LIBERTY

9.1 Introduction

In the previous chapter, you studied justice and its principles. One of the two principles is

maximum compatible liberty for all. The concept of liberty and the rationale behind its

protection is the focus of this chapter. Liberty is generally considered as a concept of

political philosophy that identifies the condition in which an individual has the ability to

act according to his or her own will. However, there are two different concepts of liberty

based on ‘ideological’ differences. One is concerned with the autonomy of the individual

and absence of external interference. This has been embraced by the West from the

natural right theories and American Constitution up until today. All individual rights are

considered to be of this sort. The second idea of liberty focuses on people in general and

groups but does not rule out individuals. It is concerned with not only external

interferences but also mostly internal ones, which means that people may not be capable

of freedom even in the absence of external interference and thus may need assistance

from the state. This idea crudely formulated by the Greeks in the form of democracy

(government of the people), developed by Enlightenment philosophers, incorporated in

American Constitution, reformulated by Marx and used/abused by Communists and

dictators. All group rights are examples of the second version. However, both concepts

have been recognized by the UN and given protection in international human rights

instruments. In Rawls’ theory of justice, liberty refers to the first version only. Why did

he choose that? What justifies one over the other? Is there a third way, which

encompasses and compromises both? This chapter will introduce students with different

theories of liberty and tries to respond to these questions.

9.3. Isaiah Berlin: Two Concepts of Liberty

The first of the two political senses of liberty which Berlin calls 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 what he is able to do or be,

without interference by other persons?' The second, which Berlin calls 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?'

9.3.1 The Notion of 'Negative' Freedom

Q. What is negative freedom? What is coercion? Why

should it be limited? Where should it be limited?

Berlin states, 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. If I am prevented by others from doing what

I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is invaded by other men

beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved.

Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. 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.

Mere incapacity to attain a goal is not lack of political freedom. If my poverty were a

kind of disease which prevented me from buying bread, or paying for the journey round

the world or getting my case heard, (as lameness prevents me from running) this inability

would not naturally be described as a lack of freedom, least of all political freedom. It is

only because I believe that my inability to get a given thing is due to the fact that other

human beings have made arrangements where by I am, whereas others are not, prevented
from having enough money with which to pay for it that I think myself a victim of

coercion or slavery. In other words, this use of the term depends on a particular social and

economic theory about the causes of my poverty or weakness. The criterion of oppression

is the part to be played by other human beings, directly or indirectly, with or without the

intention of doing so, in frustrating my wishes. The wider the area of non-interference

means that the wider my freedom.

This is what the classical English political philosophers meant when they used this word.

They disagreed about how wide the area could or should be. They supposed that it could

not be unlimited because if it were, it would entail a state in which all men could

boundlessly interfere with all other men. This kind of 'natural' freedom would lead to

social chaos in which men's minimum needs would not be satisfied; or else the liberties

of the weak would be suppressed by the strong. Because they perceived that human

purposes and activities do not automatically harmonize with one another, and because

(whatever their official doctrines) 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. For, without
this, it was impossible to create the kind of association that they thought desirable.

Consequently, it is assumed by these thinkers that law must limit the area of men’s free

action. Equally it is assumed, especially by such libertarians as Locke and Mill in England, and

Constant and Tocqueville in France, that there ought to exist a certain minimum area of

personal freedom which, must on no account be violated. For if it is overstepped, the

individual will find himself in an area too narrow for even that minimum development of

his natural faculties which alone makes it possible to pursue, and even to conceive, the

various ends which men hold good or right or sacred. It follows that a frontier must be

drawn between the area of private life and that of public authority. Where it is to be

drawn is a matter of argument. Men are largely interdependent, and no man's activity is

so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others in any way. The liberty of

some must depend on the restraint of others. 'Freedom for an Oxford don', others have

been known to add, 'is a very different thing from freedom for an Egyptian peasant.'

It is true that 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; they

need medical help or education before they can understand, or make use of, an increase in
their freedom. What is freedom to those who cannot make use of it? Without adequate -

conditions for the- use of freedom, what is the value of freedom? First things come first:

there are situations in which boots are superior to the works of Shakespeare; individual

freedom is not everyone's primary need. For freedom is not the mere absence of

frustration of whatever kind; this would inflate the meaning of the word until it meant too

much or too little. The Egyptian peasant needs clothes or medicine before, and more than,

personal liberty, but the minimum freedom that he needs today, and the greater degree of

freedom that he may need tomorrow, is not some species of freedom peculiar to him, but

identical with that of professors, artists, and millionaires.

What troubles the consciences of Western liberals is not 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. They believe, with good reason, that if individual liberty is an

ultimate end for human beings, others should deprive none of it; least of all, that some

should enjoy it at the expense of others. Equality of liberty; not to treat others as I should not wish them
to treat me; payment of my debt to those who alone have made possible
my liberty or prosperity or enlightenment; justice, in its simplest and most universal

sense- these are the foundations of liberal morality.

