At least since the publication of Isaiah Berlin's famous essay "Two
Concepts of Liberty" nearly half a century ago, political philosophers
have argued vigorously over the relative merits of "positive" and
"negative" accounts of freedom. Matthew Kramer writes squarely within
the negative-liberty tradition, but he incorporates a number of ideas
that are quite often associated with theories of positive liberty.
Much of The Quality of Freedom is devoted to elaborating the necessary
and sufficient conditions for the existence of particular freedoms and
unfreedoms; however, the book's cardinal objective is to establish the
measurability of each person's overall freedom and of each society's
aggregate freedom. On the one hand, Kramer contends that the existence
of any particular instance of liberty or unfreedom is a matter of fact
that can be confirmed or disconfirmed without any reliance on
evaluative or normative considerations. On the other hand, he argues
that the extent of each person's overall freedom or unfreedom cannot
be ascertained entirely in the absence of evaluative assumptions. By
combining those two positions and developing them in detail, Kramer
pits himself against all positive accounts of liberty and most
negative accounts. In the course of so doing, he aims to demonstrate
the rigorous measurability of overall liberty - something that many
writers on freedom have casually dismissed as impossible. Although
Kramer concentrates principally on constructing a systematic analysis
of sociopolitical freedom, he engages critically with the work of many
of the leading contemporary writers on the topic.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780191562860
Publisert
2020
Utgiver
Oxford University Press Academic UK
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter