ABSTRACT
It is the argument of an influential school of philosophers, working within a tradition of thought strongly influenced by logical positivism and by linguistic analysis, that disputes about the nature of freedom may be resolved conclusively and to the satisfaction of all reasonable students of the subject. Among such exponents of what I shall henceforth call a restrictivist 1 approach to the subject of freedom, there are wide differences as to the nature of freedom and about the means whereby discussion about its nature is to be rationally foreclosed. Some writers are prepared to treat as decisive the production of a stipulative definition of freedom backed by weighty arguments about its operational utility. Others make their ultimate appeal to intuitions about freedom which are supposed to be embedded in ordinary thought and practice, or to allegedly standard uses of the concept in classic texts of social and political thought. Whatever their disagreements in these areas, restrictivists all hold that it must in principle be possible to elaborate a preferred view of freedom against the background of an authorative elucidation of the concept of freedom, so that the resultant theory of freedom will commend itself to all reasonable men. What restrictivists have in common, in other words, is a rejection of the claim that freedom is what has been called an essentially contestable concept. 2
