Freedom is the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants. Political freedom is often associated with liberty and autonomy in the sense of "giving oneself their own laws", and with having rights and civil liberties with which to exercise them without undue interference by the state. Frequently discussed kinds of political freedom include freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of choice, and freedom of speech.
Center of the liberal ideology: freedom of choice, grounded in the notion of the “psychological” subject endowed with propensities he or she strives to realize. When the ruling ideology endeavours to sell us the insecurity caused by the dismantling of the Welfare State as the opportunity for new freedoms.
True freedom is certainly not the ability to do whatever you like. The fundamental level of ideology is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society.
