Isaiah Berlin, Negative Liberty, and Neoliberalism

This essay suggests that the events of the 1980s require us to update Berlin’s claim that “the ‘positive’ conception of freedom… has in fact, and as a matter of history, of doctrine and of practice, lent itself more easily” to political manipulation. These events prompt us not only to review Berlin’s empirical-historical observation; they also call on us to take seriously Berlin’s passing comment that the political perversion of positive liberty “can no doubt be perpetrated just as easily with the ‘negative’ concept of freedom”. In Part II of this essay, I take forward Berlin’s suggestion that negative liberty may be just as liable to be perverted as positive liberty. I close in Part III by proposing future lines of inquiry, and sketching the implications of the argument for the history of neoliberalism and the future of positive liberty.