an idea and tradition, has been more concerned with the negative than the positive, with freedoms from rather than freedoms to. The very fact that liberalism a philosophy of freedom has become an ideal in the first place presupposes that people are not always free, or are at risk of becoming non free. If freedom were the expected state of affairs, no one would build a political philosophy around it.
Liberalism is thus inherently a somewhat negative philosophy, aimed more at avoiding certain things, namely intrusions upon freedom, than at achieving particular things. The following discussion will first examine threats to freedom and their implications, in the process relating the ideas of Hobbes and Machiavelli to liberalism. We will then consider two alternatives to liberalism: a politics like Aristotle's, in which certain positive goods are pursued, rather than negatives simply avoided; and a perspective, conservatism, that gives weight to usage or custom in preference to any theoretical doctrine. We will finally consider the challenge faced by liberalism, a negative conception, when confronted with groups who have strong positive views.
If liberalism as a philosophy is generally concerned with freedom from, it is particularly concerned with specific threats to freedom. Several of these can be identified. The first and most basic is freedom from anarchic chaos.
Hobbes is not, at first glance, an obvious exemplar of liberalism. He is associated with absolute monarchy, the anthesis of liberal political institutions. To say that a subject's freedom is obedience to the sovereign sounds like an exercise in Orwellian cynicism. However, to make sense of Hobbes, and find his place in the intellectual history of liberalism we must consider the alternative he posits.
This primal alternative is the famous Hobbesian description of the human condition in a state of nature: "solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and ...