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Abstract
Isaiah Berlin distinguished between negative liberty, which is freedom from external coercion, and positive liberty, the freedom to master oneself. But the schema is too simple. Adam Smith thought that God had harmoniously arranged the world in such a way that the freedom provided by our negative liberty tended to redound to the public good. Mill, worried about the deleterious effects of public ignorance, accorded elites a prominent role in ensuring that negative liberty would lead to positive results. More recently, libertarian paternalists, such as Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, have argued that research on biases and heuristics demonstrates the need for psychologically informed elites to direct negative liberty toward positive ends by crafting better “choice contexts.” In these thinkers one can discern a third version of liberty, where negative liberty is not an end in itself but a means, however insufficient, to positive outcomes.
Acknowledgments
the author of Optimizing the German Workforce (Berghahn Books, 2010), thanks Stacy Abramson, Donald Beahm, Jeffrey Friedman, Johanna Meskill, Les Silverman, and Brian Stipelman for comments on earlier drafts.
Notes
1. Toward the end of his essay titled “A Third Concept of Liberty,” for example, Skinner (Citation2002, 261–62) tries to define what a “concept” means, then subverts his title by claiming that there are two concepts of liberty—positive and negative—and two “theories” of negative liberty: one focused on “non-interference” and the other on “non-domination.” Pettit (Citation1993) originally categorized neo-republican freedom as part of a “resilient non-interference” (i.e. negative liberty), but since Pettit Citation1997 he began making the distinction between liberal “non-interference” and neo-Republican “non-domination,” the latter of which, he believed, contained elements of both negative and positive liberty. Tellingly, Ian Carter (Citation1999, 238–39) criticized Pettit's and Skinner's distinction as merely one that pointed to “empirical conditions” supportive of negative liberty, not one that defined a true, and presumably much more interesting, conceptual difference. Skinner (Citation2002, 262n123) responded by insisting on his focus on conceptual questions: “I am no longer arguing simply about the conditions necessary for maximizing negative liberty, but about how to construe the concept itself.” Also, see Nelson Citation2005 and John Christman's (2005) critique of it for being, in part, overly focused on conceptual questions.
2. See Skinner Citation2002, 265, to this effect as well.
3. As mentioned in note 1, Pettit later changed his argument and he and Skinner now resolutely deny that neo-republican “non-domination” is a means to bolster “non-interference.” Skinner (Citation2002, 262) goes so far as to claim that the two are “rival and incommensurable.” Many critics disagree. See Carter Citation1999 and Larmore Citation2001.
4. Smith frequently avoids ought statements and explicit value judgments, and instead uses empirical “is” statements for the sake of evaluation.
5. There are numerous similarities to today's influential “heuristics and biases” school of psychology. See Kahneman Citation2011 and Thaler and Sunstein Citation2008, discussed below.
6. The futile ambitions of the poor man's son may, in fact, unintentionally contribute to a desirable societal outcome.
7. Smith places considerable emphasis on self-command. See Smith Citation1759, 145, 237, for example. His theory of self-command is largely an internalized form of social control.
8. However, Muller Citation1993 rightly draws the distinction between Smith's ethics and those of conventional utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham. Further complicating assessments of Smith's ethical theory is his commingling of normative preferences with at least superficially empirical statements, to which we have already alluded.
9. Similarly, Galileo and Newton thought that God was ultimately responsible for the natural laws governing the world. This religious or metaphysical belief, though it may no longer be shared by most physicists, in no way diminishes Galileo's and Newton's role in the scientific revolution, just as Smith's deism does not diminish his seminal role for modern economics and social science.
10. In fact, Smith refers so often to both the world's overall order and the power or being behind that order that his theology can hardly be said to be hidden. While the majority of Smith commentators have ascribed to him a “natural theology” or deism, a few scholars have cast doubt on the theological framework of his thought. See Rothschild Citation2002.
11. See also the important footnote in Smith Citation1759, 58–60.
12. See, for example, Smith's account of Europe's “unnatural” path to opulence, in Smith 1776, Book III.
13. At other points Smith (Citation1776, 47) adds to this distinction between “necessaries” and “conveniences” a third term, “amusements.”
14. Amartya Sen (Citation1999), partly inspired by Smith, has similarly argued that the increased capability or capacity brought about by wealth is a basic form of freedom.
15. Mill was one of the earliest advocates of the kind of critical rationalism elaborated in the twentieth century by Karl Popper.
16. The tension between these two processes—convergence by Darwinian competition or self-sustaining, healthy divergence—also characterizes Mill's remarks on the growth of knowledge. See Mill Citation1859, 49–50.
17. Along with his contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville, Mill was one of the earliest critics of mass society, anticipating Nietzsche, Weber, Ortega y Gasset, and others.
18. Berlin (Citation1969, 128) compounds his own error by wrongly claiming that the two notions are both “liberal views.”
19. That the “connection between [freedom and progress] is, at best, empirical,” as Berlin (Citation1969, 128) says, may be the case. This was not Mill's position, however.
20. In The Logic of the Moral Sciences, Mill (Citation1843) suggests that the main cause of progress, which he thinks will continue—“saving occasional and temporary exceptions” (ibid., 103)—lies in “the speculative faculties of mankind” (ibid., 115).
21. In decrying the current weight of conformity, Mill (Citation1859, 68) goes so far as to claim that the common man's “nature” can be erased: “Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved.” As much as Smith's theory is based on empathy and mutual adjustment, he never ascribed such strength to social influence.
22. Cass Sunstein served the Democratic administration of Barack Obama from 2009 to 2012 as head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and the Obama administration also consulted with Richard Thaler. In Britain David Cameron's Conservative government has lavished praise on Thaler and Sunstein's book Nudge (Citation2008).