Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom

'Two Concepts of Liberty' 50 Years Later

Bruce Baum, Robert Nichols, Bruce Baum, Robert Nichols

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138914735
• eBook ISBN: 9781135132385
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Philosophical Essays
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since his death in 1997, Isaiah Berlin's writings have generated continual interest among scholars and educated readers, especially in regard to his ideas about liberalism, value pluralism, and "positive" and "negative" liberty. Most books on Berlin have examined his general political theory, but this volume uses a contemporary perspective to focus specifically on his ideas about freedom and liberty.

Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom brings together an integrated collection of essays by noted and emerging political theorists that commemorate in a critical spirit the recent 50th anniversary of Isaiah Berlin's famous lecture and essay, "Two Concepts of Liberty." The contributors use Berlin's essay as an occasion to rethink the larger politics of freedom from a twenty-first century standpoint, bringing Berlin's ideas into conversation with current political problems and perspectives rooted in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, democratic theory, and critical social theory. The editors begin by surveying the influence of Berlin's essay and the range of debates about freedom that it has inspired. Contributors' chapters then offer various analyses such as competing ways to contextualize Berlin's essay, how to reconsider Berlin's ideas in light of struggles over national self-determination, European colonialism, and racism, and how to view Berlin's controversial distinction between so-called "negative liberty" and "positive liberty."

By relating Berlin's thinking about freedom to competing contemporary views of the politics of freedom, this book will be significant for both scholars of Berlin as well as people who are interested in larger debates about the meaning and conditions of freedom.

Part I

Berlin in Context

1 “Two Concepts of Liberty” in Context

James Tully

My objective is to contextualize Isaiah Berlin's 1958 inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University. By “contextualize” I mean to interpret the lecture in the context of the political problems and various solutions to them in which Berlin wrote and to which he responded. Fortunately, Berlin left us considerable guidance in this interpretive task. He explicitly contextualized his own lecture, setting out the major political problems he addresses and the major rival interpretations of these problems against which he advances his own opinions. In addition, he responded to the first critics of “Two Concepts of Liberty.” The lecture was published shortly after it was delivered on 31 October 1958.¹ He then revised it over the following eleven years in response to the many criticisms of it, including the “devastating criticisms” of H. L. A. Hart and Stuart Hampshire in 1967. It was published in revised form along with three other essays in 1969.² This volume includes an important Introduction in which he responds to major criticisms and modifies some of his views, yet with the realization that the critics will remain unconvinced. “My doctrines are attacked so ferociously in this year's B.Phil. examination in Politics,” he wrote just before publication, “that I anticipate storms, not from embattled students only, but from every possible quarter, when my unpopular doctrines are published.” Finally, in 2002, Henry Hardy edited and corrected the 1969 version of “Two Concepts of Liberty” and published it along with the 1969 Introduction, four other essays, other writings related to liberty, a guide to Berlin's critics by Ian Harris, and a concordance to the 1969 publication.³

By reading the lecture in relation to its contexts, I hope to show the debates Berlin was passionately engaged in and the way he reconstructed liberalism in an exceptionally narrow and exclusive way in response to what he saw as the threats of communism, socialism, nationalism, social democracy, progressive liberalism, and the struggles for self-determination of the decolonising Third World. In so doing he helped to discredit and marginalize the progressive and pluralistic liberalism of his interlocutors and to construct the new “negative liberty” liberalism that rose to hegemony during the Cold War in Europe and North America.

One underlying question to which the lecture as a whole is a series of responses is the following troubling concern of the majority of his audience and first critics that Berlin identifies at the beginning:

What troubles the consciences of Western liberals is, I think, the belief, not that the freedom that men seek differs according to their social or economic conditions, but that the minority who possess it have gained it by exploiting, or, at least, averting their gaze from, the vast majority who do not. They believe, with good reason, that if individual liberty is an ultimate end for human beings, none should be deprived of it by others; least of all that some should enjoy it at the expense of others. (TC, 172)⁴

This is the question at the heart of decolonisation and the Cold War for conscientious liberals. The following sections are organized to show how Berlin's arguments all lend support to his objective of dispelling it. He does this by radically redefining liberty so that it is not associated with the broader senses of liberty that give rise to the concern. The last two sections take up Berlin's final response to the liberal critics who were dissatisfied with the arguments of the lecture and continued to raise this pressing issue.

1. THE COLD WAR: THE POLITICAL CONTEXT OF NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE LIBERTY

According to Berlin the contemporary context in which his two concepts of liberty are “intelligible” is the “open war … between two systems of ideas which return different and conflicting answers to what have long been the central question of politics—the question of obedience and coercion” (TC, 168). The open war is the three-sided conflict of the Cold War: the war between the capitalist West and the Communist countries, their wars for control over the decolonising and developing Third World, and the struggles of the Third World countries against postcolonial dependency and for self-determination. The key to understanding this context is to see the two rival concepts of liberty that underlie and animate the two dominant rivals (“capitalist civilization” and “communist totalitarianism”) and the third “hybrid” concept of liberty that animates decolonisation and the Non-aligned Movement of the Third World.⁵

In an allusion to the Oxford historian R. G. Collingwood, Berlin argues that we can see that his two concepts of liberty are the master-key to understanding the central twentieth-century conflict if we start with the questions to which the two concepts are answers (TC, 168). “Negative liberty” is the answer to the question “‘What is the area within which the subject—a person or group of persons—is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?’” It is the liberty of noninterference or of a sphere of noninterference (TC, 169). “Positive liberty” is the answer to the question, “‘What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?’” (TC, 169), or “‘By whom am I ruled?’” (TC, 177). It is the liberty of self-mastery, self-realization, and self-government (TC, 177–178).

