Political Freedom and Belonging

This paper develops a novel theoretical framework for understanding political freedom from the Philosophy of Belonging. It argues that freedom is not a primary attribute of the individual nor a universal institutional form, but an emergent property of psycho-institutional arrangements that generate sufficient belonging and reduce arbitrariness across political, economic, and social domains. The analysis reconstructs the Western genealogy of freedom and demonstrates its historical achievements as well as its structural limits, particularly its reliance on individualist ontology and procedural guarantees. The paper introduces an alternative framework in which political freedom depends on institutional mentalization, psychological freedom grounded in belonging, stable legality, and minimum material and social thresholds. Extending the analysis to traditional and hybrid societies, the paper proposes a comparative definition of political freedom that avoids both essentialist universalism and cultural relativism. It concludes that global freedom cannot be based on the universalization of Western democracy, but must instead be built through non-arbitrariness, functional belonging, and institutional synchrony across diverse cultural systems.