Hello Aspirant,

I hope that you are doing well.

"The response to the inquiry 'What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?'" says Positive Liberty.

Self-mastery is one definition of positive liberty. Both ideas of liberty are real human goals, according to Berlin, and both forms of liberty are required in any free and civilised society.

"Liberty in the negative meaning entails an answer to the question: 'What is the region within which the subject—a person or group of persons—is or should be permitted to do or be what he is capable of, without interference from other persons?'"

Negative liberty, according to Berlin, is a different, sometimes contradictory, interpretation of the concept of liberty that needs to be carefully explored. Later proponents (such as Tocqueville, Constant, Montesquieu, John Locke, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill, who accepted Chrysippus' understanding of self-determination) insisted that constraint and discipline were the antithesis of liberty, and thus were (and are) less prone to conflating liberty and constraint in the way that rationalists and philosophical forerunners of totalitarianism were. Negative liberty, Berlin maintained, is a complementary, if not diametrically opposed, idea to positive liberty, and one that is often closer to the intuitive current use of the term. Negative liberty was one of Berlin's distinctive notions of modern liberalism, as he observed.