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The Psychological Dangers of Positive Liberty: Reconstructing a Neglected Undercurrent in Isaiah Berlin's “Two Concepts of Liberty”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2014

Gina Gustavsson
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Abstract

Berlin is often taken to have exaggerated his case against positive liberty, since contrary to what he seems to argue, several versions of it do not logically justify coercion. A more historical interpretation of his warnings may save him from this accusation, yet on the other hand suggests his message is of little relevance for contemporary liberalism. In contrast to both these approaches, this essay considers a third and largely neglected aspect of “Two Concepts of Liberty,” that speaks more directly to the challenges facing liberalism today: Berlin's warning that positive liberty invites the specific kind of coercion that parades as liberation, and that it does so according to a psychologically predictable pattern. After reconstructing this undercurrent in Berlin's critique of positive liberty, this essay also considers the relevance of Berlin's warnings to contemporary European debates on banning the Muslim veil in the name of liberation.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 76 , Issue 2 , Spring 2014 , pp. 267 - 291
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2014 

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References

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13 Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 69; Joshua Cherniss, “Berlin's Early Political Thought,” in The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin, 95; Ricciardi, “Berlin on Liberty,” 126.

14 TCL, 178–79.

15 TCL, 212. This reading is also found in Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism, 8–9; Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 17; Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 78.

16 Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 15–16.

17 Berlin, Isaiah, “Introduction,” in Liberty, ed. Hardy, Henry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 179Google Scholar. For an insightful account of these different sides of positive liberty, see Miller, David, editor's introduction to The Liberty Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006)Google Scholar, 10. Berlin, moreover, clearly refers to “individual liberty, in either the ‘negative’ or in the ‘positive’ senses of the word” (TCL, 204). Thus, although he blames positive liberty for being more easily perverted into an idea of freedom as merging one's individual self into “some super-personal entity,” it seems fair to say that he does not identify positive liberty with any collectivist notion. This reading is argued for in further detail in Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 68; and Ricciardi, “Berlin on Liberty,” 132.

18 Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism, 36; Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 188.

19 This reading is also found in Macpherson, “Berlin's division of liberty,” 95; Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism, 104; Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 22; and Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 68–69.

20 Isaiah Berlin, “Introduction,” 32.

21 Ibid. 39 (emphasis added).

22 TCL, 169.

23 TCL, 180–81.

24 TCL, 215.

25 TCL, 180.

26 Zakaras, “Isaiah Berlin's Cosmopolitan Ethics,” 504–7. Cf. Berlin, Isaiah, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Hardy, Henry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 11Google Scholar; Berlin, Isaiah, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. Hardy, Henry (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 49Google Scholar.

27 TCL, 216–17.

28 Christman, “Liberalism and Individual Positive Freedom,” 359; Simhony, “On Forcing Individual to be Free: T. H. Green's Liberal Theory of Positive Freedom,” 305; West, “Spinoza on Positive Freedom,” 296; Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 86.

29 TCL, 179, 181. Berlin, “Introduction, 37.

30 Cf. Macpherson, “Berlin's division of liberty,” 110–11.

31 Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 69–70. The notion of the “inversion thesis” is also used in Ricciardi, “Berlin on Liberty,” 121.

32 Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 84.

33 Ibid., 69.

34 TCL, 167.

35 TCL, 179.

36 Berlin, Isaiah, “Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Nationalism,” in The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History, ed. Hardy, Henry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 237Google Scholar.

37 TCL, 198 (emphasis added).

38 TCL, 207–8 (emphasis added).

39 Berlin, “Introduction,” 31–32.

40 Zakaras, “Isaiah Berlin's Cosmopolitan Ethics,” 515; Müller, “Fear and Freedom,” 59; Zakaras, “A Liberal Pluralism.”

41 Cf. Cherniss, Joshua L., “Isaiah Berlin's Political Ideas: From the Twentieth Century to the Romantic Age,” in Political Ideas in the Romantic Age, ed. Hardy, Henry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Graeme Garrard, “Strange Reversals: Berlin on the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment,” in The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin; Ricciardi, “Berlin on Liberty.”

42 Gray, Isaiah Berlin; Galston, “Value Pluralism and Liberal Political Theory”; Riley, “Interpreting Berlin's Liberalism”; Franco, “The Shapes of Liberal Thought: Oakeshott, Berlin, and Liberalism.”

43 Macfarlane, “On Two Concepts of Liberty,” 79–80; Christman, “Liberalism and Individual Positive Freedom,” 359; West, “Spinoza on Positive Freedom,” 288; Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism, 101–2.

44 His more general concern that, as Galston puts it, “the totalitarian temptation is an enduring feature of the human mind” has often been recognized, however. See Galston, William A., “Moral Pluralism and Liberal Democracy: Isaiah Berlin's Heterodox Liberalism,” Review of Politics 71, no. 1 (2009): 99Google Scholar; and Zakaras, “A Liberal Pluralism,” 86.

