The Meaning and Value of Freedom: Berlin contra Arendt

Abstract

This essay considers the theoretical disagreement between Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt on the meaning and value of freedom. Berlin thinks that negative liberty as non-interference is commendable because it is attuned to the implication of value pluralism that man is a choice-making creature and cannot be otherwise. By contrast, the political freedom to act is in Arendt’s view a more fulfilling ideal because it is only in political action that man’s potentiality is actualised, his unique identity manifested and his being-in-the-world-with-others reaffirmed. What lies beneath the two thinkers’ dispute over the most satisfactory meaning of freedom, I argue, is a deeper disagreement over human nature itself. The implication of this analysis for the contemporary debate between pluralist liberals and their agonistic critics is briefly discussed in conclusion.

I would like to thank Roger Crisp, Chikako Endo, Henry Hardy, Mark Lilla and Samuel Moyn for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay. Quotations from Berlin’s unpublished papers are used with the permission of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust.

Notes

1. Berlin to Morton White, 6 February 1959, in Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, ed. Henry Hardy and Jennifer Homes (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009), 676. More such remarks will be found in the forthcoming third and fourth volumes of Berlin’s collected letters.

2. Berlin to “Izzy” [i.e. Isidor F. Stone], 13 February 1975. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Berlin 209, fols. 262–3, 263.

3. Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), 253.

4. Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes, in Berlin, Enlightening, 430.

5. Berlin to William Phillips, 7 May 1963, in Berlin, Enlightening, 430.

6. Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Phoenix Press, 2000), 82.

7. The hostility was one-way because the few comments Arendt made on Berlin show no sign of emotion, positive or negative. See Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1970), 27; Arendt, Denktagebuch: 1950 bis 1973, Volume 2, ed. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (München: Piper, 2002), 654; Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975, ed. Carol Brightman (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995), 254; and Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence, 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1992), 535.

8. See, for example, Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, new ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), li; Dana R. Villa, “Hannah Arendt: From Philosophy to Politics,” in Political Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Authors and Arguments, ed. Catherine H. Zuckert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 119; and David Caute, Isaac & Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 262–72.

9. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), revised and reprinted in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 166–217; see also his “Introduction” to Four Essays on Liberty (1969), also reprinted in Liberty, pp. 3–54; hereafter page references to “Two Concepts” and to the “Introduction” are cited in the text; Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” (1961) in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 143–71; hereafter cited in the text.

10. There are some notable, though inadequate, exceptions to this rule. They are Bernard R. Crick, Freedom as Politics (Sheffield, UK: University of Sheffield, 1966); Hannah F. Pitkin, “Are Freedom and Liberty Twins?” Political Theory 16 (1988): 523–52; and Iván Zoltán Dénes, “Personal Liberty and Political Freedom: Four Interpretations,” European Journal of Political Theory 7 (2008): 81–98.

11. Jahanbegloo, Conversations, 41.

12. Berlin and Arendt use “he” to refer to “he or she” and often use “man” to mean “human.” This essay adopts their terminology for the sake of consistency.

13. I take this to be Berlin’s final word on this issue, but there is room for different interpretations. See David Miller, “Constraints on Freedom,” in The Liberty Reader, ed. David Miller (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 183–99.

14. C. B. Macpherson, “Berlin’s Division of Liberty,” in Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 102.

15. Mario Ricciardi, “Berlin on Liberty,” in The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin, ed. George Crowder and Henry Hardy (New York: Prometheus Books, 2007), 136.

16. Ricciardi, “Berlin on Liberty,” 137.

17. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 146. The similarity between Berlin’s negative liberty and Hobbes’s “liberty or freedom properly understood” in Leviathan is often overstated. See Charles Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?” in Philosophical Papers, Volume 2: Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 212–29; and Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

18. Berlin used the term “liberal” instead of “negative” (and “romantic” instead of “positive”) during the early 1950s, but he changed his terminology by 1958 when he presented “Two Concepts of Liberty” as a lecture. See Isaiah Berlin, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

19. Michael Kenny, “Isaiah Berlin’s Contribution to Modern Political Theory,” Political Studies 48 (2000): 1037.

20. Isaiah Berlin and Polanowska-Sygulska, Unfinished Dialogue (New York: Prometheus Books, 2006), 121.

21. Isaiah Berlin and Steven Lukes, “Isaiah Berlin in Conversation with Steven Lukes,” Salmagundi 120 (1998): 92–93.

22. Isaiah Berlin, “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life,” in Liberty, 218–51.

23. Berlin recounts his meetings with these and other Russian artists on several occasions, including in Isaiah Berlin, “Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956,” in Personal Impressions, ed. Henry Hardy, 2d ed. (London: Pimlico, 1998), 198–254.

