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  Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty

  Isaiah Berlin, in his famous lecture ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (1958), suggested that political philosophers throughout history have understood liberty in one of two ways: as a ‘negative’ or a ‘positive’ concept.

  NEGATIVE LIBERTY

  This is the idea that an individual is free in so far as they are able to act without interference from external bodies or forces. This, Berlin argued, was the idea of liberty shared by thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, as well as by classical liberal thinkers like F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. It is ‘negative’ not in the sense that it is bad, but in the sense that it signifies the absence of restraints and tends to be defended by libertarians and classical liberals who argue for a minimal state and the protection of a private sphere of choice free from government intrusion. It is also associated with free markets, as free market thinking minimizes state intervention (for example, by minimizing the welfare state which requires coercive taxation).

  ‘LIBERTY, or FREEDOME, signifieth (properly) the absence of Opposition; (by Opposition I mean externall Impediments of motion;) … And according to this proper, and generally received meaning of the word, A FREE MAN, is he, that in those things, which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to doe what he has a will to.’

  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin Classics, 1985 [1651]), pp. 261–2.

  POSITIVE LIBERTY

  According to this idea an individual is free if she is her own master, responsible for her own choices. She must be able to make those choices with reference to her own ideals and purposes, and to carry them out. This view of liberty is associated with thinkers like Jean Jacques Rousseau and emphasizes the communal nature of freedom: self-mastery requires, at least in part, membership of, and participation in, a political community. It is more wide-ranging in scope than negative freedom as it emphasizes not just the importance of choice, but also the contexts in which individuals make their choices. Not all choices are necessarily free choices; that is, social, economic and political factors can influence us and our choices in ways that may be fair or unfair. Consequently, to be free in a positive sense we might require that the state respect choices made in certain conditions and not others. For Berlin, this point meant that positive liberty was dangerous: it suggests that other people may be better placed to know when an individual is free than the individual herself. This, he thought, can justify coercion and lead to tyranny.

  ‘Coercion is not […] a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind, or cannot understand the darker pages of Hegel, it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I would otherwise act.’

  Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ [1958], The Proper Study of Mankind, ed. H. Hardy (London: Pimlico, 1998), pp. 191–242, at p. 194.

  Many political philosophers have criticized this distinction, but it has proven very influential. In this and the next chapter we will discuss three ways in which we might distinguish between negative and positive liberty. We will discuss the first distinction in this chapter and the other two in the next.

  Spotlight: Isaiah Berlin

  Berlin’s personal history sheds some light on why he was so against positive liberty. Berlin was one of numerous émigré intellectuals who emigrated in order to escape political tyranny. Born in 1909 in Riga, which was then part of the Russian Empire, and living in Petrograd in 1917, Berlin witnessed the February and October revolutions in Russia, and the rise of the Bolsheviks. As a Jew, he and his family suffered anti-Semitism. Despite having moved to Britain in 1921, Berlin was acutely aware of the events unfolding in Russia, the centralization of power under Stalin, and the atrocities committed by the Party in the name of the greater good and freedom of the people. With the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and the terrible conflict of World War II, many liberals like Berlin sought to champion individualism and freedom over nationalism and oppression.

  The distinction between formal and effective freedom

  The first distinction between positive and negative liberty is the distinction between effective and formal freedom or, to put it a different way, the understanding of freedom as a power or capacity and freedom as the absence of interference. The distinction turns, therefore, on whether we should equate freedom with being formally permitted to do something, or with possessing the capacity to actually do that thing.

  In most cases, having permission to do something, having no one stopping you from doing it, is very different from actually being able to do it. For example, we all have formal permission to break the 100-metre sprint world record. No one says we may not, or prevents us from making an attempt. We are, in that sense, free to break the world record. On the other hand, few of us are actually able to do so. We lack the strength, skill and training to run fast enough. In that sense, then, we are unable to break the record and so not free to do so.

  Friedrich von Hayek defended a negative conception of liberty as a lack of interference in The Constitution of Liberty (Hayek 1960). For Hayek, the specific sort of interference that undermines freedom is coercion, which he defined as ‘such control of the environment or circumstances of a person by another that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced to act not according to a coherent plan of his own but to serve the ends of another’ (Hayek 1960: p. 71). Hayek therefore thinks that you can only be coerced by the deliberate actions of other people. Coercion is a political, interpersonal act: it is being subjected to the will of another.

  This is crucial. It means that, firstly, you cannot be rendered unfree by mere physical objects or acts of nature. A rock climber who falls into a crevasse is not unfree, even though she has very limited options available to her. She would only be free if she were pushed into the crevasse, or held in it by another person, in which case her freedom would be constrained by that person and not by the crevasse itself. Freedom for Hayek is therefore not about having a range of available options or choices; it is about having no one prevent you from doing something that you want to do.

