Northeastern Political Science Association

Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty: A Reassessment and Revision

Author(s): Theodore L. Putterman
Source: Polity, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Jul., 2006), pp. 416-446
Published by: Palgrave Macmillan Journals
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Polity * Volume 38, Number 3 * July 2006
( 2006 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/06 $30.00
www.palgrave-journals.com/polity

Berlin's Two Concepts of

Liberty: A Reassessment
and Revision
Theodore L. Putterman
California State University

In distinguishing between negative and positive freedom, Isaiah Berlin

expressed a preference for negative freedom. Given the track record of those who
in the past have advocated positive freedom, this is not surprising.But advocates of
positive freedom do not accept that tyrannynecessarily results from embracing their
conception of freedom, and they are convinced that a commitment to negative
freedom is never enough to defend "freedom"against tyrants. They do, however,
share one thing in common with those who favor negative freedom: both equate
theirconception of freedom with "truefreedom,"and treat the other as either false or
incomplete. Thismight suggest that Berlin'sdistinction is more a partisan's tool than
a tool of analysis. I disagree. But rather than reducing it to a distinction between
"freedomfrom"and "freedomto,"we need to expand it. Not only will this enable us
to move beyond an importantcriticismof Berlin'sconception of freedom, it will also
provide a better explanation for why negative freedom is as likely as positive
freedom to diminish "true freedom" and why positive freedom is as likely as
negative freedom to increase it.
Polity (2006) 38, 416-446. doi: 10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300038

Keywords negative freedom; positive freedom; Isaiah Berlin

Theodore L. Putterman has taught political theory at universities in the US.A.

and in the UnitedKingdom.He has published articlesin Historyof Political Thought,
Legal Studies Forum, Polis, Bright Lights Film Journal, and The Antioch Review.
He can be reached at [email protected]

The essence of liberty has always lain in the ability to choose as you wish to
choose, because you wish so to choose, uncoerced, unbullied, not swallowed
up in some vast system; and in the rightto resist, to be unpopular,to stand up for
your convictions merely because they are your convictions. That is true freedom,
and without it there is neither freedom of any kind, nor even the illusion of it.1
-Isaiah Berlin

1. Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 103-04.

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 Theodore L. Putterman 417

Berlin's Position
The distinction Isaiah Berlin drew between negative and positive liberty
was not new; however he, perhaps more than any previous thinker, explored
to the full its political implications. That, at least, was his intention. And
although Berlin's distinction has been extensively criticized, I still find it
provocative, especially when illuminating what A.D. Lindsay once referred to as
the "operative ideas" of a society.2 I think it is also true that some of the criticism
his distinction received failed to adequately take into account his purpose.
Admittedly,Berlin may be partly to blame for this. What starts out as an attempt to
conceptualize freedom often comes across as a defense of a particular
conception of freedom, namely, "the desire not to be impinged upon, to be left
to oneself."3 This is the freedom we have-or have taken-which enables us,
provided we can hold on to it, to live as we choose. However, freedom so
conceived is not the only freedom. There is also the freedom we are given. It
presupposes a measure, or a measuring body, that makes it possible to compute
how much freedom we are entitled to, a measure, Berlin implied, whose
discovery will, like the headwaters of the Nile, reveal one source from which all
other values, including freedom, flow.
Berlin, however, reckoned that there is no one source of value. His "moral
outlook" accepted differences in moral outlooks. For some, this has always been
a disturbing thought, but even more disturbing was Berlin'scontention that these
differences are irreconcilable. They are not, he stressed, the product of some
master plan that, if properly consulted, would enable us to decide which is better.
And so, rather than trying to compose these differences, it becomes necessary, as
well as desirable, to tolerate them. "Toleration,"Berlin explained,

is historically the product of the realization of the irreconcilability of equally

dogmatic faiths, and the practical improbability of complete victory of one
over the other Those who wished to survive realized that they had to tolerate
error.They gradually came to see merits in diversity,and so became sceptical
about definitive solutions in human affairs.4

Toleration presupposes that others are as tolerant of you as you are of them. It is
either mutual or unreal. Berlin's "moral outlook" is synonymous with a live and
let live attitude, a kind of moral laissez-faire-in other words, "the freedom to live

2. A.D. Lindsay, The Modern Democratic State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943), chapter I.
3. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 129. As Berlin
chooses not to distinguish between liberty and freedom (121), I shan't either.
4. Isaiah Berlin, "TheOriginalityof Machiavelli,"reprinted in Against the Current(New York:Penguin
Books, 1982), 78.

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418 BERLIN'STWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY

as one prefers"--which also happens to be Berlin's conception of "negative

liberty."
One does not have to be a Sherlock Holmes, then, to figure out which
conception of liberty he preferred, and why. While negative freedom may not
secure the good life or bring about a just polity, neither will be as good or just
without it. Berlin wanted freedom to be valued more for what it is than for what it
does. In other words, being free may and probably will improve us, individually
and as a society, but even if it did not, it would still be valuable. "God requires of
man,' Elie Wiesel has said, "not that he live, but that he choose to live. What
matters is to choose-at the risk of being defeated."'5Freedom-and this goes
right to the heart of what Berlin meant by "negative freedom"--should be
regarded as an end, a "source of value" (though not the only source) ratherthan
as a means to something else. The latter is what Berlin meant by positive
freedom.6 Positive freedom, he believed, is valued by its proponents because of
what it enables them to achieve, be it justice, knowledge, wisdom, virtue,
salvation, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number"-the list of ends has
no conceivable end-"an integrated personality," "a common good,' even
freedom itself (when advertised as "true',""authentic" or "real").7Each of these
ends, whether alone or in concert with others, may be desirable, but it will be
purchased at a price. The price Berlin had in mind added up to a considerable
loss of freedom. As a result, his juxtaposition of positive with negative freedom
can be a bit misleading. Since, it is synonymous with less freedom-indeed, the
more positive, the less free-positive freedom is not really freedom.8
When responding to his critics, Berlin insisted he never meant to give the
impression that he preferred one conception of freedom to the other.9To do so,

5. Elie Wiesel, Zalmen, or the Madness of God (New York:Random House, 1974), 53.
6. The classic exposition of positive freedom is T.H.Green's. For him, freedom, in the sense of "doing
what one will with one's own, is valuable only as a means to an end. That end," he said, "is what I call
freedom in the positive sense: in other words, the liberation of the powers of all men equally for
contributions to a common good. No one has a right to do what he will with his own in such a way as to
contravene this end."'Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Writings(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 200 (emphasis added).
7. Berlin is not always consistent here. Most of the time he does indeed equate "true"or "real"
freedom with positive freedom and worries that we will be asked-or made-to surrender such freedom
as we now possess in pursuit of a purer or idealized form of freedom. See, for example, FourEssays on
Liberty 150-51. However, at other times, as in the quote with which I began this paper, he equates
negative freedom with "true freedom"
8. There is one place where Berlin comes very close to acknowledging as much. "Everything,"he
tells us, "iswhat it is: liberty is liberty not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or
a quiet conscience. FourEssays on Liberty125. Here "liberty"is one thing, not two. It is also worth noting
that this view of liberty may be found in Berlin'ssection on "negative freedom" rather than in his section
on "positive freedom"
9. Berlin attempts to correct this impression on p. xlvii of his FourEssays on Libertyand in a footnote
on Iviii.

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 Theodore L. Putterman 419

he said, would have meant succumbing to "the kind of intolerant monism" that
he most deplored. However, is he not being slightly disingenuous here? While his
conception of positive freedom implies, or can easily be adapted to, an intolerant
(or "ruthless") monism, his conception of negative freedom implies, or will
almost certainly lead to, a "pluralism"that will make it extremely difficult to
ignore other values, or to compress all values (including "freedom") into one
ultimate value.10
I take it that John Gray would not agree with me. The purpose of Berlin's
essay, he contends, was to offer a qualified defense of positive as well as of
negative freedom. However, this does not mean that we should embrace
both, and anyway, to do so, may be impossible. Gray admits as much
when he acknowledges that, for Berlin, the two freedoms are rivals,
divided by "incommensurable values."" We must, therefore, choose between
them.
Berlin'sposition, in at least one important respect, is the same as, or very close
to, Friedrich Hayek's, Karl Popper's, and J.L.Talmon's, a position that, until fairly
recently was considered "liberal."The liberal wishes to know, in Berlin's words,
not "Whogoverns me?" but "How far does government interfere with me?"-or in
Talmon's'-"not with whom sovereignty is deposited, but the limits of sovereignty."
The essential problem, Hayek sums up, "is not who governs but what government
is entitled to do."12 For these thinkers, negative freedom is the freedom preferred
by an open society; positive freedom is the "choice" of a closed society A closed
society may be good or just-it may even be contented (not that they thought
it would remain good or just or happy for very long)-but one thing it will not
be is free.
While not unsympathetic to Berlin's preference for negative freedom-where
the only valid reason to limit freedom is in order to preserve it-he does tend,
despite what he later says, to undervalue positive freedom. In this paper I hope to
defend positive freedom, but without jettisoning negative freedom. My aim is to
restore a necessary, and even useful, tension between them. To do this will
require a revision of Berlin's "two concepts of liberty."But this revision will be
consistent with what, I believe, he intended.

10. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty 171.

11. John Gray,Isaiah Berlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 15-16 and 25.
12. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty 130; J.L.Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (New
York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), 319; and Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1960), 403. In posing the question in the way they do, Hayek, Talmon, and
especially Berlin, manage to shift the discussion from negative freedom to "political freedom:' which is
but one variety of negative freedom. This shift, I intend to show, allows Berlin to extract from negative
freedom what he likes without lingering over what he dislikes.

