Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty”
Liberty as Political Freedom
Tahrir Square, 2011
“At last, a free country”
In today’s session we shall be talking about “liberty”, which modern
philosophers often also refer to as “political freedom”.
The campaigning group “Liberty” lists the following in its charter as
some aspects of political freedom:
• safety from personal harm;
• protection from ill treatment or punishment that is inhuman or
degrading;
• equality before the law and freedom from discrimination on such
grounds as disability, political or other opinion, race, religion, sex
or sexual orientation and marital status;
• protection from arbitrary arrest and unnecessary detention;
• a fair hearing before any authority exercising power over the
individual;
• freedom of thought, conscience and belief;
• freedom of speech and publication;
• freedom of peaceful assembly and association;
• move freely within one's country of residence and to leave and
enter it without hindrance;
• privacy and the right of access to official information
As philosophers we want to sharpen our understanding of political
freedom in all these contexts, and others. What are we getting at
when we talk about political freedom, and what kinds of assumptions
and values are involved in the ways people use the idea?
Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997)
One of the most influential attempts to answer these questions is
Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty”, which was delivered as a
lecture at Oxford in 1958.
Berlin was a renowned historian of ideas and man of letters, with a
formidably wide range of intellectual interests. Born into a wealthy
Russian-Jewish family in 1909, he came to the UK from Russia in
1921, after the Revolution of 1917 and the creation of a communist
state. Berlin returned to the Soviet Union immediately after World War
II, working for the British Foreign Office. During this period he was in
contact with “dissident” writers such as Anna Akhmatova and Boris
Pasternak; he famously organised the smuggling out to the West of
Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago.
His experience of the USSR helped to convince him of the importance
of political freedom, not least because the actions of the Soviet regime
were carried out in the name of “Liberty”. It is worth thinking about
how the argument of “Two Concepts of Liberty” relates to the struggle
between capitalism and communism in the Cold War.
 Negative Freedom

The first “concept of liberty”:

Political freedom is doing whatever you want, without

interference.

This is liberty defined as the lack of anything to hinder an agent’s

action, e.g. obstruction by political authorities. Philosophers call it a
  “negative” conception, because it is defined in terms of an absence
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan ch.21 (external interference with action). The less that is preventing you
(1651) from doing what you want to do in a given situation, the more you can
“A free man is he that…is not be said to be free. By contrast, the “positive” conception of freedom
hindered to do what he has a will involves the question of who, or what, is in control of a person’s
to.” actions. The more that a person is in control of what he or she does,
the greater his or her freedom – more on this later.

The idea of negative freedom seems to capture the non-judgmental

aspect of political liberalism. It doesn’t matter what your desires are;
whether you want to discuss philosophy, play tiddly winks, or just loaf
around all day, if there is some external factor preventing you from
doing so, then in that respect you are unfree.

However, even philosophers who explain freedom negatively have

recognised that untrammeled freedom would lead to a dire situation
where people would be at liberty to do terrible things to each other.
The problem for political theory is to find some way to constrain
people’s actions so that they can live together, which minimises the
impact on their freedom. One famous attempt to specify a bare limit to
negative freedom was John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle”: “the only
purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member
of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”  

On the other hand, because the idea of negative freedom in its purest
form is only concerned with external circumstances (as long as you
can do what you want, you are free) we get some odd outcomes. For
example, imagine a slave-owner who allows her slaves to do
whatever they like. Imagine also, that her slaves have no thought of
running away – perhaps they are happy, well-fed, entertained, and so
on. We would not usually consider such people to be free, and yet
that is what the pure idea of negative freedom indicates.

More generally, we can say that the idea of negative freedom

paradoxically gives us a reason to accommodate ourselves to our
circumstances. Since freedom is about not having our will obstructed,
we can always increase it by relinquishing desires that are likely to be
frustrated. Berlin calls this “the retreat to the inner citadel” (also “the
doctrine of sour grapes”), and sees it as a serious problem with
negative freedom.

