An analysis of Rawls’s and Sen’s concepts of freedom

The aim of this paper is to examine the concepts of freedom used by John Rawls and Amartya Sen in the light of two well-known pairs of freedom: the pair freedom of the ancients/freedom of the moderns defined by Constant and the pair negative freedom/positive freedom defined by Berlin. After a reminder of the seminal texts of both pairs, we will show that even if Rawls’s justice as fairness is mainly based on the pair freedom of the ancients/freedom of the moderns, it deals as well with the effectivity of basic freedoms and so with the pair negative freedom/ positive freedom. Similarly, Sen’s works which are principaly focused on the pair negative freedom/positive freedom have close ties with the pair freedom of the ancients/freedom of the moderns – especially in his lastest works which stress the importance of democracy. Finally, this analysis will allow us to investigate Sen’s recent dichotomy between the trascendental and the comparative traditions.