Liberty: A Correct and Authoritarian Account

The criteria of conceptual correctness tell us something about liberty, but only a bare minimum. They tell us, as MacCallum puts it, that ‘freedom is … always of something (an agent or agents), from something, to do, not do, become or not become something; it is a triadic relation.’ Within this form, many different approaches are permissible, depending on how the nature of agents or the list of valid constraints is interpreted. One sense of liberty can, though, claim conceptual primacy. It is that implicit in capitalist law and economics: the freedom of a man, as he is, given only a fair access to significant information, from the sovereign acts of the state, to live his life as he chooses. There are many good arguments for constraining liberty in this sense in the fields of education and environmental planning. These arguments are best expressed as arguments against liberty in its primary sense and not, as they so often are, as arguments for re-interpreting ‘true’ liberty to suit the writer's policy preferences.