Chapter 6: Liberty
In 1949 a small English weekly called Cross Roads began to be printed in Bombay. Its editor was Romesh Thappar, and it was sharply critical of the government of the day. Early in 1950 the Government of Madras ordered that the paper could not enter or circulate in the State. The order was passed under a public order law, and the reason given was public safety.
Thappar did not argue that his paper was harmless. He argued something larger. The Constitution, then only a few months old, guaranteed him the freedom of speech and expression. A government, he said, could not switch that freedom off merely because it found the speech inconvenient. He took his petition straight to the Supreme Court.
In May 1950 the Court struck the ban down. Freedom of speech, it held, could be restricted only on the grounds the Constitution itself listed, and a general appeal to public order was not among them.
The story does not end with the citizen winning. Parliament read the judgment and amended the Constitution in 1951. It added public order to the permitted grounds. It also wrote in the word ‘reasonable’, so that from then on every restriction would have to be defended before a court as a reasonable one.
In about eighteen months, India had argued out the question this chapter is about. Nobody asked whether people should be free. The argument was over which restraints on freedom can be justified, and who decides.
Diagram
Fig. 6.0-1 Caption: Every society draws a line between the restraints it can justify and those it cannot. Brief: A single figure walking forward towards two gates placed one behind the other. The first gate is drawn being lifted out of the way and is labelled ‘arbitrary restraints — barriers of caste, race, religion or sex; punishment for criticising the government’. The second gate stays shut and is labelled ‘rational restraints — laws against harming others, traffic rules, limits on incitement’. Show the figure moving forward only after the first gate is removed, while the second still stands. No party symbols, no identifiable real person.
6.1 The Meaning Of Liberty
Every political idea begins as a demand. The demand behind this one is very old and very simple: let me live my life by my own choices. Liberty is the condition in which a person can act on her own choices, subject only to restraints that can be justified.
That last phrase carries the whole argument of this chapter. Almost nobody claims that liberty means doing absolutely anything. Almost nobody claims that a government may restrain its people however it wishes. The interesting question lies between those two positions.
So the chapter proceeds in four steps. First, what the word means. Second, how law and liberty are related. Third, the two dimensions in which liberty is understood. Fourth, the three kinds of liberty a citizen actually exercises.
6.1.1 The Word And Its Origin
The English word liberty comes from the Latin liber, meaning ‘free’, and from libertas, the state of being free. In Roman usage liber described a status. A person was either free or a slave, and liberty was the mark of the first.
That origin is worth holding on to. For most of recorded history, liberty was not a general human condition but a privilege that some people had and others did not. Slaves, serfs and, in many societies, women were placed outside it.
The modern claim is far more ambitious. It holds that liberty belongs to every person simply because she is a person, and not because of birth, wealth, caste or sex. Much of modern politics is the record of that claim being pressed, resisted and slowly conceded.
One note on usage. In everyday speech, and in this book, ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ mean the same thing. Liberty entered English from Latin through French; freedom comes from an older Germanic root. No difference of meaning divides them.
6.1.2 Liberty Is Not The Absence Of All Restraint
Suppose liberty did mean the absence of every restraint. Imagine a society where each person may do exactly as she pleases and nothing stops her. That society is not free; it is simply ungoverned.
In such a condition, one person’s unlimited freedom cancels another’s. The stronger take what they want, and the weaker are restrained by fear instead of by law. This is anarchy — a condition in which no enforceable rules exist and no authority applies them.
The point is not that anarchy is unpleasant, though it is. The point is that it does not deliver liberty even to those who demand it. It delivers liberty to the strong alone, and calls the resulting insecurity freedom.
For this reason political theory distinguishes liberty from licence — doing as one pleases without regard to the harm done to others. A rider who ignores a red light is not exercising liberty. He is helping himself to something that costs other people theirs.
The same distinction runs through the freedoms a citizen actually holds. Freedom of speech does not include the freedom to incite a mob to violence. Freedom of trade does not include the freedom to sell poisoned food.
6.1.3 Arbitrary Restraints And Rational Restraints
If liberty is not the absence of all restraint, it must be the absence of some particular kind of restraint. That is exactly what it is. Liberty means the absence of arbitrary restraint.
