Political groups who seek their vision of freedom, often end up using violence to achieve it. This is the problem with positive Liberty, as defined by Sir Isaiah Berlin - a Russian-born British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas. His most important treaties was The 2 concepts of Liberty. Berlin argued for a nuanced and subtle understanding of our political terminology, where what was superficially understood as a single concept could mask a plurality of different uses and therefore meanings. Berlin argued that these multiple and differing concepts, otherwise masked by rhetorical conflations, showed the plurality and incompatibility of human values, and the need for us to distinguish and trade off analytically between, rather than conflate, them, if we are to avoid disguising underlying value-conflicts. The two concepts are negative freedom, or freedom from interference, which Berlin derived from the British tradition, and positive freedom, or freedom as self-mastery, which asks not what we are free from, but what we are free to do. For example the French revolutionaries wished to overthrow a monarchical system which they viewed as antithetical to freedom, but in so doing ended up with the Reign of Terror. Similarly, the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia, who sought to overthrow the old order and replace it with a society in which everyone was equal, ended up creating a totalitarian regime which used violence to achieve its ends. Using violence, not simply as a means to achieve ones goals, but also as an expression of freedom from Western bourgeois norms, was an idea developed by Afro-Caribbean revolutionary Frantz Fanon. He developed it from the existentialist ideology of Jean-Paul Sartre, who argued that terrorism was a terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others. But once a group opens that pandoras box... they have better expect to revisit it time and time again as revolution begets counter revolution... dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2591624/Fears-neo-fascist-uprising-Ukraine-far-right-group-storms-Kiev-parliament-ex-president-calls-independence-vote.html
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 04:15:20 +0000
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