abstract: Libertarians affirm the right to liberty, i.e., the right to do what one wants free from interference. Libertarians also affirm the right to private property. One objection to libertarianism is that private property relations restrict liberty. This objection appears to have the consequence that libertarianism is an incoherent position. I examine Jan Narveson's version of the libertarian view and his defense of its coherence. Narveson understands the right to liberty as a prohibition on the initiation of force. I argue that if that is what the right to liberty is, then the enforcement of property rights violates it. I also examine Narveson's attempt to support private property with his distinction between interference with and mere prevention of activity and argue that this distinction does not do the work that he needs it to do. My conclusion is that libertarianism is, in a sense, impossible because conceptually unsound. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Philosophy 2011

This thesis places pressure on common distinctions between rhetoric and ideology, ideas and arguments, semantics and form, by examining the use of freedom rhetoric in political speech and propaganda in post-war Britain. To do so it combines a sophisticated statistical analysis of large volumes of text with the qualitative methodologies of rhetorical analysts and political historians. In particular, it uses custom software written by the author to apply the techniques of corpus linguists, content analysts, and political scientists to a corpus of every speech made in the House of Commons between 1936 and 1990. By integrating data sources, the thesis recovers a partisan variable unrecorded in Hansard that enables the systematic detection of differences between Labour and Conservative MPs' speech for the first time. Chapter one both describes the novel techniques deployed and identifies changes in the use of freedom rhetoric over time as well as partisan sub-languages of debate. This quantitative analysis provides the context for a detailed qualitative analysis of Conservative party rhetoric between 1945 and 1970 over three further chapters. Combining archival research with theoretical insights from rhetoric and framing scholars, it proposes a series of corrections to the party's post-war historiography, which has often wrongly equated freedom rhetoric with 'neoliberalism' or proto-Thatcherism and therefore misunderstood the complex beliefs and contexts generating this rhetoric. Moreover, because the continued use and adaptation of freedom rhetoric between 1951 and 1970 has been neglected, the thesis argues that historians have mischaracterised post-war Conservative politics as materialistic, underplayed freedom's role in Harold Macmillan's oratory, missed an important moment of transition under Alec Douglas-Home, and falsely charged Edward Heath with either betrayal or insincerity. These narrower debates provide a new perspective on the bigger question of why freedom persisted as a major concept in political discourse. Over its chapters, the thesis develops the notion of a 'rhetorical culture', which challenges the binary between rhetoric and ideology and can explain Conservative politicians' use of similar rhetoric to articulate dissimilar beliefs.

O presente trabalho procura demonstrar a existência de quatro diferentes sentidos de liberdade no sistema filosófico de Hobbes: liberdade como ausência de impedimentos externos ao movimento, liberdade como direito natural de auto-preservação no estado de natureza, liberdade como esfera de ação delimitada pela lei civil e liberdade como direito legítimo de descumprir certas leis civis. Nesse sentido, os resultados da pesquisa contrariam a compreensão do conceito de liberdade em Hobbes a partir de sua apropriação pela tradição liberal, que considera apenas um desses quatro sentidos. As análises permitem ainda inferir que entre os diferentes sentidos de liberdade em Hobbes há relações de analogia e de pertencimento. / This research aims to demonstrate four different ways of understanding the concept of liberty in Hobbes\' philosophical system: liberty as an absent of external impediments to movement; liberty as the natural right of self-preservation in the state of nature; liberty as the field of action limited by the civil law; and liberty as the right to disobey some civil laws without injustice. The research\'s results contradict the liberal use of Hobbes\'s concept of liberty, due to this usage been restricted to only one of the four ways of the concept of liberty in Hobbes\' works.

The liberal and republican traditions of political thought are commonly treated as divergent political-philosophical doctrines which existed in a state irreconcilable opposition in late eighteenth-century France and America. The present study challenges this notion through examining the concept of political neutrality as discussed and expounded in the political and constitutional writings of James Madison and Benjamin Constant. In seeking to account for not only why, but also how, both thinkers endeavoured to construct political systems geared toward securing the production of neutral laws, this thesis explores and highlights the complex interdependent relationship between the liberal and republican philosophical traditions in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century political theory. It is argued that in their desire to construct political-constitutional systems tailored toward guaranteeing the materialisation of neutral laws, Madison and Constant incorporated republican, or ‘Real Whig’, concepts into their respective constitutional strategies. Their shared objective, it is shown, was to form limited and neutral states through exploiting the diversity of public opinion in such a way that would render popular sovereignty self-neutralising. More specifically, this thesis suggests that both Madison and Constant placed considerable emphasis on de-legitimising particular justifications for legislative action, and that their respective efforts in this area were motivated by a desire to restrict the legislature to the promotion of objective, and impartially-conceived, accounts of the public good. Thus through examining Madison’s and Constant’s attempts to form neutral states, this thesis challenges the traditional account of the development of modern liberalism through pointing to the existence of an autonomous liberal-republican philosophy in post-revolutionary French and American political thought. It is argued that this hybrid political philosophy – which underpinned the constitutionalisms advanced by both Madison and Constant – had as its principal objective the reconciliation of the practice of popular governance with the restoration and maintenance negative individual liberty. Both thinkers, in other words, exploited republican concepts and institutions in order to realise the distinctly liberal end of forming limited and neutral states.

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