Negative liberty

Negative liberty is freedom from interference by other people or institutions. It concerns the range of actions a person can take without obstruction or coercion.

Isaiah Berlin: A political philosopher known for distinguishing negative liberty from positive liberty. His 1958 lecture made this distinction a central framework in modern political thought.
Positive liberty: Freedom understood as self-direction or the capacity to govern oneself. Its focus on self-mastery contrasts with negative liberty’s focus on noninterference.
Thomas Hobbes: A seventeenth-century English philosopher whose political theory defined liberty largely as absence of external impediments. His account is an early influential formulation of liberty as freedom from obstruction.
Harm principle: The principle that coercion may be justified to prevent harm to others, but not merely for a person's own good. It supplies Mill’s influential criterion for permitting interference with conduct.
Classical liberalism: A political tradition emphasizing individual rights, limited government, private property, and free exchange. Its defense of limited state power often draws on negative-liberty reasoning.
Coercion: The use or threat of force to make someone act against their will. Coercion is a direct form of interference that restricts negative liberty.
Republican liberty: Freedom understood as protection from domination by another's uncontrolled power. Republican theory can call a person unfree even when no interference currently occurs.
John Locke: An English philosopher whose political theory grounded government in natural rights and consent. His defense of individual rights shaped later arguments for protected private freedom.
Paternalism: Interference with a person's choices justified by concern for that person's own welfare. It tests whether protecting people from their own choices violates negative liberty.
Libertarianism: A family of political theories that gives strong priority to individual liberty and limits on coercive authority. Libertarian arguments commonly treat coercive restrictions as presumptively unjust.

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