Isaiah berlin: Two concepts of Liberty

[TheGodlessUtopian]

There is a theory of negative and positive liberty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Concepts_of_Liberty

A guy I am debating is crazy about it but I hardly have the time to give him detailed critiques.So, what would you say towards Mr.Berlin's theory here?

I think it's shit and petty philosophizing. Correct me if it has something more substantial to it.

[Desperado]

Well you can just view them as almost interchangeable, and so the debate can be irrelevant. Freedom to do something can be arranged into freedom from something, and vice versa, e.g "freedom to live" = "freedom from death". So it's really just semantics - two sides of the same coin.

But, importantly, there is a difference in emphasis - negative freedom has a perspective towards individualism, positive freedom towards collectivism, and so their usage has been centred around the so called "individualist" and "collectivist" political ideologies. Of course, leftists understand that socialism is beyond individual/collective conflict, but all the same in our alienated environment we are certainly (relatively) collectivists. Some "individualists" who view this alienation as human progress go so far as to absurdly denounce "society" and "community" altogether, which - let alone impossible in the case of the former - is to common sense not at all desirable (which must contradict with the idea of "freedom" as something good).

On that note, Bakunin is awesome (though for some reason is a pre-pubescent alien in this video):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo3ZoGAK9Ok

Marx has some similar (and more ordered ideas) with species-being etc.

[hatzel]

The example that people often use is prisons. This is where we perhaps stop just talking semantics, of freedom from one thing and freedom to its inverse. What we mean here, is that releasing somebody from a prison gives them negative liberty, that is to say, it frees them from the walls, the prison itself, the guards. There is no longer anybody else restraining them, preventing them from doing anything. However, as we know, plenty of people who come out struggle to cope on the outside, and may actually commit a crime in order to be returned to prison. They lack positive liberty, in Berlin's parlance, because even though there is nobody restraining them, they limit themselves. They are not free to do anything, really, they aren't internally free to achieve their full potential, even without anybody else preventing them from doing so. (Some who don't believe in the distinction between the two types of freedom may claim that the released prisoner only struggles to cope because society itself somehow boxes them in, but this may not be applicable in all cases). Berlin himself (somebody correct me if I'm getting confused with somebody else) argued that positive liberty, before anything else, is participation in the whole political process. For him, this was liberal democracy, but it could equally well be applied to other systems, such as a participatory democracy in a socialist society.

Fromm developed a similar idea in The Fear of Freedom, wherein he claimed that many achieve negative liberty, that is, freedom from, and then fail to cope with it, as they do not create any positive liberty. That is to say, they no longer have somebody else 'controlling them,' so to speak, yet they do not feel confident enough to tell themselves what to do, to live for themselves, etc. etc. And therefore many merely submit themselves to some other authoritarian system, once again depriving themselves of their negative liberty, so that they don't have to take the responsibility to decide things for themselves, to create their own positive liberty and all that. This is clearly similar to the prison example, but has political implications, also, if those who free themselves from a given State, yet fail to embrace positive liberty, merely seek the reestablishment of the State, though perhaps draped in a different flag. It remains an authoritarian system that protects the individual from the responsibility of actually doing anything themselves, without being told...

[Luís Henrique]

Well you can just view them as almost interchangeable, and so the debate can be irrelevant. Freedom to do something can be arranged into freedom from something, and vice versa, e.g "freedom to live" = "freedom from death". So it's really just semantics - two sides of the same coin.

Nope. This is a caricature.

"Negative liberty" would be your freedom to not get involved in what you don't want to get involved. So, from the point of view, you could talk of a "liberty from politics" - your right to not get involved in the conduction of public affairs. "Positive liberty" doesn't encompass this, and cannot be translated into "freedom to do something else different from politics". It is the eleutheria, the freedom of the citizen, to whom non-participation in politics is anathema, or a form of self-enslavement, incompatible with actual freedom. So, they are not two sides of the same coin - or at least, not the two sides of the coin you describe, and the distinction is not mere semantics.

Of course, what Berlin attempts is to contrast two different concepts of liberty, one of which - negative liberty - has only been conceived recently, basically being a result of the Enlightenment. Now, to him both of these concepts represent valid views of liberty, though they sometimes are mutually exclusive, and though "positive liberty" is open to abuse, because the self-determination of individuals may be conflated with the self-determination of society, and the latter further conflated with the desires of the powers that be. This distinction has been degenerated by libertarians and neoliberals into the idea that only "negative liberty" is actual freedom, "positive liberty" being an invention of socialists, etc.

Luís Henrique