by Phil Parvin
Freedom as a protected private sphere vs. freedom as political or community participation
The third and final distinction between positive and negative liberty understands negative liberty as dependent upon the individual having her own private sphere, protected from state (and other) interference, while positive liberty is dependent on the individual actively participating in community or political life.
This distinction associates negative liberty with what Benjamin Constant called the ‘liberty of the moderns’ and positive liberty with what he called the ‘liberty of the ancients’ (Constant 1819). The liberty of the moderns is the idea that freedom is about establishing a private sphere in which individuals are able to live their lives on the basis of their conscience, without interference from other people or the state. Liberalism, for example, is grounded in the claim that it is not the business of the state or anyone else to tell individuals how to live or what to believe. Thus John Locke argued that the liberal state should not seek to impose any particular way of life on its members, but should instead establish a regime of toleration, allowing all members of society to hold their own views on matters of conscience. Liberals thus want to protect a space in which individuals can live in their own way. This ‘private’ space might include religious and moral beliefs, and the family. Hence, liberals have traditionally advocated measures restricting the power of the state: constitutions, bills of rights, civil protections and so on.
This understanding of liberty is very different to that which Constant associated with pre-modern thinkers. Political philosophers writing before the Enlightenment, such as Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece, and Cicero in ancient Rome, shared with more modern Romantic philosophers like Rousseau the idea that liberty was not a private condition enjoyed by individuals, but rather a public condition enjoyed by whole communities or peoples. These thinkers shared a civic-republican idea of freedom: freedom is about being a member of a self-governing political community. You are free in so far as you are able to participate in the collective life of your political community and, in association with your fellow citizens, shape that political community and decide its future. This view of liberty is ‘positive’ in its insistence that freedom is about being in control of one’s life, not just in the sense that one is free from interference, but in the sense that one actively participates in the collective life of the polity.
Both approaches have their own strengths and weaknesses. Negative liberty, understood as the need to establish a private sphere free from interference, is perhaps more appealing as it is the view with which we are most familiar. However, it is not philosophically rigorous. People cannot be allowed to do whatever they want in their own homes, or to other members of their families. A liberal state needs to protect children from abuse and women from violent partners, for example. Similarly, while people are free to believe whatever they want, it is not clear that they should be free to act however they want, even if certain actions are required by their beliefs. The idea that the state should keep out of matters of religion and the family in the name of freedom seems to suggest that it has no legitimate interest in regulating harmful or unjust religious or cultural practices, like forced marriage. If the private sphere is defined as the area of one’s life in which the state cannot intervene, then there is arguably no such sphere. States might operate on the presumption that they should avoid intervening as much as possible in matters of religion, culture, the family, and so on, but the idea that freedom requires a strict separation between public and private spheres is philosophically and politically untenable, a point made most convincingly by feminists (e.g. Okin 1989; Hirschmann 2003).
Spotlight: A private matter
Until 1991, there was no law in the UK against a husband raping his wife. Sexual relations between husbands and wives were seen as a ‘private’ matter and, hence, not something that should be regulated by the state.
The idea that liberty is about collective self-government seems to avoid this problem. It does not rely upon a distinction between public and private, and identifies freedom with the public pursuit of collective goals rather than the private pursuit of individual ones. However, in doing so it seems to collapse the interests of individuals into the interest of the community as a whole. That is, while there may be problems with the idea that liberty requires the establishment of a private sphere in which individuals can pursue their own self-interest, it at least takes seriously the idea that people have interests – goals, aspirations, ideals – and that this matters. The positive liberty view seems to suggest that each individual’s interests can be appropriately subordinated to the common good of society as a whole.
It is this aspect of positive liberty which Berlin thought the most dangerous of all, as he believed that it had been used throughout history to justify totalitarianism. It subsumes the good of the individual into the good of the whole and thus violates not only individual freedom but also the moral status of individuals. Individuals are seen not as ends in themselves, but as the means by which the common good might be achieved. As we will see in Part Two of this book, a central theme of liberal thought has been to establish individuals as having a moral status that cannot be overridden even if doing so would promote the good of society as a whole. Indeed, liberals have specifically afforded individuals rights and legal provisions, enshrined in constitutional arrangements, which are seen as protections against the community at large.
