Freedom as a complex-structured concept

The title I have given to this book claims that it presents a theory of freedom. What sort of a theory is it? There have been psychological, sociological, economic, and historical theories of freedom in plenty, which attempt to explain the emergence of free institutions, or to specify the empirical conditions for free choice, or to focus on the causal relations between political and economic freedom. And ever since the sixteenth century there have been political, constitutional, or legal theories, such as Harrington's in Oceana, Locke's in the Two Treatises of Government, Montesquieu's in The Spirit of the Laws, and Lord Dicey's in The Law of the Constitution, which have aimed at prescribing the legal arrangements to safeguard freedom. After World War II, in the aftermath of logical positivism, and in the spirit of the kind of linguistic analysis that for a time dominated Anglo-Saxon epistemology and philosophical psychology through the works of Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, and J.L. Austin, there emerged a fashion for works in the same genre in social and political philosophy too. These were heavily influenced by the “ordinary language school of philosophy.” A theory of freedom was taken to be a theory of “freedom”: that is to say, it would have as its object the construction of a theory which would identify necessary and sufficient conditions for the correct use of the word “freedom” and its correlates “free,” “unfree,” “freely,” and so on, in all the diversity of ordinary usage.