Eric Nelson Liberty - One or Two Concepts Liberty - One Concpt Too Many.pdf

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Political Theory

DOI: 10.1177/0090591704268179

2005; 33; 58Political Theory Eric Nelson

Liberty: One or Two Concepts Liberty: One Concept Too Many?

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10.1177/0090591704268179ARTICLEPOLITICALTHEORY/February2005Nelson/LIBERTY:ONECONCEPTTOOMANY?

LIBERTY: ONE OR TWO CONCEPTS

LIBERTYOne Concept Too Many?

ERIC NELSON Harvard University

Isaiah Berlins distinction between negative and positive concepts of liberty has recentlybeendefendedon newand interestinggrounds.Proponentsof thisdichotomyused toequate posi-tive liberty withself-masterytherule of our rationalnature overour passionsand impulses.

However, Berlinscritics have made the case that this account does not employ a separate con-cept of liberty: although the constraints it envisions are internal, rather than external, forces,thefreedomin question remains negative (freedom is still seen as theabsence of such impedi-ments). Respondingto this development, Berlinsdefenders have increasingly tended to identify

positive liberty with self-realization. The argumentis that such an account of freedomis genu-inely nonnegative, in that it does not refer to the absence of constraints on action. This essayargues that the claims made on behalf of freedom as self-realization cannot withstand scru-tiny, andthat they failto isolate a coherentview of libertythat is distinguishable from theabsenceof constraint.

Keywords: liberty; positive; negative; Berlin

I

When Isaiah Berlin unveiled his classic distinction between negativeandpositive libertyin 1958, he wasmaking both a historical andan analyti-cal claim. He was not only arguing that nonnegative locutions about liberty

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AUTHORS NOTE: I am deeply grateful to Elisabeth Camp, James Hankins, Melissa Lane, Leonidas Montes, Amartya Sen, Richard Tuck, and two anonymous readers for their commentson this essay, and to Mark Kishlansky for suggesting the title. I also owe a special debt of grati-tude to Quentin Skinner, who first prompted me to think about these issues, and without whose

encouragement this essay simply would not have been written.POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 33 No. 1, February 2005 58-78DOI: 10.1177/0090591704268179 2005 Sage Publications

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could be intelligible but also that such locutions had a significant, if sinister,history. While Hobbes andMill, Tocqueville andConstant carried the bannerfor negative libertyfreedom as the absence of interference or impedi-mentthe positive concept found expression in the writings of such tow-ering eminences as Plato, Zeno, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx. 1 SinceBerlin issuedhiscelebrated formulation, however, hisclaim for thehistoricalimportance of positive liberty has been gravely compromised, as scholarshave whittled away at the set of thinkers whose political theories the conceptwas meant to explain. Gerald C. MacCallum took a significant stride in thisdirectionwhen he pointed out that Berlinhad imposed an arbitrary restrictionon the notion of constraint in insisting that negative freedom consistedsolely in the absence of the deliberate interference of other human beings. 2

Persons can be said to be constrained by internal forces or factors as well,MacCallum argued, and the absence of such intrinsic constraints would stillcount as freedom in itsnegativesense. 3 Once thecategoryof constrainthadbeen stretched in this manner, it became a relatively simple matter to redis-trictthe province of negative liberty so that it could embrace many of the the-orists Berlin had placed in the positive camp. Stoics in the tradition of Zeno, for example, preached that man lives according to his nature (and isthus truly free) only when his passions are restrained, a straightforwardinstance of freedom as the absence of internal constraint. Likewise, Platospoke of freedom from false beliefs, 4 and Kants moral agent legislates forhimself the law of reason once he has liberated himself from the slavery of passions and sense impressions. All of these putatively positive theoriststurn outon closerinspection to disagree withHobbes andConstant, notabout

the meaning of liberty but about what counts as a constraint.MacCallum offered these observations in the service of a broader critique

of Berlins enterprise. Rejecting Berlins distinction between positive andnegativefreedom,MacCallum maintained that all intelligible locutions aboutliberty could be subsumed under a single triadic template: freedom is alwaysof something (anagent or agents), from something, to do, not do, become,ornot become something. 5 But even contemporary theorists who disputeMacCallums larger claim about a single concept of freedom often accept hisnarrower argumentabout internal constraint. QuentinSkinner provides a dis-tinguished example in this respect. He observes that Berlinscharacterizationof positive liberty as self-mastery seems to have relied in large measure onthe familiar thoughtequally familiar to students of Plato and of Freudthat the obstacles to your capacity to act freely may be internal rather thanexternal, and that you will need to free yourself from these psychologicalconstraints if you are to act autonomously. 6 But, Skinner continues, thisclaim fails to capture a separate concept of positive liberty, since, although

Nelson / LIBERTY: ONE CONCEPT TOO MANY? 59



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we now include psychic, internal forces in the universe of possible con-straints, we are still speaking about the need to get rid of an element of con-straint if we are to act freely. 7 Indeed, Berlin himself seems to have intuitedthat this particular notion of self-mastery was a nonstarter as a separate con-cept of positive liberty. In his 1958 lecture, he declared, Freedom is self-mastery, the elimination of obstacles to my will, whatever these obstaclesmay bethe resistance of nature, of my ungoverned passions, of irrationalinstitutions, of the opposing wills or behaviour of others. 8 Whether theconstraints are internal or external, we are still firmly within the realm of negative liberty.

Skinner is thus committed to MacCallums emptying of the historicalpopulation of positive theorists. Plato and Freud must go, as must the Stoics,

and presumablythe Kantians. But Skinner,whose interest is primarily in elu-cidating two different understandings of negative liberty, 9 nonethelessaccepts that a positiveconcept existsand is intelligible. When Berlinwritesinhis introduction to the 1969 Four Essays on Liberty that for the most part,freedom was identified by metaphysically inclined writers, with the realiza-tion of the real self, 10 Skinner feels that he has at last articulateda concept of freedom that is truly incommensurable with negative liberty. Freedom,Skinner explains, is thus equated not with self-mastery but rather with self-realisation, and above all with self-perfection, with the idea (as Berlinexpresses it) of my self at its best. In making this claim, Skinner suggeststhat Berlin had in mind chiefly the British neo-Hegelians T. H. Green andBernard Bosanquet. Certainly, in the descent from Plato and Kant to Greenand Bosanquet the concept of positive freedom experienced quite a falling

off. But the claim remains that this positive notion is intelligible, and that itwas articulated in a particular historical moment. We turn now to an analysisof exactly what this claim involves.

