SOURCE: “On Negative and Positive Liberty,” in Political Studies, Vol. XXVIII, No. 4, December, 1980, pp. 507-26.

In the following essay, Gray examines the components of the arguments Berlin advances, and other writers' responses to them, regarding the nature and value of negative and positive freedom.

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 restrictivist¹ 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...