Keyword

Axes

Upper Left Quadrant Details Upper Right Quadrant Details Lower Left Quadrant Details Lower Right Quadrant Details Details

Quadrants

Outline

Liberty is the most widely desired condition of mankind, the absence of external restraint and the power over one's own domain.
The main axes capture most of what leading theories of liberty are all about. The vertical axis, state/autonomy, is a rendering of Hobbes' and Locke's state-of-nature: a dialectic between autonomous individuals mixing labor with nature to create value, versus a state to which they contractually yield part of their absolute property right in return for protection of what remains. The horizontal axis -- individual/collective -- refers to the two main valences of liberty, negative liberty and positive liberty, the former stressing the Anglo-Saxon liberal liberty and the latter stressing the more radical, European, associational, democratic liberty.