Reconstructing Freedom: Concepts, Framework, and Methods

In contemporary society, although the concept of “freedom” is widely used, it exhibits a trend toward conceptual vagueness and boundary expansion. The theoretical tradition centered on the distinction between positive liberty and negative liberty has, while advancing the development of freedom theory, also led to persistent conflation between freedom and capability. Through conceptual clarification and formal modeling, this article proposes a triadic analytical framework for freedom, reconstructing freedom into three mutually independent categories: meta-freedom, social freedom, and capability. Among them, social freedom is defined as the list of rights shaped by social rules and formalized as a function of Necessary Order Discount and Unnecessary Order Discount. Capability is treated as the resource condition for realizing rights and is conceptually independent of freedom. The article demonstrates the incommensurability between rights and capability through logical analysis and thought experiments, and constructs a formal model in which social freedom and capability jointly determine the effectiveness of rights realization. This framework provides a structured tool for analyzing restrictions on freedom and offers freedom theory a conceptually clear and operable analytical foundation.