Spotlight: New Labour and positive liberty
In 1997 the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, wrote to Isaiah Berlin, saying ‘The limitations of negative liberty are what have motivated generations of people to work for positive liberty, whatever its depradations [sic] in the Soviet model. That determination to go beyond laissez-faire continues to motivate people today. And it is in that context that I would be interested in your views on the future of the Left.’ Berlin was too ill to reply.
Gordon Brown also defended positive liberty in his Hugo Young Memorial lecture, delivered in 2005 when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. He argued: ‘So in this century a consensus has evolved that liberty is not just passive, about restricting someone else’s powers, but active, people empowered to participate. And I believe that when in our generation Robert F. Kennedy argued for citizen participation and community self-government, and gave us a modern idea of the empowered citizen, he echoed a strong British tradition of civic engagement I would like to recapture.’
The fact that this kind of positive liberty appears to reject the moral status of individuals and their interests is particularly problematic, Berlin believed, when we consider it in the context of the claim discussed above that positive liberty suggests that some people are better placed to know what is in an individual’s interest than the individual themselves. Berlin believed that, taken together, these factors justified political leaders in doing whatever they want to do to the members of society in the interests of securing their wider freedom. When freedom is dependent upon the wellbeing of the collectivity (understood as the nation, for example, or the state), then protection of freedom and the protection of the wellbeing of the collectivity become synonymous. Berlin argued that Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin all used exactly this argument to justify brutal policies designed to rid the state of destabilizing forces, be they immigrants, Jews, homosexuals, the disabled, the rich or anyone else. Anyone who disagreed with the state’s actions could be denounced as irrational, or not in possession of the requisite facts: their views could be rejected as merely the product of their lower selves. Several theorists have rejected this view as a caricature (e.g. Taylor 1979).
Case study: Republicanism – Skinner and Pettit on individual and collective freedom
In his article ‘The Paradoxes of Political Liberty’ (1984), Quentin Skinner defends a form of positive liberty as related to participation in political or communal life. Skinner argues that theorists of negative liberty have accused conceptions of positive liberty of being paradoxical in two ways: that it
‘forces people to be free’, and that it appears to require that the individual subordinates her desires to the needs of the group.
Skinner’s argument is not that positive liberty does not entail these paradoxes. Instead, he argues that these paradoxes are not in fact paradoxical. Skinner, like Pettit, describes this conception of liberty as a republican one: one which draws its inspiration from thinkers like Cicero, Machiavelli and Montesquieu. The main feature of classical republicanism is its concern that individuals should live in a free state. A free state is defined, for republicans, in negative liberty terms. A state is free when it is not subject to external constraint, for example when it is not forced to follow another state’s orders. If we think about what this means for the citizens of the state, it means that they (and not the citizens or government of another state) decide what the community should do. The citizens participate in forming a general will, in determining the aims and actions of their community and the state. Participation is therefore crucial to the protection of negative liberty.
This is a view shared by Philip Pettit, whose conception of liberty as ‘non-domination’ we discussed in the previous chapter. Pettit also argues that individual freedom requires public participation in collective political life. The reason for this is that it is the only way to ensure that individuals are not dominated. A republican state is required to act in the interests of its members. Pettit argues that the only way of finding out what is in the community interest is to engage in an ongoing process of consultation with the public. People must be able to participate in the decision-making process, to give their views on a matter, and to refute the decisions that the state makes. It follows, then, that people must actively participate in political life if they are to secure their freedom.
Conclusion
In this and the previous chapter we discussed the concept of freedom and the normative implications associated with different understandings of that concept. In this chapter, we discussed two further ways of understanding the distinction between positive and negative liberty. We discussed the idea that negative freedom might be understood as focused on protecting the individual’s ability to pursue their own private self-interest, while positive liberty might be understood as the pursuit of collective, public goods within a particular kind of political community. Furthermore, we saw that the simple (some would say, simplistic) description of freedom provided by negative liberty thinkers like Hayek is complicated by the fact that, firstly, we may often make choices which are contrary to our real interests and desires and, secondly, that our desires are shaped by wider social, cultural, economic and political factors which lie beyond our control. While negative liberty theorists protect our ability to do what we want, positive liberty theorists seek to make sure that we have control over what we want by considering the ways in which things like social circumstances, income, and wider social norms influence our sense of who we are and what kind of lives we want to lead. Positive liberty theorists of this kind emphasize the importance of autonomy. We will discuss the role of autonomy in contemporary liberal theory in Part Two.
