IS THERE SOMETHING WRONG WITH FREE ACTION

This article gives an overview of traditional accounts of social freed om ('negative' and 'positive') as noninterference with action, and def ends their conceptual common ground against recent attacks. Philip Pet tit claims that freedom would be better understood as antipower than n oninterference. However, it is so far from being the case that account s of freedom as noninterference and as antipower are necessarily antit hetical, that they can in fact be complementary. More specifically, th ey are not about the same kind of freedom, the first being concerned w ith free action, but the second with the notion of a free person or a free society. Wayne Norman's arguments against the importance of the n otion of free action are subsequently examined and found wanting. In g eneral, we have no good reason for abandoning the post-Isaiah-Berlin c onceptual orthodoxy about an analysis of free action being the corners tone of any viable general theory of freedom.