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September 26, 2009
In New ideas of socialism Luke Martell says that:
The liberal theory of liberty is a negative one which sees liberty as the absence of external coercion. The role of the state is to provide the conditions for minimizing coercion, not to impose an externally defined social good on individuals. Socialists, like Hattersley and Plant, go this far but go one step further. They argue also for a positive concept of liberty. That everyone might have negative liberty - freedom from external coercion - does not mean that they all have the resources and capacities to express or realize their freedom in their actions. They may not be able to pursue their intentions freely for lack of the relevant enabling assets. Thus an absence of the resources necessary to act freely is itself a restriction on liberty. In particular an inegalitarian distribution of those resources means that some will have a greater capacity to act freely han others. A condition, therefore, for positive liberty is that resources should be distributed equally so that liberty may be so distributed also
For socialist libertarians, neo-liberalism fails to theorize the bases for the realization of positive liberty and for its egalitarian distribution.
However, Individual liberty is not always the most desirable priority in every situation. Sometimes it needs to be restricted in pursuit of another important value. For instance, it is very difficult to justify the continued freedom of motorists to clog up the atmosphere and jam the roads at great environmental, social and economic cost in the name of their freedom to do so. People are free to move about by whatever means they choose.
But in certain situations their freedom to do so needs to be overridden in preference for other priorities which take on a greater significance - environmental considerations or its consequences for the public good, for instance. Defining the doctrine of socialism as the pursuit of individual liberty does not allow socialists to subordinate individual liberty every so often to such other priorities.
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