Philosophers with an optimistic view of human nature and a belief in the possibility of

harmonizing interests, such as Locke, Adam Smith or 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 to keep them in their places; he wished

correspondingly to increase the area of centralized control and decrease that of the

individual. However, both sides agreed that some portion of human existence must

remain independent of the sphere of social control. To invade that preserve, however

small, would be despotism. We must preserve a minimum area of personal freedom if we

are not to 'degrade or deny our nature'. We cannot remain absolutely free, and must give

up some of our liberty to preserve the rest. What then must the minimum be? This has

been, and perhaps always will be, a matter of infinite debate. But whatever the principle
in terms of which the area of non-interference is to be drawn, liberty in this sense means

liberty from; absence of interference beyond the shifting, but always recognizable,

frontier.

'All the errors which a man is likely to commit against advice and warning are far

outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem is good.'

The defence of liberty consists in the 'negative' goal of warding off interference. To

threaten a man with persecution unless he submits to a life in which he exercises no

choices of his goals; to block before him every door but one, (no matter how noble the

prospect upon which it opens, or how benevolent the motives of those who arrange this),

is to sin against the truth that he is a man, a being with a life of his own to live. This is

liberty, as has been conceived by liberals in the modern world.Freedom in this sense is not, at any rate
logically, connected with democracy or selfgovernment. Self-government may, overall, provide a better
guarantee of the preservation

of civil liberties than other regimes, and has been defended as such by libertarians. But

there is no necessary connexion 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 connexion between democracy and individual liberty is weaker

than it 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:

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.

9.3.2 The Notion of Positive Freedom

Q. What is positive liberty? What is the defect 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. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on
external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other

men's, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by

conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me from outside. This

is at least part of what I mean when I say that I am rational, and that it is my reason that

distinguishes me as a human being from the rest of the world. I wish, above all, to be conscious of
myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for my

choices and able to explain them by references to my own ideas and purposes. I feel free

to the degree that I believe this to be true, and enslaved to the degree that I am made to

realize that it is not.

The freedom which consists in being one's own master, and the freedom which consists

in not being prevented from choosing as I want may, on the face of it, seem concepts at

no great logical distance from each other - no more than negative and positive ways of

saying much the same thing. 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 clear is in terms of the independent momentum which the,
initially perhaps quite harmless, metaphor of self-mastery acquired. 'I am my own

master'; 'I am slave to no man'; but may I not be a slave to nature? May I not be a slave to

my own, uncontrolled passions? Have not men had the experience of liberating

themselves from spiritual slavery, or 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 under control? 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'. This is then contrasted with irrational impulse, uncontrolled desires,

my 'lower' nature, the pursuit of immediate pleasures, my 'empirical' self, swept by every

blast of desire and passion, needing to be rigidly disciplined if it is ever to rise to the full

height of its ‘real’ nature. For example, my higher or rational self wants to live longer and

have grandchildren but my lower nature (self) wants to smoke two packs of cigarette and

have unprotected sex with many partners. If I want to be truly free (to achieve my goal)

my higher self must control my lower self.

This entity is then identified as being the 'true' self which, by imposing its collective, or
'organic', single will upon its disobedient 'members', achieves its own, and therefore their, higher'
freedom. (Imagine the above example for an individual applying for a community

and its leaders where some follow their leaders and others disobey.) The risks of using

organic metaphors to justify the coercion of some men by others in order to raise them to

a ‘higher’ level of freedom have often been pointed out. But what gives such plausibility

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, but do not, because they are

blind or ignorant or corrupt. 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. What, at most, this entails is that they

would not resist me if they were rational and as wise as I and understood their interests as

I do

The 'positive' conception of freedom as self mastery has, in fact, and as a matter of

history, of doctrine and of practice, lent itself more easily to this splitting of personality

into two: the transcendent, dominant controller, and the empirical bundle of desires and
passions to be disciplined and brought under control. It is this historical fact that has been

influential. This demonstrates that conceptions of freedom directly derive from views of

what constitutes a self, a person, and 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 too clear that the issue is not merely academic.

9.4 Charles Taylor: What’s wrong with Negative Liberty?

Q. What is the problem of Berlin’s theory?

In what follows, Taylor makes an attempt to resolve one of the issues that separate

'positive' and 'negative' theories of freedom, as these have been distinguished in the

previous section. There clearly are theories, widely held in liberal society, which want to define freedom
exclusively in terms of the independence of the individual from

interference by others, be they governments, corporations or private persons; and equally

clearly these theories are challenged by those who believe that freedom resides at least in

part in collective control over the common life. We unproblematically recognise theories

descended from Rousseau and Marx as fitting in this (the latter) category.

