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NOTE 27. Isaiah Berlin on Negative Freedom

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CHAPTER 27 ISAIAH BERLIN ON NEGATIVE FREEDOM

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One of the best-known and most influential present-day treatments of liberty is that

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of Sir Isaiah Berlin.

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In his Two Concepts of Liberty, Berlin upheld the concept of negative liberty, absence of

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interference with a person's sphere of action, as against positive liberty, which refers

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is not to liberty at all, but to an individual's effective power or mastery over himself or

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his environment.

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Superficially, Berlin's concept of negative liberty seems similar to the thesis of the

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present volume, that liberty is the absence of physically coercive interference or invasion

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of an individual's person and property.

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Unfortunately, however, the vagueness of Berlin's concepts led to confusion and to the absence

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Parts of a Systematic and Valid Libertarian Creed

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One of Berlin's fallacies and confusions he himself recognized in a later essay and edition

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of his original volume.

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In his Two Concepts of Liberty he had written that I am normally said to be free to the

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degree to which no human being interferes with my activity.

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Full liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can do what he wants.

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Or as Berlin later phrased it, in the original version of Two Concepts of Liberty, I speak

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of liberty as the absence of obstacles to the fulfillment of a man's desires.

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But as he later realized, one grave problem with this formulation is that a man can be

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be held to be free in proportion as his wants and desires are extinguished, for example,

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by external conditioning.

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As Berlin states in his corrective essay, if degrees of freedom were a function of the

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satisfaction of desires, I could increase freedom as effectively by eliminating desires

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as by satisfying them.

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I could render men, including myself, free by conditioning them into losing the original

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In his later, 1969 version, Berlin has expunged the offending passage, altering the first

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statement above to read,

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Political liberty, in this sense, is simply the area within which a man can act, unobstructed by others.

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But grave problems still remain with Berlin's later approach.

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For Berlin now explains that what he means by freedom is the absence of obstacles to possible choices and activities.

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Obstacles, that is, put there by alterable human practices.

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Practices. But this comes close, as Professor Parent observes, to confusing freedom with

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opportunity. In short, to scuttling Berlin's own concept of negative freedom and replacing

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it with the illegitimate concept of positive freedom. Thus, as Parent indicates, suppose

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that X refuses to hire Y because Y is a redhead and X dislikes redheads. X is surely reducing

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to fit some people's liberty at the expense of others.

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I am indebted to Dr. David Gordon for this point.

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Indeed, Parent goes on to point out a repeated confusion in the later Berlin of freedom with opportunity.

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Thus Berlin writes that the freedom of which I speak is opportunity for action,

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and identifies increases in liberty with the maximization of opportunities.

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As Parrott points out, the terms liberty and opportunity have distinct meanings.

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Someone, for example, may lack the opportunity to buy a ticket to a concert for numerous reasons.

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For example, he is too busy, and yet he was still, in any meaningful sense, free to buy such a ticket.

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Thus Berlin's fundamental flaw was his failure to define negative liberty as the absence of physical interference

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with an individual's person and property, with his just property rights broadly defined.

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Failing to hit on this definition, Berlin fell into confusion and ended by virtually

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abandoning the very negative liberty he had tried to establish and to fall willy-nilly

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into the positive liberty camp.

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More than that, Berlin, stung by his critics with the charge of upholding laissez-faire,

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has moved into frenetic and self-contradictory assaults on laissez-faire as somehow injurious

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to negative liberty.

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For example, Berlin writes that the evils of unrestricted laissez-faire led to brutal

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violations of negative liberty, including that of free expression or association.

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Since laissez-faire precisely means full freedom of person and property, including, of course,

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Every expression and association as a subset of private property rights, Berlin has here

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fallen into absurdity.

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And in a similar canard, Berlin writes of the fate of personal liberty during the reign

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of unfettered economic individualism, about the condition of the injured majority principally

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in the towns whose children were destroyed in mines or mills while their parents lived

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in poverty, disease and ignorance, a situation in which the enjoyment by the poor and the

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weak of legal rights became an odious mockery. Unsurprisingly, Berlin goes on to attack such

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pure and consistent laissez-faire libertarians as Cobden and Spencer on behalf of such confused

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and inconsistent classical liberals as Mill and de Tocqueville.

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There are several grave and basic problems with Berlin's fulminations.

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One is a complete ignorance of the modern historians of the Industrial Revolution, such

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as Ashton, Hayek, Hutt and Hartwell, who have demonstrated that the new industry alleviated

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the previous poverty and starvation of the workers, including the child laborers, rather

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than the contrary.

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But on a conceptual level there are grave problems as well.

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First that it is absurd and self-contradictory to assert that laissez-faire or economic individualism

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could have injured personal liberty, and second that Berlin is really explicitly scuttling

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the very concept of negative liberty on behalf of concepts of positive power or wealth.

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Berlin reaches the height or depth of this approach when he attacks negative liberty

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are studied directly for having been used to arm the strong, the brutal and the unscrupulous

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against the humane and the weak.

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Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.

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The blood-stained story of economic individualism and unrestrained capitalist competition does

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not today need stressing.

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The crucial fallacy of Berlin here is insistently to identify freedom and the free market economy

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with its opposite, with coercive aggression. Note his repeated use of such terms as arm,

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brutal, wolves and sheep, and blood-stained, all of which are applicable only to coercive

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aggression, such as has been universally employed by the State. Also, he then identifies such

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aggression with its opposite, the peaceful and voluntary processes of free exchange in

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and the Market Economy. Unrestrained economic individualism led, on the contrary, to peaceful

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and harmonious exchange, which benefited most precisely the weak and the sheep. It is the

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latter who could not survive in the statist rule of the jungle, who reap the largest share

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of the benefits from the freely competitive economy. Even a slight acquaintance with economic

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Like science, and particularly with the Ricardian law of comparative advantage, would have set

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Sir Isaiah straight on this vital point.