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420 BERLIN'STWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY

Underlying Assumptions
Taking Isaiah Berlin's distinction at face value, there are then, or should be,
two freedoms. The first freedom, negative freedom, is dependent on our having
choices.13 What is desired, on the part of those who defend negative freedom,
is the removal, and sometimes the absence, of restraint.The logic here is fairly
straightforward:to throw off restraints is to be free; to be free is to have choices,
and to have choices is to be empowered. "There is nothing," according to John
Adams,

moral or immoral in the idea of [liberty]. The definition of it is a self-

determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and
power; it can elect between objects; indifferent in point of morality, neither
morally good nor morally evil.14

The second freedom, positive freedom, is dependent on our making the

right choice. Thus, positive freedom is not the power of doing as we like but
results from our being able to do what we should. This second view is a
moral view, and it holds that if you wish to be free, then this is what you must do.
Or, to soften this a little, this is how you should behave if you wish to gain your
freedom, or remain a free person. It is in this sense that positive freedom is
the freedom to do certain things while negative freedom is freedom from having
to do them.
Underlying this distinction are two assumptions that have obvious implica-
tions for the body politic. "Freedom to" assumes not that people are, but that
they should be, moral, and therefore will require correction or tutoring. In
order, then, for people to be free, they may need to be forced-gently, or not
so gently, depending, of course, on how decent the tutor is and how docile
is the tutee. "Freedom from:' on the other hand, assumes that people are
sufficiently rational, and if left alone, are more likely to do what is right--at
least for themselves. "Liberty,"we are told, "symbolizes the belief that man
can be trusted to work out for himself a high destiny-a destiny higher than

13. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty,178. John Gray would have us take this one step further: by
negative freedom, Berlin meant not merely choice but "choice among alternatives or options that is
unimpeded by others."This means, Gray continues, that people who have been so conditioned-as in
Huxley's Brave New World-that they are unable to perceive what options are "actually available to
them" are not free (i.e., they no longer enjoy negative freedom). John Gray Isaiah Berlin, 15-16. I take his
point, but this does pose a problem, especially when trying to decide how free others actually are. If you
think I am "choosing" inappropriately or if you think the choices I make are meaningless, then, on Gray's
account, this puts the defenders of negative freedom in the company of those who would censor anyone
who did not make a proper use of his or her freedom. I doubt Berlin would have appreciated where this
is heading.
14. The Political Writingsof John Adams (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-MerrillCompany Inc., 1954), 196.

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 Theodore L. Putterman 421

that which other men could achieve for him:"15 Consequently, those who
identify with negative freedom will try, as Professor Berlin recognized, to
curb authority while those who identify with positive freedom will try to
procure it.16
It follows that the power view of freedom is principally about rights or liberties
(although later I will need to distinguish between them), and is usually identified
with classical liberalism;17 the moral view of freedom is about duties or
responsibilities, and, as such, is often identified with classical conservatism. If
one wanted to be critical of the firstview, one might say that it suffers from having
too little content. "Release of force,"John Dewey decided, "does not of itself give
direction to the force that is set free.'18 At best, it can tell us something about what
we should not do but little, if anything, about what we should do. Hence, negative
freedom, according to its critics, is never good enough. If, however, one wanted
to be critical of the second view, one might say that it suffers from having too
much content, for in telling us what we should do, it leaves us worse off than
before, particularly if one agrees with Ralph Waldo Emerson that "the only sin
is limitation."19
The negative view of freedom is also a subjective If you feel that you are
view.2
free or think you are, or if you believe that you have choices, or are capable of

15. Carl Brent Swisher, The Growth of ConstitutionalPower in the United States (Chicago: Phoenix
Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1963), 185.
16. Berlin, FourEssays on Liberty 166. There is, however, an important exception to this rule: if those
who possess negative freedom have power, or should happen to be in power, then they are free to
impose their will on others. "Liberty,when men act in bodies, is power,"Edmund Burke observed. Burke's
Works(London: George Bell and Sons, 1875), Vol. II, 283 (see note 52 below).
17. Since Hayek realized that the exercise of power might undermine the existence of freedom
he tried at times to separate power from freedom. See, for example, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1967), 26 and 158. However, in predicting what would "appear the
most significant and far-reaching effect" of negative freedom (which, he proclaimed, freed "the
individual from the ties that had bound him") he singled out men's "new sense of power over his own
fate."The Road to Serfdom, 15-17. It is in this sense that negative freedom entails a power component.
What troubled Hayek, therefore, was not power per se-after all, the private sector is not powerless-but
that positive freedom (to fall back on Berlin's distinction), left unchecked, would override negative
freedom.
18. John Dewey Liberalism and Social Action (New York:Capricorn Books, 1963), 28.
19. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Journals (Garden City: Nelson Doubleday, Inc., 1968), 215.
20. This is at the crux of what bothers many critics of negative freedom. George Weigle, for one,
traces this "subjective turn" back to William of Ockham. "Here, freedom is simply a neutral faculty of
choice, and choice is everything, for choice is a matter of self-assertion, of power" And he attributes to
Berlin "an Ockhamite tack from the outset" The upshot of which is that "Berlin's 'negative freedom'
cannot provide an account of why that freedom has any moral worth, beyond its being an expression of
my will"'Restoring "a measure of objectivity to morality" is what is now, he feels, desperately needed,
and it is precisely this that Berlin fails to deliver. 'A society without 'oughts' tethered to truths cannot
defend itself against aggressors motivated by distorted 'oughts. "'From a lecture, "TwoIdeas of Freedom,"
which was given by George Weigel and was posted on the web at www.eppc.org/scholars/scholarlD.14/
scholarasp on January 15, 2002.

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422 BERLIN'STWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY

choosing, then you are free.21By way of contrast, the positive view of freedom is,
or would like to be, objective.22Thus feeling free is not the same as being free. As
expressed by B.E Skinner, "the 'feeling of freedom' should deceive no one.'23
Human history is littered with self-deception. What we tell ourselves about
ourselves is not the test of freedom, and never has been. This means that only if
we choose "freedom"are we a free people. It also suggests-and contrary to what
Tocqueville once said about us-that no one is born free but must choose to
become so. By no means is this an easy choice or an automatic one.24
The defenders of positive freedom are led by the logic of their argument to
conclude that freedom, though real, is not "natural;'or if it is natural, it is by no
means powerful. Most people will, in fact, try to "escape from freedom." Their
preference is either to slough off all restraint or to crave more-lots more. Id or
automaton, and maybe both, since they are often found together, seem to be their
preferred modus operandi. Not that for the defenders of positive freedom it is
always our choice that is the cause of our undoing. "Youpeoples of the modern
world, you have no slaves,"Rousseau exclaimed, "butyou are slaves yourselves."25
As against Hobbes who hoped to protect one person from another, Rousseau
hoped to save us from ourselves, and therefore was not averse to forcing people
to be "free."It follows that choosing freedom is difficult not so much because
others stand in our way but because we need to understand as well as appreciate
what freedom is-what it really is. Remember, this is an "objective"view in that
freedom is never entirely a matter of opinion or taste. It is not what we want, but

21. Here, I should note, Berlin's treatment of negative freedom differs from mine. See his "'From
Hope and Fear Set Free," Concepts and Categories (New York:The Viking Press, 1979), 192-93. Berlin
believed it was "the actual doors that are open that determine the extent of someone's freedom, and not
his own preferences." I happen to agree with him, but it is a view of freedom that I am about to attribute
to those who champion positive freedom.
22. When his defense of freedom was described as being "essentially akin" to J.S. Mill's,Berlin took
the occasion to distance himself from Mill. "Mill:'he wrote, "does seem to have convinced himself that
there exists such a thing as attainable, communicable, objective truth in the field of value judgments... .
In Berlin'sestimation "this is simply the old objectivist thesis."FourEssays on Liberty,I-li. If the difference
between the empiricist and the positivist is that the former believes all knowledge is relative to the
knower and the latter believes it is relative to the cosmos, then Berlin's criticism of Mill suggests that, at
least "in the field of value judgments,' he remains an inveterate empiricist.
23. Skinner, I take it, did not mean to deceive us when he has his Doppelgdnger, Frazier,describe
Walden II as "the freest place on earth." However, since Skinner previously had Frazier "deny that
freedom exists at all,"this again raises the question of whether positive freedom really is freedom? B.E
Skinner, Walden II (New York:The Macmillan Company, 1962), 257 and 263.
24. For once, defenders of negative and positive freedom seem to be on the same side: both want us
to take responsibility for our actions. "Afree society" in Hayek'sview, "demands more than any other that
people be guided in their action by a sense of responsibility."The Constitution of Liberty 76. There is,
however, this difference: defenders of positive freedom want us to make a "responsible" choice, which
is not quite the same thing as saying, as Hayek does, that we should take responsibility for the choices
we make.
25. The Social Contract (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1976), 143.

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 Theodore L. Putterman 423

what we need. It is a view, moreover, that presupposes a standard by which it is

possible to gauge how free a person is.26

Choosing Sides
Defenders of negative freedom are not impressed. Some, as I have said, do not
even consider positive freedom to be freedom. It may, they acknowledge, make
sense to limit choice, for example, in time of war, or to argue that we need to
make the right choice, but neither is freedom. Freedom is being able to choose,
even if the choice we make is wrong. In his musical, Sunday in the Park with
George, Stephen Sondheim has Georges Seurat's mistress, in explaining to
Georges why she had to leave him, admit that "the choice may have been
mistaken, the choosing was not."In defense of this view of freedom, John Bunzel
set it along side the other: "The concept of freedom," he remarked,

can be viewed from the standpoint that freedom is knowledge or wisdom,

which also contains the assumption of an understanding of what freedom
is for. Or freedom can be viewed as individual will or volition. . . . The first
implies an elitist doctrine, derived ultimately from Plato but running through
Marxist doctrine-the presumption that society cannot be permitted to run
itself through the democratic avenues of individual political choice, but must
have an elite to organize and a mass to submit.27
Those who champion negative freedom worry that if freedom is not valued for
itself, or if it is reduced to a means to some other end, people will be more likely
to sacrifice it for some lesser or bogus good. The one that most commonly crops
up is security In other words, defenders of negative freedom are concerned lest
men sell their freedom for a mess of porridge. However, it does not have to be
security; it can just as easily be equality or morality The latter, in particular, has
always been a thorn in the side of those who defend negative freedom. They
worry that the moment someone defines freedom in terms of morality, then
morality-or, more likely the moral man, party, church, or nation-will decide
how much freedom the rest of us are entitled to.28

26. As I indicated earlier, from the perspective of those who value negative freedom, the supporters
of positive freedom value freedom only as a means to some other (more valued) end. However, from the
vantage point of those who value positive freedom, freedom need not be a means. It can be an end-
indeed, the end that trumps all other ends. And by contrasting the "freedom"that exists with the freedom
that ought to exist, those who prefer positive freedom are able to treat freedom as an ideal, which, for
them, is no less real for being an ideal.
27. John H. Bunzel, Anti-Politicsin America (New York:Vintage Books, 1970), 235.
28. What government must do, according to this line of reasoning, "is to leave people alone, and
then make sure that they are left alone by others" Charles Murray,In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good
Government (New York:Simon & Schuster Inc., 1989), 297.

