7/30/2019 Kyle Swan Three Concepts of Political Liberty
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The distinction between negative and positive liberty is
familiar to political
philosophers. The negative variety is freedom as
noninterference. The positive
variety is freedom as self-mastery. However, recently there has
been an attempt
on the part of a growing number of philosophers, historians, and
legal scholars
to recapture a third concept of political liberty uncovered from
within the rich
tradition of civic republicanism. Republican political liberty
is freedom as non-
domination. I argue that features that distinguish it from
noninterference and
self-mastery highlight the theoretical and practical advantages
of liberty as non-
domination. It is, among these candidates, best-suited to serve
as the guiding
principle for the States basic institutions and rules. The
principle says that the
State should secure nondomination among its citizens.
Isaiah Berlins distinction between negative and positive
liberty1 is familiar to
political philosophers. The negative variety is freedom as
noninterference. The
positive variety is freedom as self-mastery. However, recently
there has been
an attempt on the part of a growing number of philosophers,
historians, andlegal scholars to recapture a third concept of
political liberty. This is the repub-
lican one of liberty as nondomination. The attempt has been to
carve out the
conceptual space for this neglected third option.2 However, many
have resisted
that it is a viable third option. Some have claimed that it is
virtually indistin-
guishable from liberty as noninterference. Others have claimed
that it is sim-
ply another variety of positive liberty.3 I say that these
critiques go wrong in a
variety of ways. I will provide a characterization of the
republican concept of
freedom. I will argue that it not only is a distinct political
good; the features
Kyle Swan
Coll ege of Charl eston
Three Concepts ofPolitical Liberty
Journal of Markets & M orality
Volume 6, Number 1 (Spring 2003): 117142Copyright 2003
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7/30/2019 Kyle Swan Three Concepts of Political Liberty
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Kyle Swan
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Sandle hesitates to accept these conservative implications but
says, Of the twoversions of republicanism [read: Civic Virtue]the
modest (or instrumental)
version and the strong (or intrinsic) onethe second, seems to me
the most per-
suasive (Reply to Critics, in ibid., 325).
41. Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays,
trans. T. Hum-
phrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), 124.
42. Ibid.
43. The idea for Figure 1 comes from Peter Boettke, who has used
it alternatively to
show the relationship between assumptions of benevolence and
omniscience of
political actors and economic performance under capitalistic and
socialistic sys-
tems (Introduction: Which Enlightenment, Whose Liberalism?, in
The Legacyof Fri edri ch von Hayek, ed. Peter Boettke [Aldershot,
U.K .: Edward Elgar
Publishing, 1999], 39.)
44. See Pettit, Reworking Sandels Republicanism, in Debating
Democracys
Discontent, 5253.
45. Ibid.,Republicanism, chap. 8.
46. Ibid., Reworking Sandels Republicanism, 53. Also, see
Geoffrey Brennan and
Pettit, Hands Invisible and Intangible,Synthese94 (1993):
191225; and The
Hidden Economy of Esteem, Economics and Phil osophy16
(2000).
47. John Philpot Curran, The Right of Election of the Lord Mayor
of Dublin,Speech, July 10, 1790.
48. See R. D. Cooter, Do Good Laws Make Good Citizens? An
Economic Analysis
of Internalizing Values, Berkeley Law and Economics Working
Paper Series
2000-8; E. A. Posner, Law and Social Norms(Cambridge: Harvard
University
Press, 2000); and Jean-Robert Tyran and Lars P. Feld, Why People
Obey the Law:
Experimental Evidence from the Provision of Public Goods,
University of
Munich Center for Economic Studies Discussion Paper, no. 2001-14
(November
2001).
49. As such, there is no reason to think that proponents of
liberty as noninterference
would not endorse this list of civic virtues.
50. See Geoffrey Brennan and Alan Hamlin, Republican Liberty and
Resilience,
The Monist84, 1 (January 2001): 4559.
51. Pettit, Republicanism, 8587.
52. Ibid., 85.
53. See James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of
Consent(Ann Arbor,
Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1965).
