How did negative liberty become a liberal ideal?

ABSTRACT

This article aims to situate Isaiah Berlin’s influential conceptualization of the liberal idea of liberty in negative terms in the history of political ideologies, thus contributing to the understanding of the development of liberalism as an ideological tradition. More specifically, the article contributes to the understanding of two central themes in the ideological history of negative liberty. First, it shows that negative liberty has repeatedly served as an ideological weapon against radical democratic politics, while also pointing to an important shift in the manner of its employment: between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, we argue, negative liberty had turned from a deflationary device associated with excessive democracy into a moderate ideal endangered by totalitarian democracy. The second theme that we highlight and account for is the late development of the association of the liberal conception of liberty with the idea of negativity.

Acknowledgments

Yiftah Elazar would like to acknowledge the support of ISF (Israel Science Foundation) grant 1970/16.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Henry Hardy (Ed.) Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 166–217.

2. Joshua Cherniss and Henry Hardy, ‘Isaiah Berlin’, in Edward N. Zalta (Ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), URL= https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/berlin/.

3. On Berlin’s pluralism, see Joshua L. Cherniss, A Mind and Its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Gerald Crowder, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2004); Graeme Garrard, ‘The counter-enlightenment liberalism of Isaiah Berlin’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 2 (1997), pp. 281–296. On the cold war context, see Jan-Werner Müller, ‘Fear and Freedom: On “Cold War Liberalism”’, European Journal of Political Theory, 7 (2008), pp. 45–64.

4. Ian Shapiro and Alicia Steinmetz, ‘Negative Liberty and the Cold War’, in Joshua L. Cherniss and Steven B. Smith (Eds) The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 192–211 at pp. 192–193.

5. See, for example, Ian Carter, A Measure of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Matthew H. Kramer, The Quality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Gerald C. MacCallum, Jr., ‘Negative and Positive Freedom’, The Philosophical Review, 76 (1967), pp. 312–334; Felix E. Oppenheim, Dimensions of Freedom: An Analysis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1961).

6. See, for example, John Gray, ‘On Negative and Positive Liberty’, Political Studies, 28 (1980), pp. 507–528; John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971).

7. See Müller, ‘Fear and Freedom’, op. cit., Ref. 3.

8. Berlin, ‘Two Concepts’, op. cit., Ref. 1, pp. 176–178.

9. The manifesto of the contextualist revolution is Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, 8 (1969), pp. 3–53.

10. David Armitage, ‘What’s the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée’, History of European Ideas, 38 (2012), pp. 493–507 at pp. 496–499. See also Darin M. McMahon, ‘The Return of the History of Ideas?’ in Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn (Eds) Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 13–31.

11. For some recent histories and genealogies of liberty, see Riccardo Baldissone, Farewell to Freedom: A Western Genealogy of Liberty (London: University of Westminster Press, 2018); David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan, A Brief History of Liberty (Chichester, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Quentin Skinner, ‘A Genealogy of Liberty’ (The Harry E. Camp Memorial Lecture, Stanford University, 27 October 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjQ-W2-fKUs.

12. Berlin, ‘Two Concepts’, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 170, footnote 3.

13. Baldissone, Farewell to Freedom, op. cit., Ref. 11, pp. 65–72.

14. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen [1642], Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 111.

15. Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 109.

16. Thomas Hobbes, Of Liberty and Necessity [1645], in Thomas Hobbes and John Bramhall, Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity, Vere Chappell (Ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 15–42 at p. 38; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [1651] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 91, 145–147. See Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, op. cit., Ref. 15, pp. 124–131.

17. Hobbes, Leviathan, op. cit., Ref. 16, pp. 145–154.

18. Despite developments in Hobbes’s views on liberty, this is a consistent theme in his work. See Thomas Hobbes, (1640), The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic [1640] (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1994), pp. 173–174; Hobbes, On the Citizen, op. cit., Ref. 14, pp. 115–116; Hobbes, Leviathan, op. cit., Ref. 16, pp. 90, 147, 231.

19. Hobbes, Leviathan, ibid., pp. 149–150, 225–226.

20. Plato, Republic, 557b, 562b-564a.

21. Hobbes, Leviathan, op. cit., Ref. 16, pp. 149–150.

22. Hobbes, ibid., p. 3.

23. Hobbes, ibid., pp. 225–226.

24. Quentin Skinner, ‘States and the Freedom of Citizens’, in Quentin Skinner and Bo Stråth (Eds) States and Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 11–27, pp. 18–19.

25. Jeremy Bentham, The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 1: 1752–76, Timothy L. S. Sprigge (Ed.) (London: Athlone Press, 1968), pp. 301–311.