II

Positive liberty, on this account, is an end state, the statusof a fully self-realized human being. It is not the absence of internal or external constraints,but the actual achievement of a particular condition of life. Relying in largemeasure on an important essay by Tom Baldwin, Skinner takes Green andBosanquet to be theclassic exponents of this view. 11 Green does indeedmakeseveral statements, which would seem to tend in this direction. In LiberalLegislation and Freedom of Contract (1881), Green rejects the notion thatby liberty we mean the freedom to do as we like irrespectively of what it is

60 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2005



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that we like, and insists that, in measuring the growth of freedom, what weare measuring is the greater power on the part of the citizens as a body tomake the most and best of themselves. 12 In his lecture On the DifferentSenses of Freedom as Applied to the Will and to the Moral Progress of Man, he adds that real freedom consists in determination of the will byreason, 13 andin arrivingat harmonywiththe true law of ones being. 14 Stillmore strikingly, Green writes that freedom for a man is the statein which heshall have realised his ideal of himself. 15 Skinner, like Baldwin before him,is deeply struck by the use of the future perfect tense here. 16 Freedom, Greenseems to be saying, is not in any sense the opportunity to attain such a condi-tion but rather the actual attainment of it.

But there is good reason to doubt that Green saw himself offering a posi-

tive account of libertyin this sense.17

He begins his lecture OntheDifferentSenses of Freedom by setting up a familiar distinction. He imagines thecase of a man who pursues an unworthy object. In one sense, the man is afree agent in the act, because through his identification of himself with a cer-tain desired object . . . he makes the motive which determines the act, and isaccordingly conscious of himself as its author. 18 But in another sense he isnot free, because the objects to which his actions are directed are objects inwhich, according to the law of his being, satisfaction of himself is not to befound. 19 Such a man is externally free and internally a slave. Green offersthe caveat, however, that it must of course be admitted that every usage of the term [freedom] to express anything but a social and political relation of one man to another involves a metaphor. 20 Specifically, reflecting on theirconsciousness, on their inner life(i.e. their lifeas viewed from within), men

apply to it the terms with which they are familiar as expressing their relationtoeach other . . . a man can set overagainsthimselfhiswhole natureor any of its elements, and apply to the relation thus established in thought a term bor-rowed from relations of outward life. Much like Berlin, Green then offersPlato, theStoics, St. Paul, Kant, and Hegel as examples of thinkers who usedfreedom in this metaphorical sense. But Green insists that there is a realcommunity of meaning between freedom as expressing the condition of acitizenof a civilisedstate, andfreedomas expressing thecondition of a manwho is inwardly master of himself. 21 Freedom, for Green, is self-realiza-tion only insofar as it means freedom from wants and impulses which inter-fere with the fulfillment of ones possibilities. 22 The consciousness of theseimpulses, Green explains, is a consciousness of impeded energy, a con-sciousness of oneself as for ever thwarted and held back, and, as a result,the forecast of deliverance from these conditions is . . . a forecast of free-dom. Once such encumbrances are disposed of, man will indeed find his




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object (what else could he find?), but freedom in this sense still shares acommunity of meaning with freedom as the absence of physicalinterference.

One could say much the same thing, it seems to me, about Bosanquet inhis Philosophical Theory of the State . Bosanquet, who edited the 1907 edi-tion of Greens lectures, submits that liberty is being able to be yourself, 23

and, at the same time, that liberty is the being ourselves, and the fullest con-dition of liberty is that in which we are ourselves most completely. 24 At firstglance, it might appear that these two claims endorse twoextremely differentpositions on what constitutes liberty. On the first view, freedom seems to bethe opportunity for me to be myself, while on the second view it seems to bethe state ofmy being myself. But for Bosanquet, asfor Green, there isno con-

ceptual distance between these twoclaims: once I havea genuine opportunityto be myself (i.e., all internal impediments have been disposed of) I willbecome myself. Indeed, there is nothing else that I could possibly become.

The manner in which Bosanquet develops this argument is much influ-enced by Green, as he himself concedes. He begins by acknowledging thecommon belief that liberty is to be free from constraint. 25 He then asks,What is constraint? and proceeds to offer some version of the traditionalanswer: It is constraint when my mind is interfered with in itscontrol of mybody either by actual or by threatening physical violence under the directionof another mind. But Bosanquet then advances a second, and preferrednotion of constraint, which, he argues (as does Green), involves makinguse of a metaphorthe metaphor of internal chains. 26 There is, he insists,a higher and larger liberty that is only to be had when we realize that

what we are freed from is, in this case, not the constraint of those whom wecommonly regard as others, but the constraint of what we commonly regardas part of ourself. The higher sense of liberty, like the lower, Bosanquetadds in language that should have caught MacCallums attention, involvesfreedom from some things as well as freedom to others. 27 Once we are free

from our internal impediments, we are free to be ourselves. But forBosanquet, as for Green, the opportunity to be ourselves, if genuine, is neverpassed up: only an impediment of some kind could cause us to choose some-thing else, but freedom is precisely theabsence of such impediments. In sum,if Plato and the Stoics are to count as negative theorists, then surelyBosanquet looks qualified to join them. 28

It appears, then, that the historical supply of positive theorists is all butexhausted once we assume that constraints can be intrinsic to the agent. Yetthe claim remains that, as an analytical matter, there is an intelligible posi-tive concept of liberty that is incommensurable with its negative counter-partwhetheror not it hasa significant presence in thehistorical record. The




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remainderof thisessay willmake thecase,however, that even as an analyticalmatter the distinction does not withstand scrutiny.

