This week I’m keeping it simple. I’m talking about freedom.
What is Freedom? How can such a vague and ambiguous word be defined?
As Nietzsche remarked ‘anything that has a history cannot be defined’ and so definitions of freedom and liberty are always shifting.
Freedom is always at the heart of politics, of our personal lives, always simmers beneath debates in different forms, always means different things to different people.
Two Concepts of Liberty was a 1958 lecture delivered by the British/Latvian philosopher Isaiah Berlin.
I’m keeping it simple this week, by the way, because the next video is going to be a much larger and very different one. I’ve just got back from filming in the lake district and exploring the Roots of Romanticism, research also based on a Berlin lecture, so look out for that.
Berlin had an incredible mind. He hardly wrote anything, and all his lectures were largely improvised without a script, to be transcribed afterwards, and they still read like the most lucid and carefully planned book.
The text version of 2 concepts ends like this:
‘That’s all. Sorry it’s such a muddle, very sorry about all that, but I think you’ll get the end all right, anyhow it’s the end of the piece.’
It’s only about 30 pages, I highly recommend it.
Anyway,
Berlin thought that where philosophers, politicians, and commentators had talked about the idea of freedom as one definable concept, throughout the history of modern thought you could identify 2 different ideas about what freedom or liberty meant.
He called them negative and positive liberty.
And in short, they’re the freedom from and the freedom to. Let’s explore that.
According to Berlin, negative liberty – freedom from – is the answer to the question ‘What is the area within which the subject – a person or group of persons – is left to do what they like without control by other persons?’
It’s the freedom from coercion, interference, authority.
If I am slave I am coerced into an activity. I have no freedom from interference.
Classical liberals, libertarians, and conservatives (loosely anyway), often talk in terms of negative liberty.
People should not be coerced, must be free to make their own choices.
There is a ‘frontier’, Berlin says, between private life and public authority.
For example, people must be free from interference to speak freely, to hold personal property, to express their religious views openly.
Many liberals – John Stuart Mill, for example – argued that the freedom of an individual to act how they desire should only be curtailed when it’s going to harm others.
Your freedom to swing your fist ends at my face.
People are free from interference up to the point that they choose to drive dangerously, steal, become violent, build unsafe houses. Up to that point there is an absence of any interference. You are free.
Mill wrote that ‘‘The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way’’
As Berlin says ‘Liberty consists in the preservation of an area within which human personality is to have the fullest possible play.’
Freedom consists of many elements, though, what makes up this ‘fullest possible play’? We could look it from a number of perspectives:
- How many possibilities are open to me?
- How easy or difficult are they?
- How do they compare with each other in my life plan?
- Are many people are in the way? Who do I have to engage with?
- Are the possibilities valued by society? Are they worth pursuing?
But we can begin to see a different type of freedom here. I might be free from interference, to do what I wish, but am I free to achieve those goals, am I able to achieve them.
I may not be a literal slave, but I might still be a slave to my irrational impulses, or listen to the wrong people, or live my life in an ignorant or misguided way that makes me less free than I desire to be.
If I am a slave to my passions, my urge to smoke, drink, or gamble my money away, if I am uneducated and so get easily led down a path that’s to my detriment, then this is a different type of interference. This too might constrain my freedom – especially if I don’t really want to smoke, drink, gamble, or be misguided – but I am not coerced externally, as such. I am a slave to my passions, I am coerced by them, internally.
So Positive liberty is the freedom to. For Berlin, It’s the answer to the question ‘‘What is the source of control, when it exists, which can prevent someone from doing what he wishes?’
He writes: ‘The positive sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the desire on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and my decisions to depend on myself and not on external forces of whatever kind.’
It’s the desire to Self-directed, self-determined, independent, competent; its the the will to self-mastery, to autonomy. I want to be the master of my own life, to choose for myself.
There are some objects in my path that can’t be said to coerce me physically, but can still block me psychologically.
In this sense, we all have our passions, urges, we have people telling us how we should live and suggesting what we should do. These things all pull is in different directions, but to be free is to know what is best for us. It is the freedom to think for ourselves.
Take the idea of ‘lower impulses’.
For philosophers from the Stoics to Kant to Mill, we all have less ‘rational’ lower impulses which we can be slaves to.
But we also have a higher reason, that we are able to control, to master.
