Morality, Social Policy and Berlin's Two Concepts - .political philosopher Isaiah Berlin - )

Social Research, Winter, 1999 by Robert Grant

Negative liberty can be understood in terms of rights, but only when those are construed in the classical liberal manner, as freedoms or permissions rather than as claims. My negative liberty involves no substantive claim on others that they supply me with X, or deliver X, or perform X for me, where X is something to which I have a "right" (whether natural or contractual). Still less, being contentless, can negative liberty be considered as a substantive, welfare-style entitlement. I have a right, not that you, or the state, or whoever, do or provide X for me, but merely that you leave me alone to do (or not to do) X, Y, or Z (if I want).

This requirement sounds almost too wispy or minimal to count as a right, though in practice it has real weight, as immediately becomes obvious once it is withdrawn. To reinforce its general negativity, the idea amounts equally to this, that you have no right to obstruct my actions (of such-and-such a kind). This could be recast as your having a duty not to prevent me from performing them. If I wish to and can, that is; the facts that I may not want to and may not be able to are irrelevant, as they are not in the case of positive liberty.

In its negative conception, political liberty is proportionate to the number and extent of permissions, that is, of spheres of action, and items within them, protected against invasion. There is no suggestion that everyone can actually do what is permitted (though the permission seems pointless unless someone can): an individual's personal, social and economic circumstances may determine otherwise. But what is important, and consequently disregarded by anarchists and extreme libertarians (who have other ideas), is that the state, and in particular the law, will step in to prevent anybody who seeks to prevent the individual from doing whatever it is, if he does want to and can.

In essence this is what, at the political level, classical liberalism has always advocated, and it stops there, for a reason which from the classical liberal perspective is plausible enough. Though largely implicit, this reason is that any "deeper", more "positive" kind of freedom (e.g., that supposedly instantiated in "self-realization") could not be guaranteed by the state. Further, the state's attempt to guarantee or deliver it will always necessitate the state's appropriating powers that effectively decrease the sphere and extent of permissions (negative liberty). And further still (we might add), the "deeper" a conception, the remoter it is, by definition, from everyday experience. Some things (`scientific" explanations of self-consciousness, for example) may be so "deep" as not to engage with experience at all, in which case for all practical purposes we can surely dispense with them. (Which is not to say that positive liberty in general is illusory.)

Berlin himself never really defined this "deeper" freedom, except vaguely to suggest that it had to do with self-realization; moreover, to its detriment, that it is the "freedom" to "lead one prescribed form of life" (1969: 131). That, of course, would be a highly Pickwickian freedom. It is found, admittedly, in some positive libertarians of a classical republican stamp (Robespierre being an extreme example), as also in some Romantic Idealists, though not in Kant or Hegel; but why should Berlin suddenly introduce this anti-pluralist component into the idea, except to discredit it? Others among his examples (`Two Concepts', [sections] VI; 1969, 154-162) bear the marks of post-war decolonization.(3) implying that the "self" at issue is collective (i.e., national, or rather nationalist), and that its "realization" might involve very severe restrictions, both on individuals' negative freedom, and (partly in consequence) on the possibility of their individual self-realization.