When people attack positive theories of freedom, they generally have some Left

totalitarian theory in mind, according to which freedom resides exclusively in exercising

collective control over one's destiny in a classless society, the kind of theory which

underlies, for instance, official Communism. This view, in its extreme form, refuses to

recognise the freedoms guaranteed in other societies as genuine. The destruction of

bourgeois freedoms is no real loss of freedom, and coercion can be justified in the name

of freedom if it is needed to bring into existence the classless society in which alone men

are properly free. Men can, in short, be forced to be free.

Even as applied to official Communism, this portrait is a little extreme, although it

undoubtedly expresses the inner logic of this kind of theory. But it is an absurd

misrepresentation if applied to the whole family of positive conceptions. This includes all

those views of modern political life which owe something to the ancient republican

tradition, according to which men's ruling themselves is seen as an activity valuable in

itself, and not only for instrumental reasons. It includes in its scope thinkers like

Tocqueville, and even arguably the J.S. Mill of On Representative Government. It has no

necessary connection with the view that freedom consists purely and simply in the

collective control over the common life, or that there is no freedom worth the name

outside a context of collective control. And it does not therefore generate necessarily a
doctrine that men can be forced to be free.

On the other side, there is a corresponding misrepresented version of negative freedom,

which tends to come to the forefront. This is the tough-minded version, going back to

Hobbes, or in another way to Bentham, which sees freedom simply as the absence of

external physical or legal obstacles. This view will have no truck with other less immediately obvious
obstacles to freedom, for instance, lack of awareness, or false

consciousness, or repression, or other inner factors of this kind. It holds firmly to the

view that to speak of such inner factors as relevant to the issue about freedom, to speak

for instance of someone's being less free because of false consciousness, is to abuse

words. The only clear meaning, which can be given to freedom, is that of the absence of

external obstacles.

Now we have to examine more closely, what is at stake between the two views. The

negative theories, as we saw, want to define freedom in terms of individual independence

from others; the positive also want to identify freedom with collective self-government.

But behind this lie some deeper differences of doctrines.

What are exercise and opportunity concepts?

What is their relationship?

Isaiah Berlin points out that negative theories are concerned with the area in which the

subject should be left without interference, whereas the positive doctrines are concerned

with who or what controls. Taylor wants to put the point behind this in a slightly different

way. Doctrines of positive freedom are concerned with a view of freedom, which

involves essentially the exercising of control over one's life. On this view, one is free

only to the extent that one has effectively determined oneself and the shape of one's life.

The concept of freedom here is an exercise-concept.

By contrast, negative theories can rely simply on an opportunity-concept, where being

free is a matter of what we can do, of what it is open to us to do, whether or not we do

anything to exercise these options. This certainly is the case of the crude, original

Hobbesian concept. Freedom consists just in there being no obstacle. It is a sufficient

condition of one's being free that nothing stands in the way.

Plainly, this kind of view can't rely simply on an opportunity-concept. We can't say that

someone is free, on a self-realisation view, if he is totally unrealised, if for instance he is totally unaware
of his potential, if fulfilling it has never even arisen as a question for him,
or if he is paralysed by the fear of breaking with some norm which he has internalised but

which does not authentically reflect him. Within this conceptual scheme, some degree of

exercise is necessary for a man to be thought free. Or if we want to think of the internal

bars to freedom as obstacles on all fours with the external ones, then being in a position

to exercise freedom, having the opportunity, involves removing the internal barriers; and

this is not possible without having to some extent realised myself. So, with the freedom

of self-realisation, having the opportunity to be free requires that I already an exercising

freedom. A pure opportunity-concept is impossible here.

But if negative theories can be grounded on either an opportunity- or an exercise-concept,

the same is not true of positive theories. The view that freedom involves at least partially

collective self-rule is essentially grounded on an exercise concept, for this view (at least

partly) identifies freedom with self-direction, i.e., the actual exercise of directing control

over one's life. An exercise-concept of freedom requires that we discriminate among

motivations. If we are free in the exercise of certain capacities, then we are not free, or

less free, when these capacities are in some way unfulfilled or blocked. But the obstacles

can be internal as well as external. And this must be so, for the capacities relevant to
freedom must involve some self-awareness, self-understanding, moral discrimination and

self-control. Otherwise, their exercise couldn't amount to freedom in the sense of selfdirection; and this
being so, we can fail to be free because these internal conditions are

not realised.

What are the problems of the negative concept?

There are some considerations one can put forward straight off to show that the pure

(negative) concept won't work, that there are some discriminations among motivations

which are essential to the concept of freedom as we use it. Even where we think of

freedom as the absence of external obstacles, it is not the absence of such obstacles

simply, for we make discriminations between obstacles as representing more or less

serious infringements of freedom. And we do this, because we deploy the concept against a background
understanding that certain goals and activities are more significant than

others.