This conceptualization of the Cold War as a battle between two mutually exclusive systems of ideas—negative and positive liberty—is, I believe, the most original feature of the lecture. The idea that there are two important (and intertwined) modern senses of political and economic liberty, negative and positive liberty, is not new. It is the dual idea of liberty at the centre of European liberalism from Benjamin Constant to the present. What is new is the attempt to define liberalism in terms of negative liberty alone and to claim that this is what the capitalist West is fighting for in the “open war,” whereas the communist countries are fighting for a separate and opposed concept of liberty: positive liberty.⁶

2. PROGRESSIVE EUROPEAN LIBERALISM AND LIBERTY AT THE MID CENTURY

At the time of Berlin's lecture, the mainstream of European liberalism was based on four interrelated senses of liberty. The first two comprise the dual framework of liberty set out by Benjamin Constant in 1819.⁷ It consists of negative liberty, the “liberty of the moderns” or “private autonomy,” and positive liberty, the “liberty of the ancients” or “public autonomy,” in its modern liberal form of the right to participate in representative institutions and the public sphere, thereby grounding government on the consent of the governed.⁸ The primary modern liberty, negative liberty, includes the liberty of the person and of speech, thought, and faith, of formal equality before the law, and the liberty of individuals and corporate persons to own private property and enter into contracts. The queen of the negative liberties of the moderns is always, but never exclusively, free trade or market liberty of noninterference from the exercise of political power in economic transactions in the private sphere of private property, private corporations, and contracts.⁹ In the interwar years, progressive liberals argued that there is a third type of liberty in the tradition, “social and economic liberty.” Social and economic liberty is more recent than and subordinate to negative and positive liberty.

Berlin is correct to say that liberals before him disagreed over the boundaries of the sphere of negative liberty (TC, 173). However, they disagreed over this in relation to complementary disagreements over the degree of positive liberty of self-government (participation in representative government and the public sphere) that is necessary in a liberal society. It has to be coordinated with and limited by negative liberty, just as potentially unregulated negative market liberty has to be checked by the democratic exercise of positive liberty. Liberals also disagreed over the type of social and economic liberty citizens require in order to exercise their negative liberty in the private sphere and their positive liberty in the public sphere, as well as to counter a new and insidious kind of normalizing power: namely what John Stuart Mill called “social power,” which is distinct from political power.

These three senses of liberty were not seen as analytically or historically distinct and opposed. They comprise the historical package of European liberal liberties, as Mill roughly sketched in the first chapter of On Liberty: negative liberties, representative self-government, contestatory public participation, varieties of cooperative forms of organisation, self-realization, and social and economic capacities that enable the exercise of liberty.¹⁰ Negative, positive, and social and economic liberty were defined and weighted differently by different liberal authors and politicians. Even Benjamin Constant argued for participatory and social and economic liberty, as the means of diffusing class war. The three senses or concepts of liberty were seen as interrelated and mutually supportive, and their proper ordering in relation to the problems at hand constituted the permanent debate within the liberal tradition.¹¹

Finally, progressive postwar liberals wrestled with a fourth, international strand of liberty: the freedom of each and all. They rejected the longstanding liberal and preliberal assumption that one individual or state (or peoples) could be said to be free while other individuals or states (or peoples) to which they are related in some way are unfree, dependent, or exploited.¹² This assumption continues today in theories where liberty continues to be considered the status of an individual or state relative to others not interfering with or dominating them, irrespective of whether that individual or state interferes with or dominates others. This assumption was challenged in the nineteenth century. In perhaps the most famous formulation, the negative liberty of “free trade” to exploit other people and peoples of the world shall be replaced with “a form of association, in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all.”¹³ That is, individual persons and political associations are free if and only if they mutually recognise, respect, and interact with each other as free agents here and now.

For social-democratic liberal internationalists of the decolonisation period, therefore, the four senses of liberty have to be enjoyed by all individuals and peoples of the emerging postcolonial and interdependent international order of the Bretton Woods System and the United Nations if any individual or people is to be free. On this international understanding of liberty, the realization of freedom requires the liberation of Third-World peoples from colonial and postcolonial relationships of dependency, exploitation, and unfreedom, and the recognition of their democratic positive liberty in the form of the right of self-determination. This revolutionary vision of recognising and respecting all four interrelated types of individual and collective liberty was reformulated into the language of international human rights and extended to each and all over a twenty-year period of intense debate at the United Nations Human Rights Commission.¹⁴ All four interrelated types of liberty are enshrined in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (1960), International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), and International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966).¹⁵

Progressive liberals hoped that this pluralistic understanding of liberty as the fourfold interdependent, individual, and collective freedom of each and all would form the basis of a new, Keynesian cooperative international order institutionalised in the Bretton Woods institutions, a democratic UN, international human rights, and world federalism.¹⁶ In summary, what “troubled their consciences,” as Berlin neatly phrased it in his opening statement (TC, 172), was that the existing international order, before and after decolonisation, violated their understanding of liberty.¹⁷

To see this complex context more clearly, it is important to bear in mind that, in the mid 1950s, the liberal imagination was not yet captivated by the neol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Berlin in Context
• Part II Rethinking “Positive” and “Negative” Freedom
• Part III Democratic Pluralism and National Self-Determination
• Part IV Berlin and Critical Theories of Freedom
• References
• Index