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Article Excerpt
On October 31, 1958, Isaiah Berlin gave his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. Entitled "Two Concepts of Liberty," it was, according to Michael Ignatieff, Berlin's authorized biographer, "the most influential lecture he ever delivered." Indeed, one can argue that Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty" was one of the most important political essays of the twentieth century, for it clarified an important element in the prolonged contest between the imperfect democracies of the West and the pluperfect tyranny of the Soviet Union. Moreover, Berlin's essay defended the liberal democratic project in such a way as to reinforce the liberal anti-Communist consensus that historians still associate with men such as President Harry Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and Senators Hubert H. Humphrey and Henry M. Jackson. As things turned out, that consensus held just long enough to ensure that, deepened intellectually and reinforced politically by conservative and neoconservative thinkers and political leaders in the 1970s and 1980s, freedom's cause won out over Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism.
A wide-ranging historian of ideas who had grown up in Riga and Petrograd, Isaiah Berlin had seen firsthand the human and political effects of passionately held ideas. Berlin knew in his bones that ideas are not intellectuals' toys: ideas have consequences, for good and for ill, in what even intellectuals sometimes call "the real world." In "Two Concepts of Liberty," Berlin mounted an extended defense of what he understood to be the liberal idea of freedom against its principal modern political competitors, fascism and communism. At the same time, he raised an alarm against what he regarded as the tendency in social democratic theory to weaken individual freedom in the name of other social goods. As the title of his lecture signals, Berlin's basic intellectual move was to distinguish between "negative liberty" and "positive liberty," and then to defend the former as the only concept of liberty that could be actualized in the "real world" of inevitably conflicting interests, diverse concepts of the good, and competing human projects.
"Negative liberty" for Berlin is freedom from: freedom from interference in personal matters, which implies the circumscription of state power within a strong legal framework. As Ignatieff summarizes Berlin's argument, the primary purpose of a liberal political community is to create the public circumstances in which men and women are left alone "to do what they want, provided that their actions [do] not interfere with the liberty of others." "Positive liberty," on the other hand, is freedom to: freedom to realize some greater good in history. At the heart of the Fascist and Communist projects, Berlin warned, was a determination to use political power to liberate human beings, whether they liked it or not, for the realization of some higher historical end. That determination, Berlin argued, inevitably leads to repression.
Isaiah Berlin was not a libertarian. Rather, the man who had first worked at the intersection of ideas and power during his World War II service at the British Embassy in Washington was a Russo-English exponent of classic American New Deal liberalism: a liberal who believed that government had an obligation to secure the economic, social, and educational conditions under which people could truly exercise their liberty. Berlin broke with the social-democratic left, though, in insisting that liberty, equality, and justice were, are, and always will be in tension.
Berlin was never willing (or perhaps able) to sort out the tensions or define the boundaries between liberty and justice. Still, his insistence that politics is not therapy, his resolute refusal to deny the reality of conflicts among social goods, and his insistence that utopian politics inevitably become coercive politics (and, in the modern world, extraordinarily brutal coercive politics) were all important ideas to defend, in Europe and America, against the coercive utopians of the twentieth century. In this specific sense, Berlin was a champion of pluralism in an age in which too many other political theorists had cast their lot with monisms of one kind or another--monisms, otherwise known as totalitarianisms, of a most lethal sort. A robust pluralism, Berlin suggested, was both an expression of liberty rightly lived and political liberty's surest guarantee.
Isaiah Berlin thus deserves considerable credit for identifying the perversion of liberty that was at the root of the totalitarian project, and for defending a concept of liberty-as-noninterference that, in setting legal limits to coercive state power, has deep resonances in the American political tradition. And yet, forty-four years after "Two Concepts of Liberty," one has to ask whether Berlin's analysis of the problem of freedom is truly adequate.
In a thoughtful assessment of Berlin's achievement ("A Dissent on Isaiah Berlin," Commentary, February 1999), Norman Podhoretz has argued that, despite its important contribution in its time,...
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