The Formal Theory of Social Mobility.

The essence of freedom consists in the absence of restraint and an election or any other concrete instance of choosing is generally deemed to have been free if each voter had an unrestricted choice between several alternatives, of which not casting a vote may have been one. This approach is objective because it is based on "post factum" data reflecting actual behaviour in a given situation and it is statistical in so far as the analysis embraces the decisions taken by the full membership of the selected group. But diversity alone does not necessarily indicate the absence of restraint, because variety can be enforced just as effectively as uniformity. If, for example, the actual statistical spread of the choices can be traced back to the definite orders of an authority, the actual freedom displaced is nil. There are also instances where, though the factor itself is unavoidable, its consequences are not. Take sex, for instance, as a determinant of choice of profession. Whereas it is hardly a practical proposition to alter the sex of a girl who wants to pursue a profession at present reserved to males, it would not be impossible to throw all professions open to both sexes.