, “There are so many Albanians around stealing bags!”

It has been twenty-six years since Ypi left her home country. Since then, xenophobia has become politically legitimated in many parts of Europe. Far-right nativist parties, such as Marine Le Pen ’s National Rally (formerly National Front) and Giorgia Meloni ’s Fratelli d’Italia, have moved from the fringe to the mainstream. Last year, Suella Braverman, who was then the British Home Secretary, told Parliament, “If Labour were in charge, they would be allowing all the Albanian criminals to come to this country. They would be allowing all the small boats to come to the U.K. They would open our borders and totally undermine the trust of the British people in controlling our sovereignty.” A week after Braverman’s statement, Ypi questioned why the right was so fixated on Albanians, on the conservative-leaning talk show “Good Morning Britain.” “It’s not just a problem about the Albanian community. It’s a problem for Britain. You begin to disintegrate the multicultural project of integration if you start to treat minorities like this,” she said, her amiable debate-team-champion energy metabolizing into controlled anger. During the fourteen years she has lived in the U.K., her brother was never able to get a visa to visit. In 2015, when Ypi gave birth to her second child, immigration authorities also denied her mother. (A few years later, when Doli tried again and repackaged herself as a wealthy homeowner visiting to shop at Harrods, her entry was permitted.)

Since her appearance on “Good Morning Britain,” Ypi has received more than a hundred messages on social media from the Albanian diaspora, sharing immigration woes and feelings of anxiety at work and school. She has become their rare representative with a platform, which she has used to amplify their voices. “The UK’s immigration system does not find criminals—it creates them. It projects criminal intent well before any criminal act has occurred,” she wrote , in the New Statesman , pushing back against Braverman’s rhetoric. Ypi thinks that economic migrants should be seen as akin to refugees or political-asylum seekers. The lack of employment opportunities that drive them to leave their home countries are almost always the result of historical oppression and exploitation. Politicians should frame economic migration as “an implication of global injustice,” she says. If freedom of movement is a right worth defending, she argues, liberal societies can’t condemn countries like North Korea that prevent citizens from leaving while closing their own borders and imprisoning immigrants.

Ypi is a polyglot—she speaks Albanian, French, Italian, English, German, and Spanish—but the two languages that she finds herself travelling back and forth between most often are literature and philosophy. As a girl, she wanted to be a writer and composed poetry about repression, frustration, and freedom. After the fall of Communism, a French TV crew making a documentary about the transition filmed the eleven-year-old Ypi coming home from school. In the film, she walks between drab low-rise buildings on a path covered in rubble. “I’ve been lucky in my misfortunes,” she tells the reporter. Then she reads one of her poems in French. “Man inherits the earth with pleasure and sometimes with misery,” she recites. “It’s not God, but man that will destroy.”

In those years, as the outside world disintegrated, Ypi found refuge in reading. After the transition, the history textbooks that she and her classmates had used under Communism were discarded. It took some time for new ones to be published; for one thing, there were no printers in operation or paper to print on. Ypi’s mother unsealed a trove of books—literature, philosophy, law, and art history—that had been stored out of sight in the family attic. The books, which had belonged to her grandfather, who studied in France in the nineteen-thirties, were musty and yellowing, and many pages showed signs of being nibbled by mice. A French encyclopedia introduced her to Plato, Nietzsche, and Sartre. She binged on Dante, Shakespeare, Balzac, Maupassant, and Proust, and loved to “spend time with the Russians”: Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy. “I created a parallel identity through these books and these characters,” Ypi said. Thirty years later, the names of characters in classic novels roll off her tongue as if they were old friends: she identified with Thomas Mann’s Settembrini for his “reason, hope and belief” and loved Turgenev’s Madame Odintsova for being rational even in her emotions.

Academia had slowly killed the literature in her, Ypi told me. “You enter this realm of abstract concepts, but you lose the human side of it because you are generalizing and abstracting all the time,” she said. “It is hard to write simple. What I like about literature is that it’s a very democratic thing. You open up avenues for people to engage with their problems.” Trying to write strong characters forced Ypi to argue with her own ideas. “You create an alternative theory in your mind” in order to inhabit a particular character, she told me. Then that character “challenges you,” and “you become the worst critic of yourself.”

Writing “Free” forced Ypi to see her mother from a new perspective. Doli was never a touchy-feely mother. When she became active in politics, she didn’t have a lot of time for Ypi. “She was really giving a lot to the public sphere,” Ypi said. But, after Ypi had her own children, she has tried to balance her roles as a mother and a professional, and has come to understand her mother’s no-nonsense approach to child rearing.“I started to see more of the constraints in her life as opposed to my entitlements,” Ypi said. Without extensive help raising her children, Doli had to focus on meeting their concrete needs. She still expresses support for her daughter in the form of finishing tasks on Ypi’s to-do list and is skeptical of Ypi’s work in philosophy. She thinks Ypi is a utopian who plays “word games” and who doesn’t understand “the real world.” “My mom is just really skeptical of humans,” Ypi told me. At moments, she wavers and thinks that maybe her mother’s skepticism is right.

Many commentators seem to find it easier to appreciate Ypi’s critique of Albania’s Communist past than to engage with her equally severe critique of present-day capitalism. “I am with her mother on this,” a Financial Times journalist who interviewed Ypi writes , while acknowledging that Ypi’s “contemporary questions are well worth asking.” Still, Ypi doesn’t feel dismissed. She knows her writing pushes back against ideas that people take for granted. “Sometimes they don’t want to be challenged too much. They want to still feel safe somehow,” she said. In the first book of theory that she published, in 2011, a meditation on global justice and political agency, she presents herself as a philosopher in the “activist mode.” She isn’t content simply to observe things as they are. Instead, she wants to drive debates on how to change them. “Nothing was feasible until it was because somebody had the courage to go out there and articulate it and make it happen,” she said.

When I chatted with Ypi on Zoom a few weeks after our first meeting, she asked to postpone the call so that she could finish dinner. She hadn’t eaten all day. In her kitchen, a yellow sign indicates how chaotic her life can get. It says, in Albanian, “Look after your comrade during work.” That day, she had two other interviewers calling from Finland and Spain, one photo shoot, and a work meeting before going to her children’s school concert. Her husband, a political scientist, also travels a lot. “Our house is like a hotel lobby. One is coming with a suitcase, and the other is going,” she said. She keeps the trips short—part of the balancing act of the scholar-author-mother.

I asked Ypi if she felt free, and she returned to her grandmother’s concept of freedom. “It’s something that reveals itself when you act responsibly,” she said. Her hectic routine is punctuated by moments of harmony, as when her children, inspired by her work, have told her that they want to be writers like her. She wants to raise them in the way that her grandmother raised her, teaching them to act responsibly and to be critical of their privileges. Come Christmas, she tells me, she tries to choose presents that will make her kids neither entitled nor deprived. “Being a moral agent is very demanding,” she said. “But then everything is hard. And the cost of not trying is higher.” Her principled hope brought to mind an anecdote she shared when we first met. Americans are so enthusiastic in their greetings, she observed. In Albania, people often answer the question “How are you doing?” with “I keep pushing.” ♦

New Yorker Favorites

Searching for the cause of a catastrophic plane crash .

The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool .

Gloria Steinem’s life on the feminist frontier .

Where the Amish go on vacation .

How Colonel Sanders built his Kentucky-fried fortune .

What does procrastination tell us about ourselves ?

Fiction by Patricia Highsmith: “The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn, the Trouble with the World”

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Benjamin Kunkel

By Adam Gopnik

By James Wood

Tools for thinking: Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts of freedom

Freedoms and restrictions. Stand on the right. Don’t smoke. Photo by Phil Dolby/Flickr

by Maria Kasmirli   + BIO

‘Freedom’ is a powerful word. We all respond positively to it, and under its banner revolutions have been started, wars have been fought, and political campaigns are continually being waged. But what exactly do we mean by ‘freedom’? The fact that politicians of all parties claim to believe in freedom suggests that people don’t always have the same thing in mind when they talk about it. Might there be different kinds of freedom and, if so, could the different kinds conflict with each other? Could the promotion of one kind of freedom limit another kind? Could people even be coerced in the name of freedom?

The 20th-century political philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909-97) thought that the answer to both these questions was ‘Yes’, and in his essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (1958) he distinguished two kinds of freedom (or liberty; Berlin used the words interchangeably), which he called negative freedom and positive freedom .

Negative freedom is freedom from interference. You are negatively free to the extent that other people do not restrict what you can do. If other people prevent you from doing something, either directly by what they do, or indirectly by supporting social and economic arrangements that disadvantage you, then to that extent they restrict your negative freedom. Berlin stresses that it is only restrictions imposed by other people that count as limitations of one’s freedom. Restrictions due to natural causes do not count. The fact that I cannot levitate is a physical limitation but not a limitation of my freedom.

Virtually everyone agrees that we must accept some restrictions on our negative freedom if we are to avoid chaos. All states require their citizens to follow laws and regulations designed to help them live together and make society function smoothly. We accept these restrictions on our freedom as a trade-off for other benefits, such as peace, security and prosperity. At the same time, most of us would insist that there are some areas of life that should not be regulated, and where individuals should have considerable, if not complete, freedom. A major debate in political philosophy concerns the boundaries of this area of personal negative freedom. For example, should the state place restrictions on what we may say or read, or on what sexual activities we may engage in?

Whereas negative freedom is freedom from control by others, positive freedom is freedom to control oneself. To be positively free is to be one’s own master, acting rationally and choosing responsibly in line with one’s interests. This might seem to be simply the counterpart of negative freedom; I control myself to the extent that no one else controls me. However, a gap can open between positive and negative freedom, since a person might be lacking in self-control even when he is not restrained by others. Think, for example, of a drug addict who cannot kick the habit that is killing him. He is not positively free (that is, acting rationally in his own best interests) even though his negative freedom is not being limited (no one is forcing him to take the drug).

In such cases, Berlin notes, it is natural to talk of something like two selves: a lower self, which is irrational and impulsive, and a higher self, which is rational and far-sighted. And the suggestion is that a person is positively free only if his higher self is dominant. If this is right, then we might be able to make a person more free by coercing him. If we prevent the addict from taking the drug, we might help his higher self to gain control. By limiting his negative freedom, we would increase his positive freedom. It is easy to see how this view could be abused to justify interventions that are misguided or malign.

B erlin argued that the gap between positive and negative freedom, and the risk of abuse, increases further if we identify the higher, or ‘real’, self, with a social group (‘a tribe, a race, a church, a state’). For we might then conclude that individuals are free only when the group suppresses individual desires (which stem from lower, nonsocial selves) and imposes its will upon them. What particularly worried Berlin about this move was that it justifies the coercion of individuals, not merely as a means of securing social benefits, such as security and cooperation, but as a way of freeing the individuals themselves. The coercion is not seen as coercion at all, but as liberation, and protests against it can be dismissed as expressions of the lower self, like the addict’s craving for his fix. Berlin called this a ‘monstrous impersonation’, which allows those in power ‘to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture them in the name, and on behalf, of their “real” selves’. (The reader might be reminded of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which shows how a Stalinist political party imposes its conception of truth on an individual, ‘freeing’ him to love the Party leader.)

Berlin was thinking of how ideas of freedom had been abused by the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and he was right to highlight the dangers of this kind of thinking. But it does not follow that it is always wrong to promote positive freedom. (Berlin does not claim that it is, and he notes that the notion of negative freedom can be abused in a similar way.) Some people might need help to understand their best interests and achieve their full potential, and we could believe that the state has a responsibility to help them do so. Indeed, this is the main rationale for compulsory education. We require children to attend school (severely limiting their negative freedom) because we believe it is in their own best interests. To leave children free to do whatever they like would, arguably, amount to neglect or abuse. In the case of adults, too, it is arguable that the state has a responsibility to help its citizens live rich and fulfilling lives, through cultural, educational and health programmes. (The need for such help might be especially pressing in freemarket societies, where advertisers continually tempt us to indulge our ‘lower’ appetites.) It might be, too, that some people find meaning and purpose through identification with a wider social or political movement, such as feminism, and that in helping them to do so we are helping to liberate them.

Of course, this raises many further questions. Does our current education system really work in children’s best interests, or does it just mould them into a form that is socially and economically useful? Who decides what counts as a rich and fulfilling life? What means can the state legitimately use to help people live well? Is coercion ever acceptable? These are questions about what kind of society we want to live in, and they have no easy answers. But in giving us the distinction between negative and positive freedom, Berlin has given us a powerful tool for thinking about them.

Childhood and adolescence

For a child, being carefree is intrinsic to a well-lived life

Luara Ferracioli

Meaning and the good life

Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?

Warren Ward

Philosophy of mind

Think of mental disorders as the mind’s ‘sticky tendencies’

Kristopher Nielsen

Philosophy cannot resolve the question ‘How should we live?’

David Ellis

Values and beliefs

Why do you believe what you do? Run some diagnostics on it

Miriam Schoenfield

Gender and identity

What we can learn about respect and identity from ‘plurals’

Elizabeth Schechter

4.2 Constitutions and Individual Liberties

Learning outcomes.

• Differentiate between negative rights and positive rights constitutions.
• Define constitutionalism.
• Analyze how different constitutional systems treat the individual.
• Define due process.
• Explain how the rule of law and its principles are important to individual freedom.

As discussed in Chapter 2: Political Behavior Is Human Behavior most countries have a formal constitution —a framework, blueprint, or foundation for the operation of a government. The constitution need not be in writing, in one document, or even labeled a constitution. Britain, New Zealand, and Israel do not have codified constitutions but instead use uncollected writings that establish the form of government and set out the principles of liberty. 14 In many countries, a series of documents, usually called the basic laws , codifies the government structure and individual rights. 15 If a country lacks a single document labeled a constitution, how does one know that certain writings serve as the country’s constitution? A constitution describes the underlying principles of the people and government, the structure of the branches of government, and their duties. It limits government, listing freedoms or rights reserved for the people, and it must be more difficult to amend or change than ordinary laws. 16

A constitution may be expressed in a way that emphasizes civil liberties as negative or positive rights. When political scientists say a constitution specifies negative rights , this means that it is written to emphasize limitations on government. Consider the wording of the First Amendment :

“ Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” 17 (emphasis added)

The amendment is phrased to focus not on what the government owes the people but on the limitations on the government’s ability to infringe upon the rights of individuals. The US Constitution leans toward being a negative rights constitution because most of the Bill of Rights is written in terms of restrictions on the government.

In a positive rights constitution, rights are written in terms of a government obligation to guarantee the people’s rights. For example, article 5 of the German constitution, the German Basic Law , states:

“Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures. . . . Freedom of the press . . . shall be guaranteed .” 18 (emphasis added)

This positive rights constitution emphasizes the government’s guarantee of freedom to the individual. Though the US Constitution is primarily seen as a negative rights constitution, like most constitutions it also describes positive rights, as in those clauses that guarantee the right to something. 19 Most democratic constitutions written after World War II are positive rights constitutions. After the Nazis used the existing German constitution to restrict people’s freedoms in Germany and in the countries they conquered, people in the affected countries wanted assurances that the government recognized its obligation to the people and not just the people’s obligation to the government. Similar fears caused many countries not occupied by the Nazis to create positive rights constitutions. 20 These constitutions make the government the protector of freedom against all infringements. They do not just limit government action restricting the individual.

Positive vs. Negative Rights

In this short clip, the Center for Civic Education distinguishes between positive and negative rights.

A country’s constitution delineates the degree of freedom of action that the government allows the individual, and that degree varies by political system. An individualist system emphasizes individuals over the community, including the government, while a communitarian system emphasizes community cohesiveness while recognizing the importance of individual freedoms. Countries vary in terms of the nature of their systems and the degree to which they stress individualism or communitarianism.

What Are the Characteristics of Individualist Systems?

In an individualist system, individuals take precedence over the government. Society rests on the principle that individuals inherently possess rights that the government should preserve and promote. Two major styles of individualism are common today: libertarianism (also called classical liberalism) and modern liberalism . Libertarianism emphasizes restraints on government. Liberalism emphasizes the government’s obligation to enforce laws that protect personal autonomy and rights. Let’s review some of the different philosophies discussed in Chapter 3 in terms of how they impact civil liberties.

