Paternalism, Individualism, and the Politics of Maturity

Abstract

ABSTRACT We must, Isaiah Berlin argues, make tragic tradeoffs as we navigate the clash of incommensurable and irreconcilable values and ends of modernity. To deny this is to succumb to a politics of immaturity, and to the totalitarian temptation. The twentieth century taught that to resist final-solution fantasies, we must resist the allure, if not reject the value, of positive liberty, the liberty of self-mastery and self-rule. Two decades in, has the twenty-first century taught a different lesson? Have we learned that negative liberty, liberty from rule, with its antipaternalistic ethic of ultra-individualism, harbors its own politics of immaturity, and a demagogic temptation? I argue that this is the more frequent, if less fatal, threat to human dignity and decency today, and that we therefore ought to rebalance the scales in the tragic tradeoff of positive for negative liberty.