Review and Focus
       The Pelagian-Augustinian framework for discussing inner freedom provides help in noting implications of the more recent philosophical discussions as well as other sources.  This framework notes a difference between the capacity for making choices, the act of making choices, and the action a person engages in as a result of the choices.  By focusing on the first of these three, capacity, it is easier to recognize that many influences can be at work prior to any actual act of choice.  A person's character, including personality and habits and emotional tendencies are already part of what will influence choices. So are genetic inclinations; so are values learned from personal experience and from the culture and its traditions.
         Karl Marx, along with Herbert Spencer, provides an occasion to acknowledge the potentially enormous power of long-term historical development and of socio-economic structures.  In Marx's theory, the dominant means of production in any given society will affect who has power and who does not.  Each society usually also has a set of ideas that justify the power arrangments by describing it as natural or inevitable or as God's will.  Because this set of ideas is not recognized as a human creation to justify an unjust situation, the set of ideas is an "ideology."  It is only by recognizing that the economic order is not natural or inevitable that freedom to change can appear legitimate.