In libertarianism, individualists believe that governments exist to assist individuals in achieving their private interests. Therefore, libertarians place many restrictions (negative rights) on the government. As John Stuart Mill observed in his essay On Liberty (1859), in a strict individualist society:

“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise.” 21

The focus is on the individual, and the benefits to society that might flow from any restriction on the individual must be clear and convincing. This does not mean that the government can never restrict individual action, nor that the good of society need be wholly ignored. Still, it does mean there must be proof of sufficient harmful effects to justify any restraint. This is where the conflict between the individual and society occurs. It is here that the US style of “no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech” comes into play. For example, a person in the United States can say anything against any political candidate; they can even lie about the candidate. 22 With the restriction on government action abridging free speech, no laws restrict that person’s conduct. However, they cannot say they will kill a candidate at three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon. This is a threat to an individual’s safety and to society’s law and order, so the government has laws to punish the person for making the threat. Further, some US statutes make a person liable for damages if they engage in defamation—that is, if they lie about and cause harm to a private person—although these statutes do not apply to lies about political candidates. Thus, even with the United States’ negative rights libertarian-style constitution, the government is not prohibited from imposing restrictions “abridging the freedom of speech” in every situation at all times.

In an individualist society formed in a liberal style, the government actively protects individual rights. For example, under the German Basic Law and its guarantees of free speech, the government can prosecute a person for making false statements or heckling a candidate while they are making a speech. This is a violation of the Basic Law because the rights of free speech “shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons and in the right to personal honour.” 23 Liberal governments are more proactive than libertarian ones in protecting the individual’s rights. Because they do so to protect the rights of all individuals for the good of society, they place more restrictions on the individual. Still, governments in liberal societies cannot wholly deny a person’s individual liberties.

What Are the Characteristics of Communitarian Systems?

A communitarian system emphasizes the role the government plays in the lives of citizens. Communitarian systems are grounded in the belief that people need the community and its values to create a cohesive society. Government exists not only to protect rights but also to form a political community to solve public problems. There is a public good, and it is the government’s job to protect it, even if that means restricting individual behaviors. Communitarians oppose excessive individualism, arguing that it leads people to be selfish or egocentric, which is harmful to a community. Individuals do not stand apart from society in discrete autonomy; they are part of society and have a role to play in protecting society.

How countries put communitarianism into practice varies widely. Some countries, such as China, Singapore, and Malaysia, have authoritarian governments. This style of government enforces obedience to government authority by strongly limiting personal freedoms. These governments emphasize and enshrine in their constitutions social obligations and the common good. The Chinese constitution states, “Disruption of the socialist system by any organization or individual is prohibited.” 24 In article 35, the Chinese constitution provides that “citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy the freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, the procession and demonstration.” 25 However, comparing these two clauses with actual practices in the People's Republic of China shows that the government’s emphasis is not on protecting individual freedom and autonomy but on protecting the government’s view of a cohesive society. 26

Responsive communitarianism contrasts with the authoritarian style of communitarianism and the perceived selfishness of libertarianism. It seeks to blend the common good and individual autonomy while not allowing either to take precedence over the other. The individual is within society, the community, so the community constructs part of the individual identity. In responsive communitarianism , individual rights are balanced with societal norms of the good, and society or the government restrains the individual when individual action challenges an accepted norm. For example, the majority of people living in the United States today oppose slavery and racial injustice. However, had those people been born in the 18th century, many would have supported such concepts. Every community has standards that it declares essential to the common good—the common ground on which the community is formed. In circumstances where the common good takes precedence over the individual, conflict can ensue, and the society, including the government, must decide how to resolve the dispute.

The COVID-19 pandemic mentioned at the beginning of this chapter resulted in severe illness and mass deaths around the world. Many viewed government actions restricting individuals during the pandemic as justified because the challenge the disease posed to society was severe enough to warrant temporarily suspending certain freedoms. People accepted or rejected these government restrictions depending on the degree to which they accepted scientific explanations and on their views of individualism and communitarianism. Scientists explained how the disease spread, and government leaders urged compliance. In many areas of the world, the government instituted restrictions on movement, required that people wear face masks, and punished persons who violated these edicts. Some individuals claimed that their rights were being violated. Some argued that masks do not make a significant difference in transmission of the virus and are unnecessary in most situations. Significant scientific evidence refutes this claim, but such individuals refused to accept it. They also argued that it is their inalienable right to decide whether or not to risk becoming sick or dying, prioritizing that right over the risk they might pose to others. 27 When initial illness rates started to decline and vaccinations became available, the argument shifted to when and how to open up the social sphere and whether to require that people be vaccinated to enter certain places or to participate in certain activities. 28 These responses to the pandemic are a perfect example of the conflicts inherent in everyday situations that require a balance between individuals’ civil liberties and the government’s obligation to act for the common good.

Whether and to what degree a system is individualistic or communitarian does not determine if the system is a constitutional government. Simply having a document labeled a constitution does not give a country a constitutional government; to be considered a constitutional government, a country must practice constitutionalism.

What Is Constitutionalism?

The three main elements of constitutionalism are adherence to the rule of law, limited government, and guarantees of individual rights. The rule of law has four principles:

• Accountability : Government and private actors are accountable under the law, and no one is above the law.
• Just laws : The laws are clear, publicized, stable, and applied evenly. They protect fundamental rights, including protecting persons and property and certain core human rights.
• Open government : The processes by which the laws are enacted, administered, and enforced are accessible, fair, and efficient.
• Accessible and impartial dispute resolution : Justice is delivered in a timely manner by competent, ethical, and independent representatives, and neutral decision makers are accessible, have adequate resources, and reflect the communities they serve.

Constitutionalism balances limited government with the fundamental worth of each individual. The government is limited because people have some right to make their own life decisions. The fundamental worth of each individual means that people have some right to self-determination, as shown in a bill of rights in a constitution. Maintaining a balance between government authority and individual freedom is a challenge.

Utilizing due process is part of the rule of law and constitutionalism, so it is more robustly defended in countries that practice constitutionalism than it is in those with constitutions that do not adhere to all the elements of constitutionalism.

Due process is a legal requirement that the government respect the rights of the people, and it is a demonstration of the rule of law and the balancing of government power with individual rights. In the US Constitution, the due process clause provides that no one shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” 29 This clause applies to all persons, not just citizens of the United States. There are two aspects of due process: procedural due process and substantive due process. Procedural due process concerns the written guidelines for how the government interacts with individuals, while substantive due process concerns the individual’s right to be treated fairly when interacting with the government. A violation of due process offends the rule of law because it puts individuals or groups above the law or treats individuals or groups without equality.

Due Process of Law

In this video clip, Randy E. Barnett, professor of constitutional law at the Georgetown University Law Center, looks at the overarching concept of due process through the lens of US government and its British origins.

When one thinks of the due process of law as government fairness to all persons, civil rights and civil liberties become intertwined. In the landmark same-sex marriage case Obergefell v. Hodges , the United States Supreme Court held that the due process clause of the 14th Amendment guarantees that the government will defend as a fundamental liberty the right to choose whom one will marry. The court also held that to deny that liberty would violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because doing so would amount to unequal treatment of same-sex and opposite-sex couples, thus denying a same-sex couple equal protection of the law and amounting to a violation of the couple’s civil rights. 30

Thus, same-sex marriage is both a civil liberty and a civil rights issue. The right to marry is a civil liberty because it is a freedom from government interference in one’s choice of a life partner. Same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue because to deny same-sex couples the right to marry is to subject them to unequal treatment. The case of same-sex marriage shows how both civil rights (equality) and civil liberties (freedom from government interference) are a part of the fair government treatment of individuals.

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

This book may not be used in the training of large language models or otherwise be ingested into large language models or generative AI offerings without OpenStax's permission.

Want to cite, share, or modify this book? This book uses the Creative Commons Attribution License and you must attribute OpenStax.

Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-political-science/pages/1-introduction

• Authors: Mark Carl Rom, Masaki Hidaka, Rachel Bzostek Walker
• Publisher/website: OpenStax
• Book title: Introduction to Political Science
• Publication date: May 18, 2022
• Location: Houston, Texas
• Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-political-science/pages/1-introduction
• Section URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-political-science/pages/4-2-constitutions-and-individual-liberties

© Jan 3, 2024 OpenStax. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License . The OpenStax name, OpenStax logo, OpenStax book covers, OpenStax CNX name, and OpenStax CNX logo are not subject to the Creative Commons license and may not be reproduced without the prior and express written consent of Rice University.

Political Freedom According to Machiavelli and Locke Essay

Introduction.

Political freedom despite its imminent acceptance and popularity among so-called democratic countries has remained subjective and dependent on leaders. This paper shall try to delineate Niccolo Machiavelli’s and John Locke’s interpretation or ideological influence on political freedom.

According to Niccolo Machiavelli, the greatest moral good is a virtuous and stable state so that actions even if cruel, if intended to protect the country are justified. Leaders or state defenders must do anything necessary to keep their power but Machiavelli strongly suggests that above all, the prince must not be hated. He proposed that a wise prince or leader establish himself on where he has control and not in that of others. However, he also wrote that “It is best to be both feared and loved; however, if one cannot be both it is better to be feared than loved,” (The Prince, Chapter __ ).

Although Machiavelli wrote the same subject matter in “The Prince” and “The Discourses”, these two differ totally in their entirety because they discuss and emphasize two different kinds of political systems. In “The Prince”, Machiavelli talked about and described power situations very well: from worldwide politics to business corporations to most settings where technological advancement, influence, and control exist.

He illustrated the rules of the game that has been utilized and always will exist for many situations involving selfish humans who are in constant competition for power. Machiavelli’s propositions cannot be easily categorized as good or bad because they are just describing a process. Machiavelli also stressed the need for a strong defense through sound laws and strong military forces.

Machiavelli’s “the end justifies the means” maxim is used to mean that a good outcome excuses any wrongs committed to attain it. In Chapter 17, his “it is better to be feared than loved” line is found. In this chapter, he explains that “It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with.” (Machiavelli, 1950).

This entails that a leader, although professing what may be perceived as merciful, faithful, humane, frank, and religious, need not be such. His wisdom made him suppose that reality is full of evil and that a good leader must be able to discern that who is sincere and who is vicious, but not having to be obvious about his discernment or thoughts. At most, he must be always perceived as good but ready to be utterly cruel to defend his crown.

In Chapter V, as being summed up, Machiavelli proposes militaristic conquer and conquest as he wrote in The Prince, “When these things are remembered no one will marvel at the ease with which Alexander held the Empire of Asia, or at the difficulties which others have had to keep an acquisition, such as Pyrrhus and many more; this is not occasioned by the little or abundance of ability in the conqueror, but by the want of uniformity in the subject state.”

“The Discourses” can be summarized with this line by Machiavelli (Chapter __) when he said that “the multitude is wiser and more constant than a prince.” In addition when he said that “a corrupt and disorderly multitude can be spoken to by some worthy person and can easily be brought around to the right way, but a bad prince cannot be spoken to by anyone, and the only remedy for his case is cold steel,” (Chapter __) portrays his serious and violent ways to end disputes but taking into consideration the citizenry’s essential existence in a world where it is impossible for a group to politically survive without a keen leader.

In the Second Treatise of Government, John Locke proposed “the greatest harm one can do to the monarch and the people is to spread wrong notions about government,” (Preface). Already, there is the presumption about Locke’s respect for all humans as born equal with the same ability to reason for themselves, and because of this, the government should have limitations to ensure that people are free from the arbitrary will of another person, according to the laws of nature. “Government is a social contract between the people in control, and the people who submit to it,” (Second Treatise, Chapter __). The positive point of Locke’s anti-authoritarianism is that he firmly adheres to using reason to try to grasp the truth. This, in turn, amounts to following natural law and the fulfillment of the divine purpose for humanity.

In Chapter 1, Locke emphasized that “political power to be a right to make laws – with the death penalty and consequently all lesser penalties – for regulating and preserving property, and to employ the force of the community in enforcing such laws and defending the commonwealth from external attack; all this being only for the public good.”

Here, Lock asserted that political power entails the right to make laws backed by the threat of force. At this point, his idea parallels with Machiavelli about the need for force. Locke’s belief that a right to hold political power by reference to one’s ancestry is also the same as Machiavelli as always, there is the threat of the enemy, outside force, or usurpation, and in this instance, leadership becomes a “fair game”.

Choosing or selecting leaders must not be by birthrights since it would cause chaos and would escalate to civil disorder. Everyone is bestowed with reason and free will that can be used according to conscience. According to Locke (1690, Chapter 1), “being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of Nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorize us to destroy one another.” Ultimately, the basis of freedom rests on the people’s power of reasoning which is God-given.

Locke also emphasized that “there are two distinct rights: (1) the right that everyone has, to punish the crime so as to restrain him and preventing such offenses in future; (2) the right that an injured party has to get reparation.” (Second Treatise, Chapter 2). However, preceding on this is his proposal that “It is unreasonable for men to be judges in their own cases because self-love will bias men in favor for themselves and their friends. And on the other side, hostility, passion, and revenge will lead them to punish others too severely. So nothing but confusion and disorder will follow, and that is why God has – as he certainly has – established government to restrain the partiality and violence of men.” (Chapter 2).

Machiavelli’s and Locke’s assertions on political freedom are parallel at some points but go the opposite way at other points. Both adhere to the necessity of freedom in all aspects, as it is the method of the way freedom is acquired. Machiavelli’s approaches to political freedom as something that should be acquired no matter what the cost made him different from Locke’s as Locke believes that leadership is bested on the will of the people.

Machiavelli, however, may be perceived as the more reliable and consistent of the two for a strong leader, who may not necessarily be good. Leaders whom Machiavelli calls princes can use options that vary from peaceful to violent in order to address issues that are relevant to the maintenance of a government. His propositions border on a militaristic approach to get and maintain power (as a prince or leader) with shrewdness always at hand.

On the other hand, Locke’s proposition is the soberer of the two as he certainly points out respect for life and will of even the subjects. His stand, however, could be subject to question as he subsequently debates on one proposition as when he posed that no one is allowed to question or control those who carry out his (the leader) wishes, and everyone has to put up with whatever he does, whether he is led b reason, mistake or passion.” (Second Treatise, Chapter 2)

Therefore, between Locke and Machiavelli, Locke focuses on the subjects to uphold a leader while Machiavelli focuses on strong leadership to protect his subjects, as well as maintain leadership.

Locke, John, and Thomas Preston Peardon. (1952). The Second Treatise of Government. New York: Liberal Arts Press.

Machiavelli, Niccolo (1950). The Prince and the Discourses. New York: Modern Library. Web.

Mansfield, Harvey (2001) New Modes and Orders, A study of the Discouses on Livy. University of Chicago.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, September 14). Political Freedom According to Machiavelli and Locke. https://ivypanda.com/essays/political-freedom-according-to-machiavelli-and-locke/

"Political Freedom According to Machiavelli and Locke." IvyPanda , 14 Sept. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/political-freedom-according-to-machiavelli-and-locke/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Political Freedom According to Machiavelli and Locke'. 14 September.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Political Freedom According to Machiavelli and Locke." September 14, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/political-freedom-according-to-machiavelli-and-locke/.

1. IvyPanda . "Political Freedom According to Machiavelli and Locke." September 14, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/political-freedom-according-to-machiavelli-and-locke/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Political Freedom According to Machiavelli and Locke." September 14, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/political-freedom-according-to-machiavelli-and-locke/.

• Niccolo Machiavelli’s Philosophy
• Niccolo Machiavelli's Virtue and Fortuna
• The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli
• Niccolo Machiavelli Views on Political Decisions
• Niccolo Machiavelli: Events Determination by Fortune
• Political Theory by Niccolo Machiavelli
• Leadership Skills: "The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli
• Niccolo Machiavelli’s Views on Compassion, Honesty and Liberality
• Human Nature: "The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli
• Ideal Society: Thomas More and Niccolo Machiavelli
• Plato's Republic: Perspectives on Politics
• Machiavelli's ‘The Prince’ Review
• The Concept of Political System by Carl Schmitt
• According to Aristotle, Is the Good Citizen the Same as the Good Human Being?? Why or Why Not??
• Hobbes' Conception of an Absolute Sovereign

PovertyCure is an initiative of the Acton Institute

Get the Series

Political Freedom

Political freedom is the ability of a nation’s citizens to participate freely in the political process. It involves both the freedom of the majority to influence and guide policy (rather than merely entrenched insiders doing so) and the freedom of political minorities to publicly advocate for their positions. In the words of Lord Acton, “The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.” Practically, this absence of coercion is expressed in such rights as freedom of the press, freedom of worship and freedom of assembly. 