  Secondly, Hayek’s understanding of coercion means that you cannot be made unfree by accident. Coercion must be willed. So if you are locked in a room by someone who does not realize that you are inside, then you have not been coerced by that person and your freedom, on Hayek’s account, is not limited.

  Thirdly, for Hayek your freedom cannot be limited by factors that reside within yourself, such as certain physical or mental incapacities. So, if a person is unable to walk across the street because someone else is holding her back, then she is being coerced and is unfree. However, if she is unable to walk across the street because she cannot walk without crutches, which she does not have, then her freedom is unthreatened. She is free to walk across the street even though she is not able to do so.

  ‘Above all […] we must recognize that we may be free and yet miserable. Liberty does not mean all good things or the absence of all evils. It is true that to be free may mean freedom to starve, to make costly mistakes, or to run mortal risks. […] But if liberty may therefore not always seem preferable to other goods, it is a distinctive good that needs a distinctive name.’

  Friedrich von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 68–9.

  Defenders of negative liberty thus understand liberty as a lack of deliberate interference in our choices. They therefore argue that a state protects individual freedom by keeping out of people’s lives as much as possible, putting in place only those laws that are necessary to protect individuals from the relevant forms of interference.

  In contrast, a positive conception of liberty (in which freedom is defined as the actual ability to act according to one’s desires) would require much more wide-ranging inte
rvention. Consider the disabled person who needs crutches to walk. From a Hayekian negative liberty perspective, she is free to walk. A policy of freedom-maximization will not mean that we should provide her with crutches. Providing her with crutches may well be a virtuous, charitable thing to do and, as such, may be morally required. However, provision of crutches will not be required in the name of freedom. On the other hand, if we take the view that freedom should be understood as the positive capacity to act, then a concern to maximize the disabled person’s freedom will entail that we should provide her with crutches.

  Consequently, the conception of freedom we hold will have normative implications: it will influence our thoughts on what the state should or should not do. In particular, it will influence our thoughts on the appropriate distribution of wealth and resources in a society. Hayek insists that freedom is about the formal absence of coercion and not about the actual capacity to act because the capacity to act requires, among other things, a certain amount of material resources. You may be allowed to buy a mansion but, without several million pounds to spare, you will lack the ability to do so. More mundanely, you may be allowed to have enough food to survive, but without money you will lack the means to acquire that food. If freedom is about the positive ability to act, then maximizing or ensuring your freedom may require giving you some money. In general, freedom will mean taxing the rich to provide money to give to the poor, thereby increasing their ability to act. On the other hand, if freedom is the negative absence of interference, then taxation limits the negative freedom of the rich but does not increase the negative freedom of the poor. This is because a compulsory system of state taxation is a form of coercion: other humans (the state officials) interfere with the plans of those who are taxed, forcing them to pay their taxes so as to avoid a greater evil, namely being sent to prison.

  So, we could think of redistributive taxation as decreasing the negative freedom of the rich so as to increase the positive freedom of the poor. This means that, if you have an ideological aversion to redistributive taxation, it makes sense to claim that only negative freedom is real freedom. Redistribution then becomes a matter of decreasing the freedom of the rich without increasing the freedom of the poor. And, if freedom is a crucial value which should generally take priority over other considerations (as liberals and others tend to believe), then it follows that redistributive taxation is a bad policy. We have come full circle: if you do not like redistributive taxation, you will endorse a negative conception of liberty, which provides a justification for rejecting redistributive taxation.

  Of course, we could accuse those in favour of redistributive taxation of circular reasoning in the other direction. If you are in favour of benefits for the poor, you define liberty as the capacity to act, which then justifies taxation in order to provide the benefits which are necessary for the poor to act. In fact, this reasoning might be even more problematic than the negative liberty approach. This is because taxation decreases the positive freedom of the rich at the same time as it increases the positive freedom of the poor. Taxation reduces the ability of those who are taxed to do whatever they want. Still, it may be reasonable to suppose that money gives diminishing marginal returns, so that £500 provides less additional positive freedom to a millionaire than it does to someone earning the minimum wage. If this is the case, a system of redistributive taxation will increase positive freedom overall, even though it will reduce the positive freedom of those who are taxed.

  We can now see why negative liberty is often used by its defenders to justify a minimal state, while positive liberty is seen to justify a state which is more extensive. Defenders of negative liberty argue that states should not intervene in market transactions in order to redistribute wealth and resources to the poor in the name of freedom, because while the poor’s capacity to use their freedom for particular ends may be constrained by their poverty, their freedom itself is not constrained by lack of wealth of resources. Such a view tends to be associated with the political Right, such as the Republican Party in the USA and the Conservative Party in Britain, and has been defended by libertarian political philosophers like Robert Nozick and David Gauthier. Indeed, Hayek himself was very influential among neoliberals like Margaret Thatcher who, during her time as British Prime Minister, explicitly sought to implement Hayekian policies. Defenders of positive liberty, however, emphasize the effective ability of all individuals to make choices from options which are not forced upon them by poverty or lack of resources. Such a view tends to be held by people on the traditional Left, and has been defended in different ways by socialists, Marxists and also liberal egalitarian philosophers like G.A. Cohen, John Rawls and Joseph Raz.