26. Berlin, ‘Two Concepts’, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 170, footnote 3.

27. The first writer to argue that liberty is a ‘negative term implying no more than a denial of restraint and force’ was the early utilitarian Abraham Tucker. Philip Pettit has suggested that Tucker’s use of the Hobbesian notion of freedom may have influenced Bentham and William Paley. See Abraham Tucker, The Light of Nature Pursued (London: T. Payne, 1768), pp. 141–142; Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 44, footnote 6.

28. The primary scholarly divide has been between an ‘authoritarian’ school of interpretation and a more ‘liberal’ or ‘individualist’ interpretation. On the interpretive controversy, see James E. Crimmins, ‘Contending Interpretations of Bentham’s Utilitarianism’, Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 29 (1996), pp. 751–777. The most comprehensive study of Bentham’s idea of liberty remains Douglas G. Long, Bentham on Liberty: Jeremy Bentham’s Idea of Liberty in Relation to his Utilitarianism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977).

29. See, in particular, F. Rosen, Thinking About Liberty: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at University College London, 29 November 1990 (London: University College London); Frederick Rosen, ‘The Origin of Liberal Utilitarianism: Jeremy Bentham and Liberty’, in Richard Bellamy (Ed.) Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 58–70; P. J. Kelly, Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 71–103.

30. Bentham Papers at University College London [henceforth: UCL] LXIX, 55–56. See also UCL C, 153, 156, 167; Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, John Bowring (Ed.) 11 vols. (Edinburgh and London: William Tait, 1838–1843), vol. 2, p. 302.

31. UCL LXIX, 158; UCL XCVI, 63, 110; Jeremy Bentham, A Comment on the Commentaries and A Fragment on Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), pp. 491–492; Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 10, p. viii. On this issue, we are following the interpretation of Bentham’s theory of liberty in Yiftah Elazar, ‘Liberty as a Caricature: Bentham’s Antidote to Republicanism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 76 (2015), pp. 417–439.

32. [Jeremy Bentham] ‘Hermes’, ‘To the Gentleman Who Signs Himself IGNORAMUS’, The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 1 August 1776.

33. UCL LXIX, 60, 62.

34. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller and Harold S. Stone (Trans and Eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 154–155.

35. Montesquieu, ibid., pp. 187–188.

36. Adam Ferguson, Remarks on a Pamphlet Lately Published by Dr. Price (London: T. Cadell, 1776), pp. 3–7. See Yiftah Elazar, ‘Adam Ferguson on Modern Liberty and the Absurdity of Democracy’, History of Political Thought, 35 (2014), pp. 768–787.

37. Montesquieu, Spirit, op. cit., Ref. 34, pp. 155–56.

38. On the neo-Roman theory of free states, see Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–58.

39. In Britain, for example, the patriot crypto-Tory Viscount Bolingbroke argued: ‘Is government incompatible with a full enjoyment of liberty? By no means. But because popular liberty without government will degenerate into licence, as government without sufficient liberty will degenerate into tyranny, they are mutually necessary to each other, good government to support legal liberty, and legal liberty to preserve good government’. Bolingbroke, ‘The Idea of a Patriot King’, in Political Writings, David Armitage (Ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 217–394 at pp. 243–244. See also Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Select Works of Edmund Burke, vol. 2 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), pp. 92–93, 361–362.

40. James Gillray, ‘Britannia between Scylla and Charybdis’ (London: Hannah Humphrey, 1793).

41. John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, vol. III (London: C. Dilly & John Stockdale, 1788), p. 291. See also Annelien de Dijn, ‘Republicanism and Democracy: The Tyranny of the Majority in Eighteenth-Century Political Debate’, in Yiftah Elazar and Geneviève Rousselière (Eds) Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 59–74.

42. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: The University of North California Press, 1969), p. 609.

43. K. Steven Vincent, ‘Benjamin Constant, the French Revolution, and the Origins of French Romantic Liberalism’, French Historical Studies, 23 (2000), pp. 607–637 at p. 622.

44. Benjamin Constant, Mélanges de littérature et de politique (Paris: Pichon et Didier, 1829), p. vi; George Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville and French Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 2.

45. Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 69.

46. E.g. Rosenblatt, ibid., pp. 71–72.

47. Benjamin Constant, ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns’, in Biancamaria Fontana (Ed.) Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 307–328, p. 318.

48. Roger Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).

49. Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections, J. P. Mayer and A. P. Kerr (Eds) George Lawrence (Trans.) (London: Macdonald, 1970), p. 65.

50. Alexis de Tocqueville, Letter to Eugène Stoffels, 24 July 1836, in The Tocqueville Reader: A Life in Letters and Politics, O. Zunz and A.S. Kahan (Eds) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 152–153, p. 152.

