CHAPTER 27 ISAIAH BERLIN ON NEGATIVE FREEDOM
One of the best-known and most influential present-day treatments of liberty is that
of Sir Isaiah Berlin.
In his Two Concepts of Liberty, Berlin upheld the concept of negative liberty, absence of
interference with a person's sphere of action, as against positive liberty, which refers
is not to liberty at all, but to an individual's effective power or mastery over himself or
his environment.
Superficially, Berlin's concept of negative liberty seems similar to the thesis of the
present volume, that liberty is the absence of physically coercive interference or invasion
of an individual's person and property.
Unfortunately, however, the vagueness of Berlin's concepts led to confusion and to the absence
Parts of a Systematic and Valid Libertarian Creed
One of Berlin's fallacies and confusions he himself recognized in a later essay and edition
of his original volume.
In his Two Concepts of Liberty he had written that I am normally said to be free to the
degree to which no human being interferes with my activity.
Full liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can do what he wants.
Or as Berlin later phrased it, in the original version of Two Concepts of Liberty, I speak
of liberty as the absence of obstacles to the fulfillment of a man's desires.
But as he later realized, one grave problem with this formulation is that a man can be
be held to be free in proportion as his wants and desires are extinguished, for example,
by external conditioning.
As Berlin states in his corrective essay, if degrees of freedom were a function of the
satisfaction of desires, I could increase freedom as effectively by eliminating desires
as by satisfying them.
I could render men, including myself, free by conditioning them into losing the original
In his later, 1969 version, Berlin has expunged the offending passage, altering the first
statement above to read,
Political liberty, in this sense, is simply the area within which a man can act, unobstructed by others.
But grave problems still remain with Berlin's later approach.
For Berlin now explains that what he means by freedom is the absence of obstacles to possible choices and activities.
Obstacles, that is, put there by alterable human practices.
Practices. But this comes close, as Professor Parent observes, to confusing freedom with
opportunity. In short, to scuttling Berlin's own concept of negative freedom and replacing
it with the illegitimate concept of positive freedom. Thus, as Parent indicates, suppose
that X refuses to hire Y because Y is a redhead and X dislikes redheads. X is surely reducing
to fit some people's liberty at the expense of others.
I am indebted to Dr. David Gordon for this point.
Indeed, Parent goes on to point out a repeated confusion in the later Berlin of freedom with opportunity.
Thus Berlin writes that the freedom of which I speak is opportunity for action,
and identifies increases in liberty with the maximization of opportunities.
As Parrott points out, the terms liberty and opportunity have distinct meanings.
Someone, for example, may lack the opportunity to buy a ticket to a concert for numerous reasons.
For example, he is too busy, and yet he was still, in any meaningful sense, free to buy such a ticket.
Thus Berlin's fundamental flaw was his failure to define negative liberty as the absence of physical interference
with an individual's person and property, with his just property rights broadly defined.
Failing to hit on this definition, Berlin fell into confusion and ended by virtually
abandoning the very negative liberty he had tried to establish and to fall willy-nilly
into the positive liberty camp.
More than that, Berlin, stung by his critics with the charge of upholding laissez-faire,
has moved into frenetic and self-contradictory assaults on laissez-faire as somehow injurious
to negative liberty.
For example, Berlin writes that the evils of unrestricted laissez-faire led to brutal
violations of negative liberty, including that of free expression or association.
Since laissez-faire precisely means full freedom of person and property, including, of course,
Every expression and association as a subset of private property rights, Berlin has here
fallen into absurdity.
And in a similar canard, Berlin writes of the fate of personal liberty during the reign
of unfettered economic individualism, about the condition of the injured majority principally
in the towns whose children were destroyed in mines or mills while their parents lived
in poverty, disease and ignorance, a situation in which the enjoyment by the poor and the
weak of legal rights became an odious mockery. Unsurprisingly, Berlin goes on to attack such
pure and consistent laissez-faire libertarians as Cobden and Spencer on behalf of such confused
and inconsistent classical liberals as Mill and de Tocqueville.
There are several grave and basic problems with Berlin's fulminations.
One is a complete ignorance of the modern historians of the Industrial Revolution, such
as Ashton, Hayek, Hutt and Hartwell, who have demonstrated that the new industry alleviated
the previous poverty and starvation of the workers, including the child laborers, rather
than the contrary.
But on a conceptual level there are grave problems as well.
First that it is absurd and self-contradictory to assert that laissez-faire or economic individualism
could have injured personal liberty, and second that Berlin is really explicitly scuttling
the very concept of negative liberty on behalf of concepts of positive power or wealth.
Berlin reaches the height or depth of this approach when he attacks negative liberty
are studied directly for having been used to arm the strong, the brutal and the unscrupulous
against the humane and the weak.
Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.
The blood-stained story of economic individualism and unrestrained capitalist competition does
not today need stressing.
The crucial fallacy of Berlin here is insistently to identify freedom and the free market economy
with its opposite, with coercive aggression. Note his repeated use of such terms as arm,
brutal, wolves and sheep, and blood-stained, all of which are applicable only to coercive
aggression, such as has been universally employed by the State. Also, he then identifies such
aggression with its opposite, the peaceful and voluntary processes of free exchange in
and the Market Economy. Unrestrained economic individualism led, on the contrary, to peaceful
and harmonious exchange, which benefited most precisely the weak and the sheep. It is the
latter who could not survive in the statist rule of the jungle, who reap the largest share
of the benefits from the freely competitive economy. Even a slight acquaintance with economic
Like science, and particularly with the Ricardian law of comparative advantage, would have set
Sir Isaiah straight on this vital point.