On Not Two But Three Notions of Liberty

Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay introduced two concepts of liberty: positive and negative liberty. This binary understanding of liberty was incomplete from a very significant point of view: both terms excluded the possibility of a notion of liberty which focuses on the fact that the purposes of the actors are formed in the context of cooperative subjects, and that action can only be free of constraints in the context of cooperative actions. The paper (based on the lecture given at the Goethe Institute in Budapest on May 14th 2015) introduces a third concept of liberty, that of social liberty which relies on the notion of “objective freedom” by Hegel. By reconstructing this notion our moral understanding improves.