III

Among contemporary philosophers who have risen to the defense of positive liberty, Charles Taylor has been especially outspoken and insis-tent. It is undeniable, he has written of Berlins dichotomy, that there aretwo such families of conceptions of political freedom abroad in our civiliza-tion. I should note at this point thatTaylors essay Whats Wrong withNeg-ative Liberty carves out a significantly wider space for positive liberty than

does Skinners. Taylor, indeed, does not concede that freedom as self-ruleand independence rely on the negative rubric. 29 I introduce him herebecause he provides a helpful vocabulary for thinking through the proposeddistinction between negative and positive freedom. Doctrines of positivefreedom, Taylor suggests, are concerned with a view of freedom whichinvolves essentially theexercisingof control over ones life. On thisview, oneis free only to the extent that one has effectively determined oneself and theshape of ones life. Theconcept of freedom here is an exercise-concept. 30 Bycontrast, thenegative theory is an opportunity-concept, where being free is amatter of what we can do, of what is open to us to do, whether or not we doanything to exercisetheseoptions. Taylor suggests that positive liberty is notin any sense an absence, but is rather theaffirmative achievementof self-real-ization. It is therefore, on his view, incompatible with negative liberty, a

genuine second concept of freedom.Taylors vocabulary is valuable if only forremindingus of why contempo-

rary theorists have wanted to isolate a separate concept of positive liberty.They notice that, on some theories of freedom, free people seem to havechoices, while, on others, allfree peopleseem to be doing or being onepartic-ular thing (that thing may or may not be identical across the entire set of freeindividuals, but foreach free individual there is one particular thing he or shewill be). These differing descriptive claims about what free people will dohave seemed to require explanation in the form of differentconcepts of lib-erty. To be sure, sometimes inexact language makes it difficult to see theproblem in these terms. We have encountered, for example, the formulationfreedom is self-realization, which seems to indicate that self-realization isneither the condition free people will necessarily arrive at nor the achieve-ment that makes freedom possible, but is actually freedom itself. Yet it doesnot take much to see through this phrase. Self-realization is, presumably,quitea lotof things; we stillwantto know what is free about it. 31 To answer




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that question, we have to begin by replacing the formula freedom is self-realization with one of two conditional statements: If people are free, theywill realize themselves, or If people realize themselves, they will be free.These two conditionals represent, in my view, the two things people couldreasonably mean when they usethe phrasefreedomis self-realization. Thatis, they might mean that freedom brings self-realization, or that self-realiza-tionbrings freedom. These two conditionals do not constitutea logical trans-position of the original identity statement. The point, rather, is that this iden-tity statement is on its face unacceptable: it cannot reasonably be argued thatfreedom and self-realization are identical . Self-realization is not only free-dom. The most that can be argued is that freedom is one of the qualities of aself-realized individual, alongwith, say, completeness, fulfillment, per-

fection, harmony, peace, and so forth. We want to know what it is aboutself-realization that connects it, for some theorists, to the value of freedom.Thequestion, in short, is whether there is a nonnegativewayof explaining theuse of the word free in these two conditional statements.

I believe there is not. Once more, what is truly at issue in the quarrelbetween Taylors opportunity theorists and exercise theorists is not a dis-agreement about liberty but one about constraint. To see this more clearly inthecase of thefirstconditional statement (If peoplearefree,they willrealizethemselves), let us separate theories of freedom intotwo parts. The first partwill be a normative claim about what should count as a constraint (theabsence of such constraints will be called freedom). The second part willbe a descriptive claim about what the situation of unconstrained people willlook like (what they will do or not do, be or not be). The essential point is that

the normative claim will determine the shape of the descriptive claim. 32 Con-sider as an example theclassic formulation of libertyfound in Hobbess Levi-athan . For Hobbes, LIBERTY or FREEDOME, signifieth (properly) theabsence of Opposition; (by Opposition, I mean externall Impediments of motion;) and may be applyed no lesse to Irrationall, and Inanimate creatures,than to Rationall. 33 On this view, only physical impediments count as con-straints; a person is free so long as he is not tied up, chained, or otherwisephysically obstructed. Such is Hobbess normative claim about constraint.But this claim commits him to a particular account of what being free willlook like. If freedom is to be posited of all agents (or objects) who are notphysically restrained, then as a descriptive matter the situation of free peoplewill be extremely indeterminate. They may choose to do or not do, be or notbe any number of different things. The state of free people in a Hobbesianuniverse looks like an opportunity state because only physical impedi-ments count as constraints on freedom.




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Suppose, however, that a particular theoristGreen or Bosanquet, forinstanceassumes that each person has a higher self that, left to its owndevices, will choose to livein a particular way (and that way only)or do a par-ticular thing (and that thing only)and that only through doing that thing orliving that way will the person realize his true nature. Such a thinker wouldlist as constraints any and all things that might dissuade or distract the agentfrom following his higher self and choosing his natural object. In otherwords, if doingor being x is mans true nature (i.e., the thing hisunobstructedhigher self would alwayschoose), then anything that might make himdo orbe not x becomes a constraint. It is not difficult to see how broadening thesetof constraints in thismanner willhavea very pronounced effect on a giventhinkers descriptive view of the situation of free people. If anything that

might prompt an agent to choose not x is understood as a constraint, then of course any agent of whom freedom can be posited will do or be x and only x . Hence the rise of shifty locutions such as freedom is x, or freedom isdoing x . Suchstatementsmostoften work out to all freepeople will door be

x and rest ultimately on the negative notion of freedom as the absence of constraint. For many of those theorists whom philosophers and historianshave wantedto call positive, thestateof free peoplelooks like an exercisestate only because of their extremely broad normative claims about whatthings are to count as constraints. Free people, for positive theorists likeGreen and Bosanquet, do indeed have choices; its just that they will neverchoose anything other than their object.

