Against the climate of the recent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia and now Bahrain, the smallest Middle East nation to be engulfed in anti-government demonstrations I wanted to revisit the topic of positive and negative freedom – also known as positive and negative liberty.
The Frankfurt School psychoanalyst and Marxist humanistic philosopher Erich Fromm drew a distinction between positive and negative freedom in The Fear of Freedom (1941) and Isaiah Berlin's, in his 1958 "Two Concepts of Liberty" essay (incidentally, sometimes acknowledged as the first to draw the same distinction and probably wider read) deals with the same.
Positive Freedom
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes positive liberty, in an example, as a democratic society is a free society because it is a self-determined society, and that a member of that society is free to the extent that he or she participates in its democratic process. There are also individualist applications of the concept of positive freedom as in, a government should aim actively to create the conditions necessary for individuals to be self-sufficient or to achieve self-realization.
Where this becomes less than straight-forward is when you consider an action being taken, against an individual’s will when it is thought it is in the interest of that individual. In "Recovering the Social Contract", Ron Replogle made a similar metaphor "Surely”, he writes, “it is no assault on my dignity as a person if you take my car keys, against my will, when I have had too much to drink”. In this sense, positive liberty is the adherence to a set of rules agreed upon by all parties involved.
Should the rules be altered, all parties involved must agree upon the changes. Therefore, positive liberty is a contractarian philosophy. This is in odds to Berlin’s view of positive liberty. Positive liberty, according to Berlin, could only apply when the withdrawal of liberty from an individual was in pursuit of a choice that individual himself/herself made, not a general principle of society or any other person's opinion.
Negative Freedom
Negative liberty is defined as freedom from interference by other people, and according to Berlin, the distinction between positive and negative liberty is deeply embedded in the political tradition. Once again, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes negative liberty is most commonly assumed in liberal defenses of the constitutional liberties of liberal-democratic societies, such as freedom of movement, etc.
So why am I revisiting torts – and why now…
A fundamental question that has busied philosophers, historians, academics, and politicians for hundreds of years is that of how is an individuals’ desire for liberty to be reconciled with the assumed need for authority.
Perhaps the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, whilst not in total agreement in the level of degrees, give an influential and representative solutions answer to this question. Both agree that a line has to be drawn and a space sharply delineated where each individual can act unhindered according to their tastes, desires, and inclinations. This zone defines the sacrosanct space of personal liberty. But, they believe no society is possible without some authority, where the intended purpose of authority is to prevent collisions among the different ends and, thereby, to demarcate the boundaries where each person's zone of liberty begins and ends.
Berlin claimed that utopian ideas can be dangerous to liberal democracy. Berlin was in favor of this decline, even eager to help it along. His earlier essay, “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West” formed, to a great extent, one of his central themes of his work.
Consider for example: The common recognition that “power corrupts” doesn’t capture the real dangers of political ambition. When powerful individuals are trying to change the world, corruption may well be the saving grace of political life. Berlin suggests that it is the uncorrupted, the men and women totally committed to their utopian vision, sincerely seeking to make the world better, who are really dangerous.
The greater the good that is sought, the more power that is necessary to achieve it. But whether political ambition is personal or ideological, whether the sought-after good is great or small, total or partial, the consequences are similar; only the scale is different. Political ambition produces what we might think of as a natural tendency toward greater and greater power and wealth-a natural tendency toward authoritarianism and hierarchy.