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424 BERLIN'STWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY

Defenders of positive freedom reply that for a person or a people to be free,

they must, to reiterate, understand what it means to be free. "Is it',"Henry David
Thoreau asked, "a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free?"29He believed
that slavery is as much a moral condition as it is a power relationship. A slave,
Rousseau had said, has lost "even the desire to be free,' which is precisely what
Thoreau feared was happening to us. Neither an individual who chooses slavery
nor a state that allows it is "free:"
Also, if freedom is simply a matter of choosing, and any choice we make
reveals how free we are, then, of course, all men are free, even one who decides
at gunpoint to give a robber his purse rather than be killed. This would place
freedom on a par with the proverbial gray cat; as all cats are gray in the twilight,
so must all our actions be the actions of free men, since they always involve an
element of choice. After all, one can always say "no"to the robber, there being, if
we take Thomas Hobbes's word for it, "no obligation on any man, which ariseth
not from some act of his own; for all men equally, are by nature free."30He went so
far as to argue that if I "redeem myself from a thief by promising him money, I am
bound to pay it',"for a covenant entered into "through fear,"is as binding as any
other.31However, even Hobbes drew back from this extreme statement when, in
the very next breath, he came close to acknowledging a "right"to meet force with
force. Isaiah Berlin, too, conceded that the freedom of the victim to choose to pay
(or to pay with his life) is not what most men mean by freedom. In responding
to his critics he acknowledged that while freedom is about having choices, the
choices we make must be "unforced."32 Others must not, in other words, coerce
us into making decisions.
But while this solves one problem it creates another similar to the one that
John StuartMill's"simple principle" never solved. For Mill,the "political"question
was, "who determines whether harm has been done?" (Or, if there are degrees of
harm, "how much harm are you allowed to do before your liberty can be
justifiably limited?") For Berlin, the question is: who determines what constitutes
coercion? Notice, however, that by allowing "coercion" to affect his view of
freedom, Berlin has moved the question from the limits of authority to its source.
The question now becomes who decides whether coercion has been applied, or
if its application is excessive? Surely,feminists as well as Marxists(among others)
have made us aware of coercion's many disguises. When, for example, I sign a
contract or agree to take on work that is exceedingly hazardous or unpleasant,
can we ever completely rule out the possibility that I am not in some sense being

29. H.D. Thoreau, Waldenand Other Writings(New York:The Modern Library,1950), 728.
30. Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), 141.
31. Hobbes, Leviathan, 91.
32. See Berlin's introduction to Four Essays on Liberty,xxxviii-xxxix.

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 Theodore L. Putterman 425

coerced? One need not, after all, be hit over the head to experience what it was
like to be shanghaied.
Defenders of positive freedom contend that our choices are always limited,
and not only by the freedom of others. In addition to natural and/or physical
limitations (which Berlin also recognized) there are the chains that we have
become so accustomed to they no longer chafe; but they are still chains, even if
they are of our own choosing. Consequently, what we need to know is what sorts
of limits are conducive to our being free and what sorts are not. By rejecting
Hobbes's "naturallyfree" individual, a fiction the defenders of positive freedom
regard as pernicious as well as silly, they find it easier than do the defenders of
negative freedom to raise such questions as "can a starving man be free?"33or
how free is "an ignorant person?" or one who remains "a creature of habit?"or is
"consumed with hate?" or whose "passions forge his fetters?" Indeed, can a
people who do not know what is going on, or who prefer not to know, be
described as a free people? six years before Hitler'sthugs came to power, Justice
Brandeis had prophesied, "that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert
people."34 An inert people accepts its chains (or the chains that others are obliged
to wear) and by doing so, Brandeis implies, "chooses" to be un-free. Defenders of
negative freedom, Isaiah Berlin in particular, are by no means oblivious to these
questions,35 but they are convinced that the more emphasis is placed on
"independence of mind',"or any other precondition to liberty, the greater is the
temptation to decide for others whether they are making a proper use of their
liberty.
In the end, what separates the defenders of positive freedom from the
defenders of negative freedom is not so much that they acknowledge other values
than freedom, which they do; it is that, for them, freedom describes a choice
rather than is a choice. One must have choices, but choices alone do not make a
person free. How "significant"they are is more important than "how many."In
responding to Berlin, Don Herzog contends, "the most concise formula for
freedom is this: one is free when one faces a range of significant options." He then
adds,

33. Defenders of negative liberty are likely to turn this round: instead of seeing poverty as a limitation
on freedom, they see freedom as necessary to eliminate poverty In the words of William E. Simon, who
was President Nixon's Secretary of the Treasury,"poverty is greatest where people are least free" "The
Moralityof Economic Freedom,"National Review, November 5, 1990, 54.
34. Whitneyv. California274 U.S.A. 357 (1927).
35. When, for example, L.J. McFarlane criticized Berlin for overlooking the connection between
freedom and self-awareness-McFarlane's point being that if one is unaware of one's chains, or sees
nothing wrong with them, then one cannot, or will not, choose to be free-Berlin replied: "Foronce I am
happy to acknowledge the insight of Rousseau: to know one's chains for what they are is better than to
deck them in flowers"'Four Essays on Libertyxxxix.

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426 BERLIN'STWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY

how many options one has can [of course] vary, as can their significance; so
one can be more or less free. The options need to be significant. So choosing
among twenty-seven brands of peanut butter at the local supermarket isn't an
important constituent of freedom....

The range of options must also be "real"in that "one has to be aware of them or
at least able to find out about them by taking reasonable steps."36
The purpose of law, then, if we extend Herzog, is not to give us choices-or to
allow us to choose freely-but to limit or direct the choices we have. George Will,
for example, lets it be known that "the law must be a .' It must concern
itself "withvalues as well as actions-with mind as welltutor...
as body."37"Governmentb
an esteemed professor of constitutional law taught, "is obliged to promote right
action."38It follows that the defenders of positive freedom are less inclined than
are the defenders of negative freedom to view the State-or the Church-as a
threat to liberty.
Implicit in the view of law and freedom put forth by the defenders of
positive freedom is a paradox: it is the old paradox of free will, which, it turns out,
is a will that is free to do God's will. This explains why a contemporary Christian
thinker can depict law as being "perfectly compatible with the freedom proper
to man."39This, it seems to me, is only another way of saying that man's freedom

36. Don Herzog, Happy Slaves. A Critiqueof Consent Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1989), 218-9.
37. George F Will, StatecraftAs Soulcraft:.WhatGovernmentDoes (New York:Simon & Schuster, Inc.,
1984), 76-77. Will, apparently, has at last found his soul mate ... George W Bush. The president, he
reports, is prepared to use "public policy" to build "character" "This is a doctrine of architectonic
government-government concerned with shaping the structure of the citizen's soul." The Sacramento
Bee, January 31, 2005, B7. George F, however, moves around quite a bit. "Praisethe car,"he editorialized
not long ago, for it has made "an open society" possible.
Around 1970, Mississippi's appalling Sen. James Eastland, musing about America's mistakes,
regretted giving driver's licenses to blacks and 'letting 'em go North. He knew: an open road
produces an open society. The automobile has been an emancipating device, celebrated in our
literature, from 'The Great Gatsby' to 'on the Road.'
The Sacramento Bee, June 18, 1996, B7. It seems that Will believes in having it both ways. He wants
an open society and a properly tutored one, not so unlike the platform of the Republican Party
today
38. WalterBerns, Freedom, Virtueand the FirstAmendment (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1965), 242.
39. See Stanley Parry'sintroduction to Thomas Aquinas.:Treatiseon Law (Chicago: Henry Regnery
Co., n.d.), vi (emphasis added). Michael Ignatieff, in a similar vein, enlists the authority of Saint
Augustine: "Wehave sought . . . to expand our range of choices, all the time assuming that individuals
will know what to choose if they are free to do so. We have assumed that freedom is a problem
of external constraints: give everyone enough income and sufficient rights, and they will be free to
act in accordance with their choices. However, what if it were the case, as Augustine insists, that
freedom is a tainted good unless choosing is accompanied by a sense of certainty? What point, what
happiness, is there in freedom if we can never know whether we have chosen rightly?"Michael Ignatieff,
The Needs of Strangers (New York: Picador U.S.A., 2001), 63. George Weigle agrees: "[V]irtue and

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 Theodore L. Putterman 427

is dependent on a law that is made for man rather than by him. To the extent
that he is able to approximate this law, he embraces the truth about himself,
which, for many of these people, turns out to be God's truth as well. "Wemay bite
our chains:' Edmund Burke instructed his lordships, "but we shall be made to
know ourselves, and be taught that man is born to be governed by law; and he
that will substitute will in place of it is an enemy to God."40 The emphasis, as
before, is not on choice but on making the right choice, the choice that God
would make if God, so to speak, were man. The argument being that if God, to be
God, has no choice but to limit himself, or to make a proper use of his powers, so
must man qua man.
However, for the proponents of negative freedom, the more choices we have
the freer we are. In the current vernacular, "You may not be familiar with the
brands, but, boy, some selection, huh?" a sentiment with which Professor Berlin
concurred:

