Positive liberty is defined as having the power and resources to fulfill one's own potential as opposed to negative liberty, which is freedom from external restraint. A concept of positive liberty may also include freedom from internal constraints.
The concepts of structure and agency are central to the concept of positive liberty because in order to be free, a person should be free from inhibitions of the social structure in carrying out their free will. Structurally speaking classism, sexism, and racism can inhibit a person's freedom and positive liberty is primarily concerned with the possession of sociological agency. Positive liberty is enhanced by the ability of citizens to participate in their government and have their voice, interests and concerns recognized as valid and acted upon.
Although Isaiah Berlin's essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" (1958) is typically acknowledged as the first to explicitly draw the distinction between positive and negative liberty, Frankfurt School psychoanalyst and Marxist humanistic philosopher Erich Fromm drew a similar distinction between negative and positive freedom in The Fear of Freedom (1941), predating Berlin's essay by more than a decade.
Read more about Positive Liberty: Overview, Examples, Various Thinkers, Bibliography
Famous quotes containing the words positive and/or liberty:
“It is easy and dismally enervating to think of opposition as merely perverse or actually evil—far more invigorating to see it as essential for honing the mind, and as a positive good in itself. For the day that moral issues cease to be fought over is the day the word “human” disappears from the race.”
—Jill Tweedie (b. 1936)
“Can a free people restrain crime without sacrificing fundamental liberties and a heritage of compassion?... Let us show that we can temper together those opposite elements of liberty and restraint into one consistent whole. Let us set an example for the world of a law-abiding America glorying in its freedom as well as its respect for law.”
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)