Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 2
Three Dimensions of Freedom
Anyone who wants to read Hegel’s concept of freedom today must carry along a distinction that is implicit in Hegel’s text but not worked out there, and that remains indispensable for the engagement with Marx.
Negative freedom — freedom from: the absence of coercion. That no one arbitrarily interferes in my life. This is the dimension that liberalism places at the center; abstract right treats it first.
Positive freedom — freedom to: real possibilities for self-realization. Education, health, material foundations. Someone who is legally free but cannot read, is hungry, or is sick, is not truly free. This dimension becomes thematic in ethical life [Sittlichkeit], and it is the point where Marx begins: the formal freedom of the person is not wrong, but it becomes empty when its material conditions are lacking.
Collective freedom — freedom with: the shared shaping of the conditions under which one lives. Self-legislation. This is the democratic core that Hegel seeks to think through in the state.
These three dimensions are not alternatives, nor are they stages in a sequence in which one would supersede the other; they are moments of a concept of freedom that become real only in their mediation. Whoever plays one off against another misses all three. Liberalism makes negative freedom the whole of freedom; a social philosophy that relies only on the positive loses the moment of self-legislation; a mere republicanism overlooks that collective self-legislation without material preconditions remains fiction. Hegel wants to think all three together in their connection — and this is precisely what still makes his philosophy of right interesting today. In the course of the analysis that follows, these moments come to the fore in different ways: abstract right articulates above all negative freedom, ethical life the positive, the state the collective. But none of these moments disappears at the later stages; all three are present in the full determination of the free will.