Thus we could say that my freedom is restricted if the local authority puts up a new

traffic light at an intersection close to my home; so that where previously I could cross as

I liked, consistently with avoiding collision with other cars, now I have to wait until the

light is green. In a philosophical argument, we might call this a restriction of freedom, but
not in a serious political debate. The reason is that it is too trivial, the activity and

purposes inhibited here are not significant. It is not just a matter of our having made a

trade-off, and considered that a small loss of liberty was worth fewer traffic accidents, or

less danger for the children; we are reluctant to speak here of a loss of liberty at all; what

we feel we are trading off is convenience against safety.

By contrast a law which forbids me from worshipping according to the form I believe in

is a serious blow to liberty-, even a law which tried to restrict this to certain times (as the

traffic light restricts my crossing of the intersection to certain times) would be seen as a

serious restriction. Why this difference between the two cases? Because, we have a

background understanding of some activities and goals as highly significant for human

beings and others as less so. One's religious belief is recognised, even by atheists, as

supremely important, because it is that by which the believer defines himself as a moral

being. By contrast, my rhythm of movement through the city traffic is trivial. We don't

want to speak of these two in the same way. Freedom is no longer just the absence of

external obstacle but the absence of external obstacle to significant action, to what is

important to man. There are discriminations to be made; some restrictions are more
serious than others, some are utterly trivial. Therefore, some discrimination among

motivations seems essential to our concept of freedom. A minute's reflection shows why

this must be so. Freedom is important to us because we are purposive beings. But then

there must be distinctions in the significance of different kinds of freedom based on the

distinction in the significance of different purposes Although we have to admit that there are internal,
motivational, necessary conditions for

freedom, we can perhaps still avoid any legitimating of second-guessing (anticipate or

predict) of the subject. If our negative theory allows for strong evaluation, allows that

some goals are really important to us, and that other desires are seen as not fully ours,

then can it not retain the thesis that freedom is being able to do what I want? That is, what

I can identify myself as wanting, where this means not just what I identify as my

strongest desire, but what I identify as my true, authentic desire or purpose. The subject

would still be the final arbiter of his being free/unfree, and we are retaining the basic

concern of the negative theory. Freedom would be modified to read: the absence of

internal or external obstacle to what I truly or authentically want.

Taylor asserted that this hybrid or middle position is untenable, where we are willing to
admit that we can speak of what we truly want, as against what we most strongly desire,

and of some desires as obstacles to our freedom, while we still will not allow for secondguessing. For to
rule this out in principle is to rule out in principle that the subject can

ever be wrong about what he truly wants. And how can he never, in principle, be wrong,

unless there is nothing to be right or wrong about in this matter?

What are internal obstacles?

Well, to resume what we have seen: our attributions of freedom make sense against a

background sense of more and less significant purposes, for the question of freedom/

unfreedom is bound up with the frustration/fulfilment of our purposes. Further, our

significant purposes can be frustrated by our own desires, and where these are sufficiently

based on misapprehension, we consider them as not really ours, and experience them as

restraints. A man's freedom can therefore, be curtailed by internal, motivational obstacles,

as well as external ones. A man who is driven by malice to jeopardise his most important

relationships, in spite of himself, or who is prevented by unreasoning fear from taking up

the career he truly wants, is not really made freer if one lifts the external obstacles to act

on his ill feeling or acting on his fear. Or at best he is liberated into a very impoverished
freedom.Once we see that we make distinctions of degree and significance in freedoms depending

on the significance of the purpose fettered/ enabled, how can we deny that it makes a

difference to the degree of freedom not only whether one of my basic purposes is

frustrated by my own desires but also whether I have grievously misidentified this

purpose? The only way to avoid this would be to hold that there is no such thing as

getting it wrong, that your basic purpose is just what you feel it to be. But there is such a

thing as getting it wrong, as we have seen, and the very distinctions of significance

depend on this fact.

But if this is so, then the crude negative view of freedom is untenable. Freedom can't just

be the absence of external obstacles, for there may also be internal ones. And nor may the

internal obstacles be just confined to those that the subject identifies as such, so that he is

the final arbiter; for he may be profoundly mistaken about his purposes and about what

he wants to repudiate. And if so, he is less capable of freedom in the meaningful sense of

the word. Hence we cannot maintain the incorrigibility of the subject's judgements about

his freedom, or rule out second-guessing, as we put it above. And at the same time, we

are forced to abandon the pure opportunity-concept of freedom. For freedom now
involves my being able to recognise adequately my more important purposes, and my

being able to overcome or at least neutralise my motivational fetters, as well as my being

free of external obstacles. I must be actually exercising self-understanding in order to be

truly or fully free. We can no longer understand freedom just as an opportunity-concept.