Liberty

"There was once a display of books somewhere – I think it might have been at the British Academy, a display of books by Fellows. Berlin was the President at the time, and was asked what his most important book was. He said Four Essays on Liberty . I don’t disagree with that. It was first published in 1969, and I produced a considerably expanded edition of it in 2002, simplifying the title from Four Essays On Liberty to Liberty. It contains his principal essays on liberty and also, under the same umbrella, material on pluralism, which was one of his principal ideas: that values are incommensurable, and, associated with that, also on monism, which he’s opposed to – the idea that there’s only one correct way to live life. Monism is exemplified by movements such as Nazism and Communism, which he analyses in the first of the four essays. Liberty very much has the core of his intellectual position in it, the heart of the matter. That could be said to be true, although I believe that his contribution to the idea of pluralism has begun to overtake the idea of the two concepts of liberty. In the academic community, there’s still a lot of interest in the two concepts, which do remain very important. But I think if you ask an intelligent reader today what strikes them about Berlin, they’re more likely to talk about his pluralism. Pluralism is the view that ultimate human values – that is to say, values that we pursue for their own sake, not objectives that we pursue because they contribute to some deeper or more fundamental end – are of their very nature irreducibly distinct, and often in conflict, and cannot be measured against one another, or measured in terms of one super-value in which they can all be cashed out, such as utility – which is what the Utilitarians are supposed to have done. This means that the idea that you can construct a perfect life where all values are harmonised with each other and all make their exactly right contribution to a single perfect way of living life is conceptually incoherent. It just can’t be arrived at. And because this is so, according to him, you have to make room in your political arrangements for many different approaches to life, each of which has just as much claim to be right as the others, rather than imposing top-down a single way of life, as, say, Communists seek to do. And that’s why liberty, but in particular negative liberty – which means that you are not impeded by other people from doing what you want to do or might come to want to do – is so important, because it gives space for the plural ways of life to flourish and doesn’t promote one at the expense of others. It tends to be, yes. Positive liberty isn’t essentially a bad idea. In fact, Berlin is very careful to say that it’s a valid universal human goal when uncorrupted – he’s often misunderstood on this point and treated as a critic of all forms of positive liberty. One of the difficulties is that it’s rather difficult to define positive liberty because he arguably has more than one notion of it. Roughly speaking, though, it’s a matter of who is in charge. Negative liberty is a question of how many doors are open before you, positive liberty is a matter of who decides which ones you go through. The idea is that you want to be in charge yourself – you don’t want other people to be making those decisions for you. But Berlin concentrates his fire on a particular version of positive liberty, namely the view that there are two selves within each of us: there’s the ‘real’, ‘higher’, ‘rational’ self, and the poor benighted empirical self. According to this view, what we want or need is to have the real self in charge. For that, you move on to the idea that the real self can be guided by some higher authority (typically the state) which knows what your ‘true and objective’ needs are much better than you do yourself. And then, by a further step, it becomes possible to say that freedom is a matter of obeying the state. That’s what he calls a ‘monstrous impersonation’, and he has a lot to say against it. It’s a view typified by Rousseau’s claim that it is sometimes right for citizens to be ‘forced to be free.’"