Even if no hard and fast rule can be provided, it still remains the case that the
measure of the liberty of a man or a group is, to a large degree, determined by
the range of choosable possibilities. . .. The more avenues men can enter, the
broader those avenues, the more avenues that each opens into, the freer they
are .. .41

Not so for the proponents of positive freedom. While not discounting the
importance of having choices and being able to choose, they remind us that
choices also entail consequences. In other words, if negative freedom zeros in on
the act of choosing-voting being but one example-positive freedom looks to
the consequences that follow from our having chosen. "What, or who, did we

virtues are crucial elements of freedom rightly understood." It follows that, for Weigle, the freer we are,
the more we are able to "choose wisely;" that is, choose "the things that truly make for our happiness
and for the common good" (emphasis added). Thus Weigle, unlike Berlin, is able to reconcile
two potentially irreconcilable "goods," our own and everyone else's. George Weigle, "Two Ideas of
Freedom,' 8.
40. Burke's Works(London: George Bell and Sons, 1875), Vol. VII, 101.
41. Isaiah Berlin, "FromHope and Fear Set Free," 192. Berlin had, however, introduced a number
of qualifications, such as the importance to ourselves and to our society of the choices we have.
Four Essays on Liberty 130, nI. But one attribute all his qualifications share is their subjective
nature. Choice still matters but it has to be our choice. FourEssays on Liberty,lii. For Berlin, "conceptions
of freedom derive John Gray found, "from views of the self" However, unlike Berlin,
directly,"
Gray reckons that "any coherent conception of liberty" must incorporate "the conditions of rational
choice" This suggests that only by making a proper use of our freedom are we free. In support
of his position, Gray cites Benn and Weinstein who are of the opinion that "our conception of
freedom is bounded by our notions of what might be worthwhile doing" See his essay "On Negative
and Positive Liberty"which is included in Gray'sLiberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (London:
Routledge, 1991), 57-60. But this begs the question "to whom is it worthwhile?" Is it worthwhile because
we say so ... or because it is? The first response leads us back to negative freedom; the second, away
from it.

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428 BERLIN'STWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY

choose, a Roosevelt or a Hitler?"Freedom, therefore, is not what we can do, but

what we do can make us free.

Consequences Matter
Consequences, it cannot be emphasized enough, matter to those who favor
positive freedom.42 However, does this mean that, for those who favor negative
freedom, consequences are of no consequence, or, that freedom is good even if
everyone gets hurt?Surely not; and yet, in a society that values negative freedom,
it may prove exceedingly difficult to cut off research into hybrid plants, animal
cloning, genetic engineering, the secrets of the atom, the use of antibiotics in
animal feed (still legal in the United States), all of which carry considerable risk
to ourselves and to our habitat. Or, to cite an even more mundane example, do
we not run into a similar problem when trying to prohibit the use of hand-held
cell phones while driving, despite mounting evidence that together the two are a
lethal combination?
There is a perfectly good reason why devotees of negative freedom prefer not
to take consequences into account. The more that the consequences of our
actions must be factored in before we can act, the easier it becomes to justify
setting limits on freedom. Of course, by not factoring in consequences, there is no
way to ensure that freedom, when conceived negatively, will spawn responsible
behavior.43 But then may not the same be charged against those who prefer
positive freedom? Do not the bloody consequences of their actions testify to the
evil that "good" men have done in the service of some "noble" cause?
There are those who, as a result, see this less as an argument about freedom
and more as an argument about morality,and they may be right. On the one side
is the power of morality; on the other, the morality of power. Advocates of
negative freedom applaud the power that individuals possess (perhaps because
without it freedom will not amount to very much or last for very long), whereas
advocates of positive freedom-not all of them, to be sure-stress the limits that
men must place on their power if it is not to destroy them. In the private journals

42. Edmund Burke (C.B. Macpherson's view notwithstanding) would certainly qualify as one who
favored positive liberty If "the effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do as they please',"then, he
cautioned, "we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations" Burke's
Works,Vol. II, 283.
43. Much, of course, turns on what we mean by "responsible" behavior. Perhaps the free-marketwill
provide it, but "a fundamental fallacy of the free-marketideology,"according to a passionate believer in
positive freedom, "is the notion that the interests of the buyer and the seller are the only interests at
stake."While the market may benefit them (at least in the short run), it need not (and, for him, will not)
benefit "society as a whole" And if "society as a whole" does not benefit, then the market has behaved
irresponsibly. Andrew Bard Schmookler, The Illusion of Choice (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1993), 53, 86, et passim.

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 Theodore L. Putterman 429

he kept, Emerson admonished: "Don't trust man, great God, with more power
than he has, until he has learned to use that little better;" adding, "Whata hell
should we make of the world if we could do what we would!"44As the proponents
of positive freedom see it, freedom may be power, but power need not be
compatible with freedom; that would depend on what we do with the power we
have.
Viewed in this manner, freedom is always "relational:'a proposition that the
friends of positive freedom regard as self-evident. It takes at least two, Zygmunt
Bauman has argued, before freedom can be discussed in a meaningful way45 His
point is that a gain in freedom by one person (or group, or class, or nation), may
(and, in the world as it is presently constituted, will) come at another's expense.46
Therefore negative freedom may condone behavior that can be every bit as
destructive to freedom as the behavior that negative freedom's supporters
attribute to the backers of positive freedom. As Thomas Jefferson reminded John
Adams, "mischief may be done negatively as well as positively"47
In the United States, this has often been the case. "In 1900:' John Roche
remembered,
from the classical liberal viewpoint we find that the United States was clearly
the freest nation in the world (the otherwise sound British had a bad habit of
passing Factory Acts and other invasions of freedom of contract). There was
no centralized bureaucracy, no national police, no income tax, no national
control of state and local government-the nation was a libertarian paradise.
Yet if one analyzed the same data from another angle, he might contend that
the United States was a nation where the workers were at the mercy of their
employers, Negroes were living in serfdom, religious and ethnic minorities
were subject to blatant discrimination, and the 'rights of the individual' were
specified by a militant majority of their neighbors.48

What Roche provides here is a reality check: negative freedom pushed to the
limit may destroy the very thing it professes to love most. Men, WalterLippmann
observed, have had to learn from hard experience "that there is no freedom in

44. Emerson, Essays and Journals, 629. The utter impossibility of reconciling this statement with
what Emerson said about the sinfulness of limitations suggests that it might be easier to divide freedom
conceptually then to identify a theorist with negative freedom or positive freedom. Conceptual clarity-
Hobbes notwithstanding-should never be confused with the human alloy
45. Zygmunt Bauman, Freedom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 9.
46. Berlin did not think it necessary to state this in his essay on liberty but later, in referringto "the
bloodstained story of economic individualism,"he left no doubt that "freedom for the wolves has often
meant death to the sheep" Four Essays on Liberty,xlv.
47. Saul Padover, ed.,The Complete Jefferson (New York:Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc., 1943), 283.
48. John Roche, Shadow and Substance (New York:The Macmillan Company 1964), 73.

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430 BERLIN'STWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY

mere freedom."49 In the abstract, most people understand this but in practice
people enamored with negative freedom usually are not overly sensitive to the
harm they do. (Recall the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal in 1984.) As they see
it-and want us to-their pursuit of self-interest can only expand the choices
others have. "He profits most:' they claim, "by serving others best" Unfortunately,
what "others"get is sometimes less "a libertarian paradise" than a libertarianhell.
There is an even darker side, if that's possible, to negative freedom. I refer
to those who, in the name of freedom, are prepared to torch quite literally
the freedom of others. Freedom, no doubt, requires vigilance, but vigilance has
often been used as an excuse for vigilantism, or for some other "method"
of intimidation. To assume that the only fanatics are those who wish to extend
positive freedom is a mistake. It is hard not to see some connection between
what Harold Laski once called "an excessive love of the rhetoric of rights"
and recent events in Oklahoma City and Montana. Negative freedom, as these
events prove, may not only limit negative freedom but it can also be extremely
bellicose.
Marsha Bethel, a municipal judge serving the towns of Hamilton and Darby
in western Montana, made this abundantly clear a short time ago. In testifying
before a congressional forum on para-militaryorganizations in her county she
recounted what had happened to her after she made the mistake of trying to
enforce a traffic citation.

My experience with them began in January when a man who said he was part
of the "Freeman"movement, which has ties to the militia, appeared in court
in response to three routine traffic tickets. He described his appearance as
a "special visitation" and refused to cooperate with the initial proceedings.
He said he was not in any way bound by the laws of Montana.

On March 3, he served me with documents demanding dismissal of the

charges against him and asserting I had violated my oath of office. These
documents recounted a hearing held before "justices" of a "common law"
court, one of a number of tribunals created in Montana recently by the fringe
groups that claim they have jurisdiction over our district and local courts.

The [tribunal] demanded that I dismiss the charges within 10 days or a

warrant would be issued for my arrest. On the same day, the documents were
filed in several other courts as well. Later I received threats that I would be
kidnapped and tried before the common-law court and sentenced for my
'treasonous' acts.

49. Walter Lippmann, Preface to Morals (New York:Macmillan, 1929), 326.

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 Theodore L. Putterman 431

I also received a call one day warning me, "Don't come to Darby tonight for
court tonight (sic) or you won't be leaving."In addition, someone threatened to
shoot a justice of the peace in the head. A deputy county attorney was warned
that his home would be burned and that he would be shot in the back. Our
districtjudge heard threats,to his face, that he would be hanged in the city park.

In February,I was followed home, roughly 40 miles away, after a night court
session. Several days later, an unidentified caller informed me that I had been
followed home and gave me the location of my home to prove it. I have
received dozens of calls, both from anonymous callers and from concerned
citizens warning me of what they heard would happen to me or my home. ...

In the Spring, I testified before the Montana Legislature on a bill making it a

felony to impersonate or intimidate a public official. The threats against me
worsened, and hate mail arrived from across the country. Twice, I sent my
three children, ages 10, 11 and 13, to live with their father for a week.