Political Freedom and Prosperity

Although political freedom and economic freedom are far from perfectly correlated, history indicates that the two are mutually supportive. Political freedom often lays the foundation upon which economic freedom—and therefore prosperity—can be built. For example, a rule of law that respects property rights, enforces contracts, and punishes corruption is essential for the operation of business enterprise. These conditions most often exist in a country where free elections and active participation by the electorate ensure that government officeholders are responsive to the common good.

A society with wide berth for the political activity of its citizens also encourages civic participation, concern for the common good, and a sense of personal responsibility (traits that support enterprise and economic growth). This is substantiated by data from surveys that measure each. Based on studies by Freedom House (political freedom) and the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal (economic freedom) Freedom House director Adrian Karatnycky reported that “there is a high and statistically significant correlation between the level of political freedom … and economic freedom."

Political Freedom in the Developing World

One of the obstacles holding back developing nations is political oppression. “Bad governance,” one of the four main “poverty traps” identified by Paul Collier, keeps nations locked in poverty. Dictatorships and military juntas discourage the conditions necessary for economic development. In addition, the relative predominance of the political sphere over and above other spheres creates a set of bad incentives. As Theodore Dalrymple notes, in many poor nations “there’s no way of getting on in the world or becoming prosperous other than by finding a political sponsor.”

When people stand to gain more by political success than by entrepreneurial success, the most talented and ambitious individuals will tend to direct their energy toward personal success in the political sphere rather than to creating jobs and wealth through business activity. When minorities or individuals feel that they are powerless victims rather than active participants in the political arena, they will take their skill, creativity, and drive to a new location, depriving their native country of its most important resource: human capital.

Rethink Poverty

Subtitled in 15 languages, this six part video series that will change absolutely everything about how you approach charity and missions.

The Freedom and Prosperity Equation

September 18, 2023

Introduction: The continuing debate about freedom and prosperity

By Dan Negrea, Brad Lips, Kris Mauren

The freedom and prosperity debate at the end of the twentieth century

The essays in this book address development economics questions that have been often asked over the centuries: Does freedom lead to prosperity or does the causation go the other way? Or, to use the words of Vanessa Rubio-Márquez in her essay, is prosperity the seed or the fruit of freedom? Or is there perhaps a virtuous cycle in which more freedom leads to a more prosperous society in which the citizenry demands yet more freedoms, and freedom and prosperity mutually reinforce each other?

The answers to the above questions have real-world implications because if more freedom leads to more prosperity, it behooves governments to adopt freedom policies if they care about the welfare of their citizens.

At the end of the twentieth century, the debate appeared to have been settled. Two authoritarian models had been tried during that century in Europe and they had both failed spectacularly: fascism and communism. And the whole world saw it.

Mussolini and then Hitler had introduced state-directed public works and other economic policies to increase economic growth and employment during the Great Depression. But their unchecked absolute power ultimately led to the Second World War, horrendous crimes against humanity, millions of deaths, and the violent end of their regimes. The allure of fascism was gone after that, and no new fascist regimes were formed in Europe following the Second World War.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union assumed power through the 1917 revolution and later imposed Communism by force in the Eastern European countries it had occupied after the Second World War. Communist parties in several countries on other continents also assumed power after the Second World War, most notably in China, North Korea, North Vietnam, and Cuba.

The Soviet Union achieved many impressive successes: it transformed Russia from an agrarian country to an industrial one; eradicated illiteracy and created a successful higher education system; and established a health system that was an improvement over the tsarist one. The Soviet Union also achieved stunning successes in science: it launched into space the first satellite, the first man, and the first woman; became a leading nuclear power for both civilian and military purposes; and developed a world-class aeronautic and military technology industry.

But these successes came at a grievous price in human suffering. Millions of people were murdered in Stalin’s purges and thousands in the Soviet Union’s military interventions in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan in 1979.

And these successes were also limited: industrialization is not the same as development. The Soviet Union’s industrialization emphasized heavy industries and de-emphasized consumer products, leaving its citizens disappointed in their aspirations of a more comfortable life.

The story was similar in the other European Communist countries: many initial successes in industrialization, education, and health came at the price of great suffering under authoritarian regimes that imprisoned and killed political opponents and allowed no freedom of religion or expression.

After a few decades, economic growth in the Soviet Union and the Communist European countries plateaued. The plans of these authoritarian regimes to have their countries catching up to the level of development of the free Western European countries proved to be unattainable dreams. There were multiple causes for this economic failure, but one stands out: these oppressive regimes and their centrally planned economies in which the state owned all the means of production were not conducive to efficient investment, did not incentivize people to innovate, and did not create wealth or lead to increased productivity.

The Soviet Union failed economically before it also failed politically and militarily. The inability of these Communist regimes to offer increased prosperity to their peoples, especially when compared to the living standards in the United States and Western Europe, was plain for all to see. Even those in the repressive apparatus stopped supporting these regimes and all European Communist regimes collapsed.

The fall of the European Communist regimes started with Poland in 1989 and ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. When people in these countries were subsequently allowed to vote freely, they did not vote a Communist party into power in any of these countries. Most of the former Communist European countries have since made the profound democratic and free-market reforms required to become candidates for membership of the European Union, and many have been accepted.

Not only Communist authoritarianism but authoritarianism in general has been discredited in the former European Soviet bloc countries, except for Russia and Belarus. All the other European post-Communist countries have chosen democracy and free markets, albeit with varying levels of success.

Seen from the vantage point of the end of the twentieth century, even the People’s Republic of China (PRC) seemed to be moving away from its Communist governance model. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led by Mao had assumed power in 1949 and Mao maintained absolute power in a cult-of-personality regime until his death in 1976. He practically closed China to most of the rest of the world and led it according to strict Marxist-Leninist principles: there was no private ownership of the means of production, the economy was centrally planned, and there was no political, religious, or personal freedom for citizens. Between 1952 and 1978, China started industrializing and expanding education and healthcare, and real annual GDP growth was about 6 percent . But Mao’s personal dictatorship caused political turmoil, economic mismanagement, and harsh oppression of political dissent, whether real or imagined. During this period tens of millions of people died in prisons and labor camps, through executions, and from starvation directly linked to Mao’s policies.

One of history’s darkest chapters was then followed by one its most astounding success stories. Under Deng Xiaoping, local markets were allowed to emerge, and then reforms were put in place to open China to the world. The role of the CCP in economic planning was reduced, elements of free markets and private ownership were introduced, and term limits and other limitations on politicians’ power were put into place. The result: between 1980 and 2020, real annual GDP growth was almost 10 percent . In the positive environment created by the free-market reforms, the PRC was becoming a major global industrial power and was also achieving successes in science and technology.

As shown in a study by the PRC and the World Bank , between 1980 and 2020, the number of people in China with incomes below US$1.90 per day—the World Bank’s defining line for global extreme poverty—has fallen by almost 800 million.

At the end of the twentieth century the verdict seemed to be very clear: authoritarianism had been definitively discredited in Europe—no country was following its path on that continent. The same seemed to be true even outside Europe: Communist China, the largest authoritarian country in the world, appeared to be moving toward free markets and more political freedom.

The spirit of the times was captured in 1992 by Francis Fukuyama in his highly influential book The End of History and the Last Man: liberal democracy had triumphed in its ideological struggle with Communism and had “emerged as the final form of human government.” 1 Francis Fukuyama,  The End of History and the Last Man  (New York: Free Press, 1992). 

The freedom and prosperity debate today—the China development model

But the debate is not over. The CCP is now offering its current development strategy as a model for developing countries anywhere in the world.

The example of China was followed by several Asian economies, most notably Vietnam. Vietnam’s leaders too have attempted to develop a quasi-market economy, opened to international trade while maintaining a strict one-party system of political governance. Vietnam’s poverty-reduction story is compelling, with progress in social indicators like education and children’s health rivaling those of upper-middle-income countries.

A number of countries in Central Asia, South Asia, and Africa that had followed the Soviet model to some extent—for example Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Kazakhstan, Senegal, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania—looked at parts of the China model as worthy of consideration. China encouraged such potential followers through the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative, which finances projects in resource-rich economies. At its peak before the COVID-19 pandemic, OBOR investment proposals totaled US$150 billion—more than the combined official development assistance provided by advanced democracies.

The China development path had a dual appeal: First, financial resources seemed available outside the Washington consensus network of international development institutions and their conditionalities. Second, it promised a faster way to prosperity.

Xi Jinping became the leader of the CCP in 2013 and has since reversed many of the reforms inspired by Deng Xiaoping. In the political sphere, collective leadership at the top of the CCP has been replaced by Xi’s absolute power and a personality cult resembling that of Mao; high-tech government surveillance of citizens is becoming ubiquitous; and the CCP has waged a brutal and widespread oppression of China’s Uighur minority.

In the economic sphere, the Xi era has seen an increase in the control of the CCP in the economy and a preference for state-owned enterprises over private ones. International economic relations have suffered because of sharp practices sanctioned by the Chinese authorities, such as forced transfer of intellectual property and preferential treatment for Chinese companies over foreign ones doing business in the PRC. The country has also attracted international criticism for the extensive damage it is causing to the environment as a price for its economic growth.

Xi Jinping has been clear that he opposes a development model based on political freedom and free markets, and that he favors the PRC’s authoritarian model based on the leadership role of the CCP. In a February 7, 2023 speech, President Xi rejected the idea that “modernization means Westernization.” He touted China’s “new modernization model” that is “different from the West” and that “expands path choices for developing countries.” He made clear that the leadership role of the CCP is key and that the CCP will decide the “ultimate success or failure” of China’s effort to develop.

President Biden is keenly aware of the reopening of the debate and considers this an important matter. In his February 2021 address to the Munich Security Conference he noted:

We are in the midst of a fundamental debate about the future and direction of our world. We’re at an inflection point between those who argue that, given all the challenges we face – from the fourth industrial revolution to a global pandemic – that autocracy is the best way forward . . . and those who understand that democracy is essential – essential to meeting those challenges.

President Biden sees this as the defining issue of our time : “It is clear, absolutely clear . . . this is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies,” Biden said. “That’s what’s at stake here. We’ve got to prove democracy works.”

In December 2021, President Biden hosted a Summit for Democracy, attended by over 100 countries. Notably, the PRC was not invited. In his opening remarks he noted that the world’s complex challenges are exacerbated by autocrats that “seek to advance their own power, export and advance their influence around the world, and justify their repressive policies and practices as a more efficient way to address today’s challenges.” But, he added, “History and common sense tell us that liberty, opportunity, and justice thrive in a democracy, not in an autocracy.”

Quantitative evaluation of the Chinese development model

How can we evaluate the performance of the PRC in increasing the freedom and prosperity of their people relative to other countries?

One way is to use the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Indexes of 164 countries. The Freedom Index takes a broad view of freedom, measured through sub-indexes of economic, political, and legal freedom. This approach allows a separate exploration of the effect of each of these freedoms on prosperity. The Legal Freedom sub-index measures the strength of key institutions on which the other two freedoms depend; it ascertains, for example, if the government and judiciary are effective and free of corruption.

The Prosperity Index also takes a comprehensive view. It measures not just the GDP per capita of a country, but also its performance on several other criteria such as health, education, the environment, inequality, and the treatment of minorities.

We thought it edifying to compare the performance of the PRC against that of Taiwan and South Korea, two other highly successful Asian countries that were at a development level comparable to that of the PRC at the end of the Second World War, and against that of the developed countries belonging to the Organ-isation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD average only includes data for the 1995 member countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, Sweden, Switzerland, USA, UK.

At the end of the Second World War, China, South Korea, and Taiwan were all poor. In 1962, the gross national income (GNI) per capita for the PRC, South Korea, and Taiwan was $70, $120, and $163 respectively. But their political and economic paths were different. From the end of the Second World War to the early 1990s they were all autocracies: the PRC was a dictatorship of the CCP, while Taiwan and South Korea were military dictatorships. But in the early 1990s, both Taiwan and South Korea became democracies, while the PRC did not change.

Figure 1 has a narrow focus and explores just the relative performance of the GNI per capita for these three countries. It shows that the PRC, South Korea, and Taiwan had a similarly low starting point in 1962. The two countries that had free markets at the beginning of this period and maintained it, and also chose democracy in the early 1990s, grew much faster than the PRC. By the early 1990s, South Korea and Taiwan had escaped the “middle-income trap”: they had crossed the World Bank’s threshold between middle-income and high-income countries. The PRC remained below this threshold in 2020.

Figure 2 explores the PRC’s relative performance over time in the Atlantic Council’s Freedom Index—which measures economic, political, and legal freedom—from 1995 to 2022. In 1995, the PRC’s freedom score was less than half that of the OECD average. Over this period, the OECD freedom score remained stable and the PRC score decreased by more than 2 percent. The ratio between the two remained just as large at the end of the period. But South Korea increased its freedom score by 9 percent over this period and improved its relative ratio from 1.16 to 1.07. Taiwan’s freedom score increased by 28 percent and its relative ratio improved from 1.33 to 1.03.

Figure 3 explores the PRC’s relative performance in the Prosperity Index. The PRC started behind the OECD in 1995, increased its score by 16 percent, and closed the ratio-gap somewhat, from 1.71 to 1.58. South Korea started very close to the OECD score and exceeded it by the end of the period, increasing its score by 10 percent. Taiwan already outperformed the OECD on prosperity in 1995 and increased its score by another 1 percent over the period. The OECD countries improved by 8 percent.

The discussion above is not meant to minimize the successes of the Chinese Communist Party in leading the development of the People’s Republic of China. Just like the Soviet Union decades earlier, the PRC has been transformed from a poor and backward country to one of the most consequential countries of the world due to its industrialization and progress in many other aspects of its society. Its rapid economic development and accomplishments in education, science, and healthcare are undeniable.

But it is very important to note that this has been achieved in the context of an authoritarian regime that denies basic freedoms to its citizens and deals harshly with dissent. One of the questions this raises is whether the repression and suffering were a price worth paying for the rapid economic growth and if this was the only way to achieve development.

Taiwan and South Korea show that neighboring countries—from a comparable level of development sixty years ago—were able to achieve more economic growth than the PRC over that period. Both Taiwan and South Korea ensured relative economic freedom throughout those years, combining this with political freedom for the latter thirty.

A related key question is whether the PRC’s economic success is durable. This question is certainly relevant in light of the recent reversal of the freedom reforms of the 1980s that caused the PRC’s 10 percent growth. The PRC’s growth is currently at 5 percent and trending downward.

Can the innovation and entrepreneurship needed for economic growth blossom in an authoritarian regime? There are very few examples of countries with both advanced economies and authoritarian regimes for extended periods of time. Singapore, with a population of just 5.5 million, is perhaps the most prominent outlier. It blossomed under the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew for thirty-one years as prime minister and for another twenty-one in which he served as a cabinet minister. The two prime ministers that followed him were also effective.

But there is no guarantee that a system without effective checks and balances will continue to produce good leaders. Democracy, despite all its imperfections, has proven itself the form of government that is best at producing good leaders and removing bad leaders, and thereby leading to durable prosperity.

This volume’s reflections on freedom and prosperity

The question of whether people should live in freedom or not deserves careful study given the enormous consequences it has for history and human well-being. The aim of this book is to offer essays on various aspects of the relationship between freedom and prosperity and how they can be achieved.

In his foreword, Juan José Daboub reflects on his experience as a former minister of finance and chief of staff to the president of El Salvador, and as former managing director of the World Bank Group. He recalls El Salvador’s impressive economic gains after it adopted free-market reforms in the late 1990s. The author argues that an imperfect market will always be better than a perfect bureaucrat telling people what to do. To achieve freedom, the role of government should be that of a referee that maximizes competition and minimizes regulation.