A restraint is arbitrary when it rests only on the will of whoever holds power. It is imposed without a public reason, it falls on some people and not others, and the person restrained has no way to challenge it.
History supplies the examples plainly. Barring a person from a well or a school because of the caste she was born into was an arbitrary restraint. So was closing a profession to women, and so is punishing a citizen for criticising the government.
A rational restraint is different in kind, not merely in degree. It is imposed for a stated reason, it applies equally to everyone in the same situation, and it can be tested before an independent authority.
How To Tell Them Apart
Three questions do most of the work. Does the restraint protect somebody else’s liberty, safety or dignity? Does it apply equally, or does it single out a group? Can the person restrained challenge it before an independent court?
Traffic rules pass all three tests. They protect other road users, they bind every driver alike, and a driver may contest a wrongful penalty. A rule that only members of one community must carry a pass fails the second test at once.
The Constitution of India works with exactly this distinction. It guarantees a set of freedoms to every citizen, and it allows the State to restrict them — but only on grounds the Constitution itself names, and only by restrictions that are reasonable.
6.1.4 Liberty And Rights
Liberty is not exercised in the air. It is exercised through rights — claims that society recognises and the state protects, because a person needs them to live a dignified human life.
The two ideas hold each other up. Rights give liberty a definite legal shape: the right to assemble peacefully turns a vague freedom into a claim a citizen can actually make. Without such rights, liberty is a sentiment rather than a protection.
The dependence runs the other way too. A right that a person is not free to use is worth very little. The right to vote means nothing to a voter who will be beaten for using it.
India’s own founding document treats liberty in exactly this spirit, and names it among the objects the Constitution was written to secure.
Read the list closely. Thought and belief happen inside a person’s mind; expression, faith and worship are carried out in public, where they meet other people. The Preamble therefore covers both the inner and the outer life of a citizen.
Notice also what the sentence does not do. It does not say who may restrict these liberties, or on what grounds, or how far. Those questions are settled elsewhere in the Constitution, and the Preamble by itself is not something a citizen can enforce in court.
There is a second silence, and it matters more. The Preamble promises liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship — but says nothing about whether a person has the schooling, the income or the safety to use any of them. Sections 6.3 and 6.4 take up precisely that gap.
6.2 Liberty And Law
At first sight law and liberty pull against each other. Law commands; liberty chooses. Every statute is one more thing a citizen may not do.
Yet the two are bound together. Law is the instrument through which a society removes arbitrary restraints and keeps them removed. Take the law away and the restraints do not vanish; they simply stop being answerable to anyone.
This section works through both halves of that relationship. Law protects liberty, and law can also destroy it. A citizen needs to be able to tell which is happening.
6.2.1 How Law Protects Liberty
The first service law performs is order. A person can only make plans, keep a job or speak in public if she can predict how others will behave. Rules that are known in advance make that prediction possible.
The second is enforcement. A freedom that nobody is obliged to respect is a wish. Law converts freedoms into rights that can be claimed, and provides a court that will hear the claim.
Third, law settles the clashes that freedom itself produces. Your freedom to play a loudspeaker at midnight meets my freedom to sleep. Somebody must draw a line, and a public rule is the only fair way to draw it.
Fourth, law applies to everyone alike. This is the principle of the rule of law — that power is exercised through known general rules, that the same law binds ruler and citizen, and that nobody is punished except under law.
Fifth, and least obvious, law restrains the powerful. Between an employer and a daily-wage worker, or a landlord and a tenant, freedom of contract on its own favours the stronger side. A law fixing minimum wages or hours of work returns some real choice to the weaker one.
Finally, a country may put its most important freedoms into its constitution. Once there, they cannot be taken away by an ordinary majority in a legislature on an ordinary afternoon.
6.2.2 When Law Endangers Liberty
None of this means that every law protects liberty. A law is simply an instrument, and an instrument can be turned in either direction. The same legislature that guarantees a freedom can also withdraw it.
Colonial India furnishes the plainest examples, because there the law was made by a government the governed had not chosen. The Vernacular Press Act of 1878 placed Indian-language newspapers under restrictions that English-language papers did not face.
