The Two Concepts of Liberty
I’ve been teaching Introduction to American Government this past semester in the state prison in Muskegon. Teaching that subject to a group of older prisoners who are not allowed to vote is a far different, and in many ways more interesting, experience than teaching it to 18-year olds. Discussing with first-year college students how a bill becomes law causes their eyes to glaze over, but the men in the prison classroom could hardly contain their wonder at the complexity of the process.
Things get especially interesting in the section on civil rights and liberties. In a previous semester we ended up having about a 40 minute conversation interpreting the language of the 13th amendment, with special attention on the word “duly” in the second clause. Since it’s my habit to typically change up the readings every semester, this semester I had them read Isaiah Berlin’s classic essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” forcing me to re-read it. The essay holds up well on multiple readings. I was struck by how timely its arguments remain, and how they can help illuminate some of the divisions occurring in our current political environment.
Berlin’s essay resulted from a speech he gave in Oxford in 1958 during the height of the cold war, when political differences resulted from clashing ideas: democracy in the west versus communism in the east. Those political differences proved intractable because there was no way to reconcile the underlying ideas and principles that expressed competing notions of ultimate purposes. Berlin believed that the core of the disagreement was between those who beleived that reason or history provided a definitive solution to the problems of the human condition and those skeptical of such claims.
Berlin believed that the western democracies and the communist powers differed fundamentally on their idea of the role of coercion and obedience in human affairs. This age old problem has a profound moral dimension: is it enough to do the right thing, or must one also do the right thing for the right reasons? Can those reasons be right if one performs an act simply because one is yielding to the superior force of another? Under what circumstances does our understanding of what is right entitle us to bend another’s will to our own? How high must the stakes be before such coercion is morally acceptable? Why wouldn’t coercion always or usually be morally acceptable? Berlin’s main assumption is that the problem of coercion highlights contradictions in the idea of freedom, and those contradictions in the idea of freedom explained the Cold War.
The essay hinges on his distinction between two types of freedom: negative and positive. As to negative freedom: “I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity.” This negative idea of freedom operates in two senses: one, in that I can act upon my will unobstructed by others; and, second, that others cannot impose their will upon me. I am released from “the deliberate interference” of others “within the area in which I could otherwise act.” A person who cannot identify and pursue his own goals and purposes in the ways he sees fit is a person who is not free. “The wider the area of non-interference the wider my freedom.”
Berlin, drawing upon well-known liberal philosophers such as Locke and Mill identified the limits and restrictions on such freedom. Mill famously observed that one’s freedom to swing his fist ends where another person’s nose begins. Mill’s postulating of the “harm principle” intended to provide a discernible limit to a person’s area of freedom: my acts are licit so long as they harm no one else. This understanding of freedom remains prevalent, especially on college campuses. One of the difficulties with the idea of negative freedom is that it isolates us, for none of us exist in a purely private sphere. Mill tried carefully to demarcate the private from the public realms, allowing for interference in the latter but not in the former. It would be virtually impossible, however, to isolate one person’s actions in such a way that they could have no affect on others. Whether to wear a seat-belt might not harm another person directly, but given the complexity of our insurance and healthcare systems that decision will affect others indirectly. Critics of Mill’s harm principle argue that its scope is far too narrow to be useful.
Further: Berlin argued that negative freedom required certain conditions to meet its demands. It makes no sense to talk of freedom to people who lack the material conditions necessary to pursue their desired ends. Poverty, ignorance, disease, violence and so forth all limit the area within which freedom can take place and we can accomplish our chosen ends. In language similar to that of Abraham Maslow a decade later, our material needs must be met before any “self-actualization” can take place.
Berlin’s point in part is that the liberal democracies with their emphasis on negative freedom do not do justice to the full range of freedom’s demands. Indeed, the commitment to freedom may be tenuous, democracies often holding notions of equality and justice and material well-being to be preeminent over the idea of freedom. Tocqueville and other liberal thinkers realized the truth of this when they observed that people would trade off freedom to get other goods, but would not often trade-off other goods to get freedom.
This problem of trading-off liberty in the service of other goods is the problem that bedevils liberal democracies. How much freedom, and of what sort, must I give up in order to receive other goods such as security in return? How far must I narrow the scope of privacy in order to allow for a more fulsome public life? In the catalog of liberties, which ones will achieve preeminence such that I can’t bargain them off without offending what is essential to me? Is “control of my body” the last frontier of such bargaining? On what basis will I defend and justify such claims?