Some of the essays examine theoretical questions.

In chapter 1, Ignacio P. Campomanes points out that democracy can (and should) be defended on ethical and moral grounds, as the system that best upholds the dignity of every citizen, but that the case for democracy can be strengthened significantly if we can rigorously show that free societies are also superior to autocracies in producing higher overall prosperity. He posits that, in order to make progress in the empirical assessment of the freedom-prosperity relationship, we need to dig deeper into the constitutive attributes of free societies. In his essay, he assesses the theoretical soundness of the analytical framework proposed by the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Indexes that measure separately economic, political, and legal freedom, and provides preliminary evidence of the empirical relevance of this division.

In chapter 2, Markus Jaeger argues that historically oriented, qualitative studies can help shed light on the often complex and complicated interactions among structural factors (e.g., geography, demographics), institutions (e.g., political freedom, free markets), and policies and their contribution to successful economic development. He points out that free societies and market-based economic systems are important factors underpinning productivity and prosperity, particularly once countries reach middle- and high-income levels.

In chapter 3, Michael Klein explores the various mechanisms that drive development. He discusses how societies need freedom to prosper, while firms and markets need cooperation to reach their full potential. Finding the right balance between freedom and cooperation is not always easy, and the author talks about finding a “good mix” of rules, discretionary power, and freedom.

In chapter 4, Vladimir Fernandes Maciel, Ulisses Monteiro Ruiz de Gamboa, Paulo Rogério Scarano, and Julian Alexienco Portillo examine the relationship between freedom and prosperity around the world by using the Freedom and Prosperity Indexes and a neo-institutionalist analysis approach. They find a symbiosis between freedom and prosperity: a virtuous cycle (higher levels of freedom and prosperity lead to more freedom and prosperity) and a vicious cycle (lower levels of freedom and prosperity lead to less freedom and prosperity), with these cycles tending to reinforce each other.

In chapter 5, Jamie Bologna Pavlik, Benjamin Powell, and Andrew Young provide evidence that economic freedom not only correlates with prosperity, but that it is also an important predictor of prosperity. The authors apply the Mahalanobis Distance Matching method to the Atlantic Council’s Economic Freedom sub-index to analyze the causal statistical relationships between improvements in economic freedom and subsequent prosperity. The researchers find that meaningful increases in economic freedom led to large increases in GDP per capita over a five-year time horizon, supporting Adam Smith’s assertion that increased economic freedom is an essential precondition for greater prosperity.

In chapter 6, Luis Ravina Bohórquez discusses the role of elites in a country’s prosperity and development. He defines elites to include politicians, government officials, and other people with influence in civil and economic circles. He argues that the elites have a responsibility to foster strong institutions and government policies, including those that prevent nepotism and corruption. Bohórquez highlights the role elites played in Kenya in promoting investment in good education and how education helped the country’s development.

In chapter 7, Elakiya Ananthakrishnan looks at the impact of the informal economy on countries’ overall prosperity. She also reviews the main reasons leading citizens to conduct business outside of regulated markets, especially the avoidance of taxes and social security contributions. Other reasons include escaping government bureaucracy or regulatory burdens, and bypassing corruption, all of which relate to inefficient public institutions and weak rule of law.

In chapter 8, Julio Amador Díaz López looks at innovation and misinformation as they relate to economic development. He argues that the Western system—characterized by risk taking, a diverse population, and less restrictive policies—is better suited for promoting innovation than the authoritarian model, which is more restrictive and risk averse. Protecting rule of law, free markets, and diversity of people and ideas remain essential to harnessing new technologies—the key to prosperity in our time. Other essays offer reflections focused on certain countries and regions.

In chapter 9, Khémaies Jhinaoui examines the ongoing struggle for freedom and prosperity in the Middle East and North Africa region. The author argues that the lack of realism and the inexperience of the region’s regimes hindered social progress following the Arab Spring. The author suggests three lessons: that the quest for freedom does not have to be radical; that gradual reform is more effective; and that foreign influence shapes the pace and intensity of the struggle for freedom and prosperity in the region.

In chapter 10, Mohamed M. Farid examines Egypt’s development over the last fifteen years and the effects of extensive government intervention in the economy. Farid argues that to increase prosperity, Egypt must reduce the role of the state in the economy, implement free-market reforms, and focus public investments in human capital.

In chapter 11, Sergio M. Alcocer and Jeziret S. González examine the decrease in press freedom in Mexico and how this might result in less prosperity. The authors review current Mexican policies to protect journalists and they recommend improvements. They argue that prosperity cannot be achieved without freedom of the press.

In chapter 12, Vanessa Rubio-Márque z investigates the use of the Freedom and Prosperity Indexes in real-life policy debates and policy making. The author finds the Indexes useful in identifying the factors which make a country free and prosperous, and in providing benchmarks for comparisons with other countries. But she also calls for alertness to signs of freedom retrenchment and institutional deterioration not yet captured by the Indexes.

In chapter 13, Prashant Narang and Parth J. Shah examine India’s current economic situation and its rankings on the Freedom and Prosperity Indexes. To identify areas where India can improve, the authors compare its performance to the global averages, to that of countries in the same income category, and to the South Asia regional averages. They also identify improvement opportunities for India.

In chapter 14, Clara Volintiru, Camelia Crişan, and George Ștefan assert that achieving long-term prosperity and stability in Eastern and Central Europe requires strategic engagement by Western allies. The authors argue that economic resilience is crucial to Eastern Europe’s security strategy and propose three overlapping lines of effort: increasing European integration; transitioning to a new economic model; and engaging all societal actors in the pursuit of sustainable and shared prosperity.

In chapter 15, Danladi Verheijen explores the government’s role in assuring economic and legal freedoms in Nigeria. The author suggests that the Nigerian government should be less involved in the economy and more involved in providing security.

In chapter 16, Dan Negrea, Joseph Lemoine, and Yomna Gaafar investigate freedom and prosperity trends in a group of Eastern European countries since the early 1990s. Using the scoring and rankings of the Freedom and Prosperity Indexes, the authors find that countries that instituted more political, economic, and legal freedoms since the 1990s enjoy greater prosperity today.

We hope that the essays in this book will be a useful tool for those promoting improvements in freedom and prosperity around the world.

Dan Negrea is the senior director of the Freedom and Prosperity Center at the Atlantic Council.

Brad Lips is the CEO of Atlas Network.

Kris Mauren is the co-founder and president of Acton Institute.

Related Experts: Dan Negrea

Image: People in Placa (square) da Matriz - By Maremagnum

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Locke On Freedom

John Locke’s views on the nature of freedom of action and freedom of will have played an influential role in the philosophy of action and in moral psychology. Locke offers distinctive accounts of action and forbearance, of will and willing, of voluntary (as opposed to involuntary) actions and forbearances, and of freedom (as opposed to necessity). These positions lead him to dismiss the traditional question of free will as absurd, but also raise new questions, such as whether we are (or can be) free in respect of willing and whether we are free to will what we will, questions to which he gives divergent answers. Locke also discusses the (much misunderstood) question of what determines the will, providing one answer to it at one time, and then changing his mind upon consideration of some constructive criticism proposed by his friend, William Molyneux. In conjunction with this change of mind, Locke introduces a new doctrine (concerning the ability to suspend the fulfillment of one’s desires) that has caused much consternation among his interpreters, in part because it threatens incoherence. As we will see, Locke’s initial views do suffer from clear difficulties that are remedied by his later change of mind, all without introducing incoherence.

Note on the text: Locke’s theory of freedom is contained in Book II, Chapter xxi of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding . The chapter underwent five revisions in Locke’s lifetime [E1 (1689), E2 (1694), E3 (1695), E4 (1700), and E5 (1706)], with the last edition published posthumously. Significant changes, including a considerable lengthening of the chapter, occur in E2; and important changes appear in E5.

1. Actions and Forbearances

2. will and willing, 3. voluntary vs. involuntary action/forbearance, 4. freedom and necessity, 5. free will, 6. freedom in respect of willing, 7. freedom to will, 8. determination of the will, 9. the doctrine of suspension, 10. compatibilism or incompatibilism, select primary sources, select secondary sources, additional secondary sources, other internet resources, related entries.

For Locke, the question of whether human beings are free is the question of whether human beings are free with respect to their actions and forbearances . As he puts it:

[T]he Idea of Liberty , is the Idea of a Power in any Agent to do or forbear any Action, according to the determination or thought of the mind, whereby either of them is preferr’d to the other. (E1–4 II.xxi.8: 237)

In order to understand Locke’s conception of freedom, then, we need to understand his conception of action and forbearance.

There are three main accounts of Locke’s theory of action. According to what we might call the “Doing” theory of action, actions are things that we do (actively), as contrasted to things that merely happen to us (passively). If someone pushes my arm up, then my arm rises, but, one might say, I did not raise it. That my arm rose is something that happened to me, not something I did . By contrast, when I signal to a friend who has been looking for me, I do something inasmuch as I am not a mere passive recipient of a stimulus over which I have no control. According to some interpreters (e.g., Stuart 2013: 405, 451), Locke’s actions are doings in this sense. According to the “Composite” or “Millian” theory of action, an action is “[n]ot one thing, but a series of two things; the state of mind called a volition, followed by an effect” (Mill 1974 [1843]: 55). On this view, for example, the action of raising my hand is composed of (i) willing to produce the effect of my hand’s rising and (ii) the effect itself, where (ii) results from (i). According to some interpreters (arguably, Lowe 1986: 120–121; Lowe 1995: 141—though it is possible that Lowe’s theory applies only to voluntary actions), Locke’s actions are composite in this sense. Finally, according to what we might call the “Deflationary” conception of action, actions are simply motions of bodies or operations of minds.

Some of what Locke says suggests that he holds the “Doing” theory of action: “when [a Body] is set in motion it self, that Motion is rather a Passion, than an Action in it”, for “when the Ball obeys the stroke of a Billiard-stick, it is not any action of the Ball, but bare passion” (E1–5 II.xxi.4: 235—see also E4–5 II.xxi.72: 285–286). Here Locke is clearly working with a sense of “action” according to which actions are opposed to passions. But, on reflection, it is unlikely that this is what Locke means by “action” when he writes about voluntary/involuntary actions and freedom of action. For Locke describes “a Man striking himself, or his Friend, by a Convulsive motion of his Arm, which it is not in his Power…to…forbear” as “acting” (E1–5 II.xxi.9: 238), and describes the convulsive leg motion caused by “that odd Disease called Chorea Sancti Viti [St. Vitus’s Dance]” as an “Action” (E1–5 II.xxi.11: 239). It would be a mistake to think of these convulsive motions as “doings”, for they are clearly things that “happen” to us in just the way that it happens to me that my arm rises when someone else raises it. Examples of convulsive actions also suggest that the Millian account of Locke’s theory of action is mistaken. For in the case of convulsive motion, there is no volition that one’s limbs move; indeed, if there is volition in such cases, it is usually a volition that one’s limbs not move. Such actions, then, cannot be composed of a volition and the motion that is willed, for the relevant volition is absent (more on volition below).

We are therefore left with the Deflationary conception of action, which is well supported by the text. There are, Locke says, “but two sorts of Action, whereof we have any Idea , viz. Thinking and Motion” (E1–5 II.xxi.4: 235—see also E1–5 II.xxi.8: 237 and E4–5 II.xxi.72: 285); “Thinking, and Motion…are the two Ideas which comprehend in them all Action” (E1–5 II.xxii.10: 293). It may be that, in the sense in which “action” is opposed to “passion”, some corporeal motions and mental operations, being produced by external causes rather than self-initiated, are not actions. But that is not the sense in which all motions and thoughts are “called and counted Actions ” in Locke’s theory of action (E4–5 II.xxi.72: 285). As seems clear, convulsive motions are actions inasmuch as they are motions, and thoughts that occur in the mind unbidden are actions inasmuch as they are mental operations.

What, then, according to Locke, are forbearances? On some interpretations (close counterparts to the Millian conception of action), Locke takes forbearances to be voluntary not-doings (e.g., Stuart 2013: 407) or voluntary omissions to act (e.g., Lowe 1995: 123). There are texts that suggest as much:

sitting still , or holding one’s peace , when walking or speaking are propos’d, [are] mere forbearances, requiring…the determination of the Will . (E2–5 II.xxi.28: 248)

However, Locke distinguishes between voluntary and involuntary forbearances (E2–5 II.xxi.5: 236), and it makes no sense to characterize an involuntary forbearance as an involuntary voluntary not-doing. So it is unlikely that Locke thinks of forbearances as voluntary not-doings. This leaves the Deflationary conception of forbearance, according to which a forbearance is the opposite of an action, namely an episode of rest or absence of thought. On this conception, to say that someone forbore running is to say that she did not run, not that she voluntarily failed to run. Every forbearance would be an instance of inaction, not a refraining.

In E2–5, Locke stipulates that he uses the word “action” to “comprehend the forbearance too of any Action proposed”, in order to “avoid the multiplying of words” (E2–5 II.xxi.28: 248). The reason he so stipulates is not that he literally takes forbearances to be actions (as he puts it, they “pass for” actions), but that most everything that he wants to say about actions (in particular, the distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, and the account of freedom of action) applies pari passu to forbearances (see below).

Within the category of actions, Locke distinguishes between those that are voluntary and those that are involuntary. To understand this distinction, we need to understand Locke’s account of the will and his account of willing (or volition). For Locke, the will is a power (ability, faculty—see E1–5 II.xxi.20: 244) possessed by a person (or by that person’s mind). Locke explains how we come by the idea of power (in Humean vein, as the result of observation of constant conjunctions—“like Changes [being] made, in the same things, by like Agents, and by the like ways” (E1–5 II.xxi.1: 233)), but does not offer a theory of the nature of power. What we are told is that “ Powers are Relations” (E1–5 II.xxi.19: 243), relations “to Action or Change” (E1–5 II.xxi.3: 234), and that powers are either active (powers to make changes) or passive (powers to receive changes) (E1–5 II.xxi.2: 234). In this sense, the will is an active relation to actions.

Locke’s predecessors had thought of the will as intimately related to the faculty of desire or appetite. For the Scholastics (whose works Locke read as a student at Oxford), the will is the power of rational appetite. For Thomas Hobbes (by whom Locke was deeply influenced even though this was not something he could advertise, because Hobbes was a pariah in Locke’s intellectual and political circles), the will is simply the power of desire itself. Remnants of this desiderative conception of the will remain in Locke’s theory, particularly in the first edition of the Essay . Here, for example, is Locke’s official E1 account of the will:

This Power the Mind has to prefer the consideration of any Idea to the not considering it; or to prefer the motion of any part of the body to its rest. (E1 II.xxi.5: 236)

And here is Locke’s official E1 account of preferring:

Well, but what is this Preferring ? It is nothing but the being pleased more with the one , than the other . (E1 II.xxi.28: 248)

So, in E1, the will is the mind’s power to be more pleased with the consideration of an idea than with the not considering it, or to be more pleased with the motion of a part of one’s body than with its remaining at rest. When we lack something that would deliver more pleasure than we currently experience, we become uneasy at its absence. And this kind of uneasiness (or pain: E1–5 II.vii.1: 128), is what Locke describes as desire (E1–5 II.xx.6: 230; E2–5 II.xxi.31–32: 251) (though also as “joined with”, “scarce distinguishable from”, and a “cause” of desire—see Section 8 below). So, in E1, the will is the mind’s power to desire or want the consideration of an idea more than the not considering it, or to desire or want the motion of a part of one’s body more than its remaining at rest. (At E2–5 II.xxi.5: 236, Locke adds “and vice versâ ”, to clarify that it can also happen, even according to the E1 account, that one prefers not considering an idea to considering it, or not moving to moving.) [ 1 ]

In keeping with this conception of the will as desire, Locke in E1 then defines an exercise of the will, which he calls “willing” or “volition”, as an “actual preferring” of one thing to another (E1 II.xxi.5: 236). For example, I have the power to prefer the upward motion of my arm to its remaining at rest by my side. This power, in E1, is one aspect of my will. When I exercise this power, I actually prefer the upward motion of my arm to its remaining at rest, i.e., I am more pleased with my arm’s upward motion than I am with its continuing to rest. This is what Locke, in E1, thinks of as my willing the upward motion of my arm (or, as he sometimes puts it, my willing or volition to move my arm upward ).

