Group reactions to the New Zealand land sales legislation, 1943 - 1950

Abstract

Professor Harold J. Laski has asserted that freedom or liberty "is essentially an absence of restraint". Laski, H.J., Liberty in the Modern State, p. 48. Although this definition is obviously too broad and vague to be final, it can provide a starting point for a more specific study of freedom. Another writer, Barbara Wootton, goes a few steps further and divides freedom into four principal divisions. She distinguishes civil, cultural, political, and economic freedom. Wootton, Barbara, Freedom Under Planning, p. 17. This division narrows our field of inquiry or at least marks out tentative boundaries. The same author asserts that in day to day living, freedom as such means little. Freedom must continually be reinterpreted in terms of specific freedoms available to the individuals or groups of individuals within society. Freedom has no value merely as a term or as a mere philosophical concept. This study, therefore, will attempt to deal as concretely and specifically as possible with one small phase of the problem of freedom.