Liberty: Freedom from, or Freedom to?

From Berlin, Isaiah. "Two Concepts of Liberty." As reproduced in Four Essays on Liberty (London/Oxford/New
York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118-134, 162-166, 172.

Where ends are agreed, the only questions left are those of means, and these are not
political but technical, that is to say, capable of being settled by experts or machines like
arguments between engineers or doctors. That is why those who put their faith in some
immense, world-transforming phenomenon, like the final triumph of reason or the proletarian
revolution, must believe that all political and moral problems can thereby be turned into
technological ones. That is the meaning of Saint-Simons's famous phrase about 'replacing
the government of persons by the administration of things', and the Marxist prophecies about
the withering away of the state and the beginning of the true history of humanity. This outlook
is called utopian by those for whom speculation about this condition of perfect social harmony
is the play of idle fancy. Nevertheless, a visitor from Mars to any British--or American--
university today might perhaps be forgiven if he sustained the impression that its members
lived in something very like this innocent and idyllic state, for all the serious attention that is
paid to fundamental problems of politics by professional philosophers.
. . . Over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heine warned the French not to
underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a
professor's study could destroy a civilization. He spoke of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as
the sword with which European deism had been decapitated, and described the works of
Rousseau as the blood-stained weapon which, in the hands of Robespierre, had destroyed
the old rgime; and prophesied that the romantic faith of Fichte and Schilling would one day
be turned, with terrible effect, by their fanatical German followers, against the liberal culture of
the West. The facts have not wholly belied this prediction; but if professors can truly wield this
power, may it not be that only other professors, or, at least, other thinkers (and not
governments or Congressional committees), can alone disarm them?
Our philosophers seem oddly unaware of these devastating effects of their activities. It may
be that, intoxicated by their magnificent achievements in more abstract realms, the best
among them look with disdain upon a field in which radical discoveries are less likely to be
made, and talent for minute analysis is less likely to be rewarded. Yet, despite every effort to
separate them, conducted by a blind scholastic pedantry, politics has remained indissolubly
linked with every other form of philosophical inquiry. To neglect the field of political thought . .
. is merely to allow oneself to remain at the mercy of primitive and uncriticized political beliefs.
It is only a very vulgar historical materialism that denies the power of ideas, and says that
ideals are mere material interests in disguise. It may be that, without the pressure of social
forces, political ideas are stillborn; what is certain is that these forces, unless they clothe
themselves in ideas, remain blind and undirected.
. . . Consequently our own attitudes and activities are likely to remain obscure to us, unless
we understand the dominant issues of our own world. The greatest of these is the open war
that is being fought between two systems of ideas which return different and conflicting
answers to what has long been the central question of politics--the question of obedience and
coercion. 'Why should I (or anyone) obey anyone else?' 'Why should I not live as I like?' 'Must
I obey?' 'If I disobey, may I be coerced? By whom, and to what degree, and in the name of
what, or for the sake of what?'
Upon the answers to the questions of the permissible limits of coercion opposed views are
held in the world today, each claiming the allegiance of very large numbers of men. . . . [A]ny
aspect of this issue is worthy of examination.
To coerce a man is to deprive him of freedom--freedom from what? . . . Like happiness and
goodness, like nature and reality, the meaning of this term [liberty] is so porous that there is
little interpretation that it seems able to resist. I do not propose to discuss . . . the more than
two hundred senses of this protean word recorded by historians of ideas. I propose to
examine no more than two of these senses--but those central ones, with a great deal of
human history behind them, and, I dare say, still to come. The first of these political senses of
freedom or liberty (I shall use both words to mean the same), which (following much
precedent) I shall call the 'negative' sense, is involved in the answer to the question 'What is
the area within which the subject--a person or group of persons--is or should be left to do or
be . . . without interference by other persons?' The second, which I shall call the positive
sense, is involved in the answer to the question 'What, or who, is the source of control or
interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?' The two
questions are clearly different, even though the answers to them may overlap.