At this point the following objection might be raised: the argument thatthese putatively positive claims about freedom are actually claims about

the absence of constraint involves the use of a rhetorical slight of hand. Allpositive accounts of freedom, it might be argued, can be rewritten in such away as to turn them into negative claims, but to do so is to misrepresentthem. In other words, it is surely thecase that the absence of all things whichcould prevent x is equivalent to x, but putting the matter in these termsmight obscure the emphasis a given author is trying to convey. Positive theo-rists, we are told, are fundamentally concerned not with obstacles but ratherwith x itself; negative theorists, on the other hand, are neutral with respect tooutcomes and focus only on the removal of obstacles. As a result, we shouldagree that two different understandings of the core element in the idea of freedom are present. Several replies to this line of reasoning immediatelysuggest themselves. First, even if we were to grant all of this, it would stillbequite significant from an analytical point of view if all positive claimsabout libertycould be successfully accounted forin negative terms. That is, itwould be very odd indeed to say that we require a separate concept of posi-tive liberty, but at the same time to acknowledge that there are no claims




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about liberty that such a concept is needed to explain (i.e., which cannot beexplained using the more conventional negative understanding). Indeed,formany of itsproponents, theattractionof positiveliberty liesprecisely inthe fact that it is supposed to make sense of various arguments about lib-erty, which are said to be incoherent in negative terms. 34

But this is already to concede far too much ground to the objection,because in point of fact there is no rewriting going on here. Green andBosanquet themselves turn to the language of constraint whenever they arerequired to explain what self-realization has to do with freedom. All kinds of language, it seems, canbe used to explain why self-realizationis good, but,in order to explain how it is connected to thevalue of freedom, recourse mustbe had to the standard negative idiom. Again, no one seems to have been able

to provide any account of why a self-realized individual should be calledfree (as opposed to happy, fulfilled, complete, etc.) that does notinvolve the absence of constraints. Thus, as we have seen, both Green andBosanquet are anxious to stress the community of meaning between theirtwo senses of freedom, and to define thehigher freedom they have in mindas liberation from the constraint of what we commonly regard as part of ourself. Likewise, Kant, whose account of freedom is often styled as a para-digmaticpositive view, makes clear that he locates freedom in adherencetothe law of reason because such conformity reflects independence of deter-minate causesof theworld of sense. 35 Once such constraints havebeen over-come, my authentic self, which is pure intelligence, operates according tothe rational necessity of themoral law. 36 It isfor this reason that Kant scholarsconstantly find themselves drawn to privative language when they are dis-

cussing his account of freedom. For one critic, Kants creature of inclinationis fettered, while his free agent is one who breaks loose from what ismerely given by nature, including the brute facts of my inclination. 37 Foranother, Kant grounds the principle of right solely in the legislative reason,purified of all anthropological features and excluding all elements of nature,of a metaphysics of freedom. 38 All of this language aims to make concretethe absence of internal and external constraint, and to dramatize the idea thatrational necessity is arrived at by process of elimination. As Kant himself puts it, reason is a somethingthat is left over [ das da brig bleibt ] if I haveexcluded everything from the determining grounds of my will that belongs tothe world of sense. 39 Kants account, in short, needs no more rewriting thanGreens or Bosanquets to make clear that it involves the absence of con-straint. 40

Yet at the center of the objection we have been considering there lurks amore fundamental error. Different theories of freedom are not characterizedby differing levelsof concern withthe actualconduct of free people; they dif-




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fer, rather, in the specificity withwhich they areable to describe that conduct.Let us return for a moment to the case of Hobbes, so often identified as thequintessential negative theorist. Hobbes is famous for rejecting the con-ventional notion of a purely rational will; there is, for him, no act of delibera-tion that is not based on passions (themselves the results of sense impres-sions). The will is simply the last Appetite, or Aversion in a whollydetermined process of deliberation (Beasts, Hobbes informs us, alsoDeliberate). 41 It would, therefore, makeno sense for him to speak of the pas-sions or sense impressions as constraints, since, on his account, there is nopristine will for them to constrain. Freedom for Hobbes is, thus, simply theabsence of physical constraint on natural motion (i.e.,motion dictated by nat-ural necessity, which includes all human action). 42 A river without a dam is

free in precisely the same sense as a man without chains. But because onlyphysical impediments count as constraints in his theory, Hobbes cannotdescribe the behavior of free people with any degree of specificity: a man,on his account, is free from chains to walk three miles, go to France, throw hisbelongingsinto the sea,writea book. . . ad infinitum . Thislack of specificityis in no sense intrinsic to an account of freedom as the absence of constraint;it follows from a theory of thehuman person to which such an account is thenapplied.

A second, and related objection to the model I have proposed might go asfollows: it is disingenuous to claim that there is any real choice (opportu-nity) involved in a theory of freedom that lists everything that might pre-vent x as a constraint.In sucha theory, a rational agent has only one conceiv-able option,andno other choice is possible. Therefore, freedom here really is

an exercise conceptit is doing x . For an investigation of this line of rea-soning, it should be useful to consider an example from a different area of political philosophy: Michael Sandels analysis of the choice situation in theRawlsian original position. Sandel poses the question of just how free thechoice of principles would actually be behind Rawlss veil of ignorance.On one hand, he writes, once the parties find themselves in a fair situation,anything goes; the scope for their choice is unlimited. 43 On the other hand,however, it becomes clear that theoriginal position hasbeen designed explic-itly to ensure the selection of Rawlss two principles of justice. On Rawlssaccount, it seems, a fair choice situation is by definition one in which it isinconceivable that the parties would choose any other principles.

On this interpretation,whatit means to saythat theprincipleschosen will be just what-

ever they turn outto beis simplythat, given their situation, theparties areguaranteed tochoose the right principles. While it may be true that, strictly speaking, they can chooseany principletheywish, theirsituationis designedin such a waythattheyare guaranteedtowish tochoose certain principles.. . . Thenotionthatthe full descriptionof the origi-




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nal position determines a single choice which the parties cannot but acknowledgeseems to introduce a cognitive element to justification after all and to call into questionthe priority of procedure which the contract view . . . seemed to require. 44

Here Sandel invokes a previously introduced distinction betweenvoluntarist and cognitive formsof justification: on the former, principlesof justice are said to derive their authority from the fact that they are selectedby the parties in an act of unencumbered choice, while, on the latter, they aresaid to be preexisting authoritative principles thatare simply discovered oracknowledged by the parties once the requisite circumstances have beenput in place. Rawls appears at various points in A Theory of Justice to resortto both styles of justification, but, as Sandel points out, he cannot haveit bothways. Either the principles of justice derive their authority from the fact that

they are chosen in the original position or the original position derives itsauthority from the fact that it generates the correct principles of justiceandSandel makes a strong case for thinkingthat Rawls is actually committedto the second claim. But the key point for our purposes is that, while Sandelinsists that choice cannot coherently be said to authorize the principles of

justice in the Rawlsian framework (because the choice conditions wereestablished with the principles already in mind), he does not deny thatRawlss parties make a choice (strictly speaking, they can choose any prin-ciple they wish). The fact that it is inconceivable for any principles otherthan Rawlss to be chosen in the original position does not mean that his par-ties make no choice; it simply means that their choice does not ground theprinciples of justice.

