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Self-Ownership & Negative Liberty



Two interesting and highly useful terms and concepts within the study of the personal and party sciences:

  1. Self-Ownership: “Self-ownership (or sovereignty of the individual or individual sovereignty) is the condition where an individual has the exclusive moral right to control his or her own body and life. The concept has been originated inside mainstream anarchist theory, from different thinkers like Josiah Warren, Max Stirner, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.”
  2. Negative Liberty: “The concept of negative liberty refers to an individual’s freedom from authority. According to Thomas Hobbes, ‘a free man is he that in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do is not hindered to do what he hath the will to do.’”

The first one is just wrong though. It is an intentional bastardization of the ancient Greek and Roman Stoic philosophers. Epictetus talks about the sphere of the moral purpose, but he says it is not the body. For men can come and break your bones and wolves can devour your hands and legs. Thereby you cannot ever fully control your body (or maybe I am misreading or misquoting him), because it is outside the sphere of your moral purpose. The moral purpose, as I understand it, has to do with your reactions to your perceptions: the are which you learn to control through self-mastery and which brings one peace and the cessation of suffering. You cannot necessarily control what assaults your senses (although you can exercise Free Will to change your environment), but you always have a choice over how you respond intellectually and emotionally to that stimulus. This, I believe is what they mean by the term ‘Negative Liberty’.








3 Reader Responses

  1. Svenson Says:

    The moral purpose, as I understand it, has to do with your reactions to your perceptions: the are which you learn to control through self-mastery and which brings one peace and the cessation of suffering.

    This is an interesting issue, I was thinking about your reference to being oppressed as a state of mind. That’s an aspect of it, it always takes two to tengo. But if one of those tengoers is really good, its a hell of a lot easier to tengo. So if you’ve got somebody with a whip in their hand, you certainly can’t blame just the slave exclusively for the oppresion, you have to look at all involved. This is subtle, but important…The slaver is himself being oppressed by participating in the oppression…Its tricky to see sometimes, but if you look carefully that whip in his hand is his own God, the fear of pain is his own God, his own concept of power. That’s why he tries to use it to control in the first place, because he himself is a slave.

  2. Julia Says:

    It’s a beautiful video but you know that’s the Tsar of Russia right?

  3. Tim Boucher Says:

    Of course!



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