Towards a New Definition of Liberty

Neo-Roman liberty: beyond positive and negative freedom

By Giulio Amerigo Caperchi

Delacroix-La liberté guidant le peuple. Credit: Wikipedia

Delacroix-La liberté guidant le peuple. Credit: Wikipedia






The Statue of Liberty. Credit: Wikipedia

The Statue of Liberty. Credit: Wikipedia








For more information on the subject consult the following:





10 responses to “Towards a New Definition of Liberty

  1. Thanks for the very academic dissection of how liberty has been perceived in the past 40 years through various political prisms and for concluding that true liberty does not rest within either side of the dichotomy.

    I would also point out the influence of less well-known predecessors that also attempted to redefine liberty such as the Netherlands’ precedent of ending absolute monarchies, the Australian secret ballot, or the Iroquois’ coalition organization upon American political thinking.

    • Hello David,

      Thanks for reading my work. All of the examples of types of liberty you mentioned are well worthy of attention and have had much influence on the way we think about liberty today. Thank you for pointing them out.

      One of the purposes of this post was to refute the “dichotomization” of the subject and open it up to alternative conceptualizations such as the ones you mentioned. Concepts such as liberty should never be set in stone but remain forever essentially contested ideas, open to interpretation.


  2. Mike

    I think there is a simpler answer. Liberty is the moral right of the individual to live free from the force of others.

    Force is the key. There are two types of force. *Initiation* of force, and *Retaliatory* force. Both ultimately require the use of violence, but retaliatory force/violence can only exist in response to initiation of force/violence. The normal state of being is peace until disrupted by initiation of force/violence. Initiation of force is a choice of one to for the submission of the will, values, life of another. The first has decided by THEIR choice and by force the fate of the other, in some aspect, who did not have THEIR own choice. Just as white can’t be both black and white at the same time, liberty can not exist where force dictates.

    Therefore, the principle of liberty must limit government to retaliatory force only for the protection of liberty. Obamacare, for example, is immoral. I would add that Obamacare is also illegal under the United States Constitution, but we have enough chief justices who don’t care about the Constitution they pledge to uphold and apparently don’t care about individual rights.

    • Hi Mike,

      Thanks for reading my work and commenting.

      With regards to your definition of liberty, I am quite sure that it is very similar to what Isaiah Berlin calls negative liberty. Initiation of force is exactly what Berlin understands as an instance of having one’s actions constrained (or having violence done upon) by another individual without consent. When one individual’s actions unduly decide the fate of another’s, it is a case of privation of the victim’s liberty. Your comment amounts to a textbook defense of individual natural rights and hence a defense of negative liberty. As you rightly point out, it follows that the government should limit itself solely to legitimate retaliatory force to preserve freedom from the undue use of initiation force.

      But what many of the civic republicans of old believed (including many of the Founding Fathers) was that a government concerned solely with the protection of natural rights (those to life, speech and property chiefly) would not necessarily ensure a free or just society. They held this position because they knew that losing freedom was not only caused by having force or violence imposed upon without consent -as negative liberty has it. They also new that there are more subtle ways of losing freedom, such as having one’s government influenced by powerful interests. When this occurs -as it is today- your individual rights are still in place: no one is curtailing your right to speech, no one is taking away your property, and no one is threatening to arbitrarily end your life. But simultaneously the education system is being dismantled, higher education is increasingly out of the reach of ordinary citizens, healthcare -despite obamacare- is still in the thrall of insurance companies, lobbyists wield more control over government than citizens, the media is controlled by a handful of giant companies, our military is increasingly being outsourced to private contractors….must I go on? These instances impede many of my freedoms.

      So even if our individual natural rights remain in place, there are a whole lot of other issues which, in my humble opinion, curtail my freedom as an individual, put me at a structural disadvantage in the free market and limit my ability to participate in government as a free and equal citizen. It also demeans the idea of a government for, by and of the people. It is spitting in democracy’s eye. This is not a condition of liberty. The present state of affairs puts me in a condition of dependence vis a vis the powerful interests influencing public life and public institutions. Hence, the idea of neo-roman freedom which points out these structural conditions which limit our liberty and agency as democratic citizens. This is why I believe that negative liberty does not go far enough.

  3. The Machiavellian Moment is great. If I could add to your list I’d say Hannah Arendt is my favorite civic republican. I am thinking specifically of her book On Revolution, her definition of political action in her The Human Condition and her excellent essay “What is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future.

  4. Pingback: What can Machiavelli teach us about democracy? | The Genealogy of Consent

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