Within liberal democracies such justifications may come from different systems of thought such as natural law thinking, utilitarianism, Kantianism, and social contract thinking, with no way to reconcile their competing claims: one must choose a system of justification, but there is really no way to justify such choices. Berlin seems to believe that the law ought to be agnostic about its own system of justification. Perhaps one could think that in 1958, but the history of Supreme Court decisions at least since the Warren years makes us realize that different justices have used different and incommensurate moral frameworks to render their decisions, and for that reason the decisions reveal deep faultlines in our polity even while they exacerbate them. There are many circumstances where the law might be agnostic, but probably not always. The important thing about the negative view of freedom is that it emphasizes individual liberty but necessarily entails restrictions and bargaining.
Many thinkers found that situation frustrating, and so developed a different view of liberty. “The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master.” On the surface it may not sound much different, but the distinction plays out in significant ways. Positive freedom involves my ability to determine for myself what my nature and being are and not to be beholden to others for my “identity” nor to be playing a “role” that I do not create myself. Furthermore, I expect affirmation for such self-fashioning. I am only free when I am completely emancipated from external restrictions, both social and from nature, and operating purely on the basis of being the person I understand myself to be — my authentic self. That “self” must attempt to achieve the “real” self that alone can satisfy its desires. Whereas in the negative view of freedom there is always one self, in the positive view there are always two, and they are always in conflict with each other. The authentic self, being different than both the natural and the social self, must have the authority to alter social conditions such that the authentic self can now come into the fulness of its being.
Here’s the rub that makes it, from Berlin’s point of view, politically troublesome: the real, authentic self doesn’t necessarily have to be an idealized version of the individual who achieves authenticity in private; the real self can be bigger than the individual, it can be a collective aggregation of selves into a higher being, one more permanent, more powerful, more moral. This occurs when one identifies one's authentic self with the collective whole that now gives the individual untrammeled moral energy.
This entity is then identified as being the ‘true’ self which, by imposing its collective, or ‘organic,’ single will upon its recalcitrant ‘members,’ achieves its own, and therefore their, ‘higher’ freedom. The perils of using organic metaphors to justify the coercion of some men by others in order to raise them to a `higher' level of freedom have often been pointed out. But what gives such plausibility as it has to this kind of language is that we recognize that it is possible, and at times justifiable, to coerce men in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or public health) which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue, but do not, because they are blind or ignorant or corrupt. This renders it easy for me to conceive of myself as coercing others for their own sake, in their, not my interest. I am then claiming that I know what they truly need better than they know it themselves.
Indeed, the collective power may know the “real” self better than the empirical (actually existent) self does, the latter requiring “re-education” in places such as Soviet labor camps and Maoist struggle sessions and Room 101. The key thinker here is Rousseau, and what makes this positive view of freedom especially resistant to criticism is not simply that I might have to be coerced for my own good; rather, the problem is that it denies coercion even exists, for my re-identification from self to citizen is, in Rousseau, an actual expression of my will. I am truly free when I submit to what is my genuine will as manifested in the collective. In Rousseau’s words, “I am forced to be free,” but neither do I experience it as force. An enlightened elite must raise the consciousness of those who live with the "false consciousness" of unemancipated selves.
Berlin regards this positive view of freedom as the source of the totalitarian regimes that dominated the middle part of the 20th century. The actually existent person must always yield to the “real” person absorbed into and identified with the super-personal entity – the state, the party, an economic class, racial groupings, sexual identity, or the “arc” of history itself. The positive view of freedom is meant to resolve the conflict between a “transcendent, dominant controller” and “the empirical bundle of desires and passions that must be disciplined and brought to heel.” Berlin’s investigation of positive freedom helps us understand the otherwise incomprehensible relationship between those who have narrowly circumscribed the area of privacy while otherwise negating the self into group identities. The circumscription refers to the essential element within the self that connects it to the group, but on the group’s terms. Women must be thought of as more than fetus-carriers, so therefore the relationship of the woman to the fetus cannot be an essential characteristic of the self, meaning that a woman should carry the fetus only on the terms dictated by the group’s own self-understanding, a “self-identification with a specific principle or ideal.”
The conflict between the two ideas of freedom makes itself apparent everywhere in our politics, largely defining the difference between the left and right in this country, and explains how those differences result in our policy debates. Perhaps nowhere was this distinction more apparent than in debates over COVID policy with those on the libertarian right circumscribing the body as a zone of non-interference (“my body, my choice”) and those on the left arguing that the good of the whole body required the disciplining of all particulars. The fact that the “my body, my choice” nostrum can be employed in different circumstances by both sides indicates the depth of our confusion over the idea of freedom, a confusion that results from competing justifications, including the subordination of “science” to a mode of social authority. This is because, as Berlin realized, in the positive view of freedom a “free” state is one governed by laws all rational men would accept if they were sufficiently enlightened. As the French thinker Auguste Comte, a defender of the positive view of freedom, once observed: if we do not allow free thinking in chemistry or biology, why should we allow it in morals and politics? Coercing individuals into membership in the whole is an act of mercy.