Key ideas
Autonomy: The idea that freedom is concerned with self-mastery, with being in control of one’s desires.
Higher/lower self: The distinction between one’s base desires and one’s higher (rational) desires, used by some theorists of positive liberty to explain the idea of autonomy.
Paternalism: The idea that, in certain circumstances, the state is justified in passing laws forcing people to do certain things, or banning them from doing certain things, for their own good.
The private sphere: The notional space sought by defenders of negative liberty which is considered beyond the scope of the state or others to intervene in, covering areas of life such as religious and moral belief, opinion and the family.
Republicanism: A conception of politics and freedom, defended in different ways by Quentin Skinner, Philip Pettit, Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor, which links individual freedom with public participation in the collective life of the polity.
Social construction of choices: The idea, advanced by some defenders of positive liberty, that our choices (and our wider identities) are influenced by the social context in which we live and that this has direct implications for the idea of freedom.
Dig deeper
Ian Carter, Matthew H. Kramer and Hillel Steiner (eds), Freedom: A Philosophical Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
Clare Chambers, Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).
Benjamin Constant, ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns’ [1819], in Biancamaria Fontana (ed.), Constant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 304–7.
Nancy Hirschmann, The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Janet Radcliffe Richards, The Sceptical Feminist (London: Routledge, 1980).
Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Quentin Skinner, ‘The Paradoxes of Political Liberty’ [1984], in S.M. McMurrin (ed.),The Tanner Lectures on Human Values VII (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986).
Charles Taylor, ‘What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?’ [1979], Philosophy and the Human Sciences, vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 211–29.
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
Fact-check
1 Why is positive liberty so called?
A To signify that it is a good thing
B To signify that it is optimistic
C To signify that it requires the presence of something
D All of the above
2 Why might you lack positive freedom even if you are doing what you want?
A Because you are acting out of weakness of will
B Because you are acting out of fear
C Because you are acting as the result of misinformation
D All of the above
3 Why, according to Berlin, does positive liberty lead to totalitarianism?
A Because only totalitarians endorse positive liberty
B Because there is a necessary connection between positive liberty and totalitarianism
C Because positive liberty means that the individual may not be the best judge of her own desires
D Because positive liberty is the same thing as coercion
4 How is positive liberty sometimes understood?
A As prioritizing the higher self over the lower self
B As prioritizing self-mastery over mere preferences
C As prioritizing the rational self over the irrational self
D All of the above
5 Which of the following are associated with positive liberty?
A Autonomy
B Autocracy
C Automata
D Automotives
6 Which of the following are associated with negative liberty?
A A protected private sphere
B An active political community
C Being in control of one’s desires
D All of the above
7 Which of the following might undermine positive liberty?
A Social welfare
B Social life
C Social conditioning
D Socialism
8 Why is political participation important for positive liberty?
A Because it enables individuals to resist totalitarianism
B Because it enables individuals to affect the conditions of their lives
C Because it limits domination
D All of the above
9 One form of positive liberty is known as republicanism. What is meant by this term?
A The views associated with th
e US Republican Party
B The view that liberty requires the absence of domination
C The view that liberty requires the availability of public houses
D The views of Plato’s Republic
10 Which of the following is the most accurate?
A Feminists insist on the importance of the private sphere
B Feminists criticize the public sphere
C Feminists argue that the private sphere and the public sphere are the same thing
D Feminists criticize the classical liberal view of the distinction between the private and public spheres.
3
Equality (1): The concept of equality
Equality is a difficult concept: What does it mean to say that all people are equal? Indeed, the idea that all human beings are in some sense equal is relatively new and controversial, and was rejected by Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Rousseau, Nietzsche and the American Founding Fathers, to name but a few. People are straightforwardly unequal in all kinds of ways: in their talents, physical characteristics, ambitions and desires. People are also unequal in their social endowments: their wealth, class and status. Nevertheless, we (including contemporary political philosophers) now hold that people are all equal in some sense – but what do we mean by this?
In this chapter and the next we discuss a range of issues concerning the idea of equality. We begin by discussing the idea that equality means treating people with equal respect, or as having equal worth. We then introduce the distinction between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity, both of which are discussed in greater detail in later chapters.