Freedom from interference and freedom to achieve are distinct goods that can conflict, and most political disagreement is over which is meant.
Berlin's 1958 lecture. His warning was about positive liberty specifically: freedom to achieve invites someone to define what a person would want if they were rational, which licenses coercion.
In practice
- A council drops the rule requiring residents to keep their frontages tidy, and the residents who wanted a tidy street have lost something the rule was giving them.
- A grant that requires attendance at budgeting sessions before release is described by its designers as expanding choice and by its recipients as a condition.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works