Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. ;A study of three concepts of liberty, the thesis argues that Isaiah Berlin's text 'Two Concepts of Liberty', seeks to expand the limits of the contemporary Anglo-American debate on the idea of liberty by linguistically shifting the terrain of the debate such that its participants are prompted to view the nineteenth century French Post-Revolutionary debate on the idea of liberty. The first section, dealing with Berlin's text and the contemporary Anglo-American debate on the idea of liberty, contends that the misunderstanding of Berlin's text is due to an empiricist epistemology that sees liberties as causally grounded rather than grounded through social norms. In this respect, the intention of Berlin's text is lost. The second section, dealing with the French nineteenth century Post-Revolutionary debate on the idea of liberty, analyses the importance of language in the formation of a new socio-political order and in the conceptualisation of new forms of liberty that are constitutive of that order. The third section deals with Tocqueville's sociological analysis of the profound historical tendency of equality that marks the new socio-political order of Democracy and how that tendency can be linked to the concrete realisation of the forms of liberty conceptualised within the Post-Revolutionary debate. A brief conclusion argues that the very nature of democracy is such that the concrete realisation of the forms of liberty viewed within the French nineteenth century Post-Revolutionary debate and by Tocqueville, will furnish humanity with a greater understanding of itself