After someone threatened to "riddle my house with gunfire,' the police came
to map my house and land. They told me where to hide if the house were
attacked. They suggested I pack a duffel bag with a police radio, flashlight and
other emergency gear. They mapped out where in the woods I would hide
with the children if we had to run.

Over Easter weekend, the police suggested we leave the county after they
received information that an attack would be made on me or my house. Most
recently a federal law-enforcement agency told me a contract had been issue
for my murder.

This has been a living nightmare. As judges, we all expect to deal with
disgruntled people who refuse to take responsibility for their actions. But who
in their right mind would choose to serve their community when the
community becomes defenseless in the face of such terrorism.50

What Hobbes had to say in connection with the Kingdom of the Proud bears
repeating. A frightened Leviathan is every bit as bad as a divided Leviathan. The
one won't help; the other can't.

50. Her testimony was given at an unofficialhearing, "AmericaUnder the Gun: The MilitiaMovement
and Hate Groups in America."A report of Judge Bethel's testimony appeared in the New YorkTimes, July
20, 1995, A15 and 23. (Others testifying included a director of the Audubon Society in Washington State,
Ellen Gray At a public hearing, she was warned, "Wehave a militia of 10,000 and if we can't beat you at
the ballot box, we'll beat you with a bullet.")

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432 BERLIN'STWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY

Judge Bethel's experience is also indicative of another, not unimportant,

difference between negative and positive freedom: when negative freedom is
abused we, whether by design or through negligence, hurt others but when
positive freedom is abused we hurt ourselves. To make sense of this we need to
think of abuses of positive freedom as sinful, and to realize that while others may
suffer for our sins, the sin is still ours. Consequently, what we are being asked to
judge is a moral rather than a legal transgression. It follows that even if the law
condones or ignores it, this does not make the sin any less sinful. The reverse is
true for negative freedom. Transgressionsbecome crimes only if the law says they
are.s' Negative freedom allows me to hurt others-the law pretermitting-or be
hurt by them. I may, then, abandon, ignore, fire, expel, infect, harass, stalk, or
betray you. I may choose to discriminate, profane, or pollute. And, although we
do not usually look at it in this way, this also applies to governments; they may
choose to spy on, blacklist, or (as in Waco) incinerate you.52 Hence the harm that
we (or they) do to others-including the environment-is the price we pay for
allowing negative freedom free reign. It is a high price indeed, but one that those
who champion negative freedom are willing to pay, at least when it comes to the
individual, or his business.
That negative freedom is no less susceptible to abuse than positive freedom is
easily demonstrated. It was, after all, one thing for Thomas Jefferson to rebuke
John Adams for his mistrust of majority rule, but Jefferson also allowed mischief
to be done "negatively."After all, his defense of states' rights, which, in the United
States, can be regarded as an attempt to institutionalize negative freedom, played
right into the hands of the pro-slave faction.53 "Weall declare for liberty,"Lincoln
would later admit,

51. We have Locke to thank for this as well as Hobbes. In The Second Treatise Locke tells us that
"freedom of men under government is ... a liberty to follow my own will in all things where the rule
prescribes not.... " The Political Writingsof John Locke (New York:Mentor Books, 1993), 272 (emphsis
added). In addition to what Hobbes says about "the silence of the law,"his view of sin-"every crime is a
sin; but not every sin a crime"-is also relevant. Leviathan, 190. During the 1980s, Mary McGrory
extended the position taken by Hobbes and Locke, and in doing so put a very nasty spin on it. She
described the stance taken by Ed Meese, Ronald Reagan's attorney general, as "no ethical transgression
except an indictable one" Mary McGrory,"StandardMeese,' The WashingtonPost, March 30, 1989, A2.
52. In his attack on "legal positivism,' Hayek remarked that for the positivists, 'A 'free'state was to be
one that could treat its subjects as it pleased." The Constitutionof Liberty239. This type of "freedom"is
defended, not surprisingly in Wilbourn E. Benton and Georg Grimm, eds., Nuremberg: German Views of
the War Trials(Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1955).
53. As regards the slaveholders, Judith Shklar found, "nobody liked negative freedom more" See
Shklar's essay on "Positive Liberty, Negative Liberty in the United States',"which is included in her
Redeeming American Political Thought (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Although the negative view of freedom is, as I noted earlier, usually identified with classical liberalism,
judging from Professor Shklars remark, it can be employed in defense of the status quo. See my article on
"Calhoun'sRealism?,' in History of Political Thought, 12 (Spring, 1991): 107-24.

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 Theodore L. Putterman 433

but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the
word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the
product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men
to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here
are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name-
liberty.And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called
by two different and incompatible names-liberty and tyranny.54

The South's identification of freedom with slavery is even now hard to fathom
(except perhaps in Orwellian terms). When John Quincy Adams asked Calhoun
what would the South do if the North insisted on the abolition of slavery,Calhoun
told him "it would be from necessity compelled to form an alliance with Great
Britain,' even if this meant "returning to [a] colonial state"'55Southerners, if
Calhoun is to be believed, would rather have been enslaved than give up their
freedom to enslave others.
The choice we are given here, the reader will note, is no longer between
negative freedom and an open society or positive freedom and a closed society
Negative freedom is being used to defend the latter, while positive freedom is
being used to challenge it. Did not the abolitionists (of whom, Emerson
complained, "affect us as the insane do"56) use their freedom positively in order
to end the scourge of slavery? Did not Thoreau come to the realization that its
abolition required more than a return to nature (or an overnight stay in a
Concord jail)?57Not only did negative freedom make it difficult to get rid of
slavery, it often left those it was meant to benefit in a pitiful state. Dred Scott, for
example, ended his days working as a porter in a St. Louis hotel carting other
people's baggage. Manumission begged the question of whether a freedman was
also a free man.
If we view the distinction between negative and positive freedom a little more
dispassionately, what we find is that those who defend positive freedom usually
have something to gain while those who defend negative freedom usually have
something to protect. Civil rights, as a case in point, imply the need to create

54. Abraham Lincoln, Selected Speeches, Messages, and Letters (New York:Rinehart & Co., 1958),
264.
55. From Adams's entry in his diary dated 24 Feb. 1820. Allan Nevins, ed., The Diary of John Quincy
Adams: 1794-1845 (New York:F Ungar Pub. Co., 1969), 228.
56. This led Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.,not given to extreme views, to reflect: "Itwould have taken a
very long time to get rid of slavery if some of Emerson's teachings had been accepted as the whole
gospel of liberty."
57. See his "Plea for Captain John Brown,"in Walden and Other Writings,683-707. Apparently,the
negative freedom one finds in Thoreau's nature writings no longer sufficed. His defense of John Brown
stems from his positive view of freedom. "What,'he asked, "is the value of any political freedom, but as a
means to moral freedom?" Walden and Other Writings,728.

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434 BERLIN'STWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY

rights, as such rights were not there previously or received, at best, only partial
protection. Civil liberties, however, imply the need to defend rights that are
already in existence, rights that are not "claims on, but assurances against the
government.'58
Locked in combat (and when the issue is abortion or gun control, it often
seems like combat) are those who look to government to create rights, and those
who look to government to defend rights that have already been created. Both
parties-those who want government to do more and those who want it to do
less-have their place under such governments as ours, but the places they
occupy will seldom, if ever, lie easily together.

Berlin's Preference for Negative Freedom

Up to now I have accepted Berlin's two concepts, while expressing reserva-

tions about his apparent preference for negative freedom. I say "apparent"
because when Berlin was challenged by his critics for failing to take note
of the abuses of negative freedom he assured them that he thought they
were so obvious, he did not see any reason to catalog them. And as to
positive freedom, he never meant, he said, to ignore the good things that
it helped bring about. However, despite his belated recognition of the value
of positive freedom, what Berlin actually does is defend not it but other
values.59 Thus, it is not positive freedom that we must find a place for but
justice, equality, democracy, knowledge, truth, national as well as economic
security, etc. Consequently, the value of positive freedom tends to dissolve
into other values, while the value of negative freedom remains independent
of them.
Berlin revealed his preference for negative freedom in yet another way when,
in responding to his critics, he acknowledged that "the evils of unrestricted
laissez-faire . . . led to brutal violations of 'negative' In other words,
liberty."60
negative freedom is good but, unfortunately the practice of "unrestrictedlaissez-
faire"violated it (a position not so different from the position of those who believe
Marxism or the teachings of Plato are good but communism or fascism have
managed to misapply or misappropriate them). In contrast, positive freedom not
only has no intrinsic value but the evil Berlin attached to it was more monstrous,
certainly in this century, than the evils that resulted from a misuse of negative
freedom. But isn't this because, on a deeper level, Berlin assumed such evils

58. Mark DeWolfe Howe, "Religion and the Free reprinted in Selected Essays on
Society,"
Constitutional Law: 1938-1962, ed. The Association of American Law Schools (St. Paul, Minn.: West
Publishing Co., 1963), 786.
59. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty,170.
60. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Libertyxlv.