The Rowlatt Act of 1919 went further. It allowed persons to be detained without the ordinary process of trial, and it provoked the protests that ran through that year. A rule that removes the trial removes the citizen’s only means of showing that the state has made a mistake.
What Makes A Law Despotic
The tests set out in section 6.1.3 can be turned on the law itself. Does it serve a purpose beyond the convenience of those in power? Does it fall equally on everybody? Can the person it burdens challenge it before an independent authority?
A fourth test is worth adding. Was the law made by a body answerable to the people, and can it be repealed by them? A law that no election can touch is a law with no brake on it.
6.2.3 Safeguards Of Liberty
If law can go either way, a free society needs arrangements that keep pushing it in one direction. These are the safeguards of liberty, and no single one of them is sufficient by itself.
A written constitution comes first. It states the freedoms of citizens and places them above the reach of ordinary legislation, so that changing them requires a special and difficult procedure.
An independent judiciary comes next. Judges must be able to decide against the government without fearing for their posts, which is why their appointment, salary and removal are protected by the Constitution rather than left to the executive.
The judiciary’s central instrument here is judicial review — the power of a court to examine a law and strike it down if it conflicts with the Constitution. It is what makes a guarantee of liberty enforceable rather than decorative.
A further safeguard is separation of powers — the arrangement by which law-making, law-executing and law-interpreting are placed in different hands. Concentrating all three in one authority is the shortest road to arbitrary rule.
Outside the state altogether lie the informal safeguards: a free press, political parties in opposition, trade unions, non-governmental organisations and ordinary public opinion. These do not strike down a law, but they raise the political cost of passing a bad one.
The route by which a citizen actually tests a restriction is set out in FC 6.1 below.
Flowchart
FC 6.1 — How A Citizen Challenges A Restriction On Liberty Caption: The path a fundamental-rights challenge takes in India, from the affected person to a final decision. Nodes: A law or official order restricts a citizen’s freedom → the person affected files a writ petition → either in the High Court under Article 226, or directly in the Supreme Court under Article 32 → the court asks whether the restriction rests on a ground the Constitution permits → if it does not, the law or order is struck down → if it does, the court asks whether the restriction is reasonable → if it is not, the law or order is struck down → if it is, the restriction stands → from a High Court decision, either side may appeal to the Supreme Court
Two features of that path deserve notice. The citizen, not the government, sets it in motion, so the safeguard only works if people know it exists. And the court decides whether the restriction is reasonable, which is a judgement, not a measurement.
That is why the last safeguard is the least legal one. Constitutions, courts and free newspapers are all machinery, and machinery is worked by people. No paper guarantee has ever protected a population that was not prepared to use it.
6.3 Dimensions Of Liberty
Two people can both use the word liberty and mean quite different things by it. One is asking who is stopping her. The other is asking whether she can actually do the thing at all.
These are the two dimensions of liberty: the negative and the positive. They are not two rival definitions so much as two different questions asked about the same freedom.
The distinction matters because it changes what a government is being asked for. On one view the state is asked to step back. On the other it is asked to step in.
6.3.1 Negative Liberty
Negative liberty is freedom from interference — the absence of external restraints placed by others on what a person may do. It is liberty in its oldest and simplest sense.
The measure is straightforward. Count the doors that other people have closed to you. The fewer the doors closed, the freer you are.
What negative liberty attacks, above all, are restraints imposed for arbitrary reasons: barriers of caste, race, religion, place of birth or sex. These close doors on people for what they are rather than for anything they have done.
India’s Constitution takes exactly this route in abolishing untouchability, the practice by which people of certain castes were excluded from wells, temples, schools and shared meals. Article 17 abolishes it and forbids its practice in any form.
South Africa, at the southern tip of the African continent, offers the same idea on a national scale. Until 1994 a system called apartheid sorted the whole population by race and fixed by law where each group could live, work, study and vote. Its dismantling was a demand for negative liberty in its purest form.
Negative liberty also marks out a protected private sphere. What a person believes, reads, eats or thinks is her own affair, and the state has no business entering it.
The strength of this dimension is its clarity. A law either bars you from a profession or it does not, and you can point to the provision.
