freedom

Personal liberty to act according to the individual will and without any physical or other form of restraint. The absence of restraint is known in philosophical terms as negative freedom; a concrete example is the freedom of a prisoner released from jail. Positive freedom refers to the state of self-mastery or self-realization; for example, breaking an addictive habit or conquering shyness.

John Locke, J S Mill and Thomas Hobbes are among philosophers who hold the negative view of freedom; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georg Hegel and the British neo-Hegelians – F H Bradley (1846–1924), T H Green (1836–1882) – hold a positive view of freedom. The negative view of freedom tends to be held by those philosophers who think that the state is no more than the sum of the individuals composing it (mechanism). The positive view of freedom tends to be held by those philosophers who regard the state as an end to which its citizens are the means (organicism).