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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Berlin on liberty « Previous | |Next »
August 23, 2009

The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library. On it we find the Preface by Gil Delannoi to the French Edition of The Sense of Reality. Scrolling down we come across some political philosophy--the distinction between negative liberty and positive liberty by which Berlin left an imprint on political philosophy. Delannoi says:

In the tradition of Locke, Constant, Mill and Tocqueville, he came to understand that the idea of independence, of self-realization, of struggling to be one’s own master, had taken the form of two concepts of liberty that could be at odds with each other and diverge to the point that each became the other’s victim. Negative liberty results from the clearing of an open space. It answers to the question : What are the boundaries within which I am not to be governed? Positive liberty stems from the definition of authority. It answers to the question : Who is to govern, how and why?

Delannoi adds that Berlin rightly concluded that these two liberties, taken as absolutes, were incompatible and that their diverging claims could not entirely be satisfied. At the time he was writing, the brunt of his critique was directed at Marxism, against the priority given to positive liberty to the detriment of negative liberty. He insisted that no form of liberty worthy of the name could exclude negative liberty entirely.

However, and this undercuts my understanding of Berlin as a defender of negative liberty in oppostion to positive liberty, Delannoi says that Berlin recognized the essential worth of each of the two concepts. Negative liberty means possibility of choice, including the possibility of not choosing. Positive liberty means capacity to achieve. Liberty always includes the two aspects. Delannoi says take an illustration even simpler than those proposed by Berlin.

Negative liberty: I am free to play tennis, to play football or not to play at all. Positive liberty: I have a racket and a ball.What good is it to have a choice if I don’t have the means to put my choice into effect? This explains why negative liberty implies positive liberty in order to be effective. On the other hand, what does liberty consist of when I have the means without having the choice, or when the choice is forced on me? Positive liberty, if it is positive only, is positive but is no longer free. Positive liberty requires the negative to be truly itself. We can thus grasp how this cardinal distinction accounts for the two sides of the same phenomenon.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:35 PM |