FREEDOM AS A FOUNDATION OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY: A NORMATIVE PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The paper analyzes the connection between freedom and liberal democracy and claims the former to be a fundamental reason of the later. It claims that the two constituent parts of liberal democracy, namely liberal and democratic, embody the two dimensions of freedom substantiated by Isaiah Berlin – negative (“freedom from”) and positive (“freedom two”). The paper summarizes key philosophical arguments that led throughout history to the articulation of freedom as a key social value, including the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and other thinkers. In the end, it establishes three political and philosophical conditions that make freedom possible: 1. The distinction between Vladimir Lefebvre’s two ethical systems; 2. The value of isegoria (the Greek term for political equality); 3. The differentiation between common good and common weal. The paper makes a particular emphasis on the topicality of the discussion of freedom as a key underpinning of democracy: the world is entering the epoch of the unprecedented crisis of liberal democracy with a growing number of scholars arguing that it should give its way to other types of government. In this paper, I claim that liberal democracy is much more that the approach to the organization of society and the election of rulers, but the political embodiment of freedom, which inevitably becomes endangered when democracy is under attack.