51. François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).

52. James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); William David Jones, The Lost Debate: German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

53. A. D. Lindsay, The Modern Democratic State (London: Oxford University Press, 1943), p. 14.

54. On this point, see Duncan Bell, ‘What Is Liberalism?’, Political Theory, 42 (2014), pp. 682–715.

55. Bertrand de Jouvenel, Power: The Natural History of Its Growth (London: The Batchworth Press, 1952), p. 237.

56. Jouvenel, ibid., p. 235.

57. E. H. Carr, Democracy in International Affairs (Nottingham: University College, 1945), pp. 7, 9.

58. Carr, ibid., p. 6. According to Carr, ‘long before the adoption of Marxism as the official ideology, Russian thinkers had pondered with sympathy the Hegelian dictum that freedom consists in the knowledge and willing acceptance of the laws of necessity […] true freedom can be conceived only as collective freedom for the largest class, i.e., the workers, who are free where no man is compelled to work for another individual for the latter’s profit’ (p. 13). See also Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

59. J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1952).

60. J. S. Mill, ‘On Liberty’ [1859], in On Liberty: With, The Subjection of Women; and Chapters on Socialism, Stefan Collini (Ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 1–115, p. 5.

61. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, Mary J. Gregor (Ed. and Trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 41–108, p. 94.

62. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, T.N. Knox (Ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 227.

63. T.H. Green, ‘On the Different Senses of “Freedom” as Applied to Will and to the Moral Progress of Man’, in Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Writings, Paul Harris and John Morrow (Eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 228–249.

64. Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State (London: Macmillan and Co., 1930), pp. 116–119.

65. T. H. Green, ‘Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract’, in Collected Works of T.H. Green, vol. 3 (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997), pp. 365–386 at p. 372.

66. Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). See, L.T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (London: Oxford University Press, 1911); J.A. Hobson, The Social Problem (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1901).

67. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan: Or Man, Society, Civilization, and Barbarism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942). See also Guido de Ruggiero, History of European Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927).

68. L. T. Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1918).

69. On this, see Quentin Skinner, ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 117 (2001), pp. 239–243; Cherniss, A Mind and Its Time, op. cit., Ref. 3, p. 156.

70. See Cherniss, ibid., p. 160.

71. Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957).

72. Adam Müller, Elemente der Staatskunst [1809], vol. 1 (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1922), pp. 313–314.

73. Karl Mannheim, Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 90–95.

74. Dorothy Fosdick, What Is Liberty? A Study in Political Theory (London: Harper & Brothers, 1939), pp. 3–8.

75. Fosdick, ibid., pp. 25–28.

76. Fosdick, ibid., pp. 40–71. While Fosdick’s work can and should be read in the historical context of a ‘centrist’ liberal critique of the anti-liberal right and left, she does not claim that the core meaning of liberty is exclusively liberal. According to her account, both the core meaning and the deviations can be used by liberals and anti-liberals alike.

77. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), pp. 228–231, 257.

78. Arthur Schopenhauer, Prize Essay on the Freedom of Will, in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, Christopher Janaway (Ed. and Trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 31–112, p. 32.

79. Harold J. Laski, Liberty in the Modern State (London: Faber & Faber, 1930), p. 22.

80. Christopher Brooke, ‘Isaiah Berlin and the Origins of the “Totalitarian” Rousseau’, in Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson (Eds) Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 89–98.

81. Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: Georg Allen & Unwin, 1961), p. 755.

82. Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein’s Challenge to Marx (New York: Collier Books, 1962), pp. 141–150.

83. Popper, The Open Society, op. cit., Ref. 77, pp. 274–275.

84. Cherniss, A Mind and Its Time, op. cit., Ref. 3, pp. 23–24, 63.

85. Judith N. Shklar, ‘The Liberalism of Fear’, in Nancy Rosenblum (Ed.) Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 21–39.

86. Müller, ‘Fear and Freedom’, op. cit., Ref. 3, pp. 55–57.

87. Eric Mack, ‘Libertarianism and Individual Rights’, in Thomas Christiano and John Christman (Eds) Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 121–136; Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988); Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974); Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1973). For a more comprehensive view of modern libertarianism, see Jason Brennan, Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Peter Vallentyne and Bas van der Vossen, ‘Libertarianism’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/libertarianism/.

88. Ronald W. Reagan, The 49^th Presidential Inauguration. 20 January 1981, URL = https://www.reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/speeches/1981/12081a.htm.

89. On Tea Party ideology, see Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2010).

90. Berlin, ‘Two Concepts’, op. cit., Ref. 1, pp. 176–178.

91. Gerald C. MacCallum, Jr., ‘Negative and Positive Freedom’, op. cit., Ref. 5, pp. 314–319; Skinner, ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’, op. cit., Ref. 69, pp. 237–268.