Its limitation is equally clear. Negative liberty counts only the interference of other people. A person whom nobody stops, but who cannot read the form, reach the office or afford the fee, is perfectly free by this measure alone.
Diagram
Fig. 6.3-1 Caption: The two dimensions ask different questions about the same doorway. Brief: Left panel — a doorway with a chain and lock being removed, labelled ‘Negative liberty: is anything stopping her?’ Right panel — the same doorway, now unlocked but set high above ground level, with a ramp being built up to it, labelled ‘Positive liberty: can she actually get through it?’ Same figure in both panels. Keep the two panels the same size to show neither dimension is the lesser one.
6.3.2 Positive Liberty
Positive liberty is the presence of the conditions that allow a person to act on her choices and develop her capacities. It is freedom to, where the other dimension was freedom from.
The claim behind it is a plain one. An open door is of no use to somebody who cannot reach it. Schooling, health, a livelihood, physical safety and a voice in decisions are what turn a permitted action into a possible one.
These are usually called enabling conditions, and they are the reason a state may be asked to act rather than merely to refrain. Removing a barrier costs a government nothing; building a school costs it a great deal.
India’s Constitution recognises the point directly. Article 21A makes free and compulsory education a fundamental right for children between the ages of six and fourteen, and the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 sets out how that right is to be delivered.
Ask what this does for liberty. The freedom to choose an occupation was already guaranteed to every citizen. For a child who cannot read, that freedom names a choice she is in no position to make.
One clarification is needed here, because the two ideas are easily confused. Being free under law — the argument of section 6.2 — is about which restraints are justified. Positive liberty is about capacity. A person may live under perfectly reasonable laws and still lack every condition needed to use her freedoms.
The honest objection to positive liberty is worth stating plainly. Once we say that a person is not truly free unless certain conditions are met, somebody has to decide what those conditions are. That somebody may end up overruling the person in the name of her own freedom.
6.3.3 The Two Dimensions Together
It is tempting to treat the two dimensions as opposed camps, one demanding a smaller state and the other a larger one. Real political demands rarely divide so neatly.
Consider a demand for equal access to higher education. It requires that no candidate be excluded on grounds of caste, religion or sex, which is negative liberty. It also requires schools, scholarships and hostels, which is positive liberty.
The two are also useless in isolation. Enabling conditions without the removal of barriers produce an educated population that is still not allowed in. Removing barriers without enabling conditions produces a right that only the already-comfortable can use.
The contrast between them can now be set out side by side.
The sensible conclusion is that liberty needs both dimensions and is incomplete with either alone. A society removes the arbitrary restraints, and then it builds the conditions that make the remaining freedom worth having.
6.4 Kinds Of Liberty
The two dimensions told us how liberty is measured. The kinds tell us where it operates. A person lives in several spheres at once, and freedom means something a little different in each.
Three kinds concern us here: civil liberty, political liberty and economic liberty. They are not separate compartments. Each supports the others, and the weakness of one shows up quickly in the rest.
6.4.1 Civil Liberty
Civil liberty is the body of freedoms a person enjoys as a member of an organised society, guaranteed by law and available to everyone alike. It concerns the ordinary business of living rather than the business of governing.
Its usual content is familiar. Life and personal security; freedom of speech and expression; freedom of belief, faith and worship; freedom to move and to reside anywhere in the country; freedom to form associations; equality before the law; and access to a court when any of these is denied.
Two features distinguish civil liberty. It is enjoyed within the law rather than against it, and it is enjoyed equally, whatever a person’s wealth, birth or opinions. A freedom available only to the well-connected is a privilege wearing the wrong name.
In India these freedoms are written into the Constitution as Fundamental Rights, which means a citizen may go to court when one of them is violated. The most far-reaching of them protects life and personal liberty itself.
Civil liberty is not absolute, and section 6.1.3 has already explained why. Speech may be restricted to prevent incitement, movement may be restricted during an epidemic, and association may be restricted where the purpose is violent.
The test remains the same one. A restriction on civil liberty must rest on a stated ground, must apply generally, and must be open to challenge before an independent court.
6.4.2 Political Liberty
Political liberty is the freedom to take part in the government of one’s own country. Civil liberty asks the state to leave a person alone; political liberty gives her a share in what the state does.
