Too Few Concepts of Liberty

Against Isaiah Berlin

I.

Suppose you wrote a history of the whole of human thought, a million threads of narrative tracing all that we’ve believed. Place students by their teachers and disciples by their saints. Weave together rivalries to be synthesized in time, and lay out fellow travelers neatly side by side. Fill the spaces between strangers with their distant relayed links; draw out conversations while a coalition holds - then cut along the bitter lines left behind when allies split apart. Record each and every instant of all remembered time - let no thought be forgotten; let no word be lost. Let every subtle shade of meaning be laid out there to see. Now trace the thread of “freedom” for me, and follow where it goes.

This is a trick question, of course. There can be no single ending; there is no such single thread. Nor, for that matter, are there merely two. Those who claim to count them all are engaged in action, not analysis; they hope to make their stories true. Freedom is an ancient cluster-concept, carried down through two thousand years of institutions that cannot say the same. It has not come to us unchanged. A thousand different uses have marked its meaning with a thousand different stains; its severed brambled branches have been put to use in anger in a hundred different ways. To say what freedom really means is to brandish one again.

Presently it’s a certain sort of liberal who is most at risk of putting “freedom” to good use: they would cut the left out of their family tree, if they could only find a way. Some concern themselves with “freedom”, in a tribal-signal sense: the left begins when the applause light of “equality” floods the center stage. More sophisticated accounts employ those same key words, but in a very different way. They know precisely just what liberal freedom is; it is private and it is personal, outside the public sphere. It is the stuff of politics only insofar as the political intrudes: freedom was there first, they would like to say.

II.

Consider, for instance, the totalizing pluralism of Isaiah Berlin, which frames those of us who advocate for concrete visions of the good as incipient totalitarians, to be ignored if not repressed. Berlin, notoriously, found the roots of Stalinism in Rousseau. “Freedom”, Berlin’s Rousseau asserts, “is not freedom to do what is irrational, or stupid, or wrong. To force empirical selves into the tight pattern is no tyranny, but liberation.” Insofar as individual wills depart from the “general will” which wills the good of all, the caricature claims, they are acting irrationally, and the state shall set them free.

This is a rather selective reading of the Social Contract; Rousseau’s halting admiration of his native Geneva - Classical democracy in form, Renaissance oligarchy in fact - suggests that it was not the reading he intended. His Discourse on Political Economy states as much outright. The claim that the interests of the state may justify the unwilling sacrifice of the life of a citizen, Rousseau says, is

…one of the most execrable rules tyranny ever invented, the greatest falsehood that can be advanced, the most dangerous admission that can be made, and a direct contradiction of the fundamental laws of society…

Need we look for examples of the protection which the State owes to its members, and the respect it owes to their persons? It is only among the most illustrious and courageous nations that they are to be found; it is only among free peoples that the dignity of man is realised.

Rousseau is in essence a classical republican: his ideal state is not just a guarantor of natural liberties, but plays an active role in constituting them: “it is certain that if any constraint can be laid on my will, I am no longer free” and so, in virtue of providing for the collective defense of individual freedom, “it is to law alone that men owe justice and liberty”. “Can” is the crucial point here: to be free, we must be securely free. And so the subjects of a despotism in full alignment with the “general will” are nonetheless unfree: there is no room in Rousseau’s republic for the nightmare Berlin imagines.

Perhaps Berlin realized this; perhaps not. Either way, he had intentions of his own. The distinction Berlin draws in Two Concepts of Liberty, between the “negative liberty” of non-interference and the “positive liberty” of being “one’s own master”, is meant, in essence, to cast suspicion on all substantive aims. Self-mastery, Berlin acknowledges, is “initially perhaps quite harmless” - but in his hands it quickly becomes first the power to act in accord with one’s real interests, and then simply the state of actually so acting, voluntarily or not. In the space of thirty pages we proceed, somehow, from slavery’s negation to its recapitulation by the state.

The positive concept of liberty, Berlin reports, is held by certain unnamed persons “to lead one prescribed form of life” and thus be “no better than a specious disguise for brutal tyranny.” These persons are, of course, just Berlin himself: by the end of the essay he has given up the pretense, asserting in his own voice that

This monstrous impersonation, which consists in equating what X would choose if he were something he is not, or at least not yet, with what X actually seeks and chooses, is at the heart of all political theories of self-realization.

Two Concepts is a very clever bit of rhetoric. “Positive liberty” is not a concept embraced by the left, which admits no such distinction, but it is built of the same materials as the left’s particular concerns: it talks of agents and their options, not some idealized abstraction of how things ought to be, and the problem of collective rationality lies at the heart of the not-quite-liberal left. And so, having correctly associated a distinctly non-negative conception of liberty with the left, and totalitarianism with the “freedom” found in doing what we ought to will, he collapses the distinction.

There is negative liberty, “[freedom] from control by any outside authority”, and then there is everything else - all of it fraught with danger, none of it much worth distinguishing from the rest. Politics thus becomes a conflict between those who like Berlin would defend the wills of actual individual persons, rational or not, and those who would subordinate them to a rational collective will, voluntarily or no; between, that is, decent liberal citizens and the totalitarians at the gates.

III.

