Short answers, pulled from the story.
Political freedom, also called political autonomy or political agency, is a central concept in history and political thought and one of the most important features of democratic societies. It has been described as freedom from oppression or coercion, the absence of disabling conditions paired with the fulfillment of enabling conditions, or the absence of life conditions of compulsion such as economic compulsion.
Negative liberty interprets political freedom as freedom from unreasonable external constraints on action, while positive liberty refers to the exercise of rights, capacities, and possibilities for action. Left-wing political philosophy couples freedom with positive liberty, while social anarchists treat negative and positive liberty as complementary concepts.
Milton Friedman argued in his book Capitalism and Freedom that there are two types of freedom, political freedom and economic freedom, and that without economic freedom there cannot be political freedom. Robin Hahnel challenged this in his article Why the Market Subverts Democracy, arguing that exercising economic freedom infringes on the freedom of others.
Friedrich Hayek criticized the socialist definition of individual liberty as freedom from obstacles, arguing it confused the aim of securing individual freedom by permitting an identification of freedom with power. He warned that once freedom is identified with power, a totalitarian state can form where liberty has been suppressed in the name of liberty.
Hannah Arendt traced the conceptual origins of freedom to ancient Greek politics, where freedom was inseparable from political action and reserved for those who had freed themselves from the necessities of life. She said freedom became associated with the Christian notion of freedom of the will, or inner freedom, around the 5th century CE, and she called freedom the raison d'être of politics.
Environmentalists argue that political freedoms should include some constraint on the use of ecosystems, rejecting any freedom to pollute or freedom to deforest because such activities create negative externalities that violate other groups' liberty not to be exposed to pollution. They point to the popularity of SUVs, golf, and urban sprawl as evidence that some ideas of freedom can clash with ecological conservation.