ABSTRACT
At one point in Reason and Faith in Modern Society, Eduard Hei-mann raises the old problem of the compatibility of liberty and equality in the political community. The statements “Liberty and equality are compatible” and “Liberty and equality are incompatible” are in themselves remarkably imprecise. Today conceptual nominalism is so widely accepted that people are inclined to grant every author his own “definitions,” thereby so alienating thought from its objects that any statement, however inconsequential by any outside standards, is adjudged valid if it complies with its author’s standards of validity. Although the example of the slave’s throat ring may help to explain this meaning of liberty, its very concreteness makes it misleading. In recent times in particular, many writers have emphasized that it is not sufficient to define human freedom as a “freedom from” this or that, i.e., as a “merely negative” value; rather, it should be understood primarily as “freedom to,” as a “positive” value.
