Two Concepts of Liberty

Two Concepts of Liberty was the inaugural lecture delivered by the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin before the University of Oxford on 31 October 1958. It was subsequently published as a 57-page pamphlet by Oxford at the Clarendon Press. It also appears in the collection of Berlin's papers entitled Four Essays on Liberty (1969) and was more recently reissued in a collection entitled simply Liberty (2002).

"Positive liberty... is a valid universal goal. I do not know why I should have been held to doubt this, or, for that matter, the further proposition, that democratic self-government is a fundamental human need, something valuable in itself, whether or not it clashes with the claims of negative liberty or of any other goal... What I am mainly concerned to establish is that, whatever may be the common ground between them, and whatever is liable to graver distortion, negative and positive liberty are not the same thing."

The essay, with its analytical approach to the definition of political concepts, re-introduced the study of political philosophy to the methods of analytic philosophy. It is also one of Berlin's first expressions of his ethical ontology of value-pluralism. Berlin defined negative liberty (as the term "liberty" was used by Thomas Hobbes ) as the absence of coercion or interference with agents' possible private actions, by an exterior social-body. He also defined it as a comparatively recent political ideal, which re-emerged in the late 17th century, after its slow and inarticulate birth in the Ancient doctrines of Antiphon the Sophist, the Cyrenaic discipleship, and of Otanes after the death of pseudo-Smerdis. In an introduction to the essay, Berlin writes:

"As for Otanes, he wished neither to rule nor to be ruled — the exact opposite of Aristotle's notion of true civic liberty... [This ideal] remains isolated and, until Epicurus, undeveloped... the notion had not explicitly emerged".

Positive liberty may be understood as self-mastery, and includes one's having a role in choosing who governs the society of which one is a part. Berlin traced positive liberty from Aristotle's definition of citizenship, which is historically derived from the social role of the freemen of classical Athens: it was, Berlin argued, the liberty in choosing their government granted to citizens, and extolled, most famously, by Pericles. Berlin granted that both concepts of liberty represent valid human ideals, and that both forms of liberty are necessary in any free and civilised society.

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