Nigel Warburton has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Just about everyone is for liberty, but we mean different things by it. Far-right libertarians want almost all constraints on their actions removed. They desire free markets, no unions, low taxes, free speech and the freedom to be very rich. The oppressed want freedom from tyranny: in extremis, they want to be free from jail and free to live without the threat of arbitrary arrest and torture. The moderately oppressed want more freedom than they have now, but within the context of a functioning democracy that is more equal, and more supportive, than the kind of society imagined by the right. They make a distinction between liberty and licence (complete freedom) of the kind that results in the pike dining at leisure on the minnows. Some libertarians seem completely relaxed about fat pike and vulnerable minnows – perhaps because they see themselves as naturally at the top of the food chain, or, in the worst case, there by dint of their exceptional brilliance and hard work, rather than by a mixture of luck, inheritance and timing.
Quentin Skinner, one of our greatest intellectual historians, is interested in how the concept of liberty has changed over time. In particular, he wants us to reflect on the older Roman tradition of liberty, as independence from the arbitrary will of others. This is what he means by liberty as independence. It contrasts with the late-Enlightenment emphasis in liberal thought on the idea that liberty is best conceived as non-interference – as absence of constraint or coercion, described by Isaiah Berlin as negative liberty, or ‘freedom from’.
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