Positive and Negative Freedom: The Two-Party Debate

In Philosophy of Freedom, there are two concepts of freedom: positive and negative. Negative freedom is merely a lack of restriction. A person is negatively free when they have nothing impeding their actions—no policing force. Positive freedom, on the other hand, is a bit more difficult to explain. Positive freedom uses force or restriction in order to promote a greater freedom. The idea is that humans need aide in reaching their full freedom potential. It might help to think of it as empowerment.

Most everyone has a political ideology that implements both concepts of freedom (anarchism is an obvious exception which values only negative freedom). But, if you look closely at the two parties of U.S. politics, you can see very clearly the tendencies among the party members as to which kind of freedom they value most. On closer inspection, when the angry and bigoted rhetoric of both sides is pushed aside, the political debate is one regarding whether positive or negative freedom is more important.

The Democrats, on one side, claim that positive freedom is essential. The democratic polities which the right calls “Big Government” are there in order to ensure that all citizens of the nation are able to behave as freely as they can.

The Republicans, on the other side, claim that the “Big Government” the Democrats promote actually infringes on the citizens’ true freedom. Freedom isn’t about policies which ‘empower’ people, it is about government getting the heck out of our business.

Obviously, neither party endorses a purely negative or purely positive sense of freedom. Republicans tend to agree that there does need to be some government intervention and Democrats tend to agree that the government shouldn’t control everything. My point is only that, in the loud and ignorant political debates going on all around us, there is a fundamental philosophical question being addressed in two distinct but simple ways. If we could be quiet for a moment and really listen to the other side, perhaps we could accomplish something in solving this philosophical problem.