DAVID SIDORSKY
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focus of concern away from the search for balance between "positive"
and "negative" liberty.
A significant change in the understanding and interpretation of
human nature differentiates the third concept of liberty from both pos–
itive and negative liberty. For both "negative" and "positive" liberty
presuppose that the individual or the group possesses or develops a
fixed character and a determinate history: The individual has an integral
self just as the group is constituted by the given properties which have
formed its identity throughout its history. In "negative liberty," it is that
integral
self that is
to
be protected from governmental intervention or
societal coercion. In "positive liberty," it is the historically formed indi–
vidual or group whose potentialities are
to
be actualized and whose
ends are to be realized. The third concept of liberty, however, was to
reject the idea of a given identity of the self or of the group. Instead, it
focused on the ways in which the self would be chosen or constructed
and group identity would be created or defined. Accordingly, freedom is
understood in terms of the rights of the individual and of the group to
select, create, define, or redefine their own identity.
The connection between the interpretation of freedom and the
agenda of political action since the 1960s is demonstrable. The new pol–
itics of identity on such diverse issues as gender, ethnicity, race, nation–
alism, and multiculturalism has aimed at social transformation based
upon the freedom to form new patterns of self and group identification.
The third concept of liberty did not originate as an instrument of the
social and political movements of the 1960s, although it was adopted
and adapted by them. Like any concept of liberty, its origins can be
traced back
to
ancient myth and metaphor. In particular, the third con–
cept of liberty relates to a tradition which is anti-fatalistic, either
because there is a denial that the future can ever be fated, predestined,
or predetermined, or because there is an affirmation that the free agent
can and should defy the decrees of Fate, regardless of the consequences.
Thus, the model of freedom is illustrated by Prometheus in his defiance
of the gods, or by Bertrand Russell in
A Free Man's Worship.
Russell
described the duty of a free person: "To defy with Promethean con–
stancya hostile universe,
to
keep its evil always in view, always actively
hated" and "not bow before the inevitable."
This concept of liberty, in which a person's free choice does not
depend upon an evaluation of the consequences of his decision, was
given philosophical elaboration in existentialist thought. For Martin
Heidegger, human beings are differentiated from all other species of beings
because they have no essential nature or given ends but are constituted by
