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

Social Research, Winter, 1999 by Robert Grant

The Sophistic, ultra-individualist view in fact amounts to a celebration of the lawless individual; of the man who, because he acknowledges no ties, in fact belongs nowhere.(8) This is the man of whom Aristotle, quoting Homer, said that he was "clanless, and hearthless, and lawless". Such a man, Aristotle added, could not be human, but must be either a beast or a god (1978: 5-6). And we might add that it is just when man, intoxicated by his powers, aspires to the condition of godhead, that he most shows himself to be a beast.(9)

Under this view, freedom is a zero-sum game. Only some can be free. The more freedom I have, the less there must be for you. The free are the strongest. The rest have simply to obey them, since the strongest are constrained by no laws (if they were, they would not be free in the sense intended). If there are laws, they work, or are made to work, in the interest of the strong. This ultra-individualist position is in fact an apology for despotism.

It is worth asking, however, whether the despot, or the individualist, is really as free as he thinks; or, if he is, whether his freedom can be said to have any value. Obviously it will have little in the eyes of those subject to it (unless, as Mill said, they are lucky enough to find themselves subjects of an Akbar or a Charlemagne); but could it have any value for the despot either? In short, can a tyrant, or despot, be free, in any sense that leads to a fulfilment whose worth he himself would acknowledge once he had achieved it? (He is of course maximally free in the negative sense, by definition.)

In his Phenomenology of Spirit (178-196; 1977, 111-19) Hegel set forth a famous parable, usually called the parable of the Master and Slave (alternatively, Lord and Bondsman). It is meant to illustrate the phase of self-consciousness in which we become aware of ourselves as existing separately from the world of people and things, as empowered to act upon it, and as obliged to concede its independence of our egoistic desires. But for present purposes let us take Hegel's parable literally, as pertaining wholly to people, though clearly it already has, and is meant to have, moral and political overtones.

Hegel imagines that the Master wants the Slave to acknowledge his, the Master's existence, since it is only through others and their reactions to us that we acquire any true, objective idea of ourselves.(10) Without that, we cannot be convinced that we exist. Someone who had grown up alone on a desert island, or somebody like the Wild Boy of Aveyron (see Truffaut's brilliant and moving film, L'Enfant Sauvage), would not, in fact, know that he existed. He would have no conception of himself as a person, because he would have no human model outside himself upon which to construct a personality. If you have never seen, or known, a human being other than yourself, you cannot know even that you are one.

Now the master, or tyrant, who knows others only as his slaves, is in just the position of a man on a desert island. For in holding others in subjection, he never experiences them as they really are; that is, as full human beings, free centres of consciousness, motivated not outwardly by his commands, but inwardly, by the law of their own spontaneous nature. His power, so to speak, dehumanizes them. The fear in which he holds them leads them always to lie, always to tell him only what he, the master, wants to hear.