24. This aspect of Berlin’s thought is highlighted in John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (London: Harper Collins, 1995).

25. Berlin and Lukes, “Isaiah Berlin,” 101, emphasis added.

26. Jeremy Waldron, “Arendt’s Constitutional Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana R. Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 201–19.

27. This is why Tim Gray’s analysis of Arendt’s political freedom as a “status” conception is inadequate. Tim Gray, Freedom (Basingstoke, UK: McMillan, 1991), 46–50.

28. The prime example of the mid-twentieth-century literature on political culture is Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956). I am not suggesting that this body of work directly influenced Arendt.

29. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 146.

30. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2d ed. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 52.

31. Arendt, The Human Condition, 7.

32. Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

33. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 8.

34. Quentin Skinner, “Two Concepts of Citizenship,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 55 (1993): 411.

35. Arendt, On Revolution, 279.

36. See Skinner, “Two Concepts of Citizenship,” 415–16.

37. Arendt, On Revolution, 279.

38. Dana R. Villa, Public Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 411.

39. Arendt, On Revolution, 218.

40. Quentin Skinner, “A Third Concept of Liberty,” Proceedings of the British Academy 117 (2002), 242. See Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?”; and Thomas Hill Green, “Lecture on ‘Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract’,” in Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Writings, ed. Paul Harris and John Morrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 194–212.

41. Green, “Lecture,” 199.

42. See Villa, Public Freedom, 331.

43. Arendt, The Human Condition, 10–11, 193.

44. Waldron, “Arendt’s Constitutional Politics,” 201–2.

45. For an overview of this conception of politics, see John G. Gunnell, “The Genealogy of American Pluralism: From Madison to Behavioralism,” International Political Science Review/Revue internationale de science politique 17 (1996): 253–65.

46. Arendt, The Human Condition, 176.

47. Arendt, The Human Condition, 97, 246.

48. See Benhabib, Reluctant Modernism, 109–10.

49. Arendt, The Human Condition, 176–77.

50. Berlin to Bernard Crick, 29 March 1966. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Berlin 173, fols. 116–19. See also Berlin’s published criticism of Crick’s view in “Introduction,” 34–35.

51. Berlin to Martin Peretz, 22 November 1974. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Berlin 208, fol. 202.

52. Two interviews, published during Berlin’s lifetime, are notable exceptions to this rule. See Jahanbegloo, Conversations, 81–85; and Berlin and Lukes, “Isaiah Berlin,” 107–8.

53. See, for example, Hannah F. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blog: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998).

54. Berlin to Crick, fol. 118.

55. Isaiah Berlin, “The Birth of Greek Individualism,” in Liberty, 287–321.

56. Berlin, “Greek Individualism,” 304.

57. Arendt, The Human Condition, 41.

58. Berlin, “Greek Individualism,” 321.

59. Berlin, “Greek Individualism,” 321.

60. Arendt, The Human Condition, 41.

61. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). For an insightful discussion of Berlin’s value pluralism and its relationship to Rawls’s “fact of pluralism,” see Peter Lassman, Pluralism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).

62. See, for example, Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005); and James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

63. Chantal Mouffe, “The Limits of John Rawls’s Pluralism,” Politics, Philosophy and Economics 4 (2005): 226.

64. See, for example, Mouffe, On the Political; Julia Skorupska, “Liberal Dilemmas and the Concept of Politics,” Journal of Political Ideologies 13 (2008): 297–320; and William A. Galston, “Realism in Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Theory 9 (2010): 385–411.

65. See Eric Nelston, “Liberty: One Concept Too Many?” Political Theory 33 (2005): 58–78.

66. The term “unfoundational” was proposed by Joshua Cohen in “Minimalism About Human Rights: The Most We Can Hope For?” The Journal of Political Philosophy 12 (2004): 190–213. As for anti-foundationalism, see, for example, Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2d ed. (London: Verso, 2001).