Two concepts of liberty

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Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty I
Posted by Jim Ryan at 9:50 PM on Wednesday, March 25, 2009

This is a profound essay, a classic in political philosophy. I will suggest in this little series that it has a deep flaw, but you should read it if you have not. As I said before, it embodies part of liberalism's transition from classical liberalism evolved to big-government "liberalism." For now, two notes.

Negative liberty is "not being interfered with by others." Positive liberty, a rather more opaque concept, is autonomous action or being one's own master (by partaking in activities such as giving oneself the law, achieving an elevated status, and being in a society recognized as autonomous by other societies.) Berlin's explanation of the totalitarian dangers lurking in the concept of positive liberty is quite eloquent. But do not mistake the essay for a simple argument in favor of negative liberty and against positive liberty. In fact, Berlin defends positive liberty tenaciously.

In particular, Berlin describes the efforts of subjected societies to become democracies or to gain the status of respectable autonomy as a just cause ("their cause is just"). Indeed, he claims that "it is a profound lack of social and moral understanding not to recognize that the satisfaction" of this goal of positive freedom is, as well as negative freedom, "an ultimate value which, both historically and morally, has an equal right to be classed among the deepest interests of mankind." Again,

t is the notion of freedom in its 'positive' sense that is at the heart of the demands for national or social self-direction which animate the most powerful and morally just public movements of our time, and...not to recognize this is to misunderstand the most vital facts and ideas of our age.

We'll take up Berlin's caveats later, but this is strong stuff.

I, for one, must stand as one who, in Berlin's eyes, suffers from "a profound lack of social and moral understanding." I do not accept that positive liberty has any worth whatsoever. Moreover, anything bad in the subjection of a society derives from infringement of individuals' negative liberty rights and has nothing to do with a lack of positive liberty or group autonomy, whatever those things are.

We have not gotten to the bottom of this flaw in Berlin's essay, but we will in the next post.

 

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Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty II
Posted by Jim Ryan at 10:09 AM on Sunday, March 29, 2009

Berlin's essay defends positive liberty vehemently, though without argumentation. One of his interpreters sees the essay as a "polemic against positive freedom" which "left his commitments to social justice unspecified" (M. Ignatieff, Berlin: A Life), while another, M. Rothbard (in The Ethics of Liberty) says, "Berlin fell into confusion, and ended by virtually abandoning the very negative liberty he had tried to establish and to fall, willy-nilly, into the 'positive liberty' camp."

Both views are correct because Berlin was confused. It is worth quoting again the passages in which Berlin lashes out at those who do not cherish the positive liberty of the poor. As I said in post I:

Indeed, he claims that "it is a profound lack of social and moral understanding not to recognize that the satisfaction" of this goal of positive freedom is, as well as negative freedom, "an ultimate value which, both historically and morally, has an equal right to be classed among the deepest interests of mankind." Again,

t is the notion of freedom in its 'positive' sense that is at the heart of the demands for national or social self-direction which animate the most powerful and morally just public movements of our time, and...not to recognize this is to misunderstand the most vital facts and ideas of our age.​

Elsewhere Berlin lashed out at systems of full negative liberty for the usual trite reasons about their letting the "wolves eat the sheep." He praised the New Deal and other restrictions on economic freedom as correct trade-offs of negative freedom or "social justice" (a hackneyed leftist phrase meaning redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor.) Rothbard attempts to diagnose the confusion of a man who so clearly understood the threat of positive liberty yet also embraced it.

...Berlin’s fundamental flaw was his failure to define negative liberty as the absence of physical interference with an individual’s person and property, with his just property rights broadly defined. (Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty)

Not so. Rothbard thinks that if Berlin could only see that removing property from the wealthy and giving it to the poor was an infraction of the rights of the wealthy to liberty, then he would have backed away from his "social justice" and avoided the confusion. But on the contrary, Berlin knew that his redistributive ambitions would impinge upon liberty. Indeed, he said precisely in "Two Concepts",

Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience. If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust or immoral. But if I curtail or lose my freedom, in order to lessen the shame of such inequality...an absolute loss of liberty occurs. This may be compensated for by a gain in justice or in happiness or in peace, but the loss remains, and it is a confusion of values to say that although my 'liberal' individual freedom may go by the board, some other kind of freedom - social or economic - is increased.

