Abstract
While focusing on the concept of liberty, this article produces a dialogue between the Talmud and western political theory, and thus expands the canon of political thought. Equipped with three concepts of liberty - negative, positive, and republican - this article offers an original reading to Babylonian Talmud Git 12a-13a. The talmudic passage's pivotal question - whether liberty is necessarily beneficial to a slave - enables us to reconstruct its fundamental, albeit implicit, understandings of both slavery and liberty. The talmudic approach to slavery and liberty emerges as concrete, and hence yields a thick and multi-faceted notion of liberty. Considering that a person might prefer the benefits of slavery reveals a paradox in Isaiah Berlin's negative concept of liberty. Therefore, as this article concludes, his conceptual distinction between two concepts of liberty is unsustainable and needs to be replaced by a concrete and thick notion of liberty.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 147-173 |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| Journal | Harvard Theological Review |
| Volume | 111 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Apr 2018 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2018.