‘Two Concepts of Liberty: Rival Moral Visions
A review of ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, by Isaiah Berlin; Oxford University Press, 1958.
Isaiah Berlin first delivered his Two Concepts of Liberty as a lecture at Oxford, which makes its clarity all the more striking. It is (as you may have guessed, reader) an essay that deals with two distinct ideas of liberty which, for the author, amount to two rival moral visions which, if confused, bring danger.
‘Negative liberty’ is freedom from interference. It is the freedom to post a spicy opinion on X, or to start a business selling velvet jumpsuits. It is what we express when no one stops us from doing what we might otherwise do. ‘Positive liberty’ is the freedom to be our own master — freedom not merely from constraint, but to make choices that come from our true, rational selves, not from fear, ignorance, or outside pressure. It is having the education and self-confidence to share that spicy opinion, or the business know-how to start that business.
The first kind of liberty is the kind that English liberals like John Stuart Mill and John Locke held dear: the idea that society must limit authority and draw lines beyond no government or individual may cross. So far, so good, Isaiah says. But the second form is treacherous. For anything designed to enable or empower us risks becoming the justification for coercion. It suggests that there is someone who knows our ‘true’ selves and what we need better than we do. When that claim is used to rule over us, liberty, for Berlin, has been turned inside out.
The first kind of liberty is the kind that English liberals like John Stuart Mill and John Locke held dear.
He draws on example from the French Revolution, the German idealists, the Soviet Union. Each serves to show how ideas, once loosed into the world, can mutate or be twisted and harden. Our longing for inner freedom and for becoming the best that we can be, is far more likely to lead to tyranny than liberty. And the belief that we must be made free, in the cause of our ‘real’ nature, is a kind of moral bulldozer. The road to hell, Berlin says, is paved with good intentions. After all, the French revolutionaries rose up in 1789 crying Liberté, egalité, fraternité and within a matter of years were guillotining people who disagreed.
And here we come upon Berlin’s central theme, which was perhaps put best by Thomas Sowell: there are no solutions; there are only trade-offs. In other words, the ‘agonising truth’ of moral life, says Berlin, is that the values we care about most passionately may clash, and there is no way to reconcile them. Liberty naturally entails inequality. Justice can require coercion. The world of values, and so the world of politics, is intrinsically tragic. It is a mark of political maturity to resist the temptation to try to bring about a harmony that can never be brought about and accept the irreconcilability of values instead.
There is a sense in which what Isaiah is calling for is humility. He does not say that positive liberty is evil, or that negative liberty is perfect. Rather he is saying that real freedom is delicate, easy to misunderstand, and always at risk—especially from those who, often for the best of reasons, want the best for others. We must therefore hold our ideals loosely and be very wary of anyone who claims to be able to fix our problems. That is not how life works. It is messy.
Liberty naturally entails inequality. Justice can require coercion. The world of values, and so the world of politics, is intrinsically tragic.
Fittingly his tone throughout the essay is gentle, almost wistful, as though he himself wishes things were simpler and has been forced to conclude otherwise. He explains rather than proclaims, and when he warns against ‘monism’—the belief that all good things must fit together into one neat and tidy moral system—he does not thunder. He reasons. This will strike those who wish to change the world as disappointing or perhaps discouraging. but it will speak to those who are instinctively uneasy with grand political visions. The very worst horrors of the twentieth century came about because of men who claimed to know what was best for others, and because those others believed them:
‘There is no avoiding choices between ultimate human values. All fanatical belief in the possibility of a final solution, no matter how reached, cannot but lead to suffering, misery, blood, terrible oppression … If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict — and of tragedy — can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social.’
Tragedy. It is that little word that lies at the heart of Berlin’s argument. Life is tragic, and we moderns must grow up and abandon the hope that freedom, equality, justice, happiness, etc. etc. can all reach their fullest expression together. He suggests that we must learn to live with compromise, limits, and the permanent tension between rival goods.
It is something of an achievement that such a sentiment does not come across as tediously preachy. For this is a deeply moral essay. It works chiefly by asking us to think deeply about what we value and why, and to consider what happens when we think all problems are technical and all conflicts soluble. We have the impression of a man who is attempting to tell an unwelcome truth as clearly as he can and hoping at least some of it goes in.
It is something of an achievement that such a sentiment does not come across as tediously preachy.
At this point we might suggest there is a small irony in all of this talk of the messiness of life, given that the distinction Berlin makes between his two concepts of liberty are rather too neat and too clean. We would file education or healthcare under ‘positive liberty’, and whatever you might think of this or that education or health system, these do not as yet look too likely to lead to some great march into the abyss. Moreover, we might ask ourselves whether providing some support to, say, a single mother with a disabled child that requires all of her time and energy might be justified. We might not know what someone’s ‘truest’ self requires, but we do some things about what human beings need to flourish.
Post-liberals like Patrick Deneen might quarrel with Berlin’s framing of negative liberalism as imperfect but basically good. The argument advanced by those post-liberals is that negative liberty cuts social bonds, wrecks communities, commercialises life and eliminates manners and morals, which invariably means the state must swell in size to manage the resulting chaos. In other words, that positive and negative liberty are two sides of the same coin.
But Berlin writes as a man scarred by history. Born in Riga, exiled from Russia, witness to the rise of both Hitler and Stalin, he knew very well what happened when political certainty replaced doubt. His essay aims to rescue and dignify doubt, to show that it is not moral or personal weakness but the start of wisdom: a health scepticism that says, at the very least, ‘Are you sure?’ He is not trying to inspire revolution but to defend the virtues of pluralism, compromise and restraint. You may find all of it much too cautious or too pessimistic, or perhaps out of date, wedded to a liberal order that, if some are to be believed, is in its death throes. But when moral certainty abounds, his quiet voice may be just the thing we need to hear. Not to settle our arguments, but to remind us why they matter.