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 Theodore L. Putterman 435

were, for the most part, self-correcting-shades of classical liberalism!-while the

other was not?61
That positive freedom is not as good follows then from Berlin's view of
negative freedom as an end that will remain worthwhile even if we persist in
violating it and from his view of positive freedom (notwithstanding his
subsequent reference to it as "a valid universal goal") as a means to some other
end. Thus, positive freedom will only be as good as the end it serves, which,
Berlin saw, means only as good as those who are able to make it serve them.
Its goodness then will depend upon the uses that are made of it by a savior, an
inquisitor, a class, a party, a nation, or a leader Negative freedom, on the other
hand, being "an end in itself,' remains good, even when we aren't.
Berlin, however, could maintain this separation for only so long. He, as much
as anyone, understood that if we continue to abuse a good end, we had better
take another look at just how good it really is. Perhaps this explains why Berlin
qualified his defense of negative freedom by insisting that the negative freedom
he was defending was "political freedom." His defense of political freedom
implied a commitment to those restraints we place on the state in order to
prevent it from moving into the area of personal freedoms. It is, therefore,
freedom from state tyranny,and not negative freedom per se, that Berlin defends.
However, this emphasis on political freedom may have led Berlin, at least initially,
to minimize those abuses that have often accompanied the exercise of negative
freedom. "Restraints:'David Spitz realized, "can be imposed by men other than
those in control of the state, in which case law may be used to neutralize a
restraint."62In other words, merely leaving people alone by no means ensures that
they will leave other people alone. Not surprisingly, then, if Professor Berlin
worried most about where T.H.Green's defense of positive freedom might lead,63
others worry about the implications of Senator Strom Thurmond's seemingly
innocent remark-Thurmond at the time was defending the freedom of a
hypothetical barber to serve whom he pleases-"He just wants to exercise his free
American choice."64 Less hypothetically, the head of the Seattle Apartment

61. Perhaps what E.M.Forsteronce said of Orwell-"programmes," for him, "meant pogroms" - can
also be said of Berlin. Except that, for Berlin, there were programmes, and there were programmes, and if
some led to pogroms, others did not. The New Deal, for example: "Thisgreat liberal enterprise, certainly
the most constructive compromise between individual liberty and economic security which our time has
witnessed, corresponds more closely to the political and economic ideals of John Stuart Mill
in his last, humanitarian-Socialist phase than to left wing thought in Europe in the thirties" Four Essays
on Liberty,31.
62. See Spitz's essay on "Power,Law, and Freedom of Inquiry,"reprinted in his The Liberal Idea of
Freedom (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1964), 78-88 at 79.
63. "Greenwas a genuine liberal: but many a tyrant could use this formula to justify his worst acts of
oppression" Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty,133.
64. Civil Rights-Public Accommodations, Hearings before the U.S.A. Senate, Committee on
Commerce, Washington, D.C., July 1, 1963.

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436 BERLIN'STWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY

Operators Association claimed that he and the people he represented "reserve

the right to rent to whomever we desire regardless of race, religion or place of
national origin."Thurmond's barber as well as Seattle's AOAwere in fact claiming
as a right the right to discriminate on the basis of "race, religion or place of
national origin.'65The point being: whether I prefer one freedom or the other
turns on the consequences that I expect to follow from embracing it, and I do not
see how this can be done except on a case by case basis. Not that Berlin would
disagree; it is just that he was always more likely to rush to the defense of negative
(or "political") freedom as a check on the inevitable excesses of positive freedom
than to see in positive freedom a check on the not infrequent abuses of negative
freedom.
Consider the way in which we view the judges whose job it is to breathe life
into our Constitution. It would appear that the more a judge favors positive liberty,
the more he or she is likely to identify with a result-oriented jurisprudence, and
with judges who are "activists."Such a judge knows what results he wishes to
achieve-he knows, as Justice Scalia recently said of Justice Brennan, what the
Constitution ought to mean-and he rules accordingly His is a freedom to write
into the law or the Constitution what others, apparently, have either missed or
neglected.
Conversely, a self-restraintistjudge tends to favor negative freedom. He (or
she) chooses not to interfere with the decisions others have made. In defense of
his position he is likely to quote a judge like Learned Hand who confessed, "For
myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians,
even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not."66Or, if not Hand,
then Oliver Wendell Holmes, who told Justice Stone, "when the people want
to do something ... I say, whether I like it or not, 'Goddammit, let 'em do it!"'67
On another occasion he even suggested that if the people of this country want
to go to hell, his job was to take them there the fastest way possible.
Fortunately for Mr.Justice Holmes he did not have the opportunity to put that
dictum into practice, as he might have had to had he been born in Berlin instead
of Boston, which is precisely the point: if freedom is what we value, it is extremely
difficult, if not impossible, to say which judge we prefer.That they are different is

65. Donald Haas, who at the time was the head of the Seattle apartment operators group, is quoted
to this effect in 'Apt. Group Contests Definition of Bias"an article by Hilda Bryantwhich appeared in the
Seattle Post Intelligence, February 17, 1968.
66. Learned Hand, The Bill of Rights (New York:Atheneum, 1972), 73.
67. Quoted in Charles Curtis's Lions Under the Throne (Boston: The Riverside Press, 1947), 281.
Holmes, admittedly, gave himself an out. He would let the people do whatever they wanted provided he
could not find an express provision in the Constitution forbidding it. However, given his view of the
Constitution as an evolving document as well as his repeated warnings to his colleagues that "delusive
exactness is a source of fallacy throughout the law,"one has to wonder about the significance of Holmes'
caveat.

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 Theodore L. Putterman 437

obvious, but as to whether one is "better"would depend on what, if he were an

activist judge, he would prevent others from doing, or, if he were a self-restraintist
judge, on what he allowed them to do. By tying his own hands, the self-restraintist
judge, in a very real sense, unties theirs. This may be a good thing in that it may
make for more freedom. However, whether it makes for more negative freedom
depends on who the judge is deferring to: a president who has just issued an
executive internment order, a congressional legislative committee, the state of
Georgia (whose officials think "buggery"a crime), parents who employ "corporal
punishment" in disciplining their children, the Boy Scouts of America (who can
now legally discriminate against gays), or the KKK.One must never forget that
freedom from not only allows you to do your thing, it also allows others to do
theirs, which, needless to say, is not a very reassuring prospect if they are coming
toward you with a rope. (What was it that Thomas Carlyle once said about fear
being the fear of another person's freedom?) To reiterate, when, or to the extent,
my neighbors are free from restraint,they may be able to restrain my freedom, or
deprive me of it entirely
Not only may both freedoms be abused but also we may miss something if we
insist on viewing this as a contest between positive and negative freedom. By
focusing instead on how each is used, we are more likely to see that the contest is
as much within each "conception" as between them. For example: the negative
freedom that, by causing the state to back off, allowed working men to organize is
really no different from the negative freedom that allows union members to
exclude non-union members from employment. What matters, in this instance, is
not which freedom we prefer but whether we wish to give workers more leverage
against their employers or against other workers.

Conditions Matter

Admittedly, what all this suggests has more to do with judging the value of
freedom, whether it be negative or positive, than with conceptualizing it. Berlin
initially did both, but, in responding to his critics, claimed that he was more
interested in clarifying what freedom is than in choosing sides. I, too, would
rather not have to choose, especially as I find it difficult to conceive of "freedom
from" without also conjuring up "freedom to."This is, of course, what troubled
Gerald MacCallum about Berlin's distinction. "Freedom,"MacCallum believed, "is
always both freedom from something and freedom to do or become something."68

68. MacCallum's essay "Negative and Positive Freedom" is reprinted in David Miller'sLiberty (New
York:Oxford University Press, 1993), 100-22. It is, I agree, hard to divorce the two, and often a mistake,
but where I differ with MacCallum is his reducing "freedom to" to positive freedom. That is not quite
what Berlin had in mind. (See infra text accompanying note 74.) MacCallum and I do, however, agree on
the difficulty of placing thinkers in one camp as opposed to the other. However, rather than using his

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438 BERLIN'STWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY

And in critiquing Charles McIlwain's view of constitutionalism, Douglas Sturm

reached the same conclusion. "The fundamental law limits in order to enable;
it limits the powers of government for the purpose of maintaining a form of
government in which, and through which, all the people are enabled to act."69
The connection between negative and positive freedom is usually implicit,
sometimes explicit, and almost never completely absent. Ifso, then, to distinguish
between them may be useful but only if not pushed beyond what is reasonable.
It follows that just as there will be precious little positive freedom without
negative freedom, negative freedom will have very little meaning unless it can
lead to positive freedom. The upshot of which is that positive freedom may be as
necessary to the existence of negative freedom as the existence of negative
freedom is to positive freedom.70 Indeed, for negative freedom to exist, people
must do something to achieve it. They must, Quentin Skinner posits, first establish
and then maintain "a free commonwealth."71 In the New Federalist Papers, the
historian Alan Brinkley put it this way:

Liberty has no meaning except in a social context; rights cannot be sustained

unless there is a civic life healthy enough to create a shared commitment
to them. Communities create freedom; freedom does not create itself. ...
We cannot hope to be truly free ... unless we identify with and participate
in the governance of the political community upon which our freedom
depends.72

examples, I would cite Berlin himself. When lamenting modern man's fear of "too much freedomS'Berlin
sounds very much like Erich Fromm. Four Essays on Liberty,198.
69. Douglas Sturm, 'A Critical Appreciation and an Extension of the Political Theory of C.H.
Mcllwain,"Minnesota Law Review 54 (1969): 242.
70. That negative freedom might extend positive freedom, Berlin certainly recognized. "Emphasison
negative freedom, as a rule, leaves more paths for individuals or groups to pursue" However, that the
reverse is true is not so certain; in fact, Berlin held that positive liberty would open fewer paths. Four
Essays on Liberty Ivii.
71. Quentin Skinner, "The Idea Of Liberty:Philosophical and Historical Perspectives',"in Philosophy
and History,ed. Richard Rorty J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984), 213. Skinner's view of citizenship did not, I understand, appeal to Berlin. He failed to see
how by participating in political life human nature would be improved. Michael Ignatieff details Berlin's
position in his Isaiah Berlin:A Life (New York:Henry Holt and Company 1998), 227-30. However, this
does not mean that Berlin objected to listening to "the voice of the people." What he did object to was
treating it as if it were one voice and then equating it with the voice of God, which, for all practical
purposes, was done by an American congressman, Lewis Williams, who, in the early years of the
Republic, proclaimed: "Thepeople are the sovereign power in this country. Hence I lay down the broad
principle that they must be right; in other words, that they can do nothing wrong and ought to be
obeyed." Charles S. Hyneman and George S. Carey, eds., A Second Federalist: Congress Creates a
Government (New York:Appleton-Century-Crofts,1967), 242-44.
72. Alan Brinkley, Nelson W Polsby Kathleen M. Sullivan, New Federalist Papers (New York:WW
Norton & Company, 1997), 93. The phrase "trulyfree" would have been like a red flag to Professor Berlin,
but to those who view freedom "positively,"it enables them, as I said, to view freedom not as it is, but
as it ought to be.

