An Analysis of Rawls and Sen’s Concepts of Liberty

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The aim of this paper is to examine concepts of liberty used by John Rawls and Amartya Sen in light of two well-known liberty pairs ? the “liberty of the ancients” and the “liberty of the moderns” as defined by Constant; and the “negative liberty” and “positive liberty” of Berlin. After a reminder of the seminal texts of both liberty pairs, it will be shown that even if Rawls’s justice as fairness is mainly based on ancients/moderns liberty, it deals as well with the effectiveness of basic freedoms and thus with negative/positive liberty. Similarly, Sen’s works, though principally focused on negative/positive liberty, have close ties to ancients/ moderns liberty ? especially in his latest works, which stress the importance of democracy. Finally, the analysis will allow investigation of Sen’s recent dichotomy between the transcendental and comparative traditions.