In E2–5, Locke explicitly gives up this conception of the will and willing, explaining why he does so, making corresponding changes in the text of the Essay , even while leaving passages that continue to suggest the desiderative conception. He writes: “[T]hough a Man would preferr flying to walking, yet who can say he ever wills it?” (E2–5 II.xxi.15: 241). The thought here is that, as Locke (rightly) recognizes, my being more pleased with flying than walking does not consist in (or even entail) my willing to fly. This is in large part because it is necessarily implied in willing motion of a certain sort that one exert dominion that one takes oneself to have (E2–5 II.xxi.15: 241), that “the mind [endeavor] to give rise…to [the motion], which it takes to be in its power” (E2–5 II.xxi.30: 250). So if I do not believe that it is in my power to fly, then it is impossible for me to will the motion of flying, even though I might be more pleased with flying than I am with any alternative. Locke concludes (with the understatement) that “ Preferring which seems perhaps best to express the Act of Volition , does it not precisely” (E2–5 II.xxi.15: 240–241).

In addition, Locke points out that it is possible for “the Will and Desire [to] run counter”. For example, as a result of being coerced or threatened, I might will to persuade someone of something, even though I desire that I not succeed in persuading her. Or, suffering from gout, I might desire to be eased of the pain in my feet, and yet at the same time, recognizing that the translation of such pain would affect my health for the worse, will that I not be eased of my foot pain. In concluding that “ desiring and willing are two distinct Acts of the mind”, Locke must be assuming (reasonably) that it is not possible to will an action and its contrary at the same time (E2–5 II.xxi.30: 250). [ 2 ]

With what conception of the will and willing does Locke replace the abandoned desiderative conception? The answer is that in E2–5 Locke describes the will as a kind of directive or commanding faculty, the power to direct (or issue commands to) one’s body or mind: it is, he writes,

a Power to begin or forbear, continue or end several actions of our minds, and motions of our Bodies, barely by a thought or preference of the mind ordering, or as it were commanding the doing or not doing such or such particular action. (E2–5 II.xxi.5: 236)

Consonant with this non-desiderative, directive conception of the will, Locke claims that

Volition , or Willing , is an act of the Mind directing its thought to the production of any Action, and thereby exerting its power to produce it, (E2–5 II.xxi.28: 248)

Volition is nothing, but that particular determination of the mind, whereby, barely by a thought, the mind endeavours to give rise, continuation, or stop to any Action, which it takes to be in its power. (E2–5 II.xxi.30: 250)

Every volition, then, is a volition to act or to forbear , where willing to act is a matter of commanding one’s body to move or one’s mind to think, and willing to forbear is a matter of commanding one’s body to rest or one’s mind not to think. Unlike a desiderative power, which is essentially passive (as involving the ability to be more pleased with one thing than another), the will in E2–5 is an intrinsically active power, the exercise of which involves the issuing of mental commands directed at one’s own body and mind.

Within the category of actions/forbearances, Locke distinguishes between those that are voluntary and those that are involuntary. Locke does not define voluntariness and involuntariness in E1, but he does in E2–5:

The forbearance or performance of [an] action, consequent to such order or command of the mind is called Voluntary . And whatsoever action is performed without such a thought of the mind is called Involuntary . (E2–4 II.xxi.5: 236—in E5, “or performance” is omitted from the first sentence)

Locke is telling us that what makes an action/forbearance voluntary is that it is consequent to a volition, and that what makes an action/forbearance involuntary is that it is performed without a volition. The operative words here are “consequent to” and “without”. What do they mean? (Henceforth, following Locke’s lead, I will not distinguish between actions and forbearances unless the context calls for it.)

We can begin with something Locke says only in E1:

Volition, or the Act of Willing, signifies nothing properly, but the actual producing of something that is voluntary. (E1 II.xxi.33: 259)

On reflection, this is mistaken, but it does provide a clue to Locke’s conception of voluntariness. The mistake (of which Locke likely became aware, given that the statement clashes with the rest of his views and was removed from E2–5) is that not every instance of willing an action is followed by the action itself. To use one of Locke’s own examples, if I am locked in a room and will to leave, my volition will not result in my leaving (E1–5 II.xxi.10: 238). So willing cannot signify the “actual producing” of a voluntary action. However, it is reasonable to assume that, for Locke, willing will “produce” a voluntary action if nothing hinders the willed episode of motion or thought. And this makes it likely that Locke takes a voluntary action to be not merely temporally consequent to, but actually caused by, the right kind of volition (Yaffe 2000; for a contrary view, see Hoffman 2005).

Understandably, some commentators have worried about the problem of deviant causation, and whether Locke has an answer to it (e.g., Lowe 1995: 122–123; Yaffe 2000: 104; Lowe 2005: 141–147). The problem is that if I let go of a climbing rope, not as a direct result of willing to let it go, but as a result of being discomfited/paralyzed/shaken by the volition itself, then my letting go of the rope would not count as voluntary even though it was caused by a volition to let go of the rope. The solution to this problem, if there is one, is to claim that, in order for an action to count as voluntary, it is not sufficient for it to be caused by the right kind of volition: in addition, it is necessary that the action be caused in the right way (or non-deviantly) by the right kind of volition. Spelling out the necessary and sufficient conditions for non-deviant causation is a steep climb. Chances are that Locke was no more aware of this problem, and was in no better position to answer it, than anyone else was before Chisholm (1966), Taylor (1966) and Davidson (1980) brought it to the attention of the philosophical community.

Locke’s view, then, is that an action is voluntary inasmuch as its performance is caused by a volition. The volition, as we have so far presumed, must be of the right kind. For example, Locke would not count the motion of my left arm as voluntary if it were caused by a volition that my right arm move (or a volition that my left arm remain at rest). Locke assumes (reasonably) that in order for an action A to be voluntary, it must be caused (in the right way) by a volition that A occur (or, as Locke sometimes puts it, by a volition to do A ).

What, then, on Locke’s view, is it for an action to be involuntary ? Locke says that an involuntary action is performed “without” a volition. This might suggest that an action of mine is involuntary only when I have no volition that the action occur. Perhaps this is what Locke believes. But it is more reasonable to suppose that Locke would also count as involuntary an action that, though preceded by the right kind of volition, is either not caused by the volition or caused by the volition but not in the right way. [ 3 ]

Some commentators have worried that Locke’s “locked room” example is a problematic illustration of his theory of voluntariness, at least as applied to forbearances (e.g., Lowe 1986: 154–157; Stuart 2013: 420). Locke imagines a man who is “carried, while fast asleep, into a Room, where is a Person he longs to see and speak with”, but who is “there locked fast in, beyond his Power to get out: he awakes, and is glad to find himself in so desirable Company” and “stays willingly” in the room. Locke makes clear that, on his view, the man’s remaining in the room is a voluntary forbearance to leave (E1–5 II.xxi.10: 238). But one might worry that if the man is unable to leave the room, then it is false to say that his volition not to leave causes his not leaving. At best, it might be argued, the man’s not leaving is overdetermined (Stuart 2013: 420). But, as some authors have recently argued, cases of overdetermination are rightly described as involving two (or more) causes, not a single joint cause or no cause at all (see, e.g., Schaffer 2003). On such a view of overdetermination, it is unproblematic for Locke to describe the man in the locked room as caused to remain both by his volition to remain and by the door’s being locked. [ 4 ]

Another problem that has been raised for Locke stems from his example of a man who falls into a river when a bridge breaks under him. Locke describes the man as willing not to fall, even as he is falling (E1–5 II.xxi.9: 238). The worry here is that Locke holds that the objects of volition are actions or forbearances, so the man would need to be described as willing to forbear from falling. But, it might be argued, falling is not an action, for it is something that merely happens to the man, and not an exercise of his agency; so his willingly forbearing from falling would be willingly forbearing from something that is not an action, and this is impossible (Stuart 2013: 405). The answer to this worry is that falling is an action, according to Locke’s Deflationary conception of action, which counts the motion of one’s body in any direction as a bona fide action (see Section 1 above).

Some commentators think that Lockean freedom (or, as Locke also calls it, “liberty”) is a single power, the power to do what one wills (Yolton 1970: 144; D. Locke 1975: 96; O’Higgins 1976: 119—see Chappell 1994: 103). However, as Locke describes it, freedom is a “two-way” power, really a combination of two conditional powers belonging to an agent, that is, to someone endowed with a will (see Chappell 2007: 142). (A tennis ball, for example, “has not Liberty , is not a free Agent”, because it is incapable of volition (E1–5 II.xxi.9: 238).) In E1, Locke’s definition reflects his conception of the will as a power of preferring X to Y , or being more pleased with X than with Y . But in E2–5, Locke’s definition reflects his modified conception of the will as a power to issue commands to one’s body or mind (see Section 2 above):

[S]o far as a Man has a power to think, or not to think; to move, or not to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind, so far is a Man Free . (E2–5 II.xxi.8: 237) So that the Idea of Liberty , is the Idea of a Power in any Agent to do or forbear any particular Action, according to the determination or thought of the mind, whereby either of them is preferr’d to the other. (E2–5 II.xxi.8: 237) Liberty is not an Idea belonging to Volition , or preferring; but to the Person having the Power of doing, or forbearing to do, according as the Mind shall chuse or direct. (E2–5 II.xxi.10: 238) Liberty …is the power a Man has to do or forbear doing any particular Action, according as its doing or forbearance has the actual preference in the Mind, which is the same thing as to say, according as he himself wills it. (E1–5 II.xxi.15: 241)

The central claim here is that a human being (person, agent) is free with respect to a particular action A (or forbearance to perform A ) inasmuch as (i) if she wills to do A then she has the power to do A and (ii) if she wills to forbear doing A then she has the power to forbear doing A (see, e.g., Chappell 1994: 103). [ 5 ] So, for example, a woman in a locked room is not free with respect to the act of leaving (or with respect to the forbearance to leave) because she does not have the power to leave if and when she wills to leave, and a woman who is falling (the bridge under her having crumbled) is not free with respect to the forbearance to fall (or with respect to the act of falling) because she does not have the power to forbear falling if she wills not to fall (E1–5 II.xxi.9–10: 238). (Locke describes agents who are unfree with respect to some action as acting under, or by, necessity—E1–5 II.xxi.8: 238; E1–5 II.xxi.9: 238.) But if the door of the room is unlocked, then the woman in the room is able to stay if she wills to stay, and is able to leave if she wills to leave: she is therefore both free with respect to staying and free with respect to leaving.

Notice that freedom, on Locke’s conception of it, is a property of substances (persons, human beings, agents). This simply follows from the fact that freedom is a dual power and from the fact that “ Powers belong only to Agents , and are Attributes only of Substances ” (E1–5 II.xxi.16: 241). At no point does Locke offer an account of performing actions or forbearances freely , as if freedom were a way of performing an action or a way of forbearing to perform an action. (For a contrary view, see LoLordo 2012: 27.)

Locke does write that

[w]here-ever any performance or forbearance are not equally in a Man’s power; where-ever doing or not doing, will not equally follow upon the preference of his mind directing it, there he is not Free . (E2–5 II.xxi.8: 237)

The “follow upon” language might suggest a counterfactual analysis of the claim that an agent has the power to do A if she wills to do A , namely, that if she were to will to do A then she would do A (e.g., Lowe 1995: 129; Stuart 2013: 407—for a similar account that trades the subjunctive conditionals for indicative conditionals, see Yaffe 2000: 15). The counterfactual analysis is tempting, but also unlikely to capture Locke’s meaning, especially if he has a Deflationary conception of action/forbearance (see Section 1 above). It might happen, for example, that I am prevented (by chains or a force field) from raising my arm, but that if I were to will that my arm rise, you would immediately (break the chains or disable the force field and) raise my arm. Under these conditions, I would not be free with respect to my arm’s rising, but it would be true that if I were to will that my arm rise, then my arm would rise. So Locke’s dual power conception of freedom of action is not captured by any counterfactual conditional or pair of counterfactual conditionals.

Does Locke think that there is a conceptual connection between freedom of action and voluntary action? It might be thought that freedom with respect to a particular action requires that the action be voluntary, so that if an action is not voluntary then one is not free with respect to it. In defense of this, one might point to Locke’s falling man, whose falling is not voluntary and who is also not free with respect to the act of falling (Stuart 2013: 408). But the falling man’s unfreedom with respect to the act of falling is not explained by the involuntariness of his falling. In general, it is possible for one’s action to be involuntary even as one is free with respect to it. Imagine that you let your four-year old daughter raise your arm (just for fun). According to Locke’s conception of voluntariness, the motion of your arm is not voluntary, because it is not caused by any volition of yours (indeed, we can even imagine that you do not even have a volition that your arm rise). But, according to Locke’s conception of freedom, you are most certainly free with respect to your arm’s rising: (i) if you will that your arm rise, you have the power to raise it, and (ii) if you will that your arm not rise, you have the power to forbear raising it.

Voluntariness, then, is not necessary for freedom; but it is also not sufficient for freedom, as Locke’s “locked room” and “paralytick” cases show. The man in the locked room wills to stay and talk to the other person in the room, and this volition is causally responsible for his staying in the room: on Locke’s theory, his remaining in the room is, therefore, voluntary. But the man in the locked room “is not at liberty not to stay, he has not freedom to be gone” (E1–5 II.xxi.10: 238). The reason is that even if the man wills to leave, he does not have the power to leave. Similarly, if the paralyzed person wills to remain at rest (thinking, mistakenly, that he could move if he willed to move) and his remaining at rest is caused (at least in part) by his volition not to move, then his “sitting still…is truly voluntary”. But in this case, says Locke, “there is want of Freedom ” because “a Palsie [hinders] his Legs from obeying the determination of his Mind, if it would thereby transferr his Body to another Place” (E2–5 II.xxi.11: 239): that is, the paralyzed person is unable to move even if he wills to move.

Thus far, we have been focusing on freedom with respect to motion or rest of one’s body . But, as we have seen, Locke thinks that actions encompass acts of mind (in addition to acts of body). So, in addition to thinking that some acts of mind are voluntary (e.g., the mental acts of combining and abstracting ideas involved in the production of abstract ideas of mixed modes—E2–5 II.xxxii.12: 387–388), Locke thinks that we are free with respect to some mental actions (and their forbearances). For example, if I am able to combine two ideas at will, and I am able to forbear combining two ideas if I will not to combine them, then I am free with respect to the mental action of combining two ideas. It can also happen that we are not free with respect to our mental acts:

A Man on the Rack, is not at liberty to lay by the Idea of pain, and divert himself with other Contemplations. (E4–5 II.xxi.12: 239)

In this case, even though the man on the rack might will to be rid of the pain, he does not have the power to avoid feeling it. [ 6 ]

Is the will free? This question made sense to Scholastic philosophers (including, e.g., Bramhall, who engaged in a protracted debate on the subject with Hobbes), who tended not to distinguish between the question of whether the will is free and the question of whether the mind or soul is free with respect to willing, and, indeed, some of whom thought that acts cannot themselves be free (or freely done) unless the will to do them is itself free. But, according to Locke, the question, if literally understood, “is altogether improper” (E1–5 II.xxi.14: 240). This follows directly from Locke’s account of the will and his account of freedom. The will is a power (in E2–5, the power to order the motion or rest of one’s body and the power to order the consideration or non-consideration of an idea—see Section 2 above), and freedom is a power, namely the power to do or not do as one wills (see Section 4 above). But, as Locke emphasizes, the question of whether one power has another power is “a Question at first sight too grosly absurd to make a Dispute, or need an Answer”. The reason is that it is absurd to suppose that powers are capable of having powers, for

Powers belong only to Agents , and are Attributes only of Substances , and not of Powers themselves. (E1–5 II.xxi.16: 241)

The question of whether the will is free, then, presupposes that the will is a substance, rather than a power, and therefore makes no more sense than the question of whether a man’s “Sleep be Swift, or his Vertue square” (E1–5 II.xxi.14: 240). To suppose that the will is free (or unfree!) is therefore to make a category mistake (see Ryle 1949: chapter 1).

