Fraternal, But Not Always Sisterly Twins: Negativity and Positivity in Liberal Theory

Social Research, Winter, 1999 by Richard E. Flathman

THE editor of this journal invited brief comments in response to recent essays by Steven Lukes and Mark Lilla--essays that were concerned, primarily, with posthumously published works by two of the most important liberal thinkers of our time, Isaiah Berlin and Judith Shklar. As is well known, both Berlin and Shklar gave what can perspicuously be called a decidedly negative cast to their formulations of liberal theory. Berlin is justly famous for his defense not only of what he called a negative conception of liberty, but for his denial of the possibility of achieving a unification or even a harmonization of the great variety of beliefs, goals and virtues to which human beings have, as a matter of historical and contemporary fact, been committed and by which they have been and continue to be powerfully attracted. In these and various related respects, Berlin was widely and, as a generalization, correctly classified as an anti-Utopian thinker.

Shklar's first book, After Utopia (1957) although in diction and empirical focus importantly different from that characteristic of Berlin's writings, clearly deserves the same categorization. Shklar's later investigations and reflections moved steadily from interpretive commentaries on 18th century thinkers to emphatic articulations of her own ideas concerning politics and morals; her predominant concern was with the dangers and evils that we must defend against rather than with the goods that we should pursue and the virtues or virtus we should cultivate in order to achieve those goods. Her widely discussed and highly persuasive essay "The Liberalism of Fear" (Shklar, 1989) endorsed Berlin's view that there is neither a highest human good to which all other objectives should be subordinated, nor any ordered subset or assemblage of goods that, collectively, properly command(s) the allegiance of all rational or reasonable persons. Her insistence that cruelty is by far the worst of the vices, and that fear and the fear of fear that cruelty inspires (especially when state sponsored and inflicted) are the most debilitating and destructive of human experiences is more pointed, one might say more material and hence more rhetorically powerful, than Berlin's sometimes rather abstract objections to paternalistic and moraline interferences with freedom in the name of freedom itself. Similarly, in her works on injustice, on citizenship in America, and in a number of the essays in the volumes reviewed by Lilla, she engages the reader, intensely and often vividly, with concrete fears, harm, and suffering to such a degree that rarely appears (and then even distantly) in Berlin's writings.

Despite these differences in focus and tonality, Lukes and Lilla are correct that both Berlin and Shklar chiefly chose and urged their fellow liberals to follow the via negativa--the path of raising their voices against what they took to be the worst harms and evils that human beings inflict upon one another, while for the most part leaving it to individuals and groups to judge for themselves which goods to embrace and which ends to pursue. Berlin is perhaps the most explicit and emphatic of the two in this respect. Having first argued, in "Two Concepts of Liberty" (Berlin, 1969) that freedom should be understood in a forward-looking and, hence, positive fashion as success in the satisfaction of desires, in the later Introduction to Four Essays on Liberty he retracted this view and replaced it with the argument that the freedom or unfreedom of this or that person or group should be assessed, rather, by asking how many "doors are open to them," how many doings and forgoings thinkings and disbelievings their governments and societies, friends, enemies, and neighbors leave at their disposal. "A man struggling against his chains or a people against enslavement need not consciously aim at any definite further state. A man need not know how he will use his freedom; he just wants to remove the yoke. So do classes and nations" (n. 1, p. xliii). For a yet more emphatic statement, see "From Hope and Fear Set Free," (Berlin, 1950). Analogously, for Shklar the value of being free of fear and the fear of fear is independent of any further goals or purposes that fear would otherwise prevent the person from pursuing. She agrees with Berlin that there is neither a summum bonum, nor any very convincing list or set of goods that all human beings do or should desire, but she has no doubt that there is a summum malum, namely fear and the fear of fear.

While allowing that Shklar may have been correct concerning the predominant tendencies of liberal thinking and sensibilities in America (and Berlin concerning liberalism in England?), in the name of "the essence of liberalism elsewhere," Lilla enters a dissent from these views. "In life, as in thought, the negative path always empties into a via affirmativa" (8). I do not profess to know what the "essence" of liberalism is, nor do I know what "elsewhere" Lilla has in mind. But his dissent is at once well-taken and potentially misleading. I begin with the respects in which we should agree with Lilla on this point. Various critics of liberalism, for example Michael Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre, have argued--in MacIntyree's words--that liberalism consists exclusively in a "series of denials" (MacIntyre, 1971: 283) a view that both Lukes and Lilla embrace as regard the liberalisms of Berlin and Shklar. It is, however, implausible to think that Berlin, Shklar, or anyone else did or could hold to such a conception in a consistent, certainly a rigorous, fashion.