This insight, in turn, applies powerfully to the objection we are consider-ing. The argument for distinguishing between positive and negative liberty,after all, rests on the claim that a situationcan only be called an opportunitystate in which it is not inconceivable for people to choose any number of dif-ferent ends. Ifan account offreedom doesnot placefreepeople in sucha con-dition, we are told, then it must partake of a different, nonnegative conceptof liberty. Sandel avoids this muddle because he intuits, although does notmake explicit, the impact of differentworldviews on descriptiveclaimsaboutwhat free people will actually do. A voluntarist form of justification presup-poses the sort of world in which liberty looks like an opportunity state: onein whichends exist byvirtueof thefact that theyare chosen byhuman beings.A cognitive form of justification, on the other hand, presupposes the sort of world in which liberty looks like an exercise concept: one in which humanbeings exist in order to recognize and achieve some predetermined end. Butthere is no more reason to put the word choice in quotation marks in thiscontext than in the case of the hypothetical higher self we have been dis-cussing. For Rawls, as for Kant, heteronomy and freedom are incompatible.




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Only the self unencumbered by context, materiality, contingency, and sensa-tion can make a free choice. Kant casts off these impediments by theorizingan abstracted mind that legislates for itself the law of reason; Rawls does soby situating his hypothetical parties behind the veil of ignorance in the origi-nal position. In both cases, once the impediments have been removed, theagents in question will choose a given principle because it is suggested bytheir unencumbered reason. But it is no less a choice for the fact that everyhuman being in the appropriate circumstances would make it.

Consider the following example. Let us suppose that human beings had agene that made vanilla ice cream taste better to them than all other flavors.Assuming this were the case, if I were to offer a person his choice of all theflavors behind the ice cream counter (and if he had tasted them all before),

caeteris paribus he would choose vanilla. But suppose we were to introducesome complicating conditions: suppose vanilla were the most expensive fla-vor, andthe person in question were either poor or cheap; suppose thispersonlived in a culture where red wasan auspicious color, and, accordingly, straw-berry was the trendy flavor; suppose this person had objections to the work-ing conditions of vanilla bean pickers and had therefore decided to boycottvanilla products. Given all of these circumstances, the person in questionmay never in his life have tasted vanilla ice cream and would probably neverchoose it if given the chance. If, however, we were to place him in a hypothet-ical situation in which all of these complicating factors ceased to intrude, andwe gave him a taste of every imaginable flavor and asked which he wouldprefer, he would certainly pick vanilla. Why? Because it tastes best to humanbeings; that is simply a fact of their nature. Is there really no meaningful dis-

tinction between that situation and one in which we were to take our icecream eater to a shop stocked only with vanilla? In such a situation, therewould genuinely be no choice (that is, if we were to exclude the choice of having no ice cream). But the first situation bears a much closer resemblanceto the condition of free men in theputatively positive theories of liberty wehave been discussingand in theRawlsianoriginal position. When given theopportunity, free men will choose their object because the affinity of unencumbered human nature for the object in question is stipulated inadvance.

IV

The objection might be raised at this point that the model just describedonly accounts for positive claims of the form if men are free, they will door be x and not positive claims of the form if men do or are x, they will be




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free. Thesecond category, it might be argued, still retains an exercisecon-cept of liberty: the notion that to be free one must actually do or be someunique, particular thing. In other words, it might seem that freedom in thiscase is not acquired through the stripping away of internal or external con-straints but acquired through some kind of activity. But this too is imprecise.Consider the classic Christian statement of liberty offered by ThomasCranmer in the Book of Common Prayer: His service is perfect freedom. 45

Following our earlier practice, we should replace this statement with twopossible claims: When people arefree, they will serve Him, or When peo-ple serve Him, they will be free. We have already seen that the first claimemploys the negative, opportunityconcept of liberty. It simply suggests, asa descriptive matter, that when people are free from all internal and external

constraints, they will choose His service.Yet the second claim too can be accounted for if we once again adjust ourunderstanding of constraint. This formulation supposes that there are certainconstraints that can only be removed if the agent in question embraces a par-ticular activity or way of life (in this case His service). Only if a manembraces thedevotional life of a Christian willhe overcometheslaveryof hispassions,or his ignorance, or evil inclinationthat is, theexperience of ser-vingHim has theeffect of liberation. 46 This is not at allan unfamiliar kind of reasoning about negative liberty. On Hegels view, for example, we can beliberated from our passions and sense impressions only once we have beenmade to realize that we ourselves will the universala level of conscious-ness we can acquire only through the practice of citizenship in a Hegelianstate. 47 Likewise, for Rousseau, people are governed by their higher, ra-

tional selves (and are, hence, free from internal constraint) only when theyareguided by a General Will formulated through the public life of a self-gov-erning commonwealth. 48 For both of these theorists, constraints are strippedaway through the actual experience of citizenship rightly practiced. Wemight also recall that, in a Freudian context, we are said to be freed from ourpathologiesthrough therapy (although, fortunately, we have not yetas a soci-ety generated the barbarism: freedom is therapy!). Once again, this is not adifferent claim about liberty; it is a different claim about constraint.

A good testof this construction ofthe issue is whether it can makesense of the theoryof freedom offered by HannahArendt in Between Past and Future .This text is usually cited as the positive theory of liberty par excellence, atheory that equates freedom with participation in politics. 49 As it happens,however, Arendt assiduously avoids making the claim that freedom is par-ticipation in politics, and instead ends up with a claim very much of the formwe are currently considering. In this respect, the first thing to note is that theidea of freedom Arendt means to attack by stressing the relationship between




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freedom andpoliticsis not negative liberty but ratherinner freedom. Herobjection is that freedom has been banished by philosophy from the publicsquare to the forum internum, where it is understood to be a property of thewill. But the difference between her favored notion of freedom and thisinternal one is emphatically not that one implies the absence of constraintwhile the other somehow does not. Indeed, Arendt, like Green andBosanquet, stresses thecommunity of meaning between thevarious differ-ent sensesof freedom she canvasses, making it extremely difficult to seehowshe could envision them as embodying separate concepts of l iberty.