The notion of 'negative' freedom
I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with
my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act
unobstructed by others. . . . Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human
beings within the area in which I could otherwise act. You lack political liberty or freedom only
if you are prevented from attaining a goal by human beings. . . . This is brought out by the
use of such modern expressions as 'economic freedom' and its counterpart, 'economic
slavery.' It is argued, very plausibly, that if a man is too poor to afford something on which
there is no legal ban--a loaf of bread, a journey round the world, recourse to the law courts--
he is as little free to have it as he would be if it were forbidden by law. . . . In other words, this
use of the term[s 'liberty and coercion'] depends on a particular social and economic theory
about the causes of my poverty or weakness. . . . If I believe that I am being kept in want by a
specific arrangement which I consider unjust or unfair, I speak of economic slavery or
oppression. 'The nature of things does not madden us, only ill will does', said Rousseau. The
criterion of oppression is the part that I believe to be played by other human beings . . . in
frustrating my wishes. By being free in this sense I mean not being interfered with by others.
The wider the area of non-interference the wider my freedom.
This is what the classical English political philosophers meant when they used this word
['liberty']. They disagreed about how wide the area could or should be. . . . Because they
perceived that human purposes and activities do not automatically harmonize with one
another, and because . . . they put high value on other goals, such as justice, or happiness,
or culture, or security, or varying degrees of equality, they were prepared to curtail freedom in
the interests of other values and, indeed, of freedom itself. . . . Consequently, it is assumed
by these thinkers that the area of men's free action must be limited by law. . . . It follows that
a frontier must be drawn between the area of private life and that of public authority. . . . [But]
to offer political rights, or safeguards against intervention by the state, to men who are half-
naked, illiterate, underfed, and diseased is to mock their condition. . . . First things come first:
there are situations, as a nineteenth-century Russian radical writer declared, in which boots
are superior to the works of Shakespeare; individual freedom is not everyone's primary need.
...
What troubles the consciences of Western liberals is not, I think, the belief that the freedom
that men seek differs according to their social or economic conditions, but that the minority
who possess it have gained it by exploiting, or, at least, averting their gaze from, the vast
majority who do not.
...
Philosophers with an optimistic view of human nature and the belief in the possibility of
harmonizing human interests, such as Locke or Adam Smith and, in some moods, Mill,
believed that social harmony and progress were compatible with reserving a large area for
private life over which neither the state nor any other authority must be allowed to trespass.
Hobbes, and those who agreed with him, especially conservative or reactionary thinkers,
argued that if men were to be prevented from destroying one another and making social life a
jungle or a wilderness, greater safeguards must be instituted and kept in their places . . . to
increase the area of centralized control and decrease that of the individual. But both sides
[liberal and conservative] agreed that some portion of human existence must remain
independent of the sphere of social control. . . . But whatever the principle in terms of which
the area of non-interference is to be drawn, whether it is that of natural law or natural rights,
or of utility or the pronouncements of the categorical imperative, or the sanctity of the social
contract, or any other . . . liberty in this sense means liberty from; absence of interference
beyond the shifting, but always recognizable, frontier.
What made the protection of individual liberty so sacred to Mill? In his famous essay he
declares that, unless men are left to live as they wish 'in the path which merely concerns
themselves', civilization cannot advance; the truth will not, for lack of a free market in ideas,
come to light; there will be no scope for spontaneity, originality, genius, for mental energy, for
moral courage. Society will be crushed under the weight of 'collective mediocrity.'
Three facts about this position may be noted. In the first place Mill confuses two distinct
notions. One is that all coercion is, in so far as it frustrates human desires, bad as such . . .
while non-interference, which is the opposite of coercion, is good as such. . . . This is the
'negative' conception of liberty in its classical form. . . . No one would argue[, however] that
truth or freedom of self-expression could flourish where dogma crushes all thought. But the
evidence of history tends to show . . . that integrity, love of truth, and fiery individualism grow
at least as often in severely disciplined communities . . . and if this is so, Mill's argument for
liberty as a necessary condition for the growth of human genius falls to the ground.