The fact that it makes no sense to suppose that the will itself is free (or unfree) does not entail that there are no significant questions to be asked about the relation between freedom and the will. Indeed, Locke thinks that there are two such questions, and that these are the questions that capture “what is meant, when it is disputed, Whether the will be free” (E2–5 II.xxi.22: 245). The first (discussed at E1–5 II.xxi.23–24) is whether agents (human beings, persons) are free with respect to willing-one-way-or-another; more particularly, whether agents are able, if they so will, to avoid willing one way or the other with respect to a proposed action. The second (discussed at E1–5 II.xxi.25) is whether agents are free with respect to willing-a-particular-action. The majority of commentators think that Locke answers both of these questions negatively, at least in E1–4 (see Chappell 1994, Lowe 1995, Jolley 1999, Glauser 2003, Stuart 2013, and Leisinger 2017), and some think that Locke then qualifies his answer(s) in E2–5 in a way that potentially introduces inconsistency into his moral psychology (e.g., Chappell 1994). Other commentators think that Locke answers the first question negatively for most actions, but with one important qualification that is clarified and made more explicit in E5, and that he answers the second question positively, all without falling into inconsistency (Rickless 2000; Garrett 2015). What follows is a summary of the interpretive controversies. In the rest of this Section, we focus on the first question. In the next, we focus on the second question.

In E1–4, Locke states his answer to the first question thus:

[ A ] Man in respect of willing any Action in his power once proposed to his Thoughts cannot be free . (E1–4 II.xxi.23: 245)

His argument for the necessity of having either a volition that action A occur or a volition that action A not occur, once A has been proposed to one’s thoughts, is simple and clever: (1) Either A will occur or A will not occur; (2) If A occurs, this will be the result of the agent having willed A to occur; (3) If A does not occur, this will be the result of the agent having willed A not to occur; therefore, (4) The agent necessarily wills one way or the other with respect to A ’s occurrence (see Chappell 1994: 105–106). It follows directly that “in respect of the act of willing , a Man is not free” (E1–4 II.xxi.23: 245). For, first, “ Willing , or Volition [is] an Action” (E1–5 II.xxi.23: 245—this because actions comprise motions of the body and operations of mind, and volition is one of the most important mental operations—E1–5 II.vi.2: 128), and, second, freedom with respect to action A , as Locke defines it, consists in (i) the power to do A if one wills to do A and (ii) the power not to do A if one wills not to do A . Thus, if an agent does not have the power to avoid willing one way or the other with respect to A (even if the agent wills to avoid willing one way or the other with respect to A ), then the agent is not free with respect to willing one way or the other with respect to A .

In his New Essays on Human Understanding (ready for publication in 1704, but not published then because that was the year of Locke’s death) Gottfried Leibniz famously questions premise (3) of this argument:

I would have thought that one can suspend one’s choice, and that this happens quite often, especially when other thoughts interrupt one’s deliberation. Thus, although it is necessary that the action about which one is deliberating must exist or not exist, it doesn’t follow at all that one necessarily has to decide on its existence or non-existence. For its non-existence could well come about in the absence of any decision. (Leibniz 1704 [1981]: 181)

Leibniz’s worry is that, even if one is thinking about whether or not to do A , it is often possible to postpone willing whether to do A , and the non-occurrence of A might well result from such postponement. Under these conditions, it would be false to say that A ’s non-occurrence results from any sort of volition that A not occur. Leibniz illustrates the claim with an amusing reference to a case that the Areopagites (judges on the Areopagus, the highest court of appeals in Ancient Athens) were having trouble deciding, their solution (i.e., de facto , but not de jure , acquittal) being to adjourn it “to a date in the distant future, giving themselves a hundred years to think about it” (Leibniz 1704 [1981]: 181).

It is something of a concern, then, that Locke himself appears committed to agreeing with Leibniz’s criticism of his own argument, at least in E2–5. For in E2–5 (but not in E1) Locke emphasizes his acceptance of the doctrine of suspension, according to which any agent has the “power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires”, during which time the will is not yet “determined to action” (E2–5 II.xxi.47: 263). That is, Locke acknowledges in E2–5, even as he does not remove or alter the argument of II.xxi.23 in E2–4, that it is possible to postpone willing with respect to whether to will one way or the other with respect to some proposed action (see Chappell 1994: 106–107).

However, Locke makes changes in E5 that have suggested to some commentators how he would avoid Leibniz’s criticism without giving up the doctrine of suspension. Recall Locke’s answer to the first question:

[A] Man in respect of willing any Action in his power once proposed to his Thoughts cannot be free. (E1–4 II.xxi.23: 245)

Here, now, is Locke’s restatement of his answer in E5:

[A] Man in respect of willing , or the Act of Volition, when any Action in his power is once proposed to his Thoughts , as presently to be done, cannot be free. (E5 II.xxi.23: 245—added material italicized)

The crucial addition here is the phrase “as presently to be done”. In E5, Locke is not saying that it is with respect to willing one way or the other with respect to any proposed action that an agent is not free: what he is saying is that it is with respect to willing one way or the other with respect to any proposed action as presently to be done that an agent is not free. Some actions that are proposed to us are to occur at the time of proposal : as I am singing, a friend might propose that I stop singing right now . Other actions that are proposed to us are to occur at a time later than the time of proposal : at the beginning of a long bicycle trip, a friend might propose that we take a rest once we have reached our destination. Locke is telling us in E5 that premise (3) is supposed to apply to the former, not to the latter, sort of actions. If this is right, then it is no accident that Locke’s own illustration of the argument of II.xxi.23 involves “a Man that is walking, to whom it is proposed to give off walking” (E1–5 II.xxi.24: 246).

So, as Locke incipiently recognizes as early as E1 but explicitly underlines in E5, his initial answer to the first question is an overgeneralization, and needs to be restricted to those actions that are proposed to us as presently to be done (see Rickless 2000: 49–55; Glauser 2003: 710; Garrett 2015: 274–277). But it is also possible that Locke comes to recognize, and eventually underline, a second restriction. At the moment, I am sitting in a chair. In a few minutes, my children will walk in and propose that I get up and make dinner. I am busy, my mind is occupied, so I will likely postpone (perhaps only for a few minutes) making a decision about whether to get up. The result of such postponement is that I will not get up right away, but this will not be because I have willed not to get up right away. Again, it seems that premise (3) is false, for reasons similar to the ones described by Leibniz. But this time, the relevant action (getting up) is proposed as presently to be done. Locke’s E5 emendations do not explicitly address this sort of example.

However, in E2–5, but not in E1, Locke emphasizes the fact that in his “walking man” example, the man either “continues the Action [of walking], or puts an end to it” (E2–5 II.xxi.24: 246). This suggests a different restriction, on top of the “as presently to be done” restriction. It may be that Locke is thinking that premise (3) applies, not to actions of all kinds, but only to processes in which one is currently engaged. The walking man is already in motion, constantly putting one leg in front of the other. When it is proposed to him that he give off walking, he has no option but to will one way or the other with respect to whether to give off walking: if he stops walking, this will be because he willed that his walking cease; and if he continues to walk, this will be because he willed that his walking continue. Either way, he must will one way or the other with respect to whether to stop walking. By contrast, when I am sitting in my chair, I am not engaged in a process: I am (or, at least, my body is) simply at rest. It is for this reason that it is possible for me to avoid willing with respect to whether to get up right now: processes require volition to secure their continuation, but mere states (non-processes) do not (see Rickless 2000: 49–55; for a contrary view, see Glauser 2003: 710).

Locke’s considered answer to the first question, then, is this: (i) when an action that is a process in which the agent is currently engaged is proposed as presently to be continued or stopped, the agent is not free with respect to willing one way or the other with respect to its continuing, but (ii) when an action is not a process in which the agent is currently engaged or is proposed as to be done sometime in the future, then it is possible for the agent to be free with respect to willing one way or the other with respect to its performance or non-performance. Given that, as Locke puts it in E5, the vast majority of voluntary actions “that succeed one another every moment that we are awake” (E5 II.xxi.24: 246) are (i)-actions rather than (ii)-actions, it makes sense for him to summarize his answer to the first question as that it is “in most cases [that] a Man is not at Liberty to forbear the act of volition” (E5 II.xxi.56: 270). But, as Locke also emphasizes, one has the ability, at least with respect to (ii)-actions, to suspend willing. So there is no inconsistency at the heart of Locke’s theory of freedom in respect of willing.

The second question regarding the relation between freedom and the will that Locke takes to be significant is “ Whether a Man be at liberty to will which of the two he pleases , Motion or Rest ” (E1–5 II.xxi.25: 247). Consider a particular action A . What Locke is asking is whether an agent is free with respect to the action of willing that A occur . For example, suppose that I am sitting in a chair and that A is the action of walking to the fridge. Locke wants to know whether I am free with respect to willing the action of walking to the fridge.

Most commentators think that Locke’s answer to this question is NO. The main evidence for this interpretation is what Locke says about the question immediately after raising it:

This Question carries the absurdity of it so manifestly in it self, that one might thereby sufficiently be convinced, that Liberty concerns not the Will. (E5 II.xxi.25: 247)

It is tempting to suppose that the thought that “Liberty concerns not the Will” is the thought that agents are not free to will, and that Locke is saying that we are driven to this thought because the second question is absurd, in the sense of demanding a negative answer.

But it is difficult to make sense of what Locke goes on to say in II.xxi.25 if he is interpreted as answering the second question negatively. Section 25 continues:

For to ask, whether a Man be at liberty to will either Motion, or Rest; Speaking, or Silence; which he pleases, is to ask, whether a Man can will , what he wills ; or be pleased with what he is pleased with. (E1–5 II.xxi.25: 247)

Locke says that the second question reduces to another that can be put in two different ways: whether a man can will what he wills, and whether a man can be pleased with what pleases him. (The reason it can be put in these two different ways, at least in E1, is that Locke there adopts a desiderative theory of willing, according to which willing an action is a matter of being more pleased with the action than with its forbearance.) But asking whether a man can will what he wills, or whether a man can be pleased with what he is pleased with, is similar to asking whether a man can steal what he steals. And the answer to all of these questions is: “OF COURSE!”

It is obvious that whatever it is that a man actually steals he can steal. Similarly, it is obvious that whatever it is that a man actually wills (or is actually pleased with) is something that he can will (or can be pleased with). The reason is that it is a self-evident maxim (just as self-evident as the maxim that whatever is, is—see E1–5 IV.vii.4: 592–594) that whatever is actual is possible. Locke, it seems, wishes to answer the second question in the affirmative!

This raises the issue of what Locke could possibly mean, then, when he describes the second question as “absurd”. One possibility is that, for Locke, a question counts as absurd not only when the answer to it is obviously in the negative (think: “Is the will free?”), but also when the answer to it is obviously in the affirmative (think: “Is it possible for you to do what you are actually doing?”). But it also raises the issue of why Locke would think that the second question actually reduces to an absurd question of the latter sort. One possible solution derives from Locke’s theory of freedom of action. As we have seen, Locke thinks that one is free with respect to action A if and only if (i) if one (actually) wills to do A , then one can do A , and (ii) if one (actually) wills not to do A , then one can avoid doing A . Applying this theory directly to the case in which A is the action of willing to do B , we arrive at the following: one is free with respect to willing to do B if and only if (i) if one (actually) wills to will to do B , then one can will to do B , and (ii) if one (actually) wills to avoid willing to do B , then one can avoid willing to do B . Suppose, then, that willing to will to do an action is just willing to do that action, and willing to avoid willing to do an action is just not willing to do that action. In that case, one is free with respect to willing to do B if and only if (i) if one (actually) wills to do B , then one can will to do B , and (ii) if one (actually) avoids willing to do B , then one can avoid willing to do B . Given that actuality obviously entails possibility, it follows that (i) and (ii) are both obviously true. This is one explanation for why Locke might think that the question of whether one is free with respect to willing to do B reduces to an absurd question, the answer to which is obviously in the affirmative. It may be for this reason that Locke says that the question is one that “needs no answer” (E1–5 II.xxi.25: 247).

Locke goes on to say, at the end of II.xxi.25, that

they, who can make a Question of it [i.e., of the second question], must suppose one Will to determine the Acts of another, and another to determinate that; and so on in infinitum . (E1–5 II.xxi.25: 247)

It is unclear what Locke means by this. One possibility, consistent with the majority interpretation that Locke provides a negative answer to the second question, is that Locke is providing an argument here for the claim that the proposition that it is possible to be free with respect to willing to do an action leads to a vicious infinite regress of wills. The thought here is that being free with respect to willing to do an action, on Locke’s theory, requires being able to will to do an action if one wills to will to do it; that being free with respect to willing to will to do an action then requires being able to will to will to do it if one wills to will to will to do it; and so on, ad infinitum . But another possible interpretation, consistent with the minority interpretation that Locke provides an affirmative answer to the second question, is that Locke’s argument here is not meant to target those who answer the question affirmatively, but is rather designed to target those who would “make a question” of the second question, i.e., those who think that the answer to the second question is un obvious, and worth disputing. These people are the ones who think that willing to will to do A does not reduce to willing to do A , and that willing to avoid willing to do A does not reduce to avoiding willing to do A . These are the people who are committed to the existence of an infinite regress of wills, each determining the volitions of its successor. According to Locke, who accepts the reductions, the infinite regress of wills can’t get started (see Rickless 2000: 56–65; Garrett 2015: 269–274).

The next important question for Locke is “what is it determines the Will” (E2–5 II.xxi.29: 249—the question is also raised in the same Section in E1). Locke gives one answer to this question in E1, and a completely different answer in E2–5. The E1 answer is that the will is always determined by “ the greater Good ” (E1 II.xxi.29: 251), though, when he is writing more carefully, Locke says that it is only “the appearance of Good, greater Good” that determines the will (E1 II.xxi.33: 256, E1 II.xxi.38: 270). Regarding the good, Locke is a hedonist:

Good and Evil…are nothing but Pleasure and Pain, or that which occasions, or procures Pleasure or Pain to us. (E1–5 II.xxviii.5: 351—see also E1–5 II.xx.2: 229 and E2–5 II.xxi.42: 259)

So Locke’s E1 view is that the will is determined by what appears to us to promise pleasure and avoid pain.

When in 1692 Locke asks his friend, William Molyneux, to comment on the first (1690) edition of the Essay , Molyneux expressly worries that Locke’s E1 account of freedom appears to “make all Sins to proceed from our Understandings, or to be against Conscience; and not at all from the Depravity of our Wills”, and that “it seems harsh to say, that a Man shall be Damn’d, because he understands no better than he does” (de Beer 1979: 601). Molyneux’s point is well taken, and Locke acknowledges as much in his reply (de Beer 1979: 625). The source of the problem for the E1 account is that, with respect to the good (at least in the future), appearance does not always correspond with reality: it is possible for us to make mistakes about what is apt to produce the greatest pleasure and the least pain. Sometimes this is because we underestimate how pleasurable future pleasures will be (relative to present pleasures) or overestimate how painful present pains are (relative to future pains); and sometimes this is because we just make simple mistakes of fact, thinking, for example, that bloodletting will ease the pain of gout. As Molyneux sees it, we are not responsible for many of these mistakes, and yet it seems clear that we deserve (divine) punishment for making the wrong choices in our lives (e.g., when we choose the present pleasures of debauchery and villainy over the pleasures of heaven). Our sins, in other words, should be understood to proceed from the defective exercise of our wills, rather than from the defective state of our knowledge.

Part of Locke’s answer in E2–5 is that what determines the will is not the appearance of greater good, but rather “always some uneasiness” (E2–4 II.xxi.29: 249—the word “uneasiness” is italicized in E5). “Uneasiness” is Locke’s word for “[a]ll pain of the body of what sort soever, and disquiet of the mind” (E2–5 II.xxi.31: 251). On this view, then, our wills are determined by pains (of the mind or of the body). How this answer is supposed to address Molyneux’s concern is not, as yet, entirely clear.

