Isaiah Berlin famously distinguishes 2 conceptions of freedom that he thinks have been the main variants found in socio-political theories-- viz., negative and positive liberty respectively. Here I will, following some of Berlin's critics (1), try to show that this distinction is a) not exhaustive and b) his conclusion in favor of negative liberty is not satisfying for those who would see freedom as including powers, capacities and capabilities to achieve personally valued ends in view.
Negative Liberty is simply the absence of coercion and/or external restraint applied to an individual human being. If I am hand-cuffed and detained at the county jail I am unfree. Once my cuffs are unlocked and I am released I have negative freedom; I'm left alone to do as I will. This is the kind of freedom Berlin, like most liberals in the traditional sense, is interested in as the basis for an "Open Society." Traditional liberals consider negative freedom as usually resulting from being uncoerced by the state. Thus, for example, the Bill of Rights and Amendments specify that the state cannot force me to worship in this or that denomination, that I am left alone (within some parameters) to speak unimpeded by the state, and that I shall not be reduced to chattel slavery ( the Civil War Amendments). The idea is that, for example, the more I am left alone to pursue what I want without being coerced, the more I have the right kind of freedom for a liberal society. Berlin has thinkers like JS Mill in mind here, and all of this accords with Liberalism as it evolved in the 19th and 20th centuries with an expanding realm of rights.
Positive Freedom, on the other hand, combines 2 different conceptions of freedom which Berlin claims collapse into one another in a way that threatens liberal and open societies. The first of these is self-legislating action where I am able to give myself a rule to follow, a maxim to follow so as to direct my own life. Note that negative liberty does not entail such autonomy. I can be tied to a chair for a month and then released without knowing what to do once I have my "liberty." A prisoner can be released after years of incarceration and yet have no positive conception of how to act upon being released. In other words, negative liberty is not synonymous with the notion of *autonomy*-- something about which Berlin is fully aware. So why not endorse a positive conception of freedom which includes the autonomy of the agent? This seems reasonable enough.
Berlin claims, however, that the problem with this positive conception of self-governing individuals tends to collapse into a third type of freedom which he calls the freedom to "realize your true self" or "authentic nature" or "true interests." This more value-laden conception of freedom as self-realization is, says Berlin, one which tends to merge with a form of collectivism that anticipates Totalitarianism-- and thus must be avoided at all costs no matter how seductive it may look at first. What does he have in mind?
His own examples include that of Rousseau for whom freedom means conformity to the Universal or General Will of the self-governing people. Being free is knowing what will allow for the self-realization of the well being of each and every member of the demos-- the people. If someone, even one person, does not conform his or her will to the Universal or General will, Rousseau famously says in the Social Contract, "He must be forced to be free." The freedom of each, in theories that feature positive freedom prominently, tend to depend on "the freedom of all." Another example can be found in Kant's theory of freedom as autonomy. Being free is not doing what I WANT or WISH to do, but conforming my will to a universalizable maxim-- The Categorical Imperative-- which is, in principle, morally binding on each and every rational being. This is not "do your own thing" but "obey the law that makes you free." In Kant, the law is embodied in each individual qua locus of the autonomous application of reason to action. In the end, all these freely made decisions turn out to be 'duties.' Hence the label "Deontology" for Kant's theoretical framework (*deon* means duty or obligation).
Berlin is concerned that the content of positive freedom can thus be supplied by third parties who tell us what we ought to do in order to be free, authentic, to realize our true nature, to be maximally rational, etc.
The axiological or value-laden dimension can, thinks Berlin, easily lead to a loss of individual liberty in the name of some "higher good" or set of "true interests"-- sometimes interests that the agents themselves do not see or understand; thus they must be "forced'" to do what's "really" good for themselves and other members of society.
In this regard, Hegel is another example Berlin gives. True freedom evolves rationally only in the context of socio-political and historical developments which have much more importance than the "arbitrary will" of individuals (Wilkur) which may reflect the desires of individuals, but may deviate from their own true interests and purposes. For Hegel, it is within the confines of a strong central state that we may come to realize or appropriate our freedom in modern Weswtern civilization ; NOT within civil society (for Hegel this realm means mostly the economic or market-situated realm in modern terms and not what we mean today by civil society as all informal institutions that fall somewhere between individuals and the state).
Note that Berlin is looking at the perils of positive freedom through the prism of modern Totalitarianism. He views Bolshevism, for example, as a perfectly logical outgrowth of positive freedom as discussed above. Now it is not the General Will or abstract rationality ala Kant, or the State which provides us with the knowledge of what is "really" in our best interests to flourish authentically, but rather it is a small and coercive elite or vanguard of "professional revolutionaries." Marx dreamed of workers becoming aware of their own interests; Bolsheviks said they required direction from those who know better than they, blinkered as they are by "false consciousness."