In the second place, the doctrine is comparatively modern . . . Condorcet . . . remarked that
the notion of individual rights was absent from the legal conceptions of the Romans and
Greeks. . . . The domination of this ideal has been the exception rather than the rule, even in
the recent history of the West. Nor has liberty in this sense often formed the rallying cry for
the great masses of mankind. The desire not to be impinged upon, to be left to oneself, has
been a mark of high civilization both on the part of individuals and communities. The sense of
privacy itself, of the area of personal relationships as something sacred in its own right,
derives from a conception of freedom which, for all its religious roots, is scarcely older, in its
developed state, than the Renaissance or the Reformation. Yet its decline would mark the
death of a civilization, of an entire moral outlook.
The third characteristic of this notion of liberty is of greater importance. It is that liberty in this
sense is not incompatible with some kinds of autocracy, or at any rate with the absence of
self-government. Liberty in this sense is principally concerned with the area of control, not
with its source. . . . Freedom in this sense is not, at any rate logically, connected with
democracy or self-government. . . . [T]here is no necessary connection between individual
liberty and democratic rule. The answer to the question 'Who governs me?' is logically distinct
from the question 'How far does the government interfere with me?' It is in this difference that
the great contrast between the two concepts of negative and positive liberty, in the end,
consists. For the 'positive' sense of liberty comes to light if we try to answer the question, not
'What am I free to do or be?', but 'By whom am I ruled?' or 'Who is to say what I am, and
what I am not, to be or do?' The connection between democracy and individual liberty is a
good deal more tenuous than it [has] seemed to many advocates of both. The desire to be
governed by myself, or at any rate to participate in the process by which my life is to be
controlled, may be as deep a wish as that of a free area for action, and perhaps historically
older. But it is not a desire for the same thing. So different is it, indeed, as to have led in the
end to the great clash of ideologies that dominates our world. For it is this--the 'positive'
conception of liberty: not freedom from, but freedom to--to lead one prescribed form of life--
which the adherents of the 'negative' notion represent as being, at times, no better than a
specious disguise for brutal tyranny.
The notion of positive freedom
The 'positive' sense of the word 'liberty' derives from the wish on the part of the individual to
be his own master. . . .
The freedom which consists in being one's own master, and the freedom which consists in
not being prevented from choosing as I do by other men, may . . . seem concepts at no great
logical distance from each other. . . . Yet the 'positive' and 'negative' notions of freedom
historically developed in divergent directions not always by logically reputable steps, until, in
the end, they came into direct conflict with each other.
One way of making this [distinction] clear is in terms of the independent momentum which the
. . . metaphor of self-mastery acquired. . . . Have not men had the experience of liberating
themselves from spiritual slavery, of slavery to nature, and do they not in the course of it
become aware, on the one hand, of a self which dominates, and, on the other, of something
in them which is brought to heel? This dominant self is then variously identified with reason,
with my 'higher nature', with the self which calculates and aims at what will satisfy it in the
long run, with my 'real', or 'ideal', or 'autonomous' self, or with my self 'at its best'; which is
then contrasted with irrational impulse, uncontrolled desires, my 'lower' nature, the pursuit of
immediate pleasures, my 'empirical' or 'heteronymous' self, swept away by every gust of
desire and passion, needing to be rigidly disciplined if it is ever to rise to the full height of its
'real' nature. Presently the two selves may be represented as divided by an even larger gap:
the real self may be conceived as something wider than the individual (as the term is
normally understood), as a social 'whole' of which the individual is an element or aspect: a
tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet
unborn. This entity is then identified as being the 'true' self which, by imposing its collective,
or 'organic', single will upon its recalcitrant 'members', achieves its own, and therefore their,
'higher' freedom. . . . [W]hat gives such plausibility as it has to this kind of language is that we
recognize that it is possible, and at times justifiable, to coerce men in the name of some goal
(let us say, justice or public health) which they would, if they were more enlightened,
themselves pursue. . . . This renders it easy for me to conceive of myself as coercing others
for their own sake, in their, not my, interest. I am then claiming that I know what they truly
need better than they know it themselves. . . . But I may go on to claim a good deal more
than this. I may declare that they are actually aiming at what in their benighted state they
consciously resist, because there exists within them an occult entity--their latent rational will,
or their 'true' purpose--and that this entity . . . is their 'real' self. . . . Once I take this view, I am
in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture them in
the name, and on behalf, of their 'real' selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the
true goal of man . . . must be identical with his freedom--the choice of his 'true', albeit often
submerged and inarticulate, self.
