The first problem to be tackled should be "Is freedom even possible?". Many people believe in a totally deterministic world in which various forces compete for dominance. In various versions of this worldview individual "meat puppets", or groups with a ''common social position", are just the manifestations of randomly initiated natural and social forces playing out to some set of 'laws'. No freedom exists in this picture. Other than as Hegel described it, "submission to necessity". But this is a deeply inadequate perspective. Certainly a degree of determinism is necessary to facilitate action. If everything was chaotic we couldn't act in any self determined way at all. We need to be aware of the 'laws of nature' to function effectively in the world. But total determinism is a different matter.

The fact that we feel we have some sort of freedom can not be just an illusion. We certainly have the freedom to question the society we live in and radically change it. This seems to suggest we are something more than mindless components in a vast mechanism. Marx saw this but didn't take it far enough. We have our own values that are more than those that would be generated by nature or social mechanism. Contemporary thinkers are right to point out just how driven we can be by social forces, and the importance of the conditioning we experience in the culture we are born into, but it doesn't follow that this is our source. We have non-conditioned drives that often rebel against the situation we are in. If this were not so slavery would never have been abolished (or reduced) and feminism would never have arisen. Neither can these unconditioned drives be purely automatic, natural forces (libido's or ''wills to power'') within living beings (though it would be foolish to ignore these, as Marx did). This is evident in the fact that we do not only rebel for our own sakes but also against systems we find unjust. Even if our concepts of justice, or compassion, are partly socially conditioned. Some might argue that this sense of justice is entirely a social product, formed from conditioned instincts, or newly generated drives, but it seems unlikely that social forces could transform a ''natural selfishness'' to that extent. Natural instincts would always be more deeply rooted and stronger than socially constructed drives. Unless we consciously decided to empower them. In an unconscious, mechanistic scenario, injustice would thus be a permanent world feature. The fact that most people would find this intolerable indicates that our drive for justice is much stronger than that.

So, as the idea that there might be a biological drive towards justice seems counter intuitive, it appears that either we have innate, unconditioned, non-biological, basic values, or, more likely, we have the tendency to generate them by evaluating and prioritising one desire, or feeling, over another. Even if this evaluation may not itself be entirely free of social conditioning. In other words, a conscious and qualitative model of a ''libidinal economy'' is as important as an unconscious, quantitative one. Transforming the latter to the former would also be part of a liberatory program.

This implies a degree of freedom in our activities. It doesn't conclusively prove we are (semi) autonomous beings, but it does strongly suggest that we are. Human beings consistently demonstrate the need to choose their own way of life according to their own set of values.

If we assume we have some degree of freedom the next item of contention is identifying the subject of this freedom. Earlier we said that freedom can be simplistically seen as being at liberty to do something. Well if action is the key we must conclude that the individual is the only subject of freedom. Action demands intention, groups within society, or society as a whole, rarely if ever have a common intention. Our analysis above of the nature of freedom also focuses it clearly on the 'socialized' individual. We could convincingly argue that declared, individual intentions are illusory, or merely represent some collective or cultural drive, but even this doesn't defeat our case. The individual who deludes themselves about their motivations, or the origin of their motivations, is still an embodied being, they are still the focal point of the activity arising from whatever force is driving them. It is their freedom that is in question. Some form of collective drive could be said to exist (as in the case of the common impetus of some culturally conditioned value), but even if it does it must be the product of individuals coalescing together, not the foundation of individual motivation (their total motivation would only be added to or further conditioned by this drive). Collectives are not singularly embodied, they cannot be seen as focal points of physical action in the world. Also as we have previously concluded, it is the individual who seems to be able to evaluate the drives within themselves and take responsibility for their actions. Claims of being swept along by some social movement or an irresistible drive, while sometimes true in part, are classic ways of denying this responsibility.

Some Idealists may want to invoke distinct "group minds" that move embodied individuals like puppets, but this sort of mysticism has no intuitively or empirically obvious truth to it, and is usually only another way of suppressing individual difference and denying responsibility.

If all individuals were identical, or closely similar, or were so in one particular social group, we might say that their motives were similar enough to give rise to an identical collective drive that could be a subject of freedom in itself. But we know that people are naturally divergent, the very idea of a common human nature is now largely untenable.

Similar people are always the artificial products of a common life, one that is usually imposed on them (either by natural conditions or by authority).

The working class, the paradigm political case of such a collective group, is naturally a diverse set of individuals, it is only the arbitrary economic system that is imposed on them, and the corresponding values and way of life it creates, that gives them a common identity. The crucial liberation of the working class involves not the emancipation of one class from another but the emancipation of working class individuals from the system that both creates and oppresses them. Anarchist Revolution is not the empowering of the working class as a class, but as individuals that transcend the limitations of the class imposed on them by their oppressors.