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 Theodore L. Putterman 439

So while it is true that positive freedom may be employed to diminish negative

freedom, it is equally true that positive freedom can sustain it. (And, even if it did
not, it may nevertheless be valuable in that, through its exercise, the other values
that Berlin valued may be realized.)
Still, in all fairness to Berlin, this particular criticism is somewhat off the mark.
The distinction he drew between negative and positive freedom is not, strictly
speaking, a distinction between "freedom from" and "freedom to." Positive
freedom, as I said at the outset, is the freedom to do only certain things. It is true
freedom and "Truefreedom,"from a sermon preached by an old Tory,"is a liberty
to do every thing that is right, and the being restrained from doing any thing that
is wrong"'73 No doubt, we may differ as to what we think "right"is, but that it
exists, no matter what we think, is, for those who preach positive freedom, never
in doubt. According to Berlin, it is this moral component or, better still, this
conception of morality that makes positive freedom "positive"and distinguishes it
from negative freedom.74 Positive freedom not only proscribes-which negative
freedom does too-it also prescribes. (The only prescription that makes sense to
the defenders of negative freedom is the one that Hobbes was fond of: do not do
to others what you would not have them do to you. A proscriptive prescription!75)
However, this does not erase the other problem I have with Berlin's analysis:
any account of freedom that fails to adequately take into account the conditions
that nourish it-"liberty is one thing and the conditions for it are another"76-is a
little too abstract for my taste. What Ernest Barker once said of rights without
duties applies equally to liberties without conditions: they, like men without
shadows, only exist in fairy tales. The conditions, then, that nourish freedom must
find a place in any conception of freedom.77Indeed, a conception that does not
take them into account will prove a misconception. Berlin, after all, did not think
that a slave's renunciation of his freedom, as in the case of Epictetus, made him a

73. Jonathan Boucher, A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution;
in ThirteenDiscourses, Preached in North America between the Years 1763 and 1775 (New York:Russell
& Russell, 1967), 511.
74. In laying out Berlin's conception of "positive freedom,' John Gray notes that for the individual it
entails "rationalself-direction;"for the collective, "harmonious ... self-determination" Isaiah Berlin, 20.
In other words, it is not the act itself but the character of the act that makes positive freedom "positive"
To be "positively"free our choices must be "rational"and "harmonious.
75. How did George Bernard Shaw put it? Do not do unto others what you would have them do to
you because "theirtastes may be different.""[N]ot to treat others as I should not wish them to treat me,"
is the way Berlin expressed it in Four Essays on Liberty 125.
76. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty,liii.
77. When responding to his critics, Berlin had to admit that he wished he had stressed the
"minimumconditions" which alone make "negative"freedom significant. FourEssays on Libertyxlv-xlvi.
But the presence of conditions, as we are about to see, is often implicit in what he says makes freedom
possible. For example: if each is "to develop.., on his own lines,' then providing "an area of individual
choice, however small,"'is "indispensable" From his essay "Liberty," which is reprinted in Henry Hardy's
edition of Liberty(New York:Oxford University Press, 2002), 286.

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440 BERLIN'STWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY

free man.'" Conditions, therefore, matter. By virtue of his being a slave, Epictetus
could not act freely (Judging from what he said about Epictetus, Berlin might also
have agreed with Orwell that it is a "fallacy... to believe that under a dictatorial
government you can be free inside.'79)There is no getting round it: conditions
have consequences, and consequences create conditions.
The presence of conditions colored in fact many of the things Berlin had to
say about freedom. For example, he felt that most people have never relished
it. Well, assuming that this is true, we have to ask, "why?"Why is something so
desirable, so unpopular? More to the point, why is it that only a relatively few
people have thought it worth preserving. One explanation (and I do not mean to
suggest the only one) is that people with an education, broadly conceived, are
more likely to embrace freedom than those who have not been educated, which,
in the past, was the fate of most people. Thus, there would seem to be a
connection between a free people and a people with "a certain degree of
instruction,"to borrow Thomas Jefferson's apt phrasing. Jefferson, who took great
pride in his role as founder of the University of Virginia (to say nothing of his
contribution to the Northwest Ordinances of 1784, 5, and 7), warned, "ifa nation
expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.'80
Berlin, however, did not equate an education (not that he would disparage it)
with freedom, certainly not if it meant "forcing people to be free:' which would
be the case if education were, as it almost always is, compulsory.81He did find
that "highly civilized and self-conscious human beings" (always "a small
minority") are more likely to appreciate freedom than those who aren't.82

78. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty 139-40. That Epictetus was still a slave suggests that the
"conditions" Berlin had in mind were "external"rather than "internal."Charles Taylor,however, argues
that the conditions limiting freedom (and sometimes that should limit it) are as likely to be "internal"as
"external" Taylor'sdefense of positive freedom is, as a result, more "moral"than "political" By this I
mean that, for Taylor,to throw off "internal bars to freedom" we must become more moral. However,
how are we to do this, and what if we refuse to do it? Taylor,to his credit, sees where this is going and,
accordingly, concludes his defense of positive freedom with a question; he asks whether the freedom he
prefers can be realized without our having to become "necessarily committed to justifying the excesses
of totalitarian oppression in the name of liberty"?(Maybe not "necessarily"but, from Berlin'sperch, the
probability that this will happen far exceeds the possibility that it won't.) Taylor'sessay "What'sWrong
with Negative Liberty"may be found in David Miller'sedition of Liberty(Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress,
1991).
79. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism and Lettersof George Orwell
(New York:Harcourt, Brace and Company 1968), III, 132.
80. The Political Writingsof Thomas Jefferson (New York:The Liberal Arts Press, 1956), 93.
81. It is true that Berlin early on in his essay on liberty acknowledges the debt that freedom owes to
an educated citizenry (124), but later, when discussing compulsory education, he reminds us that the
latter is a curb on freedom. To defend it, therefore, is to acknowledge "othervalues which come higher-
satisfy deeper needs-than individual freedom, determined by some standard that is not merely
subjective, a standard for which some objective status-empirical or a priori-is claimed" Berlin, "Two
Concepts of Liberty,"170 (emphasis added).
82. "TwoConcepts of Liberty"161.

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 Theodore L. Putterman 441

However, by linking freedom with the attitudes of a civilized minority,Berlin has

transformed the meaning of the word "freedom" in a subtle, albeit significant,
way. Freedom is no longer synonymous with choice but with the choices that
civilized men and women make. Consequently, freedom is not any choice but
describes a choice, and as such it can be used to determine whether, or to what
extent, people act in a way that favors it. Instead of being merely descriptive, it
has become a value-laden term, an ideal (rather than an idea), and it exists even
if we do not or are unable to make use of it.83
There is then, in Berlin'suniverse, such a thing as "genuine"or "real"freedom,
and this freedom is different from the "true freedom" Berlin usually equates with
negative freedom. He has, as a result, entered the domain of Hegel and T.H.
Green, wherein the test of freedom is "positive."In criticizing Berlin'streatment of
negative liberty, Bernard Crick observed, "while it seems dangerous and
paradoxical to attach freedom to particular objectives, yet it seems trivial and
hopelessly incomplete to leave it purely negative."'84 It seems that Berlin too found
it impossible "to leave it purely negative"

The Value of Berlin's Distinction

However, this does not mean that Berlin'stwo concepts are without redeeming
value. If they do nothing else, they allow us, as I said before, to address the
"operative ideas" of a society, and the consequences that follow from preferring,
say, negative freedom to positive freedom. Back at the time of the writing of the
Constitution, Madison, for example, admitted to being even more worried by
what individuals might do with their liberty than by what the government might
do with its power. In The Federalist, he foresaw "that liberty may be endangered
by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power; that there are
numerous instances of the former as well as of the latter; and that the forme,
ratherthan the latter are apparentlymost to be apprehended by the UnitedStates."85
Few would deny that negative freedom, whether expressed as a "pullingaway"
or a "pulling down," has always been an essential part of American society.

says Berlin, "Iam ignorant of my rights, or too neurotic (or too poor) to benefit by them, that
83. "If,"
makes them useless to me; but it does not make them non-existent .... To be free without knowing it
may be a bitter irony, but if a man subsequently discovers that doors were open although he did not
know it, he will reflect bitterly not about his lack of freedom but about his ignorance""..From Hope and
Fear Set Free:" 192.
84. Bernard Crick, Political Theory and Practice (New York:Basic Books, Inc., 1973), 42. Five years
before Berlin delivered his lectures on the two concepts of liberty, Maurice Cranston anticipated Crick's
objection when he wrote: "The word 'freedom' is incompletely descriptive. To understand what
'freedom' means, we must know what it is freedom from or freedom for" Maurice Cranston, Freedom
(New York:Basic Books, Inc., 1967), 123.
85. The Federalist (New York:The Modern Library,n.d.), 413 (emphasis added).

