Consider: “Liberty or freedom, signifies properly the absence of opposition in external impediments of motion.” (Hobbes) (1999)
The definition opens chapter 21 of Thomas Hobbes‘s Leviathan (1651), “Of the Liberty of Subjects”. In full: liberty, or freedom, signifieth properly the absence of opposition; by opposition, I mean external impediments of motion. It is the founding statement of negative liberty, borrowed from physics and applied to people unchanged. The definition guards a private sphere well, but it is too thin to register domination, incapacity or self-rule.
A Definition Taken from Physics
- Bodies, not wills. Water held in by walls is unfree; spilled on the ground it runs freely. A free man is one who is not hindered to do what he has a will to, in things his strength and wit allow.
- Liberty is not power. When the impediment lies in the thing itself, as in a bedridden sick man, he lacks power, not liberty.
- No free will. Liberty belongs to bodies; the will is only the last appetite in deliberation, so “free will” is absurd.
- Two consistencies. Fear and liberty are consistent: a man who throws his goods overboard to save the ship acts freely. Liberty and necessity are consistent, like water that descends its channel freely and necessarily.
The Liberty of Subjects
- Artificial chains. Civil laws bind like chains, so liberty exists in the silence of the law: to buy and sell, choose one’s abode, diet and trade, and bring up one’s children.
- True liberty. No man may be bound to kill or maim himself, to accuse himself, or to give up resistance to those who come to kill him.
- Lucca. The word LIBERTAS on Lucca’s turrets proves nothing about its citizens, since a republic’s independence is not its members’ freedom.
Legacy
The definition runs through Jeremy Bentham to Isaiah Berlin‘s “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), where negative freedom is the area within which one acts unobstructed by others.
Critiques
- Positive liberty. Thomas Hill Green (“Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract”, 1881) defined freedom as a positive power of doing something worth doing. Amartya Sen (Development as Freedom, 1999) treats capability deprivation as unfreedom and so rejects Hobbes’s line between liberty and ability.
- Republican. Quentin Skinner (Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 2008) shows that the definition was a polemical move against the neo-Roman view. Philip Pettit (Republicanism, 1997) replies that the slave of a kind master suffers domination without interference.
- Coerced consent. If fear leaves action free, extorted promises bind. Modern law disagrees: the Indian Contract Act, 1872 (sections 14–15) denies that consent caused by coercion is free.
- Marxist. The worker is “free” of chains yet compelled by need; formal liberty masks economic compulsion.
The Indian Anchor
In A. K. Gopalan (1950) the Supreme Court read “personal liberty” almost in Hobbes’s terms, as freedom from bodily restraint subject to enacted procedure. Maneka Gandhi (1978) rejected that reading and demanded fair, just and reasonable procedure. Anuradha Bhasin (2020) tested internet shutdowns for proportionality. The Directive Principles add the positive dimension Hobbes excluded.
Conclusion
Hobbes’s definition is precise and still indispensable: freedom begins where interference ends. As a complete account it fails. Liberty also requires protection from arbitrary power and the real capacity to act, which is why India’s constitutional jurisprudence has moved beyond it.