  This account of the character and value of freedom was for Dewey, as for the Idealists and New Liberals that he drew on and for later writers on negative and positive liberty such as Isaiah Berlin, flowed into a debate about the proper scope of social and political action. The classical identification of liberty with negative liberty bolsters the identification of freedom with the sphere of life outside the scope of political action. By contrast, for Dewey the scope of legitimate social and political action had to be determined experimentally: laissez-faire should not be assumed to be the default position for a liberal, according to Dewey, since what he called intelligent social control or social action (rather, it should be noted, than state control) is often a requirement of positive liberty or individuality, in modern industrial conditions. Unsurprisingly, this drew a hostile reception from advocates of a negative concept of liberty such as F. A. Hayek. The identification of freedom with individuality in Dewey’s sense allows the necessary means for achieving individuality to be understood as necessary conditions of freedom. So, for example, throughout his life he argued that education to produce undocile, unservile citizens was essential, in the name of individuality. More pointedly, Dewey argued, particularly in the 1930s, that a socialized economy was necessary for individuality. Dewey drew on a wide range of sources to flesh out his conception of social action or social control, including the utopian Edward Bellamy and British guild socialist G. D.  H. Cole. While much of his writing is unstructured and occasional – and spread across many different contexts over a long period – rather than systematic or prescriptive in a very specific way, Dewey supported social reforms that tended to strengthen workers’ rights, including rights to form and join unions, and to take strike action, and the extension of democratic control in the workplace, in the name of freedom as individuality.  