Of course Rothbard fails to explicate Berlin's essay; the essay is incoherent. Berlin holds that social justice both is and is not liberty. Now we're at the heart of the flaw in the essay. Berlin is bothered by his conscience and his shame to speak out in favor of positive liberty. He doesn't want to associate himself with the wolves by arguing solely for negative liberty. Yet, he also sees that his goal of positive liberty requires infringing upon the negative liberty rights of the wealthy. He thinks that their wealth depends on the misery of the poor which is impossible in a system of pure negative liberty. He sees the rich as wolves and the poor as sheep devoured, which is an appropriate simile only for a system in which negative liberty rights are not enforced but not for one in which they are.

The flaw of Berlin's essay, then, is two-fold. It both embraces and eschews positive liberty, and it is based on the confused notion that a system of absolute negative liberty is one in which the wealthy oppress the poor.

Berlin's pluralism about competing values is spot on, and this, along with the carefully-argued indictment of positive liberty, is what makes the essay valuable. However, when the pluralist misunderstands one of his values - justice - and makes an illicit addition to his set - equality of economic outcome - then he ends in confusion and incoherence. In addition, he champions the New Deal and other monstrous infringements upon liberty and frugality.

This is the transition from classical liberalism to big-government liberalism. Big government is a burden of debt on America, and in the case of the current financial debacle, the liberal government's meddling in the mortgage market has brought us a housing bubble and the real possibility of economic collapse. We respond now with more government spending, of course. What we reap next is what liberalism, in its confusion, has sewn.

 

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Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty III
Posted by Jim Ryan at 11:12 PM on Sunday, March 29, 2009

Just to sum up: This is a classic of 20th C political philosophy, in particular for its carefully marshaled indictment of positive liberty as a threat to negative liberty. It is also incoherent. It is also a case study in the evolution of classical liberalism into big-government liberalism, liberal statism, or, in Jonah Goldberg's phrase, liberal fascism.

This essay, therefore, shows how it can be that "liberalism" is now a label used to refer to statist infringements of liberty. The modern liberal is on the left and devoted to big government and redistribution of wealth. He has traveled far from classical liberalism. Berlin's incoherent essay shows in a nutshell how he got lost.

 

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Analyzing Negative and Positive Liberty
Posted by Jim Ryan at 7:52 PM on Monday, March 30, 2009

Of course, the question remains, Isn't all of this just semantics? That is, what is this issue all about? It seems that everyone understands negative liberty. If some people want to call an individual's personal fulfillment or individual control of the political system "liberty," as well, who cares? There seems to be no fact of the matter about whether those two things are really liberty independently of linguistic convention, so it seems to be fake issue which may be dissolved as "mere semantics."

What this objection overlooks is that if "positive liberty" is allowed into our vocabulary the proponent of positive liberty will also demand that negative liberty of the well-off be curtailed in order to increase the positive liberty of the poor, the personally unfulfilled, and those who have not had much of a voice in their government. For it is assumed by all parties that one may have as much liberty as is compatible with others' having the same amount. This is why you aren't allowed to walk down the sidewalk swinging your arms wildly, driving your car into people's living rooms, or enslaving people. People of excellence, wealth, and, due to their talents and the importance of their roles in society, customary influence in the political sphere will have to sacrifice some of their negative and positive liberty in order to increase the positive liberty of the losers in society who are unhappy, poor and, due to their having little to offer, have little role in political life. Wealth and political sway will have to be artificially transferred to these people because, thought they have as much negative liberty as anyone else, they don't have much positive liberty.

If this is what the advocate of positive liberty will argue, then perhaps the issue is not bogus. However, perhaps it may be drained of its newly found substance. Perhaps the assumption we stipulated above should be amended to read:

It is assumed by all parties that one may have as much negative liberty as is compatible with others' having the same amount.

But the advocate of positive liberty will require proof that the principle should be fine-tuned in this way when, after all, the principle originally included no reference to species of liberty.

So, the issue is of substance. We are forced to come up with an analytical definition of liberty if we want to answer the charge of varies leftists, big-government liberals, and totalitarians that, as a matter of our common devotion to liberty, the losers in life deserve to have more personal fulfillment and political influence provided for them by the winners at the cost of the winners' negative liberty.