Navigating our current political divides requires realizing that both sides operate out of ideas of freedom, even if they are not easily reconciled to one another, and even if we no longer have the capacity or interest in providing justifications for why one and not the other. Berlin himself had a preference for the negative view, his main argument against the positive view being an argument from results — that is, it was what made possible the brutal totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. It may appear in softer versions now, but behind it is always the totalitarian temptation. Those who operate with a positive view of freedom are more likely to submit stubborn resisters to reeducation and to silence all dissent.
I think Berlin’s essay not only illuminates the nature of our political divisions but helps point a way forward. While they may disagree on the exact nature of the thing, the two views both ground themselves in the notion of the importance of personhood. Mill articulated the negative view when he asked what was the maximum degree of non-interference compatible with the minimal demands of social life. He sought to insure that the moral dimensions of personality were not set so low that they could be negated altogether by having others direct our actions. Persons must be capable of self-assertive autonomy even in the face of all barriers constructed against it. In the positive view, authority is recognized and absolute so long as it is grounded in my authentic personality. The fact that those who hold to a positive view of freedom will often resort to Mill’s language of justification indicates a deep confusion in our contemporary notions. Indeed, the success of Mill's position in English-speaking countries resulted from obscuring the principles of justification. This renders it easy for me to conceive of myself as "coercing others for their own sake, in their, not my interest. I am then claiming that I know what they truly need better than they know it themselves.'
Berlin's most important observation is that thinkers yield to the tendency to think that there is a “final solution” to the problem of conflict, that a complete harmony can be achieved. This impulse to live without contradiction, to resolve the tensions of social order and human existence itself — indeed, to leap out of that condition altogether — and to believe subsequently that a perfect polity and fully realized selves can be achieved in the here and now is the central error of the totalitarian mind. Berlin offers in its stead a commitment to pluralism, the idea that a good social order allows for a great variety of beliefs and viewpoints with no one dominating. Pluralism “is truer, because it does, at least, recognize the fact that human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another.” The pluralist view allows persons to organize their lives around ultimate concerns without fear of circumscription by others. It is enough that we get to choose our ends and purposes; we don’t need to claim eternal validity for them.
Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. …To demand more than this [relativity] is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity.
This emphasis on the person as the source of freedom’s enduring moral appeal is correct, but I think Berlin’s inability to navigate freedom’s differences results from his inattention to a central part of personhood: namely, that we do not exist primarily in isolation from each other, but in association. Berlin draws our attention to a pluralism of “values” and beliefs, but we also live in a world with plural institutions. Institutional pluralism seems to me the more interesting kind.
Berlin’s essay repeats the modern error that the dynamic in social life results from either the relationship with or the conflict between the individual citizen and a coercive and expansive state. Tocqueville and others pointed out the symbiosis between increased individualism and an increasingly powerful state, and observed that associative life provided a way out of the dilemma. “Multiply your associations and be free,” Robert Nisbet wrote. The rich and variegated patterns of social and political association both buffer the self against external powers, but also result in more responsible selves whose capacities develop as a result of all the obligations and duties they possess, many in tension with each other, requiring us to make difficult moral choices. A self not capable of lettings others down is hardly a person at all. Freeing ourselves from the judgment of others, so essential to Rousseau and the positive view of freedom, requires either complete uniformity of thought or complete isolation. After all, a final judgement that we can bring into the here and now because we're so certain we know the final principle that ties everything together in an everlasting harmony, is one we need not fear. Albert Camus understood well that impulse to free ourselves from judgment by first submitting oneself to it so that one could now exercise it over all others. Thus, those who hold to a positive view of freedom typically hold to some sort of confessional element: only after I have confessed my own sins (racism, sexism, privilege) can I judge others.
This self, now free to judge, is like Mill's libertarian self, disassociated from others. The impulse of negative freedom is just to let others be, but the impulse of positive freedom is to gather these disparate selves into a greater whole. They result in competing notions of power and its use. But in our associations calculations of power rarely make themselves present. Our associations are either natural, such as families, or voluntary, such as joining the PTA. All have the dual character of pulling people out of their individuality, and thus also giving them the dignity of participation, but also acting as a buffer against state power by performing functions whose prerogatives these associations zealously guard against state intrusion. They make people more responsible in their exercise of freedom and provide a necessary check against the encroachments of power. Associative life results naturally from people’s affections and interests and insures that they have a voice in the decisions that most directly affect them. Berlin’s lack of attention to associative life hampers his whole otherwise shrewd essay.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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