INTRODUCTION
"The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom." This statement by Hegel indicates that in every age there is a need for rethinking and reformulating what freedom is, so that each generation can build upon past experience, live out the present and look forward to a better future. Liberation thinkers are trying to accomplish this task: they are struggling to achieve a fresh rethinking of liberation/freedom, so as to offer the twentieth century a greater consciousness of freedom and a better concrete way in which that freedom can be experienced. This project also articulates the philosophical tasks on the subject of liberation/freedom which Dussel and Novak have undertaken. This introduction will provide a framework for understanding the concepts of liberation/freedom in Dussel and Novak. I will use three main divisions: circumstantial freedom, freedom as action, and freedom as being.

CIRCUMSTANTIAL FREEDOM
Circumstantial freedom is negative freedom. The most evident circumstances of freedom are that external factors directly affect an individual and can take away or diminish his/her freedom. Circumstantial freedom is being free from someone or something, that is, one is not bound to an individual or a law, one is not dependent on something, and one is not determined by a given principle of determination. In this category of freedom there is an absence of external constraints or coercion and duress. An individual's experience of this kind of freedom consists in not being coerced or under duress. I call myself free then to the extent that no one individual or group of individuals interferes with my activity and I can act unobstructed by others. The greater the scope of non-interference means my freedom is that much greater. Thomas Hobbes had this kind of freedom in mind when he wrote in Leviathan: "liberty is . . . the absence of external impediments; which impediments may oft take away part of [a person's] power to do what [she]/he would . . . ."

FREEDOM AS ACTION
Freedom as action and as being are called positive freedoms and presuppose circumstantial freedom. When freedom is understood as action, it is viewed in terms of an individual making free choices and then being able to carry out these choices or decisions through action. It is important to begin with the minimum required for such choices: political freedom. Political freedom is the freedom an individual has in virtue of his/her political status as a citizen and is a freedom of something, such as freedom of speech, of religion, of the press and so on. These are called rights. When one possesses such rights, one then has the power to make some choices. When an individual analyzes his/her possibilities, he/she is considering motivations, drives, desires, intentions and capacities. An individual makes a choice by opting for this possibility over that one. This is freedom of choice and the individual experiences this freedom when he/she knows that he/she could have chosen otherwise. The most fundamental choice is the decision to act or not to act. Even after one has made a choice, an individual may decide not to carry out that choice because the circumstances are not favorable. In addition to what has been presented here, certain other characteristics about free choice are important to note. They are:

1. free choice produces an act which could always have been otherwise, even though all the conditions under which the choice was made remained exactly the same;
2. it is creative inasmuch as it gives existence to that which before the choice was merely a possibility; and
3. that it is self-creative inasmuch as it is not only self-determined but also self-determining.

FREEDOM AS BEING
The creative power of free choice is necessary for self-determination and this is a presupposition for the third division, freedom as being. When choices and actions result in acquiring certain skills, habits, or virtues and come to express who one is, this is freedom as being. The choices one makes and the actions which correspond to those decisions determine the kind of person an individual will become. In such choices and actions one is determining one's character, one's life project, one's fundamental orientation, one's humanity, one's personhood. This freedom is constitutive of what it means to be human, to be a person. It is the fundamental capacity for making an irrevocable choice to be someone, to be a particular kind of human being. The essential agent in freedom is always the human being, for freedom is the historical process of a human being coming to be by means of his/her free choices and actions. The culmination of this process is personhood. John Dewey explained clearly this kind of freedom when he wrote:

In committing oneself to a particular course, a person gives a lasting set to [one's] own being. Consequently, it is proper to say that in choosing this object rather than that, one is in reality choosing what kind of person or self one is going to be. Superficially, the deliberation which terminates in choice is concerned with weighing the values of particular ends. Below the surface, it is a process of discovering what sort of being a person most wants to become.

Furthermore, freedom as a person's mode of being is both individual and beyond the individual, that is, communitarian, structural or institutional. The experience of being free is a result of an individual's choices and actions and the choices and actions of one's community. When free people unite to further freedom in the economic, political, religious and academic spheres of life, their efforts lead to the construction of institutions or structures, which are an expression of this solidarity and the integration of a multitude of free achievements. This collaborative work or networking among such institutions or structures in a society provides the ambient for one to develop his/her personhood. Even though institutions or structures depend upon the individuals who constitute them, they can promote or restrict freedom to a greater extent than the singular efforts of the individuals who compose them.