'Liberty: One or Two Concepts Liberty: One Concept Too Many?' by Eric Nelson in 33(1) Political Theory 58-78 comments
Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between “negative” and “positive” concepts of liberty has recently been defended on newand interesting grounds. Proponents of this dichotomy used to equate positive liberty with “self-mastery”—the rule of our rational nature over our passions and impulses. However, Berlin’s critics have made the case that this account does not employ a separate “ concept” of liberty: although the constraints it envisions are internal, rather than external, forces, the freedom in question remains “negative” (freedom is still seen as the absence of such impediments). Responding to this development, Berlin’s defenders have increasingly tended to identify positive liberty with “self-realization.” The argument is that such an account of freedom is genuinely “nonnegative,” in that it does not refer to the absence of constraints on action. This essay argues that the claims made on behalf of “freedom as self-realization” cannot withstand scrutiny, and that they fail to isolate a coherent view of liberty that is distinguishable fromthe absence of constraint.
When Isaiah Berlin unveiled his classic distinction between “negative” and “positive” liberty in 1958, he was making both a historical and an analytical claim. He was not only arguing that nonnegative locutions about liberty could be intelligible but also that such locutions had a significant, if sinister, history. While Hobbes and Mill, Tocqueville and Constant carried the banner for “negative” liberty—freedom as the absence of interference or impediment—the “positive” concept found expression in the writings of such towering eminences as Plato, Zeno, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx. Since Berlin issued his celebrated formulation, however, his claim for the historical importance of positive liberty has been gravely compromised, as scholars have whittled away at the set of thinkers whose political theories the concept was meant to explain. Gerald C. MacCallum took a significant stride in this direction when he pointed out that Berlin had imposed an arbitrary restriction on the notion of “constraint” in insisting that negative freedom consisted solely in the absence of the “deliberate interference of other human beings.” Persons can be said to be constrained by internal forces or factors as well, MacCallum argued, and the absence of such intrinsic constraints would still count as freedom in its negative sense. Once the category of “constraint” had been stretched in this manner, it became a relatively simple matter to redistrict the province of negative liberty so that it could embrace many of the theorists Berlin had placed in the “positive” camp. Stoics in the tradition of Zeno, for example, preached that man lives according to his nature (and is thus truly “free”) only when his passions are restrained, a straightforward instance of freedom as the absence of internal constraint. Likewise, Plato spoke of freedom from false beliefs, and Kant’s moral agent legislates for himself the law of reason once he has liberated himself from the slavery of passions and sense impressions. All of these putatively “positive” theorists turn out on closer inspection to disagree with Hobbes and Constant, not about the meaning of liberty but about what counts as a constraint.
MacCallum offered these observations in the service of a broader critique of Berlin’s enterprise. Rejecting Berlin’s distinction between positive and negative freedom, MacCallum maintained that all intelligible locutions about liberty could be subsumed under a single triadic template: freedom is always “of something (an agent or agents), from something, to do, not do, become, or not become something.” But even contemporary theorists who dispute MacCallum’s larger claim about a single concept of freedom often accept his narrower argument about internal constraint. Quentin Skinner provides a distinguished example in this respect. He observes that Berlin’s characterization of positive liberty as “self-mastery” seems to have relied in large measure on “the familiar thought — equally familiar to students of Plato and of Freud — that the obstacles to your capacity to act freely may be internal rather than external, and that you will need to free yourself from these psychological constraints if you are to act autonomously.” But, Skinner continues, this claim “fails to capture a separate concept of positive liberty,” since, although we now include psychic, internal forces in the universe of possible constraints, “we are still speaking about the need to get rid of an element of constraint if we are to act freely.” Indeed, Berlin himself seems to have intuited that this particular notion of self-mastery was a nonstarter as a separate concept of “positive” liberty. In his 1958 lecture, he declared, “Freedom is self-mastery, the elimination of obstacles to my will, whatever these obstacles may be — the resistance of nature, of my ungoverned passions, of irrational institutions, of the opposing wills or behaviour of others.” Whether the constraints are internal or external, we are still firmly within the realm of negative liberty.
Skinner is thus committed to MacCallum’s emptying of the historical population of positive theorists. Plato and Freud must go, as must the Stoics, and presumably the Kantians. But Skinner, whose interest is primarily in elucidating two different understandings of negative liberty, nonetheless accepts that a positive concept exists and is intelligible. When Berlin writes in his introduction to the 1969 Four Essays on Liberty that “for the most part, freedom was identified by metaphysically inclined writers, with the realization of the real self,” Skinner feels that he has at last articulated a concept of freedom that is truly incommensurable with negative liberty. “Freedom,” Skinner explains, “is thus equated not with self-mastery but rather with self-realisation, and above all with self-perfection, with the idea (as Berlin expresses it) of my self at its best.” In making this claim, Skinner suggests that Berlin had in mind chiefly the British neo-Hegelians T. H. Green and Bernard Bosanquet. Certainly, in the descent from Plato and Kant to Green and Bosanquet the concept of positive freedom experienced quite a falling off. But the claim remains that this positive notion is intelligible, and that it was articulated in a particular historical moment. ...