Arendt begins with the historical claim that inner freedom was an ideageneratedby theStoicsat a timewhen actual, political freedom wasno longerto be had in the world. But this, as she is anxious to point out, is already to

make a claim about analytical priority: Man would know nothing of innerfreedom if he had not first experienced a condition of being free as a worldly,tangible reality. We firstbecameawareof freedom or its opposite in ourinter-course with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves. 50 And what wasthis first, nonderivative freedom? It was the free mans status, whichallowed him to move, to get away from home, to go out into the world. Itwas, in short, the absence of constraint on movement. In the late RomanEmpire, this notion was perverted and turned inward, so that it came todescribe, not thestatusof menvis--vis each other butratherthe internal sov-ereignty of thewill. In thisway, menwho were externally enslaved could stillbe said to find a degree of freedom. But Arendt believes that this palliativecame at a terrible price: it yielded a situation in which freedom has noworldly reality. 51

This is where politics comes into the argument. Although Arendt con-cedes that even in repressive societies freedom may still dwell in menshearts as desire or will or hope or yearning, when it is confined to therecesses of the heart it is not a demonstrable fact. 52 Only politics, onArendts account, provides the space in which freedom can become con-crete, in which it can emerge as a fact about human beings. Why? Becauseon Arendts account, freedom is fundamentally the status of being uncon-strained by theautomatic processes of nature and history; it is theabilitytobegin again, unencumbered by contingent circumstances. 53 And this claimintersects with a viewabout human nature: manis not for Arendt Homo sapi-ens or Homo laborans, but Homo initians a creature who can begin. 54 Theworld of politics gives us the chance to live according to our nature, to makebeginnings; it is only when we are in fact living this way that we are freedfrom the constraints of our situation. This is what allows Arendt to make thefamous claim on which so much of the confusion surrounding positive lib-ertyultimately rests: Men are freeas distinguished fromtheirpossessing




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the gift for freedomas long as they act, neither before nor after; for to befree and to act are the same. 55 Even in repressive societies man has the giftfor freedom, he is a creature who can make a new start. But only in actuallymaking such a start does he break free of the constraints of his context; untilthat moment, he is determined by them. It is not that the act is freedom insome new conceptualsensebutratherthat theactmakes us free. Manrealizeshis true nature when he begins anew, and this beginning anew makes himfree. Freedom here is still the absence of constraint; to the extent that it lookslike anything else, that is a result of Arendts conviction that the constraintsare banished by the act itself.

Our analysis of freedom as self-realization ends with Arendt. There is,however, one final account of liberty that must be addressed before we can

declare the broader case closed: it is not usually billed as a positive theory,but it might still be thought to reject the framework of the absence of con-straint. This is the so-called republican theory of liberty, or freedom as non-domination. As sketched by Philip Pettit, this view accepts that there arepositive andnegative concepts of liberty, but then suggests a third way. Thewriters of Roman antiquity, and their disciples in the Renaissance and early-modern period, viewed liberty not as the absence of interference but as theabsence of mastery, as non-domination. 56 The difference, Pettit suggests,is that the republican account of freedom as non-domination will regardmany people who are not actually interfered with by others as nonethelessunfree. The comicslave in Plautus who has the run of hismasters house stilllives in a state of dependence on thewill of his master, and is therefore unfree(although not interfered with). Conversely, such an account of liberty might

regard someone as free who is interfered with, but is not dominated by a mas-ter. A citizenof a self-governing republic, for example, might not be thoughtunfree if he is coerced into following laws enacted by the popular will. OnPettits account, this view of freedom is not exactly positive because itrequires the absence of something (i.e., domination), but it is not exactlynegative either, in that it needs something more than the absence of inter-ference. 57 This third concept, Pettit informs us, fits on neither side of thenow established negative-positive dichotomy.

Thebest response to thisline of argument is that provided by Skinner, whohas written extensively on the historical development of freedom as non-domination. The problem with Pettits presentation of the case, as Skinnerpoints out, is that it replicates Berlins initial error: it wrongly assumes thatthe universeof possible constraints in theories of negative liberty is limitedto physical interference by other human beings. But, as we have seen, anynumber of forces can count as constraints (internal psychic forces, sense




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impressions, ignorance), and a theory of freedom that specifies the absenceof these obstacles is no less negative, conceptually speaking, than itsHobbesian counterpart. In consequence, Skinner argues that liberty as non-dominationis a species of negative liberty, in which thepsychological impactof dependence itself counts as a constraint on action. As Skinner puts it, forneo-Roman theoristsa mere awareness of living in dependence on thegood-willof an arbitrary ruler does serve in itself to restrict ouroptions and therebylimit our liberty. Theeffect is to dispose us to make andavoidcertainchoices,and is thus to place clear constraints on our freedom of action. 58 Freedom asnon-domination is wholly negative, 59Skinner concludes, because it neverforan instant definesitselfas anything other than the absence of constraint. If Pettit had not been wedded to Berlins original commitment (i.e., that any

theory of freedom, which specifies theabsence of nonhuman constraints is insome sense positive), he would not have ended up providing his tripartitescheme. 60

V

Where does all of this leave us? There is an argument to be made that, insubsuming all of the abundant variety of claims about liberty under a singleconcept, we run two major risks. First, we run the risk of trivializing theconcept itself. If so many completelydifferent views about who is free canbeaccommodated using the rubricof negative liberty, then theconcept beginsto seem superficial or even meaningless. The second risk is precisely the

reverse: that by dragging allof these various claimsabout libertyinto theneg-ativecamp, we will end up projecting on to them a uniformity that theypalpa-bly lack. We will, in short, begin to lose sight of how radically different theytruly are from each otherhow they rest on incompatible views of humannature, psychology, and theology. As David Miller puts it succinctly, the dif-ferent traditions of speaking about l iberty appear to embody very differentbasic assumptions about human beings and what gives meaning to theirlives. 61 Why is it analyticallyhelpful, in that case, to reduce them to a singleparadigm?Each of these arguments is compelling, and, indeed, thisessayhasnot insisted that there is only one conceptof liberty. It has only argued that,if there are two or more concepts, they cannot be distinguished from oneanother on the basis of positivity and negativity. All claims about free-dom seem to be claims about the absence of some constraint; within thisbroad set, however, there are substantially different claims about the ends of human life, the character of human beings, and the elements that can con-




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strain us. The quarrels between these various accounts are serious anddeserve more attention than they have been able to receive under the shadowof Berlins dichotomy.