Its content is a short and demanding list:
- the right to vote in elections
- the right to contest elections and to hold public office
- the right to form or join a political party
- the right to criticise the government and demand an account of its actions
- the right to change a government by constitutional means
Notice what the last item does. It converts opposition from an act of rebellion into a normal part of politics. A government that can be voted out has to explain itself; one that cannot need not bother.
Political liberty is meaningless without the conditions that make it work. It requires universal adult franchise — the rule that every adult citizen may vote, without any test of property, education, sex or religion. In India, Article 326 fixes the voting age at eighteen.
It also requires elections that are genuinely free and fairly counted, an election authority independent of the government of the day, and enough information in public for a voter to judge. India’s Election Commission was established for that purpose in January 1950, days before the Constitution came into force.
6.4.3 Economic Liberty
Economic liberty is the freedom to earn a livelihood and to be secure against want, so that a person is not driven by need into surrendering her other freedoms.
The term is used in two senses, and it is worth separating them at the start. One sense stresses freedom of enterprise: the liberty to own property, choose an occupation and trade without undue interference by the state. The other stresses security: work, fair wages, rest and support in old age, sickness or unemployment.
The two senses can pull apart. A minimum-wage law enlarges liberty in the second sense and restricts it in the first. Which sense a person emphasises usually depends on whether she fears the market or the state more.
In the second sense, economic liberty is normally taken to include the opportunity to work, a wage sufficient to live on, limits on working hours, protection against arbitrary dismissal, and provision for those who cannot work.
India’s Constitution places most of these among the Directive Principles of State Policy — a set of instructions to the state which courts cannot enforce, but which governments are expected to work towards. Article 41 directs the State to secure the right to work, to education and to public assistance in cases of unemployment, old age and sickness.
Legislation has carried parts of that instruction into practice. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 guarantees up to one hundred days of wage employment in a financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer for unskilled manual work.
The reason economic liberty matters so much to the other two kinds is the plainest argument in this chapter.
The three kinds can now be compared directly.
That last line is the conclusion of the whole chapter. Liberty is not one possession but a set of conditions that hold one another up, and a society is free only to the extent that all three are within the reach of ordinary people.
6.5 Summary
- Liberty is the condition in which a person can act on her own choices, subject only to restraints that can be justified. The disputed word in that sentence is ‘justified’.
- The word comes from the Latin liber, meaning ‘free’, which once marked a status — free as against slave. The modern claim is that liberty belongs to every person as a person. ‘Liberty’ and ‘freedom’ mean the same thing.
- Liberty is not the absence of all restraint. Where no rules are enforced, the result is anarchy, in which the strong are free and everyone else is restrained by fear.
- Liberty is therefore distinguished from licence, which is doing as one pleases regardless of the harm done to others.
- What liberty excludes is arbitrary restraint: a restraint resting on the will of whoever holds power, imposed without a public reason, applied unequally, and impossible to challenge.
- A rational restraint passes three tests. It protects someone else’s liberty, safety or dignity; it applies equally to all in the same situation; and it can be contested before an independent court.
- The Constitution of India works with this distinction. Article 19 guarantees a set of freedoms and permits the State to restrict them only on the grounds it lists, and only by restrictions that are reasonable.
- Liberty and rights depend on each other. Rights give liberty an enforceable legal shape; a right that a person is not free to use is worth very little. The Preamble names liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship.
- Law and liberty are complementary rather than opposed. Law creates order, converts freedoms into enforceable claims, establishes the rule of law, settles collisions between freedoms, and protects the weaker party against private power.
- Restraints do not merely reduce liberty; they redistribute it. A law limiting working hours takes a freedom from the employer and gives one to the worker.
- Law can also endanger liberty. A law is dangerous when it singles out a group, when it gives officials wide discretion without stated grounds, and when it cannot be questioned. The Vernacular Press Act of 1878, which bound Indian-language newspapers but not English ones, showed all three faults. Legality and justice are not the same thing.
- Six safeguards keep law on the right side of that line: rights entrenched in the Constitution, an independent judiciary, judicial review, direct access to the courts under Articles 32 and 226, a free press and active civil society, and an alert public that actually uses them.