What, to begin, does Locke mean by “determination”? On a “causal” reading, for a will W to be determined by X is for X to cause W to be exercised in a particular way. One might say, for example, that fear of the tiger caused Bill to choose to run away from it, and, in one sense, that Bill’s volition to run away from the tiger was determined by his fear of it. On a “teleological” reading, for a will W to be determined by X is for the agent to will the achievement or avoidance of X as a goal. One might say, for example, that the pleasure of eating the cake determined my will in the sense of fixing the content of my volition (as the volition to acquire the pleasure of eating the cake) (see Stuart 2013: 439; LoLordo 2012: 55–56).

It would be anachronistic to suppose that Locke is using the word “determine” as we do today when we discuss causal determinism (see the entry on causal determinism ). And the desire to avoid anachronism might lead us to adopt the teleological interpretation of determination. But there are many indications in E2–5 II.xxi that Locke has something approaching the causal interpretation in mind. Locke’s picture of bodies, both large and small, is largely a mechanistic one (though he allows for phenomena that can’t be explained mechanistically, such as gravitation, cohesion of body parts, and magnetism): bodies, he writes, “knock, impell, and resist one another,…and that is all they can do” (E1–5 IV.x.10: 624). And there are indications that this mechanistic model of corporeal behavior affects Locke’s model of mental phenomena. Throughout the Sections of II.xxi added in E2–5, Locke talks of uneasiness moving the mind (E2–5 II.xxi.29: 249; E2–5 II.xxi.43–44: 260), setting us upon a change of state or action or work (E2–5 II.xxi.29: 249; E2–5 II.xxi.31: 251; E2–5 II.xxi.37: 255; E2–5 II.xxi.44: 260), working on the mind (E2–5 II.xxi.29: 249; E2–5 II.xxi.33: 252), exerting pressure (E2–5 II.xxi.32: 251; E2–5 II.xxi.45: 262), driving us (E2–5 II.xxi.34: 252; E2–5 II.xxi.35: 253), pushing us (E2–5 II.xxi.34: 252), operating on the will, sometimes forcibly (E2–5 II.xxi.36: 254; E2–5 II.xxi.37: 255; E2–5 II.xxi.57: 271), laying hold on the will (E2–5 II.xxi.38: 256), influencing the will (E2–5 II.xxi.38: 256; E2–5 II.xxi.39: 257), taking the will (E2–5 II.xxi.45: 262), spurring to action (E2–5 II.xxi.40: 258), carrying us into action (E2–5 II.xxi.53: 268), and being counterbalanced by other mental states (E2–5 II.xxi.57: 272; E2–5 II.xxi.65: 277). It is difficult to read all of these statements without thinking that Locke thinks of uneasiness as exerting not merely a pull, but also a push, on the mind.

Locke’s view, then, seems to be that our volitions are caused (though not, perhaps, deterministically, i.e., in a way that is fixed by initial conditions and the laws of nature) by uneasinesses. How is this supposed to work? As Locke sees it, either “all pain causes desire equal to it self” (E2–5 II.xxi.31: 251) or desire is simply identified with “ uneasiness in the want [i.e., lack] of an absent good” (E2–5 II.xxi.31: 251). So the desire that either is or is caused by uneasiness is a desire for the removal of that uneasiness, and this is what proximately spurs us to take means to secure that removal.

Locke provides evidence from observation and from “the reason of the thing” for the claim that it is uneasiness, rather than perceived good, that determines the will. Empirically, Locke notes that agents generally do not seek a change of state unless they experience some sort of pain that leads them to will its extinction. A poor, indolent man who is content with his lot, even one who recognizes that he would be happier if he worked his way to greater wealth, is not ipso facto motivated to work. A drunkard who recognizes that his health will suffer and wealth will dissipate if he continues to drink does not, merely as a result of this recognition, stop drinking: but if he finds himself thirsty for drink and uneasy at the thought of missing his drinking companions, then he will go to the tavern. That is, Locke recognizes the possibility of akratic action, i.e., pursuing the worse in full knowledge that it is worse (E II.xxi.35: 253–254). (For more on Locke on akrasia, see Vailati 1990, Glauser 2014, and Moauro and Rickless 2019.)

Regarding “the reason of the thing”, Locke claims that “we constantly desire happiness” (E2–5 II.xxi.39: 257), where happiness is “the utmost Pleasure we are capable of” (E2–5 II.xxi.42: 258). Moreover, he says, any amount of uneasiness is inconsistent with happiness, “a little pain serving to marr all the pleasure” we experience. Locke concludes from this that we are always motivated to get rid of pain before securing any particular pleasure (E2–5 II.xxi.36: 254). Locke also argues that absent goods cannot move the will, because they don’t exist yet; by contrast, on his theory, the will is determined by something that already exists in the mind, namely uneasiness (E2–5 II.xxi.37: 254–255). Finally, Locke argues that if the will were determined by the perceived greater good, every agent would be consistently focused on the attainment of “the infinite eternal Joys of Heaven”. But, as is evidently the case, many agents are far more concerned about other matters than they are about getting into heaven. And this entails that the will must be determined by something other than the perceived greater good, namely, uneasiness (E2–5 II.xxi.38: 255–256). (For interesting criticisms of these arguments, see Stuart 2013: 453–456.)

So far, Locke has argued that the wrong turns we make in life do not usually proceed from defects in our understandings. What spurs us to act or forbear acting is not perception of the greater good, but some uneasiness instead. This answers part, but not the whole, of Molyneux’s worry. What Locke still needs to explain is why agents can be justly held responsible for choices that are motivated by uneasinesses. After all, what level of pain we feel and when we feel it is oftentimes not within our control. Locke’s answer relies on what has come to be known as the “doctrine of suspension”.

Having argued that uneasiness, rather than perception of the greater good, is what determines the will, Locke turns to the question of which of all the uneasinesses that beset us “has the precedency in determining the will to the next action”. His answer:

that ordinarily, which is the most pressing of those [uneasinesses], that are judged capable of being then removed. (E2–5 II.xxi.40: 257)

Locke therefore assumes that uneasinesses can be ranked in order of intensity or strength, and that among all the uneasinesses importuning an agent, the one that ordinarily determines her will is the one that exerts the greatest pressure on her mind. The picture with which Locke appears to be working is of a mind that is the playground of various forces of varying strengths exerting different degrees of influence on the will, where the will is determined by the strongest of those forces.

Notice, however, Locke’s use of the word “ordinarily”. Sometimes, as Locke emphasizes, the will is not determined by the most pressing uneasiness:

For the mind having in most cases, as is evident in Experience, a power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires, and so all, one after another, is at liberty to consider the objects of them; examine them on all sides, and weigh them with others. (E2–5 II.xxi.47: 263)

This is the doctrine of suspension. On this view, we agents have the “power to suspend any particular desire, and keep it from determining the will , and engaging us in action” (E2–5 II.xxi.50: 266). As Locke makes clear, this power to prevent the will’s determination, that is, this power to avoid willing, is absent when the action proposed is to be done presently and involves the continuation or stopping of a process in which one is currently engaged (see Section 6 above). But when it comes to “chusing a remote [i.e., future] Good as an end to be pursued”, agents are “at Liberty in respect of willing ” (E5 II.xxi.56: 270). [ 7 ]

Some commentators (e.g., Chappell 1994: 118) think that, at least in E5, Locke comes to see that the doctrine of suspension conflicts with his answer to the question of whether we are free to will what we will (raised in II.xxi.25). This is because they take Locke’s answer to the latter question to be negative, and take the doctrine of suspension to entail a positive answer to the same question, at least with respect to some actions. But there are good reasons to think that there is no inconsistency here: for Locke’s answer to the II.xxi.25 question is arguably in the affirmative (see Section 7 above). [ 8 ]

Commentators also wonder whether the doctrine of suspension introduces an account of freedom that differs from Locke’s official account, both in E1 and in E2–5. The problem is that Locke says that “in [the power to suspend the prosecution of one’s desires] lies the liberty Man has”, that the power to suspend is “the source of all liberty” (E2–5 II.xxi.47: 263), that it is “the hinge on which turns the liberty of intellectual Beings” (E2–5 II.xxi.52: 266), and that it is “the great inlet, and exercise of all the liberty Men have, are capable of, or can be useful to them” (E2–5 II.xxi.52: 267). These passages suggest that Locke takes freedom to be (something intimately related to) the power to suspend our desires, a power that cannot simply be identified with the two-way power that Locke identifies with freedom of action at II.xxi.8 ff. (see Yaffe 2000: 12–74).

But there is a simple interpretation of these passages that does not require us to read Locke as offering a different account of freedom as the ability to suspend. The power to suspend is the power to keep one’s will from being determined, that is, the power to forbear willing to do A if one wills to forbear willing to do A . This is just one part of the freedom to will to do A , according to Locke’s definition of freedom of action applied to the action of willing to do A . (The other part is the power to will to do A if one wills to will to do A .) Thus if, as Locke seems to argue in II.xxi.23–24, we are (except under very unusual circumstances) free with respect to the act of willing with respect to a future course of action, then it follows immediately that we have the power to suspend. Locke’s claims about the power to suspend being the source of all liberty and the hinge on which liberty turns can be understood as claims that the power to suspend is a particularly important aspect of freedom of action as applied to the action of willing. What makes it important is the fact that it is the misuse of this freedom that accounts for our responsibility for actions that conduce to our own unhappiness or misery.

How so? Locke claims that the power of suspension was given to us (by God) for a reason, so that we might “examine, view, and judge, of the good or evil of what we are going to do” (E2–5 II.xxi.47: 263) in order to discover

whether that particular thing, which is then proposed, or desired, lie in the way to [our] main end, and make a real part of that which is [our] greatest good. (E2–5 II.xxi.52: 267)

When we make the kinds of mistakes for which we deserve punishment, such as falling into gluttony or envy or selfishness, it is not because we have, after deliberation and investigation, perhaps through no fault of our own, acquired a mistaken view of the facts; it is because we engage in “a too hasty compliance with our desires” (E2–5 II.xxi.53: 268) and fail to “hinder blind Precipitancy” (E2–5 II.xxi.67: 279). What matters is not that we have failed to will the forbearing to will to go to the movies or clean the fridge. What matters is that we have failed to will the forbearing to prosecute our most pressing desires, allowing ourselves to be guided by uneasinesses that might, for all we know, lead us to evil. If we have the power to suspend the prosecution of our desires (including our most pressing desire), then we misuse it when we do not exercise it (or when we fail to exercise it when its exercise is called for). So, not only is Locke’s doctrine of suspension consistent with his account of the freedom to will, it also provides part of the answer to Molyneux’s worry:

And here we may see how it comes to pass, that a Man may justly incur punishment…: Because, by a too hasty choice of his own making, he has imposed on himself wrong measures of good and evil…He has vitiated his own Palate, and must be answerable to himself for the sickness and death that follows from it. (E2–5 II.xxi.56: 270–271) [ 9 ]

Compatibilism is the thesis that free will is compatible with causal determinism, and incompatibilism is the thesis that free will is incompatible with causal determinism. Is Locke a compatibilist or an incompatibilist?

The fact that Locke thinks that freedom of action is compatible with the will’s being determined by uneasiness might immediately suggest that Locke is a compatibilist. But, as we have seen ( Section 8 above), it is illegitimate to infer compatibility with causal determinism from compatibility with determination of the will by uneasiness. Still, the evidence strongly suggests that Locke would have embraced compatibilism, if the issue had been put to him directly. Freedom of action, on Locke’s account, is a matter of being able to do what one wills and being able to forbear what one wills to forbear. Although we sometimes act under necessity (compulsion or restraint—E1–5 II.xxi.13: 240), the mere fact (if it is a fact) that our actions are determined by the laws of nature and antecedent events does not threaten our freedom with respect to their performance. As Locke makes clear, if the door to my room is unlocked, I am free with respect to the act of leaving the room, because I have the ability to stay or leave as I will. It is only when the door is locked, or when I am chained, or when my path is blocked, or something else deprives me of the ability to stay or leave, that I am unfree with respect to the act of leaving. Determinism by itself represents no threat to our freedom of action. In this respect, Locke is a forerunner of many other compatibilist theories of freedom, including, for example, those of G.E. Moore (1912) and A.J. Ayer (1954). (For a contrary view, see Schouls 1992: 121. And for a response to Schouls 1992, see Davidson 2003: 213 ff.)

• de Beer, E.S. (ed), 1979, The Correspondence of John Locke , volume 4, Letters 1242–1701, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 1704 [1981], New Essays on Human Understanding , edited by Jonathan Bennett and Peter Remnant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
• Locke, John, 1690, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , edited by Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
• Ayer, A.J., 1954, “Freedom and Necessity”, in Philosophical Essays , London: Macmillan, pp. 271–284.
• Chappell, Vere, 1994, “Locke on the Freedom of the Will”, in Locke’s Philosophy: Content and Context , edited by G.A.J. Rogers, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 101–121.
• –––, 2004, “Review of Liberty Worth the Name , by Gideon Yaffe”, Mind , 113: 420–424.
• –––, 2007, “Power in Locke’s Essay ”, in The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” , edited by Lex Newman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 130–156.
• Chisholm, Roderick, 1966, “Freedom and Action”, in Freedom and Determinism , edited by Keith Lehrer, New York: Random House, pp. 11–44.
• Davidson, Donald, 1980, “Freedom to Act”, in Essays on Actions and Events , Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 63–81.
• Davidson, Jack D., 2003, “Locke’s Finely Spun Liberty”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 33: 203–227.
• Dicker, Georges, 2019, Locke on Knowledge and Reality: A Commentary on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, New York: Oxford University Press, Chapter 9.
• Garrett, Don, 2015, “Liberty and Suspension in Locke’s Theory of the Will”, in A Companion to Locke , edited by Matthew Stuart, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 260–278.
• Glauser, Richard, 2003, “Thinking and Willing in Locke’s Theory of Human Freedom”, Dialogue , 42: 695–724.
• –––, 2014, ‘Locke and the Problem of Weakness of the Will’, in Mind, Values, and Metaphysics , Anne Reboul (ed.), Cham: Springer, pp. 483–499.
• Hoffman, Paul, 2005, “Locke on the Locked Room”, Locke Studies , 5: 57–73.
• Jolley, Nicholas, 1999, Locke: His Philosophical Thought , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Leisinger, Matthew A., 2017, ‘Locke’s Arguments Against the Freedom to Will’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy , 25: 642–662.
• Locke, Don, 1975, “Three Concepts of Free Action, Part 1”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplemental Volume), 49: 95–112.
• LoLordo, Antonia, 2012, Locke’s Moral Man , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lowe, E.J., 1986, “Necessity and the Will in Locke’s Theory of Action”, History of Philosophy Quarterly , 3: 149–163.
• –––, 1995, Locke on Human Understanding , London: Routledge.
• –––, 2004, “Locke: Compatibilist Event-Causalist or Libertarian Substance-Causalist?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 48: 688–701.
• –––, 2005, Locke , London: Routledge.
• Magri, Tito, 2000, “Locke, Suspension of Desire, and the Remote Good”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy , 8: 55–70.
• Mill, John Stuart, 1974 [1843], System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive , in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill , Vol. 7, edited by J.M. Robson, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Moauro, Leonardo, and Rickless, Samuel C., 2019, ‘Does Locke Have an Akrasia Problem?’, Journal of Modern Philosophy , 1: 9. doi:10.32881/jomp.39
• Moore, G.E., 1912, Ethics , London: Williams and Norgate.
• O’Higgins, J., 1976, “Introduction” and “Notes”, in Determinism and Freewill: Anthony Collins’ A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty , edited by J. O’Higgins, The Hague: Nijhoff, pp. 1–45 and 115–124.
• Rickless, Samuel C., 2000, “Locke on the Freedom to Will”, Locke Newsletter (now Locke Studies ), 31: 43–67.
• –––, 2001, “Review of Liberty Worth the Name: Locke on Free Agency , by Gideon Yaffe”, Locke Studies , 1: 235–255.
• –––, 2014, Locke , Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Ryle, Gilbert, 1949, The Concept of Mind , London: Hutchinson.
• Schaffer, Jonathan, 2003, “Overdetermining Causes”, Philosophical Studies , 114: 23–45.
• Schouls, Peter, 1992, Reasoned Freedom: John Locke and Enlightenment , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Stuart, Matthew, 2013, Locke’s Metaphysics , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Taylor, Richard, 1966, Action and Purpose , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
• Vailati, Ezio, 1990, ‘Leibniz on Locke on Weakness of Will’, Journal of the History of Philosophy , 28: 213–228.
• Walsh, Julie, 2014, “Locke and the Power to Suspend Desire”, Locke Studies , 14: 121–157.
• –––, 2018, ‘Locke’s Last Word on Freedom: Correspondence with Limborch’, Res Philosophica , 95: 637–661.
• Yaffe, Gideon, 2000, Liberty Worth the Name: Locke on Free Agency , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Yolton, John W., 1970, Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Broad, Jacqueline, 2006, “A Woman’s Influence? John Locke and Damaris Masham on Moral Accountability”, Journal of the History of Ideas , 67: 489–510.
• Chappell, Vere, 1994, “Locke on the Intellectual Basis of Sin”, Journal of the History of Philosophy , 32: 197–207.
• –––, 1998, “Locke on the Suspension of Desire”, Locke Newsletter (now Locke Studies ), 29: 23–38.
• Colman, John, 1983, John Locke’s Moral Philosophy , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Corneanu, Sorana, 2011, Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Darwall, Stephen, 1995, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’, 1640–1740 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Glauser, Richard, 2009, “Liberté, Compatibilisme et Agnosticisme chez Locke”, Revue Philosophique de Louvain , 107: 675–697.
• Harris, James, 2005, Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• LoLordo, Antonia, 2013, “Reply to Rickless”, Locke Studies , 13: 55–64.
• Marko, Jonathan S., 2017, ‘Why Locke’s Of Power Is Not a Metaphysical Pronouncement: Locke’s Response to Molyneux’s Critique’, Philosophy and Theology: Marquette University Quarterly , 29: 41–68.
• Rickless, Samuel C., 2013, “Locke on Active Power, Freedom, and Moral Agency”, Locke Studies , 13: 33–54.
• –––, 2013, ‘Will and Motivation’, in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century , Peter R. Anstey (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 393–414.
• Schindler, D. C., 2017, Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty , Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, Chapter 1.
• Sleigh, Robert, Vere Chappell, and Michael Della Rocca, 1998, ‘Determinism and Human Freedom’, in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy , Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Volume 2: 1195–1278.
• Walsh, Julie, 2010, “‘Things’ for ‘Actions’: Locke’s Mistake in ‘Of Power’”, Locke Studies , 10: 85–94.
• Wolfe, Charles T, 2009, “Locke’s Compatibilism: Suspension of Desire of Suspension of Determinism?” in Action, Ethics and Responsibility , edited by Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke, and Harry Silverstein, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 109–126.
• Yaffe, Gideon, 2001, “Locke on Refraining, Suspending, and the Freedom to Will”, History of Philosophy Quarterly , 18: 373–391.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Locke: Ethics entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy , by Julie Walsh.

