Why is positive liberty deemed to be so dangerous?

To put it baldly, totalitarianism –

fascism and in particular Communism - is the spectre, with apologies to Marx and
originality, that haunts this essay and concepts of positive liberty in general. As
Charles Taylor says: “When people attack positive theories of freedom, they generally
have some Left totalitarian theory in mind, according to which freedom resides
exclusively in exercising collective control over one’s destiny in a classless society.”
Berlin, of course, refers explicitly to the context of the Cold War at various stages of
the essay, giving what I as something of a historical materialist would regard as a
slightly and slightly ironically Hegelian view of the role of ideology in that geo-
political struggle – perhaps unsurprisingly for a political philosopher and historian of
ideas. However, even Marxists, as Berlin points out, have to recognise that ideas do
have some importance in history – after all Marx called on philosophers to change the
world and spoke of the weapon of critique becoming the critique of weapons, and
probably no philosopher succeeded in this regard as much as Marx himself, for better
or, mostly it has to be said, for worse.

Nevertheless, while ideas and ideology, discourse and propaganda do have causal
force in history, I’m not so sure that Berlin gives a persuasive account as to why
positive conceptions of liberty should be deemed dangerous. For a start I don’t find it
entirely clear what exactly Berlin means by positive liberty. To be fair, this is partly
because Berlin writes as an intellectual historian as much or more than as a
philosopher – he therefore seeks to track the evolution of the concept of positive
liberty, rather than proposing a coherent or conceptually defensible definition of it.
Taylor identifies positive liberty with collectivism, that is the belief, as he puts it, that
“freedom resides at least in part in collective control over the common life.” Clearly
collectivism plays a highly significant role in Berlin’s history of positive liberty, but it
doesn’t seem to be quite identical to it. John Gray identifies positive conceptions of
liberty with conceptions of freedom as autonomy, referring for example to Kant and
Mill having “positive conceptions of liberty as autonomy”. “[T]he subject of On
Liberty,” Gray says,” is not the restraint of negative liberty by legal coercion but the
curbing of individual autonomy by the ‘moral coercion’ or an invasive public
opinion.” It certainly seems true that Mill’s concern was the autonomy of the
individual, but if this puts him in the positive liberty camp it doesn’t seem to be the
same as the one Charles Taylor deals with, since Mill was hardly a collectivist. He
supported representative government only as an instrument for the protection of the
liberty of the individual, not as a substitute or equivalent for it.

The reason for this confusion is fairly simple. Berlin at first formulates positive liberty
in terms of autonomy – “The freedom which consists in being one’s own master” he
calls it. And then he claims that this positive conception of freedom, though it seems,
as he acknowledges, no more than the other side of the coin to negative liberty, is
especially vulnerable to evolving, through some process of what we might call
conceptual mission creep, into the collective concept of freedom dealt with by Taylor.
Effectively, Berlin seems to be relying on a slippery slope argument. But of course
slippery slope arguments are, in terms of logical precedent, themselves slippery slopes
– once you rely on one you are forever vulnerable to having them used against you.
So it won’t surprise you in a few moments when I use Berlin’s argument against
positive freedom to damage his argument for negative freedom.
But first let me briefly describe the particular slippery slope Berlin sees positive
liberty sliding down. Firstly he refers to “the independent momentum which the
metaphor of self-mastery acquired”. This produced a kind of dualistic ontology
characterised by internal antagonism within the individual between will and instinct,
rationality versus desire, the real autonomous self against the empirical self
imprisoned by his base desires, with freedom – that is self-mastery – seen as
consisting in the rule of the better angels of one’s nature. If Hume saw reason as a
slave to the passions, the positive libertarians represented a slave revolt. One might
also appeal here to Freudian terms of id and ego, though interestingly in Freud’s
account the mastering of the instinctual id by the rational ego, while a welcome
victory for civilisation, was in fact a disciplining of rather than a liberation for the
individual. “Civilisation, he said, overcomes the dangerous aggressivity of the
individual, by weakening him, disarming him and setting up an internal authority to
watch over him, like a garrison in a conquered town.” I think this is a sentiment that
some of the thinkers Berlin profiles in his Counter-Enlightenment essay would agree
with, and certainly protest against.