  Spotlight: Thatcher and Hayek

  Upon her election as leader of the UK Conservative Party in 1975, Margaret Thatcher quickly sought to galvanize the party around a new and dramatically reformist ideology. She was deeply impressed with Hayek’s ideas. At a meeting early in her premiership, while listening to a speech advocating the adoption of a ‘middle way’ approach over radicalism, Thatcher ‘reached into her briefcase and took out a book. It was Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. Interrupting our pragmatist, she held the book up for all of us to see. “This”, she said sternly, “is what we believe”, and banged Hayek down on the table.’ (John Ranelagh, Thatcher’s People: An Insider’s Account of the Politics, the Power, and the Personalities (London: Fontana, 1992), p. ix.)

  Case study: Philip Pettit’s ‘third’ conception of liberty

  In his book Republicanism (1997), Philip Pettit presents a third conception of liberty which he thought improved upon both positive and negative liberty. Pettit points out that lack of interference is not enough to guarantee freedom. Imagine if you were a slave, but that your slave-owner were benevolent. Imagine that she were so benevolent that, for most of the time, she did not coerce you, or interfere in your plans, but allowed you to do whatever you liked. However, you would know that, at any moment, she could interfere in your life absolutely. She could control any aspect of your life: where you lived, what work you did, whether you were allowed to see other people and so on. In the normal course of things, she does not interfere at all, but the possibility and thus the threat of interference is always present.

  Pettit’s point is that, under the conception of freedom as non-interference, as a slave in such circumstances you will enjoy considerable freedom. But this seems wrong. A slave owned by a benevolent owner is still a slave and, hence, unfree. Pettit therefore argues that negative freedom, understood as freedom from interference, is inadequate. He proposes instead that we think of freedom as a lack of domination, where domination is understood as being subject to an individual, group or institution which has the capacity to interfere in our choices on an arbitrary basis. The slave is unfree because her owner could, at any time, choose to interfere in her life: they have the capacity to interfere, even if they choose not to do so.

  G.A. Cohen on negative liberty

  Let us now consider the critique of negative liberty provided by one of these thinkers: G.A. Cohen.

  Spotlight: G.A. Cohen

  G.A. Cohen (1941–2009) was not only a formidable and influential political philosopher, he was also a famously entertaining lecturer. In one book based on a collection of his lectures on political philosophy (provocatively entitled If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?’) one chapter merely reads: ‘Lecture 7 could not be reproduced here. That is because it was a multimedia exercise: the audience accepted the invitation to sing with me, to the accompaniment of tapes’ (Cohen 2000: p. 116).

  We have seen that Hayek appeals to the idea of negative liberty in order to avoid socialist systems of redistribution. But, according to Cohen, Hayek’s argument is undermined by the fact that a lack of money threatens not only positive freedom, but also negative freedom (Cohen 2011). Cohen therefore argues that the libertarian/classical liberal argument fails on its own terms: free markets and minimal states violate, rather than prot
ect, individual freedom.

  To see why, imagine you want a pair of expensive jeans from Harrods. However, you lack the money to buy them. Undeterred, you go to Harrods, try the jeans on, find some that fit, and leave the shop with them. But as you are leaving the shop the alarm goes off and a security guard comes to investigate. The police are called, and they arrest you. You are charged with shoplifting, and tried, and ordered to pay a fine. But, as you have no money, you serve a short prison sentence instead.

  At every stage of this story, you have suffered from human interference. More than that, you have suffered coercion. The security guard interfered with your plan to leave the shop. The police officer forced you to go to the police station. The judge coerced you into remaining in prison. As a direct result of your lack of money, you have suffered human interference. A lack of money has made you negatively unfree. Even if liberty is the absence of interference, then poverty entails a lack of freedom.

  Notice that this argument does not apply to the disabled person who cannot walk without crutches. If she tries to cross the road without them, it is her legs and not other people which prevent her from doing so. For her, there is still a salient difference between freedom as non-interference and freedom as the capacity to act. A policy of negative freedom-maximization would not require that we, or the state, provide her with crutches. But such a policy would, on Cohen’s argument, require that we redistribute wealth to the poor.

  What would a defender of negative liberty like Hayek say in response to Cohen’s argument? There are two main objections to Cohen’s claim that poverty entails human interference, and that it therefore entails an infringement of negative freedom.