Dialectic Freedom: Between Positive and Negative Freedom —A Philosophical Study of the Necessity of Political Freedom and Democracy Inspired by the “Dubai Experience”

Abstract

This paper inspects the form of freedom that exists in Dubai to make people living in the city happy and satisfied. I ponder Berlin’s two notions of negative and positive freedom to see whether these notions can truly categorically exclude one another in the definition of freedom, and if so, which one applies in Dubai. I base my research on the assumption that the aim of every political/economic system is to make people happy and that the way to people’s happiness is through the satisfaction of their desires of survival and well-be-ing. The results I succumb to show that Berlin’s two notions of freedom are intricately related on many levels: both partisans of positive and negative freedom seem to disregard the fact that, the subjectivity suggested by negative freedom does not exclude the presence of an objective element in negative freedom and, consequently the objectivity suggested by positive freedom does not exclude the presence of a subjective element in it. The categorically dualistic conception of freedom suggested by Berlin would thus be incomplete and the necessity of freedom would dwell in a form of a dialectic synthesis between negative and positive freedom, that which I call Dialectic Freedom. This is the form of freedom that prevails in Dubai.