NOTES

1. IsaiahBerlin, Two Conceptsof Liberty, in FourEssays on Liberty (Oxford,UK: OxfordUniversity Press, 1969), 118-72.

2. Gerald C. MacCallum Jr., Negative and Positive Freedom, in Liberty, ed. David Miller(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991).

3. For purposes of this analysis, I have treated the terms liberty and freedom as if theywere synonyms. Althoughthese termsare not in factinterchangeable, the literaturewith whichI

am engaged hastended to view them that way, and I will not attempt to disentangle them on thisoccasion.

4. See, for example, Plato, Laws X (885b).5. Ibid., 102.6. Quentin Skinner, A ThirdConceptof Liberty, (The Isaiah Berlin Lecture), Proceedings

of the British Academy 117 (2001): 237-68.7. Skinnernever minimizesthe differences between views of liberty thatspecifythe absence

of metaphysical constraints and those that specify the absence of physical interference. He issimply pointingout thatthey cannot be distinguishedfrom each other on grounds of positivityand negativity.

8. Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, 49.9.In additionto theliberalnotion offreedomas theabsenceof interference, Skinner hasin

mind the neo-Roman idea of freedom as the absence of dependence (which is discussed later).This second idea is sometimes cast as an instance of positive liberty, largely because Berlinseemedto endorse that view inhisclassic essay(although hethenseemed tomove away from thisposition). For a recent attempt to grapple with this argument of Berlins, see Raymond Geuss,Freiheit im Liberalismus und bei Marx, in Ethische und Politische Freiheit, ed. Julian Nida-Rmelin and Wilhelm Vossenkuhl (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), esp. 118-20.

10.IsaiahBerlin, FourEssays onLiberty (Oxford,UK: OxfordUniversityPress,1969),xiv.11. See Tom Baldwin, MacCallum and the Two Concepts of Freedom, Ratio 26 (1984):

125-42.12.T. H. Green,LiberalLegislation andFreedom of Contract, in Liberty, ed. David Miller

(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991).13. T. H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, ed. Bernard Bosanquet

(London: Longmans, Green, 1907), 26.14. Ibid., 16.15. Ibid., 17.16. Cf. Baldwin, MacCallum and the Two Concepts of Freedom, 135; Skinner, A Third

Concept of Liberty, 240-41.17. Indeed, I take it to be of the highest significance that, although Green alludes casually to

freedom in thepositive sense in his1881 public lecture to theLeicesterLiberalAssociation,hepointedly neglects to speak in such terms in his contemporaneous, more technical lectures atOxford. Thephrase never occursin Onthe DifferentSenses ofFreedomas Applied tothe Will




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andto theMoralProgressof Man (deliveredat Oxfordin1879as part ofa setof lectureson TheTheory of Duty) or in the Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (delivered as ThePrinciples of Political Obligation and the Social Virtues at Balliol in 1879-80). See Green,Liberal Legislation, 23.

18. Ibid., 2.19.Thisaccountof higher freedom pointsto an area ofconcernin theanalysis provided by

MariaDimova-Cookson.Dimova-Cookson assigns to Greena convictionthat juristicand truefreedom are trade-offs within the individual. In the pursuit of the true freedom, she writes,the exercise of juristic freedom is temporarily suspended. I cannot see howGreen would agreeto this statement. Juristic freedom is the condition in which a person is not interfered with (byother people) in the pursuit of things that seem good to him. In this condition, the individual ispartiallyfree: he is notaffected by externalconstraints.Higher freedom buildscumulativelyonlowerfreedom:oncefree in the true sense,the individualis liberated from internal constraints aswell, and begins to seek that which is good for him. But the fact that the individual changes hisobject does not mean that his juristic freedomhas been compromised in the least. That wouldbe the case, ofcourse,if he were coerced from outside tochange hisobject,butthatis notthesce-nario that Dimova-Cookson is considering. See Dimova-Cookson, A New Scheme of Positiveand Negative Freedom: Reconstructing T. H. Green on Freedom, Political Theory 31 (2003):515.

20. Ibid., 3.21. Ibid., 16.22. Ibid., 18.23. Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State (New York: Macmillan,

1899), 128.24. Ibid., 146.25. Ibid., 134.26. Ibid., 137.27. Baldwin also notices Bosanquets MacCallum-esque language. See Baldwin,

MacCallum and the Two Concepts of Freedom, 126-27.28.One wayout of theimpasse would be to reject MacCallumsargument thatinternal forces

can countas genuine constraints. One could, likeGreen and Bosanquet, argue thatto calligno-rancea constraint is simply to speakmetaphorically. The onlyproblem here,as bothGreenandBosanquet point out, is that if the constraint is metaphorical so too might be the libertyinvolved.I make no attempt to settle this question.I only mean to insistthat, if Plato andthe Sto-ics are to count as negative theorists, then so must the neo-Hegelians.

29. Skinner, A Third Concept of Liberty, 2.30. Ibid., 143.31. Raymond Geuss is similarly wary of the excessive inflation of the conceptof freedom

to the point where it loses its profile and becomes indistinguishable from the vague generalnotionof a completelysatisfactory humanlife. See RaymondGeuss andMartinHollis,Free-dom as an Ideal, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 69 (1995): 102. See also ChristopherMegone, One Concept of Liberty, Political Studies 35 (1987): esp. 616, 622.

