Author: Haroon Khalil

In the context of colonial subjugation, nationalist struggles in Asia and Africa and also Latin America against the foreign domination has been termed as national freedom or liberation movements. In India also, we generally refer to the struggle for independence as India’s national freedom movement. With the emergence of nationalist consciousness and awareness for political…

Liberal thinkers support both the negative and positive views of liberty. In the negative view, liberty is treated as the absence of restraint in the sphere of individual actions. This is to counter interference of authority/state in the individual’s area of activity. One school of liberal thinkers supports the negative view of liberty and would…

While thinkers have related civil liberty in the capacity of an individual person, economic liberty in the capacity of a worker, they associate political liberty in the capacity of a citizen. When the Greeks and the Romans speak of liberty or freedom of participation by citizens in public affairs of Greece and Rome respectively, they…

Economic liberty could be treated as a part of civil liberty in the sense of liberty of business, employment and work, profession, property and trade. However, it is generally associated with the individual in the capacity of a worker or producer using physical or mental work. Thus, economic liberty could mean different things for different…

In his book, On Liberty, J. S. Mill declares that the subject of his book is not ‘Liberty of the Will’, … but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.’ In the sense of safeguarding the liberty of individual or the minority…

We can understand natural liberty in terms of liberty naturally available to the people. It implies unrestricted and unfettered liberty to do what one wills in a stage of natural condition. This can be possible only when we conceive a stage in which either there is a situation of licentious liberty as Hobbes thought it…

As hinted earlier, liberty or freedom has been understood in a variety of ways. Some common understanding and interpretation may be discussed in the following manner.

Realization of liberty and freedom as an integral part of human, moral and self-development require either un-interfered action as an agent or provision of enabling conditions. It is also dependent on fulfillment of certain other institutional and constitutional requirements.

The terms liberty and freedom have been defined and interpreted differently by writers and thinkers using different perspectives. To appreciate the meaning, nature, scope, relationship of liberty with authority and liberty and equality, etc. we should look at how they have been defined. From the brief survey of how liberty and freedom have been treated…

Liberty and freedom as principles of organizing political and civic and political societies have always been a concern of political thinkers and statesmen. Greeks put liberty and freedom at the core of civic life. They were concerned with the collective life and active participation of the individual in the affairs of the polis. Pericles, a…