According to
Thomas Hobbes, "a free man is he that in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do is not hindered to do what he hath the will to do" (
Leviathan, Part 2, Ch. XXI; thus alluding to liberty in its negative sense).
Claude Adrien Helvétius expressed the following point clearly: "The free man is the man who is not in irons, nor imprisoned in a gaol, nor terrorized like a slave by the fear of punishment ... it is not lack of freedom, not to fly like an eagle or swim like a whale." Moreover,
John Jay, in
The Federalist paper No. 2, stated that: "Nothing is more certain than the indispensable necessity of Government, and it is equally undeniable, that whenever and however it is instituted, the people must cede to it some of their natural rights, in order to vest it with requisite powers." Jay's meaning would be better expressed by substituting "negative liberty" in place of "natural rights", for the argument here is that the power or authority of a legitimate government derives in part from our accepting restrictions on negative liberty. This notion resonates with Benjamin Franklin's assertion that "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety", highlighting the delicate balance between individual freedoms and governmental authority. An idea that anticipates the distinction between negative and positive liberty was
G. F. W. Hegel's "
sphere of abstract right" (furthered in his
Elements of the Philosophy of Right), which constitutes what now is called negative freedom and his subsequent distinction between "abstract" and "positive liberty". In the Anglophone
analytic tradition, the distinction between negative and positive liberty was introduced by
Isaiah Berlin in his 1958 lecture "
Two Concepts of Liberty". According to Berlin, the distinction is deeply embedded in the political tradition. In Berlin's words, "Liberty in the negative sense involves an answer to the question: 'What is the area within which the subject—a person or group of persons—is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons'." Restrictions on negative liberty are imposed by a person, not by natural causes or incapacity.
Frankfurt School psychoanalyst and
humanistic philosopher
Erich Fromm drew a similar distinction between
negative and positive freedom in his 1941 work,
The Fear of Freedom, that predates Berlin's essay by more than a decade. Fromm sees the distinction between the two types of freedom emerging alongside humanity's evolution away from the instinctual activity that characterizes lower animal forms. This aspect of freedom, he argues, "is here used not in its positive sense of 'freedom to' but in its negative sense of 'freedom from'; namely freedom from the instinctual determination of his actions." For Fromm, then, negative freedom marks the beginning of humanity as a species conscious of its own existence free from base instinct. The distinction between positive and negative
liberty is considered specious by some
socialist and
Marxist political philosophers, who argue that positive and negative liberty are indistinguishable in practice, or that one cannot exist without the other. Although he is not a socialist nor a Marxist, Berlin argues:
Objectivist thinker
Tibor Machan defends negative liberty as "required for moral choice and, thus, for human flourishing", claiming that it "is secured when the rights of individual members of a human community to life, to voluntary action (or to liberty of conduct), and to property are universally respected, observed, and defended." According to
Charles Taylor, freedom means being able to do what you want, without any external obstacles. This concept has been criticized for being too simplistic and not taking into account the importance of individual self-realization. He thus suggests that negative liberty is little more than a philosophical term and that real liberty is achieved when significant social and economic inequalities are also considered. He proposed dialectical positive liberty as a means to gaining both negative and positive liberty, by overcoming the inequalities that divide us. According to Taylor, positive liberty is the ability to fulfill one's purposes, while negative liberty is the freedom from interference by others.
Timothy Snyder argues that only focusing on
negative freedom leads to
oligarchy. ==Monarchy example==