From The Internal Freedom To The External Freedom: Comparative Study Of Kant, Mill, Berlin's Freedom Theories

This paper compares the Freedom theories of the Kant, Mill and Isaiah Berlin, and apply the Marxist viewpoint on their theories of freedom, the source and the characters of the theories. The paper is divided into five parts.The first part and the fifth is the part of introduction and conclusion.Part II: Kant's concept of freedom includes three levels, namely, the priori freedom, the freedom to practice and the sense of freedom. Mill believes that freedom can promote personal development, but also conducive to social progress. As a result, social restrictions on the freedom of the individual should have a limit. This restriction is no harm. Berlin selects negative freedom and positive freedoms to discuss, and the distinction between the conditions for achieving freedom and freedom itself.Part III: The perspectives of ideological origins of the three are different. Kant lives in the Enlightenment period. To some extent, his thinking is the same to the basic core of the campaign - rational and freedom. Facing the Skepticism challenge of Hume, Kant must re-establish the authority of the rational, and then scientific could be saved. Rousseau insists that the human essence is freedom and equality, which inspired Kant to reveal the laws of the freedom. Mill is no longer the previous thinkers, from a moral or political point of view to discuss freedom, and to a free society, the fight for an independent personality and diversity of their rights. Berlin believes that the authoritarian centralization of power is the loss of freedom, and then the positive freedom could be abused. Then, from the theoretical point of view of the characteristics of the three are different. Kant's theory is rational, Mill's theory is that with all moral issues have to resort to utilitarian, and Berlin insists negative freedom on the basis of pluralism value.Part IV: By Mill's criticism of Kant's concept of freedom, by Berlin's criticism on the previous concept of freedom and freedom of the Marxist concept of the previous criticism, further studies their different freedom conception and simply summaries on the freedom Theory of Marxist.