Aristotle's Citizenship

For negative freedom, it is the sphere of control and for positive freedom it is the question of who is in control (129). The driving question for “positive” political freedom is “what or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that” (Berlin, 122). This sense of political freedom requires a person being his own master and not relying on any outside influence (131). Positive political freedom is about man thinking for ones self and deciding for ones self, thereby establishing who they are to the world, on their own accord. Rationality and reason are also central to this sense of political freedom.

Many modern civilizations in the west pride themselves on being democratic societies where every person possesses liberty and equality. Every citizen possesses certain rights that cannot be taken away and every citizen is equal under the law; it is upon this foundation that the institutions of modern democracy are built. However, the idea of democracy is not unique to modern societies in the west. In the fifth and fourth centuries BC, the ancient Athenians developed and implemented a democratic government with principles of liberty, equality, and citizenship. Two authors who explore the democracy, liberty, and equality of both Athenian and modern governments are Martin Ostwald and Mogens Hansen.

Seth presents the pathology behind this. In his carefree youth, John has not given love the attention it deserves, preferring the freedom that bachelorhood connects to most men to the shackles of

There is a difference though between Greek democracy and United States democracy. In Greece they ran a direct democracy where every citizen had the right to participate in deliberations, law making assembly, and other governing institutions. In the United States there is a representative democracy where citizens vote for representatives rather than participating directly. This is mainly because the changes of the way of life and the amount of people making it more difficult to ran the government the way Greece had. There have been recent political movements which have shown frustration with perceived failures of representative democracy, for example the Occupy movement was inspired by direct democracy.

The Present and the Future Over the Past The Athenian concept of freedom was completely unparalleled. Political freedom was conceived in the idea of democratic Athens. Hannah Arendt writes of the uniqueness of Athenian freedom in that freedom in Athens was the ability ‘to start again’ (Arendt 1958: 69) Parrhêsia is essential to this new beginning – the exploring and questioning of history and nature that suggest that the world is open to choices that can be investigated by speech. This means that democracy in Athens was a regime always capable of change and recreation. Athenian democracy was a system of governance that aimed not to look back in time, but forward and allowed nothing from the past to mould it.

The World State is ideal because of blissful ignorance and sustainability. The alternative environment, the Savage Reservation, allows for the freedom of thought and choice; however, these freedoms had previously resulted in chaos and instability, in which the World State seeks to prevent. The World State is the superior place to reside due to its blissful ignorance and sustainability. According to the Controller, “No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy – to preserve you, so far as that possible, from having emotions at all” (Huxley 44). By being inherently emotionless, the citizens of the World State are free from every emotion, thus negativity and pain are unfamiliar.

John Locke wrote The Second Treatise of Government and within it he expresses his views of how he believed that private property can be originally appropriated and that it can cause inequalities in terms of wealth. The Discourse of Inequalities, written by Jean Jacque Rousseau, can be used to criticize this because of its own particular way of viewing what is natural and unnatural inequality as well as his beliefs of the modernization of civilizations. In this treaties, Locke explains that the law of nature is basically a state of equality in which the people have no power over one another and they are free to do as they so please. Here, he is careful to state that this is not giving the people the license to abuse others or to be destructive.

Different encounters will create varieties of the gift. A man may make a disappointment in his issues but stay joyful. The profound and internal life is a thing separated from material achievement. Indeed a man who, in the same way as Robert Louis Stevenson, experiences perpetual sick wellbeing can even now be upbeat. Be that as it may we must forget these exemptions and arrangement with the typical man,

― Lao Tzu Any fool can rule others, but it takes courage and mental power to rule your own heart. Have you ever considered about the truth, why history never remembers those who ruled others, even while they were very strong and had an immense impact on mankind, in the same way, while you think of happiness why you run for those souls who ruled themselves instead of ruling others? “Simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. ― Lao Tzu Life is never complex; it is as simple as it should be nonetheless it is always us who made unnecessary changes to it for our so-called greater benefits, but generally which grow to be our greatest regrets later.

Locke’s assumptions that humans are rational and led by reason, and the abundance of resources allowing private ownership of land, give a higher purpose to the government in a society than just physical security. Government, on all its levels, is protecting individuals’ property and creating and enforcing laws that will apply to everyone, even the sovereign. The “levels” of government embody a new idea proposed by Locke – the separation of powers. He argues that in order for the government not to be corrupt, it has to have separated legislative, executive and juridical powers which operate independently from each other’s influences. Therefore, he directly opposes Hobbes’ argument for absolute power: an absolute monarchy would be worse than the State of Nature since the sovereign holds the whole power of the people and now it is impossible to defeat him as an individual, which would not be the case in the State of Nature where everyone was equal.