- Liberty has two dimensions. Negative liberty is freedom from interference — the absence of restraints imposed by others or by the state. It can be pinned on a named law and a named official, which is its strength.
- Its weakness is that removing a bar does not put anyone through the door. It measures the absence of obstacles, not the ability to move.
- Positive liberty is the presence of the conditions that let a person act and develop — schooling, health, work, security — together with self-direction. It asks the state to act, not merely to abstain. Article 21A, inserted by the Constitution (Eighty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2002, and the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, are Indian examples of this form.
- Positive liberty is not the same as ‘liberty under law’; law is a means, while positive liberty concerns what a person is finally able to do. Its standing difficulty is that whoever decides what a person needs may coerce her in the name of her own freedom.
- The two dimensions are two questions about the same freedom, and each guards against the other’s characteristic failure. Modern constitutions carry both.
- Civil liberty covers everyday social and personal life: security of person, speech, movement, worship, association, equality before law and access to courts. In India several of these protect every person, not citizens alone. It fails quietly when custom or local power closes what the law has opened.
- Political liberty is the freedom to share in governing: to vote, contest, hold office, form parties, criticise, know and change the government. It rests on universal adult franchise; the Constitution (Sixty-first Amendment) Act, 1988 lowered the voting age to eighteen, and the Right to Information Act, 2005 made the right to know enforceable.
- Economic liberty concerns livelihood. One position defines it as freedom of enterprise with minimal interference; another as freedom from destitution and dependence. Article 23 forbids forced labour, the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976 ended a form of bondage, and the rural employment guarantee turns work into a claim on the state.
- The three kinds are separated for study but exercised together. A worker who can be dismissed for attending a meeting has no usable freedom of assembly, whatever the law says.
The Arguments In One Place
The chapter’s central claim is that liberty is not the absence of restraint but the absence of arbitrary restraint, and that law is therefore the condition of liberty rather than its enemy.
The strongest position against it, stated in the chapter itself, is that this reasoning is easily abused: every government that has restricted its people has called its restrictions reasonable and necessary.
That objection is not answered by definitions. It is answered, if at all, by institutions — the requirement that reasons be stated publicly, that restraints apply equally, and that any citizen may take the restraint to an independent court.
A second disagreement is left standing, and deliberately so. Whether freedom chiefly requires that the state hold back, or that it act, is a question about which serious people differ, and the chapter records both cases rather than settling them.
6.6 Key Terms
Anarchy — a condition in which no enforceable rules exist and no authority applies them, so that only the strong are effectively free.
Civil liberty — the freedoms a person enjoys as a member of society, guaranteed by law and available equally to all, such as security of person, speech, movement, worship and equality before the law.
Economic liberty — freedom in the making of a living: the freedom to choose and pursue work, to receive a fair wage, and to be free from want and exploitation.
Judicial review — the power of a court to examine a law and set it aside if it conflicts with the Constitution.
Liberty — the condition in which a person can act on her own choices, subject only to restraints that can be justified.
Licence — doing as one pleases without regard to the harm done to others; it is the abuse of freedom, not the exercise of it.
Negative liberty — freedom from interference; the absence of restraints placed on a person by other people or by the state.
Political liberty — the freedom to take part in the government of one’s own country, including the rights to vote, contest, form parties, criticise and change the government by constitutional means.
Positive liberty — the presence of the conditions that enable a person to use her freedom and develop her capacities, together with the ability to direct her own life.
Rights — claims that society recognises and the state protects, because a person needs them to live a dignified human life.
Rule of law — the principle that every person, including those who govern, is bound by the same publicly known law, applied by independent courts.
Universal adult franchise — the rule that every adult citizen has one vote, regardless of property, education, sex, caste or religion.
6.7 Points to Ponder
If every government that restricts freedom claims its restrictions are reasonable, what makes the word ‘reasonable’ more than a formality?
A law that limits working hours takes a freedom from the employer and gives one to the worker. Does the total quantity of liberty in a society go up, go down, or is it simply the wrong question to ask?
Suppose two societies have identical laws, and in one of them custom keeps certain people out of places the law has opened. Are the citizens of the two societies equally free?
