This text offers a critical analysis of the liberal concept of freedom as it has been elaborated by Isaiah Berlin, who has understood it basically in the negative. This understanding of freedom, in its numerous formulations, has remained hegemonic within contemporary debates on freedom, rights and their circumstances. Based on such considerations, we have tried to demonstrate that when freedom is conceived of in the negative, it is unable to promote individual autonomy - exactly that which it supposedly exists in order to protect - without resorting to a project of distributive justice that takes elements of the socialist-inspired critique of liberalism into account.
Isaiah Berlin; liberty; liberalism; rights; distributive justice