We might have a lower impulse to eat the cake. But through our higher rationality we can resist because we know we’ve had too much or want to keep healthy.
This higher rationality, though, is a positive liberty: it might need to be taught or developed within us.
Berlin says that this leads us to a question though. How do I achieve this condition of self-mastery, this positive liberty, this freedom to… It involves a level of self-development.
To know what is right for yourself you need to understand the world, your environment, understand history, physics, culture. If you don’t you might delude yourself and become a slave to ignorance.
In this sense, you might not be free if you are misguided. You’re not free if you don’t know your way out of the forest, even if there’s no-one in your way. You’re not free if you’re lost or misread a map.
Positive freedom is knowing.
For Berlin, this knowing can be politicised into a socialised form.
This can be seen in a number of political philosophies that have emerged since the Enlightenment. Nationalism, Rousseauism, Marxism, Paternalism, Authoritarianism, the Welfare State.
Berlin argued that positive freedom, the freedom to, was at the heart of these movements.
They essentially argued that a rational state organised correctly would create the freedom to live fuller lives. They argued that human problems were solvable at the political level, that if only the map was organised correctly a fuller freedom would develop.
What he was particularly concerned about, though, was that justifying paternalism or authority on the basis that it would lead to more freedom, leads back to less negative freedom.
To understand this we have to think about paternalism.
This, essentially, is being taught what to do – having less initial freedom – because it’s meant to lead to a greater freedom in the long term.
Children have to be coerced into education, for example.
And similarly, I don’t have the freedom to act recklessly, to act violently, to shout endlessly, to eat all of the harvest, as it is irrational; if everyone did the same everyone would be less free, including myself.
But here’s the point: I might not know this. I might have the be taught it. As children do. And in some cases, I must be forced to comply. To not speed, steal, punch, endlessly disturb.
I must, as Rousseau says, be forced to be free.
Fichte wrote that education works in that ‘you will later recognise the reasons for what I am doing now.’ And Mill said that ‘compulsion is justified by education for future insight.’
But here, as Berlin says, ‘the fatal analogies begin.’ It’s here that we can see a fault line emerging.
Some people are inarguably, at different times, more rational than others. Some are taught not to fight all the time, others continue to their detriment. Some are guided out of addiction. Some are convinced to educated themselves on a topic, others not. Some encourage, and sometimes compel others into a way of thinking, a way of doing, a way of being, on the basis that it will make them more free.
If I’m approaching my driving lessons poorly, I might successfully listen to the teacher or not. Some teachers too are better at imparting the information than others. This leads to more, or less, freedom in the long term.
But sometimes this can go too far. This, Berlin says, is the argument used by dictators. That as long as you listen to them you’ll be better off for it.
Berlin argues that actually, what people want, is to be their own master, to be self-determined, to be free from coercion, or at least be guided whose interests are absolutely aligned with my own.
He says we all recognise ourselves as part of a group – an Englishman, a carpenter, a musician.
There is the question of how much I’m governed. What the limits of coercion.
But there is also the question of who is governing.
I want, as Berlin writes,
‘recognition of myself (or my class or my nation, or my colour or my race) as an independent source of action, something entitled to direct itself as it wishes, and not to be ruled, educated, guided, with however light a hand, as not quite fully human, and therefore not quite fully free.’
He argues that it’s the demand for recognition, not just the demand for more freedom, that ‘animate the great social and political movements of our time.’
Berlin’s analytical study of a single concept – liberty – has been hugely influential, and has been credited as introducing the analytical method to political philosophy.
But it hasn’t been without its critics.
Gerald MacCallum, for example, has argued that there is a single concept of liberty. It looks something like this:
A person is free from constrains to do or become a certain thing.
For MacCallum, freedom is ‘triadic’. There is an agent. Conditions. And a goal.
Others have argued that Berlin was unduly influenced by the particular historical context of the Cold War, biasing his analysis.
I’d argue it doesn’t look far enough into the relationship between negative liberty, positive liberty, and paternalism. There are certain paternalisms we accept. We don’t complain that roads are already laid for us and we’re happy to be fed when hungry. These are positive liberties.
But his insights into self-determination are important ones.
I think positive liberties and paternalism become dangerous when interests are misaligned, which is a strong argument for democracy, direct-democracy, localism, and equality.
But, we’ll look more at Berlin next time, from a very different point of view.