Freedom Is Not the Absence of Limits but the Choice of Them

In the twelfth book of the Odyssey the sorceress Circe warns Odysseus that his ship will pass an island where the Sirens sing, and that every sailor who has heard them has died on the rocks. Odysseus decides to hear the song anyway. He orders his crew to plug their ears with wax and to tie him to the mast, and he tells them that if he begs to be released they must bind him tighter. The ship passes the island, the song rises, and Odysseus strains at the ropes and shouts for freedom. His men row on. By the usual definition of liberty, he has never been less free. By the definition in the topic, he has never been freer.

The usual definition is the one the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called negative liberty in a lecture delivered at Oxford in October 1958. It holds that a person is free to the extent that nobody interferes with his actions, so that freedom is measured by the size of the area in which he is left alone. The idea is simple, and it protects something real, since a person who is constantly stopped, watched or ordered about is not free in any sense. On this view every limit is a loss, and the ideal condition is the absence of limits. The topic rejects the ideal and says that freedom is the choice of limits.