The Third Reich, though different ideologically, also claimed that the realization of the authentic self of the Aryan European required obedience to a coercive entity and dictator who can better discern the interests of individuals than the individuals themselves. Berlin, thus generalizes from these and other examples, concluding that despite seductive aspects of freedom as self-realization, it too often collapses into coercive statism, groupthink, and tyranny that snuffs out the negative liberty (being left alone by the state chiefly) so fundamental to the liberal project.
So we've seen Berlin's main argument: the most valuable and reliable form of freedom is negative freedom, and that positive freedom tends to collapse into ideas about self-realization that in turn collapse into authoritarian mechanisms. One can argue with all of this, of course, but I want to draw attention to another form of freedom which I think most people have in mind when using the term and which is submerged or lost in the discussion here. Let's call it freedom as empowerment/capability.
On this common sense view, being released from handcuffs does not leave me "free" if what is meant here is my being capable of achieving some specific end/s that have importance to me. Let's say I'm released, but lack money to eat or secure lodging. Am I "free" in the sense of having powers and capacities to get the things I want? The whole appeal of negative liberty is that when left alone by the state I have the means to live my life as I wish. If I want to become an astronaut, I'm free to pursue that goal as part of the pursuit of happiness. But absent stable living conditions, resources, access to education, the right connections etc., it's a pipe-dream. Still, formally speaking, I am free to try. Nobody can stop me from having my dream and pursuing it. I may be reminded, in liberal ideology, that "where there's a will there's the way" and read lots of Horatio Alger stories (from rags to riches) though structural realities make these very improbable on average. The ideology of can-do individualism tends to eclipse the necessity of powers and capacities that one must have to truly pursue one's personal goals with a good chance of achieving them. The emancipation of serfs in Russia and slaves in the US did not empower these long-oppressed groups so that they could realistically fulfill their needs and wants at the most basic levels (i.e. their life-chances, as sociologists say).
Berlin says that whether or not one *gets* what one wants/desires in a state of negative liberty is a contingency -- i.e. not part of the formal analysis of freedom. Just because I'm free to pursue X doesn't mean I have a good chance of getting X. These are not to be confused in his framework.
I think this makes his theory of liberty too weak to capture what many (if not most of us) mean when thinking about freedom in everyday life. In real circumstances, the reason people want liberty is because they want to actually achieve their goals in a meaningful way. The mere absence of constraint (everyone is free to go to Harvard in principle) is meaningless absent the capacities and powers to do so (e.g. good public education, relevant skills, a roof over one's head, money or subsidies, etc.). If freedom (as is the case with, for example, Marx, Dewey and others) involves increasing the ability to get what one wants or needs, then negative liberty alone would seem inadequate. One can arbitrarily define freedom as "negative liberty" but it turns out to be only one among several other ways, and not very consistent with what most people implicitly tend to include-- the ability to fulfill given needs and desires that have quite specific content.
In the end then, it's not that Berlin is "right" or "wrong" but that his conception of freedom is too thin to suit those of us who believe that the abstract possibility of getting X (make X food, education, a specific career etc.) is hollow if divorced from the MEANS to getting these. The means are personal powers and capacities often dependent on mediating social structures (family, education, the economy, etc.) which are instrumental in assuring access to life chances.
If one sees things that way, then the State has much more reason to intervene than the limited government mantra of liberals and now neoliberals. Government should be viewed with caution by citizens. But so should, say, corporate interests and many other non-governmental social constellations. We might look to the government, as Social Democracy tends to do, as one important means for trying to insure that those who have been marginalized and disempowered can find meaningful assistance in the interests of the public good (i.e. where a healthy society is thought to require that most people have reasonable life-chances, opportunities to not just pursue but achieve ends that make for a meaningful and viable existence). The exact contours of social justice can be debated and contested, but at least the idea that in principle the government has some reason to help individuals acquire powers and abilities (e.g. cognitive and linguistic skills, labor skills, access to computers and knowledge of how to use them) is compatible with any notion of freedom that includes the an account of freedom as a means to exercising one's powers and abilities. We don't just want freedom in order to be left alone by a potentially overweening state, but to achieve specific ends by exercising abilities and powers that satisfy needs and wants associated with a reasonably good life.
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(Note: An earlier post on Amartya Sen's Capabilities Approach to ethics has some relevance to this topic. Happily, he is also focused on applying his theory in policy through such institutions as the UNDP. For overview see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach).
References:
-Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays On Liberty: Oxford; 1969 (see esp. the chapter/essay, Two Concepts of Liberty)
Notes:
(1) One of the best recent critiques of Berlin's work on Freedom, in my view, can be found in Raymond Geuss's essay, Freedom as an Ideal, in his book Outside Ethics,Princeton: 2005 (pp.67-78). I would also argue that earlier work by Marx, TH Green, John Dewey et al. contains many of the insights found in Geuss' piece. Other criticisms of note written *after* Berlin's 1958 essay include those of MacCullum, GA Cohen and others. Some of these are discussed in this Stanford Ency. article on Negative and Positive Freedom here:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/
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