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

Social Research, Winter, 1999 by Robert Grant

In these pages it is unclear just how Berlin's sympathies are distributed between his "two concepts". While obviously trying to "understand" post-colonial nationalism, and to see its "good" side (as typified by its aspiration toward collective self-respect), he is ironical about the Platonizing "positive liberty" (individual and collective) espoused by Sarastro's enlightened quasi-Masonic brotherhood in Mozart's The Magic Flute ([sections] V; 1969, 145-154).(4) What is clear, though, is that in some versions collective liberty, however inspiring to its devotees, must amount to no freedom at all. For, as Reich (1972 [1933]) and Fromm (1942) rightly pointed out long ago, many of its conditions are amply satisfied by fascist regimes, whose initial hold over their subjects is due precisely, in Fromm's phrase, to their subjects.... fear of freedom" (my emphasis). In his Group Psychology (1921) Freud gave a suggestive analysis avant la lettre of the same condition (1967: 48, 545). In the supposed "primal horde", he says anachronistically, each individual has substituted for his own "ego-ideal" (i.e., moral conscience, later called the superego) the image and will of the leader; and in this way, by surrendering what we would call the duties of self-direction and personal responsibility, has literally become one, a single ego, with his fellows.

What, though, of other "deep" (i.e., positive) kinds of liberty, whether individual or collective? Can we give them a more philosophical definition than Berlin's, and show whether, and if so why, they are valuable? And further, how and how far they interrelate and interact with negative liberty?

An interesting attempt to elaborate a concept of positive liberty has lately been made by the Heidegger scholar Hubert Dreyfus and his co-authors Charles Spinosa and Fernando Flores, in their essay (subsequently expanded into a book of the same title) "Disclosing New Worlds".(5) For them, freedom is linked to self-realization, but in a social, not a purely individual-centered, context. (And so far, as we shall see in discussing Hegel, they are surely right.) They select three activities by way of illustration: entrepreneurship (typified by Flores himself), citizen action (typified by the pressure group MADD, i.e., Mothers Against Drunk Driving), and cultural leadership (typified by Martin Luther King). These three activities have a common phenomenological structure and a common purpose, which is to "disclose new worlds", i.e., so to reconfigure the collective perceptions, via a kind of Kuhnian Gestalt-switch, as to bring about "large-scale cultural and historical changes". Each, more or less unselfconsciously, is an exercise of skill, an expression of freedom, and a building of solidarity through the recovery or discovery of human meanings.

All this amounts virtually to a (somewhat incongruous) Ruskinian or even Morrisian idealization of the so-called "American way of life". Much in it is plausible, but the whole exercise, in leaving open the actual nature of the entrepreneur's product, the citizen action and the cultural leadership, is excessively formalist. The substantive content of each is surely crucial in determining their worth, no matter how enjoyable or liberating they may be for those engaged in them. And, so far as skill and self-realization go, a torturer, such as de Maistre's awesomely horrific bourreau, may take pride in his skill ("nul ne roue mieux que moi") and fully "realize himself" in its exercise (see de Maistre, quoted at length in Berlin, 1990: 117-18n.). Like skill, freedom and solidarity (which the authors treat rather as ends in themselves), cultural leadership, citizen action and entrepreneurship can work as easily towards bad ends as good. Why, after all, formally speaking, should not Hitler, the Ku Klux Klan and Larry Flynt respectively be perfectly adequate representatives of those three pursuits?