If a person’s choices are shaped by hunger rather than by anyone’s command, has her liberty been taken away — and if so, by whom?
Judges are not elected, yet they may strike down laws passed by an elected legislature. In what sense can that arrangement itself be called democratic?
Can a society guarantee positive liberty to everyone without giving somebody the power to decide what other people need? If not, what should limit that power?
6.8 Objective Questions
- The word ‘liberty’ is derived from the Latin word:
- libertas, meaning law
- liber, meaning free
- licentia, meaning permission
- civitas, meaning citizen [1 mark]
- Which one of the following is the best example of an arbitrary restraint?
- A rule requiring every driver to stop at a red light
- A law prohibiting the sale of adulterated food
- An order barring members of one community alone from using a public well
- A law fixing maximum working hours in factories [1 mark]
- Positive liberty is best described as:
- the absence of all restraints upon the individual
- the freedom to do as one pleases without interference
- the presence of the conditions that enable a person to act and develop
- the right of a nation to govern itself without external control [1 mark]
- The right to contest an election belongs to which kind of liberty?
- Civil liberty
- Political liberty
- Economic liberty
- Negative liberty [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): Law is regarded as a condition of liberty rather than its enemy. Reason (R): Law replaces arbitrary restraints with restraints that are stated publicly, applied equally and open to challenge.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true. [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): The removal of a legal bar is by itself enough to make a person free. Reason (R): Negative liberty is concerned with the absence of interference rather than with the means to act.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true. [1 mark]
- Match the items in Column A with those in Column B: [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Universal adult franchise | i. power of a court to set aside a law that conflicts with the Constitution |
| b. Judicial review | ii. doing as one pleases regardless of the harm to others |
| c. Licence | iii. prohibition of traffic in human beings and forced labour |
| d. Article 23 | iv. one vote for every adult citizen, irrespective of property, education, sex, caste or religion |
- Fill in the blank: The principle that every person, including those who govern, is bound by the same publicly known law is called the ______. [1 mark]
6.9 Check Your Concepts
Define liberty. [2 marks]
State any two contents of political liberty. [2 marks]
Differentiate between liberty and licence. [3 marks]
Give any three reasons why liberty cannot mean the absence of all restraints. [3 marks]
Explain, with one example each, the difference between an arbitrary restraint and a rational restraint. [4 marks]
Describe any four safeguards of liberty in a democratic state. [4 marks]
Explain the two dimensions of liberty. Bring out the strength and the chief limitation of each. [6 marks]
Discuss the relationship between law and liberty. In your answer, explain how law protects liberty and how law may also endanger it. [6 marks]
6.10 Source & Passage-Based Questions
- Read the constitutional provision given below and answer the questions that follow. The State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of six to fourteen years in such manner as the State may, by law, determine.
- Which dimension of liberty does this provision belong to? Give a reason for your answer. [2 marks]
- How does a provision of this kind differ in form from one that merely forbids the State from interfering with a citizen? [2 marks]
- State one thing the words of the provision by themselves cannot tell you about the liberty of a particular child. [2 marks]
- Study the cartoon described below and answer the questions that follow. A cartoon shows a wide road marked ‘Freedom of Occupation’. A signboard at its entrance reads ‘Open to All’. A queue of well-dressed figures walks in easily. At the side, a small group stands at the foot of a flight of steep steps labelled ‘school fees’, ‘travel cost’ and ‘no training’, unable to reach the road at all.
- Which distinction made in this chapter is the cartoonist drawing attention to? [2 marks]
- Explain what the exaggeration in the drawing is meant to make the reader notice. [2 marks]
- State one thing a cartoon of this kind cannot establish, however forcefully it is drawn. [2 marks]
- Read the situation given below and answer the questions that follow. A state government issues an order banning all public meetings in a district for one month. The order gives no reasons and names no ground. It applies to every organisation except those supporting the government of the day. A citizens’ group announces that it will challenge the order in the High Court.
- Give two reasons why this order would be described as an arbitrary restraint. [2 marks]
- Which kinds of liberty are affected by the order? Justify your answer. [3 marks]
- Which safeguards of liberty are the citizens’ group relying upon by going to court? [3 marks]