TITLE:
Dialectic Freedom: Between Positive and Negative Freedom —A Philosophical Study of the Necessity of Political Freedom and Democracy Inspired by the “Dubai Experience”
AUTHORS:
Loulou Malaeb
KEYWORDS:
Positive Freedom, Negative Freedom, Dialectic Freedom, Coercion, Democra-cy, Autocracy, Well-Being, Happiness, Desires, Commodious Desire
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Philosophy,
Vol.11 No.3,
August
31,
2021
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.