This is not the whole story of course, even if the primary subject of freedom is the individual, it does not follow that terms like "Free Society", "Women's Liberation" and "Working Class Emancipation" are totally meaningless. We merely need to define them more clearly. Given the aim of liberation is the free individual, that every individual operates within society and is in part conditioned by it, it is clear that social liberation is a key part of this freedom.

We also need to focus on commonalities of identity to be able to work together and to create social structures that facilitate the conditions necessary for freedom and autonomy. Free, diverse individuals cannot exist in a totalitarian or homogenous society. The production of 'democratic', autonomous and heterogeneous societies (and communities within them) is crucial for individual freedom. The creation of which demands people working together according to their various points of similarity. Libertarian Feminism, Class Struggle, Anti-Racism, Workerism, Anti-Workism, Counter Culturalism and Affinity Groups of all kinds are varied forms of this. United only by opposition to the common life forced on them by the established order.

But if freedom is what we want, defining it's nature is also difficult. Traditionally most anarchists have called for the most extreme form of negative freedom that is possible. Not many orthodox libertarians have taken them seriously because they have their own concept of negative freedom that dismisses it. For them, we already have the maximum amount of negative freedom possible. A worker, in their view, is under no coercion to work for a low wage or in unpleasant, or even dangerous, conditions. They are merely given an offer, work or live in poverty. Even if they starve, it is their ''free choice". That is the way the world works, its all that's on offer, accept it, they argue. To most ordinary people this intuitively seems like a very authoritarian notion. But in a way it is true. If you fell out of a plane and some one told you to pull the rip cord on a parachute you fortunately happened to be wearing, you would not say they were coercing you to do so. Various attempts have been made to avoid this by declaring the survival urge a wall against which the worker is being pushed, and attacking the imposed world view behind the choice, but despite the attractiveness of these counter arguments there are other problems too.

If we say freedom is the removal of deliberate restrictions on our actions and interference in our lives this sounds good when we see ourselves as passive victims, but when we act more positively and assertively (or even just more humanly) it implies that we are denied the ability to act socially in any way at all without the permission of those we interact with. While this may appear great in theory, such a rule would prohibit non-consensual activity even if it were beneficial to both parties. Even more disastrously it might easily produce a grey society of closed off, private individuals, limited in how they are able to interact with others. The height of petty bourgeois individualism, the origin of the concept. What's more, without significant self repression, it is hard to see how such interactions could be prevented without some form of authority or strict social sanction. This is not an argument to say that it is always desirable to interfere in another persons life, merely that it is a fact of life that this is how people interact and effect each other. As Bakunin said, all our actions naturally infringe on someone else's freedom. It could also be said to negate the interpersonal conflict, and ability to defend oneself, that is necessary to develop as a powerfully autonomous individual, in favour of a frightened and insecure, "leave me alone" mentality. Worse still given the effects of long term repression such a society might eventually become very a anti social one. As is the case in today's repressive cultures.

The whole picture seems to be one of a denial of freedom rather than an affirmation of it. An awful dystopia rather than a libertarian utopia. 

A libertarian concept of freedom is more feasible in the form of positive freedom. Here we affirm the freedom to do certain things and attempt to control our own life, rather than negate our own and other peoples actions. The usual anarchist objection to this is that it held to justify State power, 'libertarian' laws or social interventionism. This is because it is believed that positive freedom entails rights, and these rights need to be enforced. But this is not necessarily the case, we can declare our own rights and act on them with our own power, defending ourselves from those who would impose themselves on us. The argument against this is that it favours 'the strong' over 'the weak'. However this ignores the value of solidarity. Not in the negative, patronising form of protecting (and preserving) 'the weak', but in the positive, respectful sense of aiding their empowerment. Others see a form of micro-fascism underlying this stance, but though this could be a danger it is paralleled by the coldness and authoritarianism inherent in negative freedom. In both forms of freedom an ethic of enlightened self interest, respect for the other (perhaps on the condition of their tendency to reciprocate) and a hedonistic enjoyment of life would negate these negative possibilities. However in the case of a culture based on negative freedom we require a far more unhealthy, personal restraint, and would probably end in a future degeneration.

Another benefit of the positive freedom concept is that it is far more compatible with equality. Here equality means equality of freedom and power. Wealth too can be seen as power and so disequalizing. Under negative freedom equality is difficult to reconcile with such liberty. Any attempts at equalizing society can be seen as an interference in an individuals free economic activity. This doesn't mean that social intervention is sanctioned just that individuals can exert their economic rights as well as their social ones.

An alternative formulation might be the so called "triadic" concept of freedom, that is the freedom from constraints to do as you will. An approach attempting to combine the best features of both while removing their shortcomings. In this latter form a delicate balance would have to be maintained between the positive and negative aspects of freedom.

This has been a general look at the some of the main issues involved in the concept of freedom. There are no doubt other problems and issues that would arise in particular circumstances and these would have to be dealt with as they arose. But hopefully the above account, and others like it, could serve as the basis for a contemporary ground plan for authentic freedom.