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Freedom and Anarchism

Our next event in the mini series on 'Liberty and Freedom’ is next Tues (29 November) when Ruth Kinna (Loughborough University) will be giving a talk on ‘Freedom and Anarchism’.

Freedom and Anarchism

Tuesday, 29 November 2022, 16:00 – 17:00 GMT, Online.

Speaker: Ruth Kinna

Anarchists argue, against convention, that freedom does not demand the existence of law. To investigate this view, I consider how anarchists have responded to debates about positive and negative liberty. Adapting Isaiah Berlin’s two conceptions, I argue that anarchists are positive libertarians who reject the idea that liberty is a public or collective condition and negative libertarians who attack the idea of individual rights. The complications of anarchist thought explain why anarchists use the language of republicanism to defend freedom as non-domination. But they also highlight the view, expressed by Peter Kropotkin, that liberty is a social project not a social condition. More details and register via Eventbrite.