Author: Haroon Khalil
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Ingredients of Rights
Relationship amongst the ingredients of rights suggests that claims emerging on various grounds could be recognized by the State as rights. Although this may not be coterminous with what all rights individuals and groups perceive they should enjoy in society. For example, many states may not accept the right to self-determination of various ethnic groups. It…
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Rights Defined
T. H. Green, an idealist and advocate of positive liberty, in his Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligations has defined right as ‘a power of acting for his own ends … secured to an individual by the community on the supposition that it contributes to the good of the community.’ Power of acting for his own ends implies…
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Definition and Meaning of Rights
Defined and interpreted differently by writers and thinkers, rights are moral and legal entitlements or claims of individual or groups against society, state or a group of individuals. Rights could be claimed on various grounds such as inherent human personality, natural basis, legal basis, moral and idealist basis, historical basis, social basis, etc. Generally, society or community admits certain…
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Introduction
We, as individuals, groups and classes, require liberty and freedom for exercising our choices w.r.t. skills, business or place of residence, to move freely in the country choose our representative in a free and fair election. Liberty and freedom are also required for self-realization and development of our faculties and capacities of expression, speech, belief,…
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Herbert Marcuse, C. Wright Mills and André Gorz on Alienation
Marcuse is a critical social theorist who has criticized advanced industrial society as ‘an all-encompassing system of repression’. He has been influenced by Hegel and also by the Marxian perspective in his writings. In his One Dimensional Man (1964), he has concluded more or less in the same manner as Marx did about alienation of the worker…
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Critique of Capitalist Mode of Production as Inimical to Human Freedom
Socially defined relationship of production is what determines freedom of human beings. Work being important and a primary human activity, it is where his/her potential is fulfilled creatively or distorted in the form of alienation. Marx identifies the capitalist mode of production based on private property and private ownership of means of production as against…
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Marxian Views of Freedom
Freedom as Freedom of the Human Being Not the Individual Our survey above suggests that liberal tradition, in all its forms—classical, modern and neo-liberal, focuses on individual freedom either in terms of absence of external interference in the sphere of individual actions or removal of obstacles in the development of faculties of the individual. This…
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Negative Liberty
Liberal theorists have developed different grounds to support negative liberty. On the basis of natural liberty and natural rights of individuals, Physiocrates (Francois Quesnay and Mirabeau), early laissez-faire economists (Smith, Ricardo and Malthus) and contractualists (Hobbes and Locke) proposed individual liberty and argued for either complete non-interference or limited interference by authority in individual liberty. This basis…
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Negative and Positive Liberty
Within the liberal fold, liberty of individual has been understood and explained in two ways. In the first sense, liberty is described as that sphere or area of individual actions that is not restrained or interfered by others. In the second sense, it is associated with effective conditions or power of self-realization or moral freedom.…
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Liberty, Liberation, Freedom, Licence, Anarchy and Authority
Liberty, both in its positive and negative sense, is identified within the liberal framework and is related to the individual as the agent to be either left without interference or to be provided with enabling conditions to realize liberty in the sense of self-realization or development. Liberation, however, does not imply such a meaning. Liberation…