Sources & Extracts

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The libertarian social philosophy of today is similar to the classical liberalism of the 19th century. Classical liberalism placed great value on individual freedom of contract and allowed only a very restricted role for government in society. Government was to be quite limited in the extent to which it interfered with individual liberties.

One of the most famous criticisms of the classical liberal view was made in a lecture by the Oxford philosopher Thomas Hill Green in 1880. Green redefined freedom, limited the rights of property, and expanded the role of government. While Ann's criticism of Dee is not the same as Green's view, the following extracts are important because they are filled with ideas that are still hotly debated.

We shall probably all agree that freedom, rightly understood, is the greatest of blessings; that its attainment is the true end of all our effort as citizens. But when we thus speak of freedom, we should consider carefully what we mean by it. We do not mean merely freedom from restraint or compulsion. . . . When we speak of freedom as something to be so highly prized, we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying, and that, too, something that we do or enjoy in common with others. . . . When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the increasing development and exercise on the whole of those powers of contributing to social good with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed; in short, by the greater power on the part of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves.

Green goes on to focus on the relationship between freedom of contract and his concept of positive freedom.

. . . [F]reedom of contract, freedom in all the forms of doing what one will with one's own, is valuable only as a means to an end. That end is what I call freedom in the positive sense: in other words, the liberation of the powers of all men equally for contributions to a common good. . . . Every one has an interest in securing to every one else the free use and enjoyment and disposal of his possessions, so long as that freedom on the part of one does not interfere with a like freedom on the part of others, because such freedom contributes to that equal development of the faculties of all which is the highest good for all. This is the true and the only justification of rights of property. Rights of property, however, have been and are claimed which cannot be thus justified. . . .

Our modern legislation then with reference to labour, and education, and health, involving as it does manifold interference with freedom of contract, is justified on the ground that it is the business of the state, not indeed directly to promote moral goodness, for that, from the very nature of moral goodness, it cannot do, but to maintain the conditions without which a free exercise of the human faculties is impossible.

Reference: From "Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract, " Works of Thomas Hill Green, edited by R. L. Nettleship, Volume III, p. 370-374. Brackets added.