From the divided self it is a short hop skip and jump, so Berlin tells us, to a
conception of the self as a collectivity – nation, class, church etc. – and from there to a
conception of freedom as the rule of the rational and the suppression of the irrational
or insufficiently rational. And there you have it: from On Liberty to the Origins of
Totalitarianism in three easy steps! Well, as you can tell, I’m not sure I find it very
convincing. Of course it’s important to remember that Berlin is not claiming that these
are logical steps that follow ineluctably from the initial positive conception of liberty,
rather he makes the empirical claim that positive and negative liberty “developed in
divergent directions”. But why shouldn’t it have been the case that proponents of
negative liberty, relying on a monistic ontology where only external restraints on
action were deemed to threaten freedom, took this as an analogy for society as a
whole, thus ruling out the possibility of internal conflict and dissent as authoritarian
regimes legitimised themselves by claiming that freedom was intact so long as the
nation and its sovereignty were successfully defended from threats from outside. Etc
etc. And indeed Berlin explicitly acknowledges that such hocus pocus can be
performed for the negative concept of liberty as well, though he still maintains that
the metaphor of self-mastery leaves positive freedom especially vulnerable to the
split-personality theme. Again, this seems weak to me, and weak in just the way I
would expect from an excessively ideas-driven theory of history.

This isn’t to say that ideas can’t be in some sense dangerous. Indeed it seems to me
that any idea that genuinely did claim that freedom just is conformity with rationality
as interpreted by the Party or the Leader would be potentially dangerous, given certain
other, real-world conditions. And I would myself be rather suspicious of definitions of
freedom normatively grounded at anything other than the individual level. In other
words, like the negative libertarians I don’t think “collective freedom” is likely to be a
very meaningful or coherent concept. And again, I can see its dangers too. The point
is that conceptualising freedom as autonomy needn’t go down these roads.

Indeed when we examine negative liberty, I contend that it is difficult to come up with
a convincing version of it that does not amount to a theory of autonomy. Joseph Raz,
for example, supports negative liberty as one necessary but insufficient constituent of
autonomy. The intention of negative libertarians – I mean those who defend negative
liberty conceptually rather than normatively, it is important to remember this
distinction, especially with regard to Berlin – the intention of neg libertarians such as
Berlin seems to be to defeat tendentious and tautological definitions of freedom that
end up denying that actions that plainly restrict freedom in fact do so. But someone
like Raz will say, rather than the old Marxist game of decrying the fakery of
bourgeois freedoms – and there is I think a certain amount of fakery in bourgeois
freedom as I will indicate in a moment – someone like Raz will say that negative
freedom is inadequate, that it only expresses some of the value that people place in the
term “freedom.” And as we have already seen, JS Mill, who seems as far removed as
could be from the totalitarian temptation, in fact turns out to be a theorist of
autonomy.

I think the real problem with autonomy, which is linked to the fact that it is not as
restricted in its concerns as is negative liberty, is not the conceptual mission creep
I’ve mentioned, what Berlin calls “sleights-of-hand”, but rather the problems that
arise when one poses the question: How are we to know when a person is acting
autonomously? Answering this question requires us to consider a complicated set of
problems related to non-observable internal limitations on the choices and courses of
action available to the individual, limitations which although internal may
nevertheless have external sources, in particular in the form of relations of
domination. Such limitations upon autonomy, whether they can be attributed to the
actions of other people or not, may include things like ignorance (in the most literal
sense i.e. a lack of information), illiteracy, ill-health, addiction, false beliefs irrational
fears and so on. Clearly establishing what it is to behave autonomously will indeed
require, just as Berlin suggests, some theory of human nature, an ontology that can
serve as a guide as to what exactly autonomous individuals might look like. And such
a theory may well involve some criterion of rationality (though perhaps endogenous
rather than objective). But all this is entirely compatible with the continued
conceptualisation of freedom as an individual rather than collective experience.

And we only need look at Berlin’s footnote to see that negative liberty poses its own
questions…