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442 BERLIN'STWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY

We even, on occasion, have managed to enjoy both: a pulling away and a pulling
down.86 However, while negative freedom may be a necessary component of
freedom, one has to wonder whether it is ever sufficient. Indeed, that it is not
sufficient may be part of the explanation why there is now so virulent a reaction
against liberalism in the United States."87 Negative freedom, like bread, is never
enough, particularly if freedom is defined by the absence of something. "Tobe
free is for it to be the case:' according to one exponent of negative freedom, "that
something or other doesn't keep you from achieving whatever it is you wanted to
achieve, the 'something or other' awaiting specification."88
No one has been more contemptuous of this view of freedom than the late
Allan Bloom. In The Closing of the American Mind, he did not so much see it as
part of the American scene, but the whole of it. "Freedom for us:' he charged, has
"meant merely acting as one pleases, restricted only by the minimum demands of
social existence" We have not, he continued, "gone beyond the merely negative
freedom of satisfying brutish impulses."89 In America, choices are plentiful, but
their value is entirely dependent upon the chooser's values. "Youngpeople7 as a
consequence,
can be anything they want to be, but they have no particular reason to want to
be anything in particular.Not only are they free to decide their place, but they
are also free to decide whether they will believe in God or be atheists, or leave
their options open by being agnostics; they will be straight or gay, or, again,
keep their options open; whether they will marry and whether they will stay
married; whether they will have children-and so on
endlessly.9
86. Conceivably this may happen to public schools in the United States if more and more people
embrace the ubiquitous "school voucher programs."Vouchers, according to their proponents, will mean
more choice, and where there is more choice, there will be more competition. Public schools, therefore,
will need to do a better job if they are to hold on to their students. Those who cannot compete will be left
to wither on the vine. "School voucher programs:'parents are told, "should be seen as an incentive to do
both: improve public schools and educate children." Hence everyone-as if by an unseen hand-will
benefit, the children who'll be able to move on and the children who will be left behind. The same
argument is now being trotted out in support of charter schools. "The whole point of charter schools,
Daniel Weintraub informs us, " is to provide the kind of choice and competition that will make all
schools better, both those that declare their independence and those who do not." His editorial,
"Chartersremain best hope for public education" (emphasis added) appeared in The Sacramento Bee,
September 9, 2004, B7.
87. Notwithstanding what I have just said, vouchers too can be viewed as "anti-liberal:" It is true that
vouchers provide more choice, but when viewed from the perspective of those who support them, they
are needed because public schools not only fail to teach the "basics" but also refuse to instill in the
children a proper regard for higher (Christian?) principles. The paradox is unavoidable: the backers of
vouchers require more choice in order to limit choice ... which is yet another illustration of the
interconnectedness between negative and positive freedom, only in this instance (and there are of
course others) negative freedom is being defended-or used-by those who mean to get rid of it.
88. Jan Narveson, The LibertarianIdea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 20.
89. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York:Simon and Schuster, 1987), 161.
90. Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 87.

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 Theodore L. Putterman 443

Bloom's commitment to positive freedom is clear enough. He simply substitutes

"authentic liberation" for T.H. Green's "true freedom" To be authentic, freedom
must serve a higher purpose, and that purpose-like the Garden of Eden before
the Fall-was present at the beginning.

The United States is one of the highest and most extreme achievements
of the rational quest for the good life according to nature. What makes its
political structure possible is the use of the rational principles of natural right
to found a people, thus uniting the good with one's own. Or, to put it
otherwise, the regime established here promised untrammeled freedom to
reason-not to everything indiscriminately, but to reason, the essential
freedom that justifies the other freedoms. . ... An openness that denies the
special claim of reason bursts the mainspring keeping the mechanism of this
regime in motion.91

The title of Bloom's book is a paradox: it is not the closing of the American mind
he feared, but its openness.
All this, however, is only another way of saying that the distinction Isaiah
Berlin insisted on forces us to confront what, exactly, is meant by freedom. As a
matter of fact, applicants to the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University
of California, Berkeley, were recently given the opportunity to address this
question. As part of the application process, they were asked to respond to the
following statement:

Energy shortages are here to stay. The only way to solve the problem is to go
to its roots: we must alter our extravagant, throw-away style. The Federal
Communications Commission should forbid television stations from carrying
advertising that reinforces our habitual follies and should insist on advertising
that will lead us to greater understanding and will enhance our appreciation
of our intricate balance with Nature.

Obviously,freedom, if defined negatively,would be curtailed if one were to adopt

this program. On the other hand, by allowing the FCCto act, freedom might be
increased a thousand-fold-at least for our children's children. However, that
such action is most unlikely prompts one final criticism of those with whom
Berlin, rightly or wrongly, is lumped.
What I find most disturbing about negative freedom, and also about the variety
of liberalism that its adherents ascribe to, is that it remains locked in an eternal
present. "Eager traders,"T.H. Green complained, "do not think of the long run"

91. Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 39 (emphasis added).

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444 BERLIN'STWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY

They are "careless of the burden ... which they may be laying up for posterity."92
Their sympathies are with the old prospector who, legend has it, asked, "What
had posterity ever done for him?" I realize that freedom delayed has often
resulted in freedom denied, but if the old prospector's freedom is limited by, as
well as dependent on, those who preceded him, then, what he does (or fails
to do) will affect the freedom of those who come after him. Contraryto the view
of Thomas Hobbes-who was of the opinion that men "come to full maturity,
without all kind of engagement to each other"93-this view recognizes that we
inherit our freedoms along with our possessions. It follows that the possession of
negative freedom will not mean much to those who stand to inherent little.
Berlin, however, thought otherwise. He regarded the proposition "freedom for
an Oxford don is a very different thing from freedom for an Egyptian peasant" as
"a piece of political claptrap.'94Why? Because freedom has (or should have) the
same value for the peasant as it has for the don. But that's not the point: it is not
the value of freedom that is at issue here but its existence. As I noted when
comparing civil rights with civil liberties, the freedom sought by the advocates of
civil rights, they-or the people they speak for-do not as yet have. They would
never, therefore, knowingly equate (or confuse) the freedom we have with the
freedom we ought to have. The author of Common Sense said it best. To John
Adams, who is reputed to have boasted, "Where liberty is, there is my country,"
Tom Paine replied, "Whereliberty is not, there is mine." Both men valued liberty,
but whereas Adams hoped to hold on to his, Paine sought to extend his to others.
This, it seems to me, is what Archibald MacLeish had in mind when he advised
Henry Luce, "freedom is not something you possess, but something you do."I do
not know if, by taking MacLeish'scounsel to heart, this makes me a convert to
positive freedom but it can, I believe, serve as an antidote (even for one whose
preferences often coincide with Isaiah Berlin's) to the excesses of negative
freedom.

92. TH. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Writings (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 204. Hayek, interestingly enough, recognized this problem, at least
when discussing majority rule. "Majoritydecisions tell us what people want at the moment, but not what
it would be in their interest to want if they were better informed... "'For this reason, we ought to be
careful not to place too much weight on the majority'sdecisions. In fact, it is not only possible but also
"very probable that by the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view" The
Constitutionof Liberty 109-10 (emphasis added). However, surely one could say the same thing about
market decisions: they too cater to "whatpeople want at the moment" . . and therefore we may need to
look elsewhere for decisions that will be beneficial over the long term. Also if, as Hayek says, "he will
often serve democracy best by opposing the will of the majority"(115), why not "he will often serve the
free market best by opposing the will of investors, entrepreneurs, and their customers?"
93. A moment before Hobbes, not unexpectedly, had depicted men as having "sprung out of the
earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms... ." Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing Company 1991), 205.
94. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty 124.

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 Theodore L. Putterman 445

Conclusion

Acknowledging what positive freedom has to offer should not, however,

detract from the larger aim of this paper, which was to present a more balanced
view of positive and negative freedom as well as to sharpen the distinction
between them. I realize that not everyone will share this view; particularly those
who prefer negative freedom. They would rather I identify negative freedom with
liberty and positive freedom with power.95However, this is a loaded distinction.
Obviously, if the choice were between power and liberty most of us would prefer
liberty.Although power is useful ratherthan evil, when compared with liberty it is
usually seen as potentially, if not actually, dangerous.
By emphasizing the power component in negative freedom and the moral
component in positive freedom, I have tried to level the playing field. Not only
does negative liberty empower but also (as was the case for many who in the
1960s sought to end racism at home and the war abroad) the moral component
in positive liberty may enable us to limit power. And even if it did not, it can still
prick us (as it did Thomas More) to question the exercise of power. This does not
mean, however, that positive freedom is "good" merely because it contains a
moral component. Again, we need always to be aware of the harm that "good"
men are capable of doing.
The identification of power with negative freedom and morality with positive
freedom should help clarify the distinction between the "two concepts of
liberty,"
but for further clarification we need to ask the following: do we view freedom as
an end in itself or a means to some other good (including a more perfect
freedom)? Do we regard freedom as an objective or as a subjective good? (To put
this another way, is there one freedom or are there many?) Do we attach much
importance to the conditions that precede the choices we have, or the
consequences that follow from the choices we make? The advocates of positive
freedom, I have argued, while treating freedom as an objective good also view
it as a means rather than an end, and stress the conditions as well as the
consequences that result in more or less freedom.
Problems with Berlin's "two concepts" doubtlessly remain. For those who
prefer negative freedom, the problem of reconciling "true freedom" with a
subjective view of freedom, which insists that "the essence of liberty has always
lain in the ability to choose as you wish to choose, because you wish so to
choose."96 Freedom is about having choices, even if the choices we make can

95. Which is precisely what J.B. Kizer would have me do. "Tocall negative liberty 'freedom' and
positive liberty 'power' is ' he supposes, "to make a discrimination which is fundamental" "Twoconcepts
of Liberty,"The Freeman 26 (1976): 568.
96. Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 103-04. Michael Ignatieff also underscores the subjective
component in negative freedom. Berlin's "liberal politics deals only with what human beings say they

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446 BERLIN'STWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY

deprive us of our freedom, or others of theirs-a paradox that should make a

preference for negative freedom always problematic. As for those who prefer
positive freedom, they need to remember that if freedom is an instrumental good,
it becomes less necessary, in that the practitionersof positive freedom may find a
better or more efficient way to realize their objectives. For them, freedom is "real"
only if it mutates into something more real, its objectivity dependent on
something (or someone) even more objective (or authentic).97 But surely these
paradoxes, rather than diminishing the value of a distinction between negative
and positive freedom, will continue to challenge those who take no side in this
debate, while vexing those who do.

want." Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin:A Life (New York:Metropolitan Books, 1998), 226. Conservatives
take note: a liberal politics, of the Berlin variety, expects less from human beings rather than more.
97. Case in point: Rousseau's lawgiver, whose "authenticity" will be unmistakeable. The Social
Contract,87. This is why the "freedom" he brings not only deserves to last, but will.

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