Good rhetoric, however, does not imply good faith. On the contrary, the broader narrative thread Berlin draws out of the tangled mess of Enlightenment rationalism is rather suspect. Kant, he says, “began as an individualist”, but ultimately finds, in his assertion that we are not made less free by legislation which we would have willed be laws ourselves, that “liberty, so far from being incompatible with authority, becomes virtually identical with it.” Here we see Berlin collapse the world once more: if Kant will not join Bentham in insisting that “every law is an infraction of liberty”, then he might as well have the two were just the same. Authority becomes a single particular thing with which liberty is or is not compatible: distinctions of legitimacy are apparently too insignificant to mention.

From Kant, Berlin traces the thread of the total state through Hegel to none other than Karl Marx, his advocate par excellence of “the positive doctrine of liberation by reason” - and I suspect his real target. “For Marx”, Berlin says,

understanding is appropriate action. I am free if, and only if, I plan my life in accordance with my own will; plans entail rules; a rule does not oppress me or enslave me if I impose it on myself consciously, or accept it freely, having understood it, whether it was invented by me or by others, provided that it is rational, that is to say, conforms to the necessities of things…

…the notion of liberty contained in it is not the`negative' conception of a field (ideally) without obstacles, a vacuum in which nothing obstructs me, but the notion of self-direction or self-control.

This, unlike his rather ridiculous portrait of Kant - one almost gets the impression Berlin thought Kant’s talk of “legislation” referred to the real Prussian diet - is a real position verifiably held by a real person. That person, however, is Friedrich Engels, for whom “freedom is the recognition of necessity” (not in fact his phrase, though it may as well have been). It is difficult to know the precise contours of Marx’s political thought; Engels gave a systematic presentation in his Anti-Duhring, and Marx did not. It is clear that the early Marx was, like Rousseau, a classical republican at heart. The older Marx is more original, more meta, and hard to classify: it is entirely possible that his trajectory ultimately left political philosophy behind. Nonetheless, certain themes remain.

The gap between Marx and Engels is not so much in the opinions that they surfaced in the times in which they lived - neither flinches back from the need for state coercion, that much is simply true - as in the structures underneath; it is one thing to frankly face the need for desperate measures, and another to assert that ours are always desperate times. Engels sees a single path and hopes to clear it; Marx sees us blindly wandering down whichever path looks smoothest at the fork, and hopes to introduce mankind to the concept of a map.

Berlin, however, does not draw this distinction, and so Marx becomes the source of all his childhood fears. Once again we see a continuum collapse - there is the true and certain hope of an unobstructed “field”, or else no concern for optionality at all. Freedom means the right to do anything whatsoever, or else the capacity to do one particular thing. The possibility that there might always be obstructions, that we might only ever just be choosing between different boulder-fields, is swept away into a single parenthetical. We are speaking “(ideally)”, and so need not concern ourselves with petty things like that.

But this is the whole heart of the matter: Marx is not concerned with the mere ideal. His aim is not, as Berlin supposes, to supplant individual irrationality with a collective rational will - it is to do away with the irrational collective will of Capital. Collective reason is the means; the end remains the freedom of the individual, which must be collectively maintained. Reason is in revolt not against arbitrary choice, but against our status as “playthings of alien forces”; where Berlin sees a neutral harmless state of nature in his imagined past, Marx sees the past as he understands it to have really been - profoundly unfree. Where Berlin sees free choice among alternatives in the liberal present, Marx sees fixed choices handed down from on high - not by human reason, but by the blind inhuman will of all our choices summed.

IV.

Marx’s “realm of freedom” lies somewhere in the middle ground Berlin denies: it is the removal of those obstructions which we created but did not choose. His freedom is agency, or non-domination - not just the contingent absence of interference, but the ability to ward potential interference off. This is an old notion - perhaps the oldest, bound up as it is with the birth of citizenship in the Greco-Roman world. And, as is appropriate for a thing of that time and place, it is political, not natural - freedom in this sort of sense is the work of man. What is new is its extension to the populace at large: the liberty of the res publica was restricted to a small aristocratic set. To satisfy ourselves with negative liberty is to demand only that those elites leave the rest of us alone; the freedom of a redeemed republic insists that we are all rightfully aristocrats, and demands all the privileges of such.

The republican claim that real freedom requires the right sort of political community is rooted in the recognition that we do not live “(ideally)”, that human beings, flesh-bound patterns that we are, cannot be absolutely free, in a negative sense. Nor, lacking as we are in knowledge and reason, can we find full freedom “in the recognition of necessity”. We must always compromise; the terms on which we do so set the preconditions for every other choice. The republican position holds that we cannot be free if other wills can dictate the circumstances in which we choose.

This may entail positive commitments, as a practical matter - there are certain laws and institutions which genuinely make us more free. But this is in virtue of their actual effects, not some abstract authority: they are traffic laws writ large. There are others which impose unacceptable constraints, and must be actively removed. If we are particularly unlucky, as in fact we are, the choice to do so may not be open to us without the imposition of additional constraints: this is Berlin’s closest contact with reality, and he’s very nearly there. These claims can stretch further than they ought to; this sort of vanguardist gambit has had mixed effects. But they are nonetheless not unlimited; we are freer when we restrict our choices not insofar as they might be “irrational, or stupid, or wrong”, but insofar as they threaten our ability to choose. This is what self-mastery really entails: the spirit of the prohibition against self-enslavement made universal law.