  your freedom just by shrinking or warping your desires, and therefore
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile,
Bk 5 (1761)
Up to now you were only
apparently free. You had only the
precarious freedom of a slave to
whom nothing has been
commanded. Now be really free.
Learn to become your own
master. Command your heart,
Emile, and you will be virtuous.
Positive Freedom
The second of Berlin’s concepts of liberty involves an idea of self-
mastery:
Political freedom is being in control of your life.
On the negative conception, the slave can become free by reducing
his desires until he is happy with his situation. Proponents of the
positive conception, on the other hand, say that you cannot increase
by shrinking or warping your self. Freedom involves being your own
master, rather than someone or something else controlling you; in
other words, your actions as a free person express your true self.
Consider the case of a nicotine addict, with a compulsion to smoke
cigarettes. According to the idea of negative freedom, as long as she
is able to indulge her habit, then she is free. By contrast, a defender of
positive freedom would object that the person is not truly free,
because she is in the grip of a compulsion and not making a choice
with which she can identify.
How does this conception of freedom translate into politics? Political
life is something of a problem for defenders of the positive conception
of freedom, because it seems that in order to associate with other
people, we have to give up a bit of control over our lives – for
instance, we have to obey certain rules that govern our interactions
with other citizens. However, defenders of positive freedom have
argued that, according to their conception of liberty, the existence of
laws should not be interpreted as a limitation on our freedom, as
under the negative conception. On the contrary, so far as we can
identify with the process that decides the laws, they can be seen as a
way in which we extend control over our lives. By conforming to the
laws we are increasing our own and others’ freedom.
The positive conception of liberty assumes that freedom is not an
easy matter. For one thing it requires us to be the best people we can
be, which, as Berlin points out, usually involves a difficult process of
overcoming our vices or other inadequacies. In other words, the
positive conception includes an assumption that people are divided
against themselves, and that this is a problem to be overcome. At the
same time, the positive conception also requires of us that we identify
closely with the political process. It is only by taking to heart the idea
that the laws express everyone’s attempts at being their own master
that I can truly consider myself a free citizen.
The upshot of this is that we may need to challenge ourselves and
other people in order to make sure we live continue to live together as
free citizens in a free society; think of how we become concerned if
people are too apathetic to vote in an election, or if our
representatives behave corruptly, and so on. Because the ideal of
positive freedom often requires us to confront our political
circumstances, Berlin claims, it has been a motivating factor for many
revolutionary movements (e.g. in France and Russia). This is a
different emphasis from negative freedom, which, as we have seen,
might lead us to become accommodated to our circumstances, so
long as a basic core of personal space is protected.

However, Berlin worries the ideal of positive freedom might,

paradoxically, impel revolutionary movements to become totalitarian.
Suppose we are unwilling or unable to live up to the standards upheld
by those in power; doesn’t this give the authorities a motivation for
intervening to make us conform to their conception of good
citizenship? The anxiety is that people might be forced into doing
things against their actual wishes, because, it is claimed, this is what
their “true” selves would desire.

More subtly, Berlin also objects to the idea of positive freedom

because it is monolithic; it assumes (or so he thinks) there is one
system of values to which we should all aspire. By contrast, negative
freedom is more consistent with the idea of value pluralism: the belief,
as Berlin puts it, that “human goals are many, not all of them
commensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another”.

Further Questions

Are two concepts of liberty are enough to understand the uses of the
term? How important or useful is the distinction? Some philosophers
have argued that whenever we talk about political freedom, we always
have a sense of someone being free from constraints to do something
– this seems to combine positive and negative conceptions. On the
other hand, perhaps the different kinds of liberty have a “family
resemblance”, but ultimately cannot be reduced to one or two ideas.

We might also ask how the different conceptions of liberty relate to

other ideals, like knowledge, justice or equality. How does liberalism
relate to feminism, or nationalism?

Berlin seems to prefer negative liberty (with qualifications) on the

grounds that it supports value pluralism. But isn’t he rather helping
himself to the idea that the conflict of incommensurable values is
perpetual? That seems to deny the possibility of progress towards the
truth in discussions about values.

References and Suggested Reading

The text of “Two Concepts” can be found in a collection of Berlin’s

writing called Liberty, edited by Henry Hardy (2002). It’s also available
online: do a Google search on “Isaiah Berlin liberty full text”. For a
summary of his work see the article on Berlin in the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/) -
this is a great general resource, by the way, and it’s free! There are
some good biographies of Berlin, e.g. by Michael Ignatieff. John
Gray’s Isaiah Berlin (1995) contains a strong response to the idea that
value pluralism and liberalism go together. The idea of political
freedom is very much a “hot topic” in philosophy, e.g. Phillip Pettit’s
book Republicanism (1997). For more background reading, see the
article on “Positive and Negative Liberty” in the Stanford Encyclopedia
(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/).