Freedom

Freedom, in a political context, is the absence of physical coercion in human relationships: the condition of a man who is not subject to the initiation of force by other men or by the state. Objectivism treats it as a single, definite condition rather than a matter of degree or a general term for well-being, and holds that it is the social requirement of a being who survives by reason.

“Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, or freedom from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state—and nothing else.”
~ Ayn Rand, "Conservatism: An Obituary", Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Why man needs it

The argument for political freedom in Objectivism is not that people dislike being ordered about. It is an argument from the nature of the human means of survival.

Man has no automatic knowledge of what will keep him alive. He has to identify it, and identification is an act of a mind that must be exercised by choice. Force is the one thing that can stop that process: a man at gunpoint can be made to move, hand over goods, or recite an approved sentence, but he cannot be made to think, and nothing he produces under compulsion was produced by compulsion. Force does not redirect a mind; it suspends one.

Freedom is therefore the social precondition of rational action, and this is why rights are formulated as negative claims. A right is a sanction to act on one's own judgment, and what it requires from everyone else is abstention rather than provision. See Volition and Man's nature.

Freedom and free will

The word does double duty, and Objectivism keeps the two senses apart.

Volition — free will — is a metaphysical fact about human consciousness: the capacity to focus one's mind or not. It is not granted by anyone and cannot be taken away, though the range over which it can be exercised can be narrowed to almost nothing.
Political freedom is a social condition: the absence of coercion by other men. It can be created and destroyed, and it is what political philosophy is about.

A prisoner still has free will. What he lacks is freedom in the second sense. Conflating the two produces both the claim that a slave was "free to choose his attitude" and the claim that men in a free society are unfree because their options are limited by circumstances.

The "freedom from want" substitution

Objectivism's sharpest disagreement with modern usage concerns proposals to extend the word to cover the absence of hardship — freedom from poverty, from insecurity, from need.

The objection is not that hardship is unimportant. It is that the substitution reverses the concept's meaning. Freedom in the political sense imposes on others only the obligation not to interfere. A "freedom" from want imposes on others the obligation to supply something, which can only be enforced by directing their work and disposing of their earnings. Whatever the merits of that arrangement, it is achieved by the very thing the original concept named the absence of.

Rand treated this as a case of the package-deal: two things with opposite requirements carried under one word, so that a listener who approves of one is manoeuvred into approving of the other. See Rights and Altruism.

Freedom and capitalism

Because freedom is the absence of coercion, and because production and trade are the activities most easily coerced, Objectivism holds that a consistently free society is capitalism: a system in which all property is privately owned and all human relationships, economic ones included, are voluntary.

The connection runs both ways. Economic controls are not a separate category from other restrictions, since a man's work is how he sustains his life and directing it directs him. Rand rejected the notion of political freedom coexisting with a controlled economy for the same reason she rejected the reverse. See Property rights, Free market and Trader Principle.

Common misunderstandings

That freedom means the absence of restraint of any kind. Being stopped from assaulting someone is not a loss of freedom, because the action it forbids is itself the initiation of force. Rights are defined so that they cannot conflict.
That the employer-employee relationship is coercive because one side has more to lose. Objectivism distinguishes an offer that may be refused from a threat that may not. Unequal bargaining strength is not force. See Exploitation.
That freedom is opposed to law. It requires law — objective law, defined in advance and applied by known procedure. What it excludes is discretionary power. See Government and Constitution.
That more freedom means less order. Objectivism argues that the two are produced by the same institution, since what makes coordination possible among strangers is confidence that agreements will hold.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. "Conservatism: An Obituary", Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New American Library, 1966.
Rand, Ayn. "Man's Rights" and "The Nature of Government", The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964.
Rand, Ayn. "What Is Capitalism?", Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 10.

External links

Freedom at the Ayn Rand Lexicon