In contrast to this idea of freedom stood John Locke’s contention that the purpose of law is to “preserve and enlarge freedom,” not to abolish or diminish it. According to Locke, “where there is no law, there is no freedom.” Freedom denotes a social state‐​of‐​affairs in which individuals enjoy equal and reciprocal rights; it signifies the freedom to exercise one’s rights without coercive interference by others. I am free to the extent that I can use and dispose of that which is properly my own–or “property” in the broad sense, such as moral jurisdiction over my person, labor, and fruits of my labor–as I see fit. (It should be noted that Locke was not the first to defend this notion of equal freedom; far from it. But he is its best known and most influential proponent.)

What are we to make of these different conceptions of freedom, both of which are “negative” in character?

First, let me emphasize that I have no desire to defend one conception of freedom as its only “true” meaning. Word meaning is determined by conventional usage, and it certainly makes sense to say that even in a libertarian society people would not be “free” to steal, rape, murder, etc. My objection concerns those philosophers who claim that only the Filmer/​Hobbes notion is the correct idea of freedom, and that the rights‐​based conception, as defended by John Locke and other classical liberals, illicitly imports a value judgment into what should be a value‐​free definition.

The implication here is that libertarians engage in circular reasoning. They defend freedom as essential to the preservation of individual rights, but they proceed to define “freedom” in terms of those selfsame rights. In Marxian terminology, this is a thoroughly “bourgeois” notion of freedom, a conception that was specifically designed to protect property rights and that excludes, by definition, other notions of freedom, such as various “positive” freedoms.

I had hoped to explain and defend the rights‐​based idea of freedom in this essay, but it quickly became evident that the historical background required to understand this issue is far too complex to cover in one essay. I have therefore adopted a different approach. In this essay and in several to follow (I don’t yet know exactly how long this will take), I will discuss some general points about the development of modern political philosophy. Then, after sufficient background has been provided, I will once again zero in on the purely philosophical aspects of the rights‐​based conception of freedom.

A fundamental theme will recur throughout my essays on “Freedom, Rights, and Political Philosophy,” however far afield some may appear to wander from the issue of rights‐​based freedom. I wish to make it clear that Locke and other liberal individualists did not smuggle the notion of “rights” into their discussions of freedom as a method of reaching a predetermined ideological destination. Rather, the notion of “rights” was inherent in their debates with their political opponents. All sides appealed to rights; indeed, the major political controversy of the seventeenth century, which revolved around the notion of “sovereignty,” was thoroughly infused with rights‐​talk and would have made no sense without it.

I would make an even stronger claim, namely that the very idea of “rights” (in some form) is essential to political philosophy itself. I say this because of the role that the idea of the state has played in political philosophy, especially since the sixteenth century. The nature of the state, its justification, its proper functions–these and similar matters are dominant themes in political philosophy; and to the extent that we discuss the state, we are discussing an institution that claims to exercise coercive power as a matter of right.

It is obvious that the state is a coercive institution, one that deals with people by means of physical force and threats of force. But the state is also a normative institution–one that claims the right to exercise coercion and the right to function as the sole and ultimate arbiter of legitimate force within its territorial jurisdiction.

When, in the seventeenth century, Algernon Sidney differentiated de facto power from de jure power, he was appealing to a distinction with a long provenance in the history of political philosophy. To possess de facto power may be sufficient to compel obedience, according to Sidney; but only de jure power–power exercised as a matter of right–can claim moral legitimacy and thereby create a moral obligation to obey. De jure power, in short, is a matter of justice.

Augustine, writing in the early fifth century, presented a classic formulation of this issue. In a question that would be invoked for many centuries thereafter, Augustine asked: “Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale?” Then, drawing from an example given by Cicero, Augustine continued: