Isaiah Berlin's 1959 essay, ''Two Concepts of Liberty,'' is considered a major contribution to political theory. In it, he made a distinction between negative liberty, that which the individual must be allowed to enjoy without state interference, and positive liberty, that which the state permits by imposing regulations that, by necessity, limit some freedoms in the name of greater liberty for all. The question asked by negative liberty is: “What is the area within which the subject…is or should be left to do or be what he wants to do or be, without interference by other persons?” Positive liberty, universally professed and practiced in the Sino-Soviet East, asks a very different question: “What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, one thing rather than another?”
“Negative” freedom is a familiar enough concept, defined by liberal and conservative theorists, from Locke and Hobbes to Mill, Constant, Bentham, and Tocqueville. They have disagreed as to the area to be left to the individual free of society’s control but they all have agreed that something must be left— “To invade that preserve, however small, would be despotism.”
It is shocking to reflect on how new the doctrine of negative freedom is. It is a recent creation. Creation. Freedom, as an inherent part of mankind, is new and, as such, is fragile. There is no obvious evolutionary channel that was followed to create it, no obvious provenance. It has no discernible history in mankind before the Middle Ages. It has not, until recently, become a context in which to view man and his behavior.
Mr. Berlin writes:
There seems to be scarcely any consciousness of individual liberty as a political ideal in the ancient world. … 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 a 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.
Positive liberty is older. Philosophically, this kind of liberty rests on the assumption that there is one “real” human nature, with “rational” needs. Every prophet of positive freedom, from Plato to Khrushchev, thinks he knows what this “real” human nature is.
He write:
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 [and they would not resist me if they were as rational and as wise as I. … 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, although it is belied by all that they overtly feel and do and say, is their “real” self, of which the poor empirical self in space and time may know nothing or little; and that this inner spirit is the only self that deserves to have its wishes taken into account. 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, or on behalf, of their “real” selves.
“Negative” freedom is a familiar enough concept, defined by liberal and conservative theorists, from Locke and Hobbes to Mill, Constant, Bentham, and Tocqueville. They have disagreed as to the area to be left to the individual free of society’s control but they all have agreed that something must be left— “To invade that preserve, however small, would be despotism.”
It is shocking to reflect on how new the doctrine of negative freedom is. It is a recent creation. Creation. Freedom, as an inherent part of mankind, is new and, as such, is fragile. There is no obvious evolutionary channel that was followed to create it, no obvious provenance. It has no discernible history in mankind before the Middle Ages. It has not, until recently, become a context in which to view man and his behavior.
Mr. Berlin writes:
There seems to be scarcely any consciousness of individual liberty as a political ideal in the ancient world. … 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 a 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.
Positive liberty is older. Philosophically, this kind of liberty rests on the assumption that there is one “real” human nature, with “rational” needs. Every prophet of positive freedom, from Plato to Khrushchev, thinks he knows what this “real” human nature is.
He write:
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 [and they would not resist me if they were as rational and as wise as I. … 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, although it is belied by all that they overtly feel and do and say, is their “real” self, of which the poor empirical self in space and time may know nothing or little; and that this inner spirit is the only self that deserves to have its wishes taken into account. 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, or on behalf, of their “real” selves.
No comments:
Post a Comment