Isaiah Berlin’s lecture on political liberty ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (1958) created a new standard for understanding the individual and society. It has become a classic work.
Berlin’s seminal essay on liberty – which, like so many of his essays, began as a lecture – starts by differentiating between two notions of political freedom. The first of these is described as ‘negative liberty’, since it refers to the extent to which I am free from the interference of other individuals or authorities. Being negatively free, according to Berlin, does not mean that I am free from physical or psychological constraints. It simply refers to the degree of freedom from human interference or coercion such as the freedom to be left alone from engaging in politics. Contrasted with it is ‘positive liberty’, so-called because it is the freedom to do something rather than the freedom from something: eg, the freedom to stand for election to parliament. In many ways, this is a far richer, if more nebulous, notion that ‘derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master’.
So far, one could be forgiven for thinking that we are being presented with a rather obvious distinction between two sides of the same coin. Berlin doesn’t dissent, acknowledging that both concepts appear at ‘no great logical distance from each other’. But what distinguishes his account is that he treats each of these concepts realistically and historically, showing not only that there is a substantively significant – not merely a logically valid – distinction to be made between negative and positive liberty, but also that the failure to recognise its significance can cause far more harm than mere conceptual confusion. The key point here is that Berlin switches the default understanding of things by making theory more answerable to reality rather than the other way around. This bold move means that history and realism can take centre-stage in making sense of things. And what history and our current experience reveal is that negative and positive liberty respond to real and legitimate human needs and ideals. Negative freedom has been the beating heart of political liberalism, with its insistence that individuals be left alone to their own devices, so long as their actions do not unduly harm others. Similarly, positive liberty has lain at the heart of emancipatory theories of politics from democratic and republican doctrines to those of nationalism and communism.
In this vein, Berlin shows that one of the major insights of modern history and contemporary reality is just how catastrophically the concept of positive liberty is vulnerable to, or exploitable by, the most atrocious types of totalitarianism. The 20th century, in particular, has shown just how tragically brief the leap can be from a desire for self-realisation to the sense of having discovered a real or rational self and ending in the embrace of oppressive and murderous forms of despotism. One of the key factors that has brought about such a deformation over the past 200 years is the hugely influential assumption that harmony among social values is not merely desirable but possible.
So, for example, if I know in my heart of hearts or by the light of unaided reason that my true self is a manifestation of what my political party or my nation or humanity as a whole can or should be, the historical record reveals that it can be a short skip and jump before we find ‘the wise’ or ‘the party leaders’ or ‘the chosen few’ having to force the rest of us to be free to bring about the so-called ‘radiant tomorrow’. The history of the Soviet Union in the previous century has shown how potent this Rousseauian urge can be when it is coupled with the widespread, if tacit, belief that the genuine goals of all rational human beings must fit into a single, universal and all-embracing system, a kind of cosmic jigsaw where everything, or at least everything worthwhile, eventually finds its natural, preordained place and fits without remainder.
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Isaiah Berlim, philosopher of the human by Johnny Lyons - edited by Nigel Warburton
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