KEYWORD
Everyone defends freedom: the freedom to speak, to move, to act, to eat, to practice the religion they want. But what does freedom — a concept that has been redefined and revisited innumerable times by scholars — really mean? Isaiah Berlin, in his seminal essay published in 1958 titled "Two Concepts of Liberty', speaks broadly of two senses of freedom. The first is what he calls "negative liberty". This revolves around the existence of a private sphere where an individual can do as he or she pleases, free from interference of any kind, whether from other individuals, communities, the State, or by oppressive social forces. The individual is free of any external barriers or constraints. The second is what he calls "positive liberty", which refers to the act of taking control over one's life and realising its fundamental purposes. Negative and positive liberty are not just seen as two kinds of liberty; they are often seen as rival and incompatible interpretations of the idea of liberty and can have major social and political implications.
Let us suppose that a woman, Devi, works in Chennai and wants to visit her family which lives in a village in Bihar. Under a negative conception of liberty, Devi could travel from Chennai to her village in Bihar without anyone stopping her for any reason. If someone — Devi's relatives or neighbours or the Government — prevented her from travelling, that would amount to a violation of her negative liberty.
