ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the negative' conception of individual liberty, and proceeds to elicit several of its implications—particularly those which touch upon understanding of the relation between liberty and threats. Arguments about the nature of individual liberty—and they are legion—are usually disputes concerning either the relation between a prevented action and its subject, or that which is to count as prevention. The conception of liberty as the absence of prevention of only actually desired actions—permitting, as it does, the aforementioned inference about the expansion of liberty—logically requires that reader extend this class to include those actions which one has no actual desire to do. Isaiah Berlin observes, in a figurative vein, that ' "Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows" ' and interprets this epigram literally to mean that 'the liberty of some must depend on the restraint of others'.