agency | Collins, Anthony | compatibilism | determinism: causal | euthanasia: voluntary | free will | Hobbes, Thomas | Hume, David: on free will | incompatibilism: (nondeterministic) theories of free will | Locke, John | Locke, John: moral philosophy | Masham, Lady Damaris

Copyright © 2020 by Samuel Rickless < srickless @ ucsd . edu >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

The Constitutionalist

The politics of constitutions.

Education As the Root of Freedom

Jeffrey Tyler Syck is a PhD candidate in the University of Virginia Department of Politics.

There is nothing more American than freedom. The United States is the “land of the free” and her president is the “leader of the free world.” In short, there is little we Americans take more pride in than our freedoms. Despite this fact, we often find ourselves torn between two different conceptions of freedom – the personal and the political. Personal freedom demands that humans restrain our selfish passions, while political freedom requires the lack of restraint necessary to author our own destinies.  Perhaps shockingly, given these seemingly irreconcilable differences, the reality is that liberal democracy can only ever be sustained by a civilization that appreciates both meanings of freedom. Without personal freedom society descends first into disorder and then into despotism, without political freedom we can only ever be slaves to the state. Modern America has tragically forgotten this important reality and thus imperiled both brands of liberty. John Quincy Adams, one of America’s greatest thinkers and statesmen, dedicated his life to solving this same difficulty in his own lifetime. Through his writings, he shows us that the path to renewing our free society and healing the political divide that dominates our age lay in strengthening both brands of freedom. The first step of this noble endeavor is the spread of liberal arts education.

That education is such a vital part of freedom may strike the modern citizen as unusual. After all, most of us today define freedom as simply doing whatever we wish as long as it does not harm anyone else. However, this is because we have lost a full appreciation for the two primary meanings of freedom. 

Political freedom means that individuals can do what they think is right without undue interference from outside forces. As the British thinker Lord Acton put it, echoing Adams’ view, freedom is the “assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities.” This first part of freedom is vital. Political tyranny corrupts both the ruler and the ruled. It turns the citizen into a servant and makes the unfettered pursuit of the Good nearly impossible. This freedom can be fully achieved only in a restrained government, one that places relatively few constraints on the individual or community.

In addition to the unrestrained nature of political freedom, personal freedom demands restraint and the fulfillment of duties. This sort of liberty requires dedication to virtue, essentially agreeing with the definition of freedom offered by  John Paul II when he declared that “Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.” To achieve personal freedom we must all strive to cultivate virtue. This means aiming for improvement in all aspects of life and living selflessly for others rather than oneself. If we fail to cultivate personal freedom within ourselves, we become enslaved to our selfish desires. Just as a political tyranny makes us servants of the state, the tyranny of our degraded desires makes us mere animals. Both must be overcome if we truly wish to exercise our free will. 

Reconciling these two different definitions of freedom served as one of the keys of John Quincy Adams’ broader political project and explain the vitality of education in creating a free society. He argued that a lack of personal freedom usually leads to a lack of political freedom. When a society becomes consumed with selfishness it becomes disordered. In the face of this chaos, the state assumes powers it has no right to, and the people, weakened by their lack of virtue, put up very little fight. As Adams once observed “Virtue is the oxygen, the vital air of the moral world. Immutable and incorruptible itself” unless “the whole soul of every citizen” of a republic is dedicated to improving “the condition of his country and of mankind” then freedom and justice cannot survive. This was no mere theoretical claim. Adams was always happy to point out examples of great republics that followed this pattern such as Athens, Rome, or Florence. 

Many on the political right and left today seem to understand the danger of moral collapse in America, and to promote virtue they advocate laws that restrict human behavior. Just recently the Department of Education proposed regulations restricting due process in an effort to end sexual assault on college campuses. Meanwhile, some Republican candidates, among other personal restrictions, have proposed banning contraceptives. The problem with such laws is that they almost inevitably lead to political tyranny. Even if one was hypothetically willing to sacrifice political freedom for personal freedom, it is not possible. Adams pointed to the example of the Middle Ages as proof of his argument. Though much more religiously open-minded than most Protestants at the time, Adams thought the Catholic church–at least pre-reformation–had not allowed their parishioners to fully participate in the life of Christ. They could not read the scriptures in their native language, the sermons were usually in Latin, and priests existed on a social and intellectual plane far removed from their congregants. Instead, citizens were forced by the laws of their nation to behave virtuously without even understanding what virtue was. As Adams himself put it : “[i]n the theories of the crown and the miter, man had no rights. Neither the body nor the soul of the individual was his own.” Adams also observed that the works of Tacitus show that Augustus Caesar believed himself to be restoring Rome by assuming absolute authority and mandating goodness, but that this legally required virtue did not last long. Inevitably the people of Rome descended into selfishness and vice worse than that Augustus was attempting to avoid.  

How does one reconcile the demands of personal and political freedom? John Quincy Adams’ answer was education. He contended that at its very best education acquaints students with a variety of ideas and subjects united by their permeant relevance to human life. No education is complete without a serious study of history, literature, mathematics, science, philosophy, or religion. All these subjects in their own way, and when taught correctly, instruct students in the permanent things. The things which have been true in all ages and upon which mankind can build a solid moral outlook. Adams summarized this point during a speech he gave while visiting his hometown towards the end of his life: “Education is the business of human life … as the child must be educated upon earth, so the man must be educated upon earth, for heaven; and finally that where the foundation is not laid in Time, the superstructure cannot rise for Eternity.” 

As president, Adams emphasized the importance of  to ensure that a liberal arts education formed a vital part of the nascent republic. He argued in his first annual message to Congress that the United States has a duty to “contribute their share of mind, of labor, and of expense to the improvement of human knowledge which lie beyond the reach of individual acquisition.” He argued that by bringing together the future leaders of the nation in one university we would be able to ensure the inculcation of values that naturally flow from a liberal arts education. In the process undermining sectional and factional divisions that in his lifetime (as in ours) increasingly threatened to split the country apart. 

For a number of reasons, the idea of a national university is not as applicable as it once was. We are a much larger nation and the consolidation of training the nation’s future leaders in the hands of one set of faculty seems a recipe for disaster. However, Adams was right to emphasize the importance of a liberal arts education in cultivating a free society. Though tragically, for the last fifty years liberal arts education has been declining in the United States.  Fewer and fewer institutions of higher education offer a curriculum that even remotely whiffs of the liberal arts and primary education long ago stopped equipping its students with this vital resource. The consequences of this decline are clear. Social degradation and the weakening of the moral imagination have led to a brutally self-centered culture. Everywhere people feel less free and less happy. The desperation to move past these problems has caused ideological extremism to flourish pushing our country further away from not only personal freedom but political freedom. 

Given this, it is unsurprising that in the last year, education has become the centerpiece of American politics. Local school board meetings are suddenly national news and many of the most hotly contested policy debates revolve around the content found in our classrooms. As John Quincy Adams well understood, what we think as a people determines who we are as a nation. When the right ideas live in the heart of our citizens America is prosperous and free; when these ideas are corrupted society becomes oppressive and selfish. If our civilization is to truly flourish, we must push passed the clamor of the culture wars and build our society on the firm foundation of a liberal arts education.  

Share Our Content

24 thoughts on “ education as the root of freedom ”.

• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom - Winners Investing
• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom -
• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom - United Push Back
• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom
• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom - ETF Alerts
• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom – Investings Keeper
• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom – Market Trend Alert
• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom - Daily News Alertz
• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom - Stable Confidence - Investing and Stock News
• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom – True Success Scape – Investing and Stock News
• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom – MAGAtoon
• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom – United for Profit
• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom – Beneficial Investment Now – Investing and Stock News
• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom – Market Daily Updates
• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom |
• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom - Capitalists And Money
• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom - Online Investing Daily
• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom – Activist Donor
• Pingback: Education as the root of freedom - DEUV
• Pingback: Education As the Root of Freedom - Business In News
• Pingback: Recovering Virtue Means Recovering Self-Government – Tyler SyckLegal News & Law Articles | 101now ®
• Pingback: Recovering Virtue Means Recovering Self-Government – Tyler Syck - VBLSA
• Pingback: Recovering Virtue Means Recovering Self-Government – Tyler Syck – Audit Student
• Pingback: Recovering Virtue Means Recovering Self-Government - Building Blocks for Liberty

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Discover more from the constitutionalist.

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

25,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Meet top uk universities from the comfort of your home, here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

• School Education /

Essay on Freedom in 100, 200 and 300 Words

• Updated on  
• Nov 15, 2023

Before starting to write an essay on freedom, you must understand what this multifaceted term means. Freedom is not just a term, but a concept holding several meanings. Freedom generally refers to being able to act, speak or think as one wants without any restrictions or hindrances. Freedom encompasses the ability to make independent decisions and express your thoughts without any fear so that one can achieve their goals and aspirations. Let’s check out some essays on freedom for more brief information.

This Blog Includes:

Essay on freedom in 100 words, essay on freedom in 200 words, essay on freedom in 300 words.

Also Read: English Essay Topics

Also Read: How to Write an Essay in English

Also Read: Speech on Republic Day for Class 12th

Freedom is considered the essence of human existence because it serves as the cornerstone on which societal developments and individual identities are shaped. Countries with democracy consider freedom as one of the fundamental rights for every individual to make choices and live life according to their free will, desires and aspirations. This free will to make decisions has been a driving force behind countless movements, revolutions and societal progress throughout history.

Political freedom entails the right to participate in governance, express dissent, and engage in public discourse without the threat of censorship or retribution. It is the bedrock of democratic societies, fostering an environment where diverse voices can be heard.

Also Read: In Pursuit of Freedom- India’s Journey to Independence From 1857 to 1947

Freedom is considered the lifeblood of human progress and the foundation of a just and equitable society. It is a beacon of hope that inspires individuals to strive for a world where every person can live with dignity and pursue their dreams without fear or constraint. Some consider freedom as the catalyst for personal growth and the cultivation of one’s unique identity, enabling individuals to explore their full potential and contribute their talents to the world.

• On a personal level, freedom is synonymous with autonomy and self-determination . It grants individuals the liberty to choose their paths, make decisions in accordance with their values, and pursue their passions without the shackles of external influence.
• In the political sphere, it underpins the democratic process, allowing individuals to participate in governance and express their opinions without retribution.
• Socially, it ensures equality and respect for all, regardless of differences in race, gender, or beliefs.

However, freedom comes with the responsibility to exercise it within the bounds of respect for others and collective well-being. Balancing individual liberties with the greater good is crucial for maintaining societal harmony. Upholding freedom requires a commitment to fostering a world where everyone can live with dignity and pursue their aspirations without undue restrictions.

Also read: Essay on Isaac Newton

Freedom is considered the inherent right that lies at the core of human existence. It encompasses the ability to think, act and speak without any restrictions or coercion, allowing individuals to pursue their aspirations and live their lives according to their own values and beliefs. Ranging from personal to political domains, freedom shapes the essence of human dignity and progress.

• In the political sphere, freedom is the bedrock of democratic societies, fostering an environment where citizens have the right to participate in the decision-making process, voice their concerns, and hold their leaders accountable.
• It serves as a safeguard against tyranny and authoritarian government , ensuring that governance remains transparent, inclusive, and responsive to the needs of the people.
• Social freedom is essential for fostering inclusivity and equality within communities. It demands the eradication of discrimination based on race, gender, religion, or any other characteristic, creating a space where every individual is treated with dignity and respect.
• Social freedom facilitates the celebration of diversity and the recognition of the intrinsic worth of every human being, promoting a society that thrives on mutual understanding and cooperation.
• On an individual or personal level, freedom signifies the autonomy to make choices, follow one’s passions, and cultivate a sense of self-worth. It encourages individuals to pursue their aspirations and fulfil their potential, fostering personal growth and fulfilment.
• The ability to express oneself freely and to pursue one’s ambitions without fear of reprisal or oppression is integral to the development of a healthy and vibrant society.

However, exercising freedom necessitates a responsible approach that respects the rights and freedoms of others. The delicate balance between individual liberty and collective well-being demands a conscientious understanding of the impact of one’s actions on the broader community. Upholding and protecting the principles of freedom requires a collective commitment to fostering an environment where everyone can thrive and contribute to the betterment of humanity.

Freedom generally refers to being able to act, speak or think as one wants without any restrictions or hindrances. Freedom encompasses the ability to make independent decisions and express your thoughts without any fear so that one can achieve their goals and aspirations.

Someone with free will to think, act and speak without any external restrictions is considered a free person. However, this is the bookish definition of this broader concept, where the ground reality can be far different than this.

Writing an essay on freedom in 100 words requires you to describe the definition of this term, and what it means at different levels, such as individual or personal, social and political. freedom comes with the responsibility to exercise it within the bounds of respect for others and collective well-being.

Related Articles:

For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing webpage and follow Leverage Edu .

Shiva Tyagi

With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Contact no. *

Connect With Us

25,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today.

Resend OTP in

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

January 2024

September 2024

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

Have something on your mind?

Make your study abroad dream a reality in January 2022 with

India's Biggest Virtual University Fair

Essex Direct Admission Day

Why attend .

Don't Miss Out