45 TCL, 208.

46 TCL, 214.

47 TCL, 216.

48 TCL, 217.

49 As an anonymous reviewer brought to my attention, a monist could of course merely assume that there is one rational ordering of human values, but doubt that there can be any positive access to this knowledge. By repeatedly lumping together monism, certainty, and self-righteousness, Berlin thus neglects this much less comforting version of monism. Cf. Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” 13–14.

50 Note that this differs from the more common interpretation of Berlin as seeing monism as a consequence of positive liberty, which has recently been discussed by Kis, Janos, “Berlin's two concepts of positive liberty,” European Journal of Political Theory 12, no. 1 (2013): 38–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 TCL, 181.

52 TCL,179–80.

53 TCL, 192.

54 Berlin seems to have thought of himself as a pluralistic supporter of positive liberty: Berlin, “Introduction,” 50; Cherniss, “Berlin's Early Political Thought.”

55 TCL, 193.

56 TCL, 213.

57 TCL, 180.

58 Ross, Lee and Ward, Andrew, “Naive Realism in Everyday Life: Implications for Social Conflict and Misunderstanding,” in Values and Knowledge, ed. Reed, Edward, Turiel, Elliot, and Brown, Terrance (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), 110–11Google Scholar. Also see Griffin, Dale W. and Ross, Lee, “Subjective Construal, Social Inference, and Human Misunderstanding,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 4 (New York: Academic Press, 1991), 319–59Google Scholar.

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60 Nickerson, Raymond S., “How we know—and sometimes misjudge—what others know: Imputing one's own knowledge to others,” Psychological Bulletin 125, no. 6 (1999): 739–59Google Scholar; Royzman, Edward B., Cassidy, Kimberly Wright, and Baron, Jonathan, “‘I Know, You Know’: Epistemic Egocentrism in Children and Adults,” Review of General Psychology 7, no. 1 (2003): 38–65Google Scholar; Epley, Nicholas, Keysar, Boaz, Van Boven, Leaf, and Gilovich, Thomas, “Perspective taking as egocentric anchoring and adjustment,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87, no. 3 (2004): 327–39Google Scholar.

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62 TCL, 169.

63 Berlin, “Introduction,” 32.

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68 TCL, 185, 204, 195, 169.

69 TCL, 180–81.

70 Christman, “Liberalism and Individual Positive Freedom,” 354–55; Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism, 101; Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 21.

71 Berlin, “Two Concepts of Freedom: Romantic and Liberal,” 185, 89 (emphasis added). The term “romantic” is of course notoriously difficult to define. I here simply follow Berlin in using it to refer to ideas he associates with early German Romanticism. See Berlin, Isaiah, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

72 Berlin, Roots of Romanticism, 50–51.

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74 Berlin, “Two Concepts of Freedom: Romantic and Liberal,” 201.

75 Ibid., 197.

76 Berlin, “The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will,” 231.

77 Berlin, “Two Concepts of Freedom: Romantic and Liberal,” 201–2.

78 TCL, 169, 70, 79, 75.

79 TCL, 175, 78, 81–82.

80 TCL, 184.

81 TCL, 185.

82 TCL, 198–99.

83 TCL, 199.

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86 Ibid., 63.

87 TCL, 197.

88 Berlin, “Two Concepts of Freedom: Romantic and Liberal,” 202.

89 Zakaras has suggested this in passing, yet no one has yet to my knowledge actually tried to bring together the two (Zakaras, “A Liberal Pluralism,” 94).

90 André Gerin and Eric Raoult, Document no. 2262: Rapport d'information au nom de la mission d'information sur la pratique du port du voile intégral sur le territoire national, Assemblée Nationale, 29 January 2010, 87; retrieved from http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/rap-info/i2262.asp, last accessed on 18 November 2013. All quotes from this document were translated by the author.

91 Ibid., 93.

92 Ibid., 287–88, 291. He also raised other concerns, for example that the unveiled majority needed protection from the “symbolic violence” inherent in the full veil (ibid., 286).

93 Ibid., 291.

94 Ibid., 286.

95 Ibid., 291.

96 Ibid.

97 Ibid.

98 Ibid., 287. Also see his insistence on the face as the expressive mirror of the soul (ibid., 286).

99 Ibid., 98, 118. Also see the reasoning of the Sufi poet and intellectual Abdelwahab Meddeb, cited at116–17.

100 For a lucid account of Schlegel's sometimes opaque critique of Kant on this matter, see Gorodeisky, Keren, “(Re)encountering Individuality: Schlegel's Romantic Imperative as a Response to Nihilism,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 54, no. 6 (2011): 576–79Google Scholar.

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102 Baehr, Peter and Gordon, Daniel, “From the headscarf to the burqa: The role of social theorists in shaping laws against the veil,” Economy and Society 42, no. 2 (2013): 253, 255Google Scholar.

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