Political Science: How can freedom be the recognition of necessity?

Freedom can be defined as being able to do what one pleases without restraint as long as it doesn't harm others. I think that a more useful definition of freedom is "the degree to which members of a society can influence the rules and laws imposed upon them." It is not black and white, but rather a multidimensional spectrum. Point is: freedom is a word that has many different meanings, and it means different things to different people.

Freedom has the same root as words like friend and frere, which is French for brother. It means an affiliation similar to kinship.  It involves some degree of care for one another.  The part of the meaning we've lost over time is really important to society.  Liberty is lack of constraint.  The meaning was already deluded when the US Constitution was written, but the framers tended to use freedom with a notion of protection.Freedom and liberty are the bookends of society.  We surrender some liberties for freedom.  With freedom we get all the benefits of society, which results in liberties of much greater importance.  You don't have the liberty of burning garbage, but you can travel safely, get find people on the net to do your homework for you You're taking a liberty and I'm giving you the freedom to do so.  (~:http://www.westegg.com/etymology/  Freedomhis comes from German (literal, modern-day translation, "Freiheit"), but is actually closer in derivation to the German word "Friede", which means "peace" and is a word of pre-Christian, Germanic origin (originally "Frith"). The archaic term was used to signify the period following the termination of a bloodfeud between two Germanic clans when the softer, feminine qualities of the god "Freda" or "Frita" held sway. To achieve such a peace, some consideration had to given up on the part of the clan whose member had committed the most recent wrong against another clan, such as a certain quantity of meat or animal hides. What was given up was called "Bot" (delivered good) or "Botschaft" (literally delivered shank (of meat), but currently is the modern German word for "message"). It is interesting to note that this is from where we get the English term "boat" (Apparently, as time went on, the term was used less to describe what was being delivered and more to describe the deliverer or means of delivery--Hence, the modern German words "Bote" (messenger) and "Boot" (boat--which can be visualized as a means of delivering something or someone)).

Freedom or liberty can be broken down into http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/. You can get all the fancy terms of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_liberty and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty respectively at wiki as well. In my pragmatic language -Negative liberty is against oppression from others and positive liberty can be oppression to others.There you see it's a paradox, another perfect example of metaphysical philosophy, a twin brother to the supernatural western religion.Not to ruin your thesis, the Chinese philosophy never talked about freedom or liberty. Freedom is considered as instinct and emotional desire possessed by all animals in the Chinese culture. Is it true? You be the judge. What is emphasized in the Chinese tradition is against human freedom and liberty. The Chinese define it as morality, i.e., self restraint from emotional desire for freedom or liberty. In Neo-Confucianism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhu_Xi called for -存天理灭人欲 (Restore heaven's way and eradicate humans' desire.)that was of course condemned by the communists. What do you think?By "heavens' way" it really means "nature's way" in https://jiansun2.quora.com and https://jiansun0.quora.com. There you see the Chinese philosophy really headed the opposite way to the western equivalent.Political science is really social science as we're all social animals defined by Aristotle. Therefore, social ethics ought to be the real philosophy in politics not metaphysical ideals or supernatural concepts such as freedom or liberty.I hope it gives you a perspective as to how freedom can be the recognition of necessity.

As I understood it from the article "The Tragedy of the Commons" by G. Hardin (1968), the phrase "freedom is the recognition of necessity" means that in order to be free (in the same sense as you used, "do what one pleases without harming others") we, as a society, need to acknowledge some aspects of reality that would necessarily lead to undesirable outcomes and, consequently, restrict our freedom (as in the current reality) in some respects to prevent such outcomes and be freer to some extent. To make this clearer, the example of the commons from Hardin's article may be useful. In brief, if rational herdsmen are given free access to a common pasture, each of them will keep adding animals to their herds until it brings ruin to all (since the common is a limited resource). The reason behind this predicted behaviour is that the benefit of adding one animal (the profit made when it's sold) entirely goes to the herdsman, whereas the cost of this (overgrazing) is shared among all herdsmen and to it is rational for someone seeking to maximize their own interests to add animals. To come back to the phrase, we see that if we are to prevent ruin (and if the system really works as described), we need to restrict freedom somehow (Hardin proposes privatisation or the allocation of user rights for instance). However, restricting our freedom in this way would actually enable us to "pursue other goals" (thanks to the lasting profits resulting from a sustainably managed common I guess) than bringing ruin to all. (Of course, other interpretations that I don't know of may exist.)