Libertas: On the unity of the concept of freedom

The paper distinguishes two accounts of the relationship between individual and political freedom: the Disunity View (according to which personal and political freedom are not only conceptually distinct but are also incompatible) and the Unity View (which assumes that personal and political freedom are conceptually inseparable, and that thereby freedom is a unitary concept – reminiscent of the Roman-republican libertas). The aim of this paper is to provide several arguments for the Unity View (psychological, conceptual, ‘republican’, and discourse-theoretic). We also argue that the Unity View entails what Ortega y Gasset labeled “life in freedom” (a condition whereby state coercion is not experienced as a limitation of freedom) and that it provides an additional (freedom-based) justification for liberal/constitutional democracy.