this passage talks about the importance of equality and fraternity .
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Answer:
Liberty is commonly represented in terms of ‘negative’ and ‘positive’
approaches. Negative freedom refers mainly to freedom from restraint.
People are free if no one is interfering with them, or preventing them
from doing what they are able to do. Positive freedom can refer to the
freedom to act, or to self-determination. In the first sense, positive
freedom is about power; people who are unable to do things are not
free to do them. In the second sense, positive freedom is about being
able to make decisions, and to choose.
Although the distinction is widely used, it does not make a great
deal of sense. The negative idea of freedom seems to require only that
other people should not intervene. Isaiah Berlin, who popularised
the concept, argued that people do not cease to be free because they
are unable to do something, but only if someone is interfering with
them.14 It is possible, if that is accepted, for people to be left in a
position where they are unable to act, but are still free. If, for example,
there has been an earthquake, and people are physically trapped under
the rubble, they have not ceased to be free. (This argument, or at least
one very like it, was made by Hayek.15) It follows that a rescuer from
the emergency services who tries to release survivors without obtaining
prior consent is interfering with their circumstances, and that must be
an infringement of their freedom. This is silly, and it takes a particular
kind of academic cleverness to convince oneself that it should be
taken seriously. Conversely, the positive idea of freedom, certainly as
it is represented by Berlin, seems to suggest that all that matters is
whether people are able to act, and not whether they are free from
constraint. If people are being directed, but the constraint is one they
might reasonably agree to, they are still free; and people can, in
Rousseau’s notorious phrase, be ‘forced to be free’.16 This is just as
ridiculous, and it does violence to the very idea of freedom.
The ideas of negative and positive freedom have taken root because
they are, at least, partly right. All freedom, Maccallum argues, has
three elements: it has to be freedom of a person; the person must be
free from restraint; and the person must be free to do something.17
That means that both negative and positive concepts are relevant to
any consideration of freedom. Many writers have tried to put their
arguments in terms of negative and positive freedom, even if they do
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Liberty, equality, fraternity
not quite reflect what the writers mean to say. The following discussion
begins with those ideas, but it cannot finish with them, and other
dimensions of the arguments are considered subsequently
Explanation: