Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Political freedom
Summary
Political freedom (also known as political autonomy or political agency) is a central concept in history and political thought and one of the most important features of democratic societies. Political freedom was described as freedom from oppression or coercion, the absence of disabling conditions for an individual and the fulfillment of enabling conditions, or the absence of life conditions of compulsion, e.g. economic compulsion, in a society. Although political freedom is often interpreted negatively as the freedom from unreasonable external constraints on action, it can also refer to the positive exercise of rights, capacities and possibilities for action and the exercise of social or group rights. The concept can also include freedom from internal constraints on political action or speech (e.g. social conformity, consistency, or inauthentic behaviour). The concept of political freedom is closely connected with the concepts of civil liberties and human rights, which in democratic societies are usually afforded legal protection from the state.
Various groups along the political spectrum hold different views about what they believe constitutes political freedom.
Left-wing political philosophy generally couples the notion of freedom with that of positive liberty or the enabling of a group or individual to determine their own life or realize their own potential. In this sense, freedom may include freedom from poverty, starvation, treatable disease, and oppression as well as freedom from force and coercion, from whomever they may issue.
According to neoliberal philosopher and Nobel Memorial Prize Economist Friedrich Hayek, the "socialist argument" defined "individual liberty" as " 'freedom from' obstacles", which only "confused" and obscured the aim of "securing individual freedom." This obfuscation and conceptual scope of " 'freedom from' " in turn permitted a possible "identification of freedom with power." The subsequent "collective power over circumstances" misappropriated "the physical 'ability to do what I want', the power to satisfy our wishes, or the extent of the choice of alternatives open to us.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.