Positive liberty, or positive freedom, is the possession of the power and resources to act in the context of the structural limitations of the broader society which impacts a person's ability to act, as opposed to negative liberty, which is freedom from external restraint on one's actions.

The concepts of structure and agency are central to the concept of positive liberty because in order to be free, a person should be free from inhibitions of the social structure in carrying out their ambitions. Structurally, classism, sexism, ageism, ableism and racism can inhibit a person's freedom. As positive liberty is primarily concerned with the possession of sociological agency, it is enhanced by the ability of citizens to participate in government and have their voices, interests, and concerns recognized and acted upon.

Isaiah Berlin's essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" (1958) is typically acknowledged as the first to explicitly draw the distinction between positive and negative liberty.

Timothy Snyder argues that positive freedom is necessary for flourishing democracies and societies, whereas negative freedom is more conducive to autocrats.

Charles Taylor distinguishes positive freedom from negative freedom, which defines freedom exclusively in terms of the independence of the individual from interference by others, be these governments, corporations, or private persons; this theory is challenged by those who believe that freedom resides at least in part in collective control over the common life. He criticizes negative liberty for being too simplistic and not taking into account the importance of individual self-realization, while real liberty is achieved when significant social and economic inequalities are also considered.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theory of freedom, according to which individual freedom is achieved through participation in the process whereby one's community exercises collective control over its own affairs in accordance with the "general will". He wrote: "The mere impulse to appetite is slavery, while obedience to law we prescribe ourselves is liberty." For him, the passage from the state of nature to the civil state substitutes justice for instinct gives his actions the morality they had formerly lacked.

G.W.F Hegel wrote in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (in the part in which he introduced the concept of the sphere of abstract right) that "duty is not a restriction on freedom, but only on freedom in the abstract" and that "duty is the attainment of our essence, the winning of positive freedom".

In the description of positive liberty from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,