32.It isworth pointingoutherethat all theoriesof freedom are normative;none are neutral.Thatis, basedon their respective accountsof thehuman person,they alladmit certain elements aspotential constraints and exclude others. It is, therefore, extremely important to distinguish

normativity frompositivity.Hobbes,for example,arguesthat passionsshouldnot countasconstraints on action; he does so because he rejects the conventional notion of a free will (thewill, for him, is simply the final outcome of a wholly determined process of deliberation). This




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argument is certainly normative, but it is not in the least bit positive. Freedom, for Hobbes,remains the absence of impediments to motion.

33. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1991), 145.

34.See, forexample,Skinner, A ThirdConcept of Liberty,243. It is enough forme, justasit is forBerlin,to displaythe coherenceof theneo-Hegelianview. Thatin itself is sufficient to dis-pose of the prevailing belief that there is only one concept of liberty. The argument, in short, isthat such a view cannot be accounted for under the negative rubric, and that, as a result, if it iscoherent we must search for a different concept of liberty to explain it.

35. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals [Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten ], ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,2002), 69.

36. There is considerable debate among Kant scholars as to whether (as Kant seems to sug-gestinthe Groundwork ) onlyactionstakenin accordancewith rationalmaximscan countas free.On suchan account,all immoralacts are determined, and,therefore,not imputableto theiragentsina moralsense. Inhis worksfromthe 1790s,Kantseems tomoveawayfromthisposition,argu-ing that heteronomous impulses influence but do not determine behavior. For evaluative pur-poses, therefore, they do not count as constraints on the freedom of the agent. On this issue, seeHenry E. Allison, Kants Theory of Freedom (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,1990), 94-99. Allison attempts to harmonize Kants various statements on this subject.

37. Charles Taylor, Kants Theory of Freedom, in Conceptions of Liberty in Political Phi-losophy, ed. Zbigniew Pelczynski and John Gray (London: Athlone Press, 1984), 107.

38. Wolfgang Kersting, Politics, Freedom, and Order: Kants Political Philosophy, in TheCambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,1992), 344.

39. Kant, Groundwork, 78.40. At this point it should be useful to remove a possible confusion. In several of his works,

but in the Groundwork in particular, Kant contrasts a negative definition ( Erklrung ) of free-domwitha positive concept( ein positiver Begriff ).It is importantto recognizethatKantis notusing this language in Berlins sense (or in Skinners). Kant begins the third section of the

Groundwork by definingfreedom as a quality of thewillby which it canbe effectiveindepend-ently of alien causes determining it ( Groundwork, 61). Kant views this definition (which,importantly, he never rejects) as negative because it is arrived at theoretically;that is, specula-tive reason requires the possibility of some sort of causation that is not itself determined, but itcan tellus nothingabout howthat causationmight operate. An understandingof the source ofthefreeact (theauthentic selfoperatingunder rational,ratherthan physical,necessity) comesto usthrough pure practicalreason,and is positive inthe sense that itshows usthe mechanicsof freeaction. Kant iscertainly notarguingherethatthereis a wayof thinkingabout liberty that does notinvolve the absence of constraint. He is arguing, in MacCallums terms, that liberty has both afreedom from and a freedom to component. One could apply precisely the same model toHobbes, for whom a river is free from a dam to flow downstream. Hobbess definition would bewholly negative inKantssense if,forsomereason,he knew that itwas possibleto conceiveof anunimpeded river but did not know what would happen to one. On Kants argument aboutnegativity, see Dennis P. Quinn, An Examinationof KantsTreatment of Transcendental Free-dom (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988), esp. 13-23; see also Allison, Kants

Theory of Freedom, 243-45.41. Hobbes, Leviathan, 44.




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42.Ibid.,146. Liberty and Necessity areconsistent; as inthe water, that hath notonly liberty,but a necessity of descending by the Channel; so likewise in the Actions which men voluntarilydoe: which, because they proceed from their will, proceed from liberty ; and yet, because everyact of mans will, and every desire, and inclination proceedeth from some cause, and that fromanother cause, in a continuall chaine, (whose first link is the hand of God the first of all causes,)they proceed from necessity .

43. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cam-bridge University Press, 1998), 127.

44. Ibid., 127-28.45. Martin Hollis cites this view of Cranmers as an instance of positive liberty on the

grounds that it identifies freedom with what it is proper for me to want, rather than what Iwant. See Geuss and Hollis, Freedom as an Ideal, 102.

46. It goes without saying that these two constructions of Cranmers statement cannot besimultaneouslytrue.If freedom is a necessarycondition of Hisservice, thenHis service can-notbe a necessaryconditionof freedom.However, itis certainlypossible fora theoryof freedomto incorporate twodifferent sorts of constraints:externalconstraintsthat can be removedwithoutany activity on the part of the agent, and internal constraints that require some sort of activity(say, His service) in order to be removed.

47. See, for example, G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, ed. and trans. T. M. Knox(Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1942), 155 (257).

48. See, for example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social I.8 in Oevures Compltes,vol. 3, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). See also Patrick Gardiner, Rousseau on Liberty, in Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy, ed.Zbigniew Pelczynski and John Gray (London: Athlone Press, 1984), 83-99.

49. See, for example, Ronald Beiner, Action, Natality and Citizenship: Hannah ArendtsConcept of Freedom, in Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy , esp. 352, 355.See alsoSkinner, A Third Concept of Liberty, 242.

50. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1993), 148.

51. Ibid., 149.

52. Ibid.53. Ibid., 168.54. Ibid., 167.55. Ibid., 153.56. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedomand Government (Oxford, UK: Clar-

endon, 1997), 22.57. Ibid., 51.58. Skinner, A Third Concept of Liberty, 256-57. Skinner closes his essay by suggesting

that he is more comfortable with the following schema: there are two concepts of liberty (onenegative, one positive), and two theories of negative liberty (one about interference, one aboutdomination). See also Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, UK: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998), 85-99.

59. Ibid.,255.60. Note that Pettit himself describes domination as a constraint: The constraint from

which exemption is given is not interference of any sort, just arbitrary interference; Pettit,

Republicanism, 26.61. Introduction, in Liberty, ed. David Miller (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,1991).




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Eric Nelson is a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows, HarvardUniversity, and a fellowof Trinity College, Cambridge. He has published articles on Thomas Mores Utopia and

Miltons politicalprose. His first book, The GreekTraditionin RepublicanThought , wasreleased by Cambridge University Press in February 2004.


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