. . . This demonstrates (if demonstration of so obvious a truth is needed) that conceptions of
freedom directly derive from views of what constitutes a self, a person, a man. Enough
manipulation with the definition of man, and freedom can be made to mean whatever the
manipulator wishes. Recent history has made it only to clear that the issue is not merely
academic.
The consequences of distinguishing between two selves will become even clearer if one
considers the two major forms which the desire to be self-directed--directed by one's 'true'
self--has historically taken: the first, that of self-abnegation in order to attain independence;
the second, that of self-realization, or total self-identification with a specific principle or ideal
in order to attain the selfsame end.
...
Liberty and sovereignty
The French Revolution . . . was, at least in its Jacobin form, just such an eruption of the
desire for 'positive' freedom of collective self-direction on the part of a large body of
Frenchmen who felt liberated as a nation, even though the result was, for a good many of
them, a severe restriction of individual freedoms. Rousseau had spoken exultantly of the fact
that the laws of liberty might prove to be more austere than the yoke of tyranny. . . .
Rousseau does not mean by liberty the 'negative' freedom of the individual not to be
interfered with within a defined area, but the possession by all, and not merely by some, of
the fully qualified members of a society of a share in the public power which is entitled to
interfere with every aspect of every citizen's life.
...
[Benjamin] Constant saw in Rousseau the most dangerous enemy of individual liberty,
because he had declared that 'by giving myself to all I give myself to none'. Constant could
not see why, even though the sovereign is 'everybody', it should not oppress one of the
'members' of its indivisible self, if it so decided. . . .
Throughout the nineteenth century liberal thinkers maintained that if liberty involved a limit
upon the powers of any man to force me to do what I did not, or might not, wish to do, then
whatever the ideal in the name of which I was coerced, I was not free. . . . If I wish to
preserve my individual liberty, it is not enough to say that it must not be violated unless
someone or other--the absolute ruler, or the popular assembly, or the King in Parliament, or
the judges, or some combination of authorities, or the laws themselves . . . authorize its
violation. I must establish a society in which there must be some frontiers of freedom which
nobody should be permitted to cross.
. . . For Constant, Mill, Tocqueville, and the liberal tradition to which they belong, no society is
free unless it is governed by at any rate two interrelated principles: first, that no power, but
only rights, can be regarded as absolute, so that all men, whatever power governs them,
have an absolute right to refuse to behave inhumanly; and, second, that there are frontiers,
not artificially drawn, within which men should be inviolable, these frontiers being defined in
terms of rules so long and widely accepted that their observance has entered into the very
conception of what it is to be a normal human being, and, therefore, also of what it is to act
inhumanly or insanely; rules of which it would be absurd to say, for example, that they could
be abrogated by some formal procedure on the part of some court or sovereign body.
. . . This ['negative' conception of liberty] is almost at the opposite pole from the purposes of
those who believe in liberty in the 'positive'--self-directive--sense. The former want to curb
authority as such. The latter want it placed in their own hands. That is a cardinal issue. These
are not two different interpretations of a single concept, but two profoundly divergent and
irreconcilable attitudes to the ends of life. It is as well to recognize this, even if in practice it is
often necessary to strike a compromise between them. For each of them makes absolute
claims. These claims cannot both be fully satisfied. But it is a profound lack of social and
moral understanding not to recognize that the satisfaction that each of them seeks is an
ultimate value which, both historically and morally, has an equal right to be classed among
the deepest interests of mankind.
...
It may be that the ideal of freedom to choose ends without claiming eternal validity for them,
and the pluralism of values connected with this, is only the late fruit of our declining capitalist
civilization: an ideal which remote ages and primitive societies have not recognized, and one
which posterity will regard with curiosity, even sympathy, but little comprehension. This may
be so; but no skeptical conclusions seem to me to follow. Principles are not less sacred
because their duration cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our
values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the
certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. 'To realize the relative
validity of one's convictions', said an admirable writer of our time, 'and yet stand for the
unflinchingly, is what distinguished a civilized man from a barbarian.' To demand more than
this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one's
practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political
immaturity.

Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.