How are we to understand the relations between contemporary analytic political theory and the history of political thought? How are we to conduct the analysis of political concepts? These questions are central to the practice of political theory and the history of political thought. Analytic political theory tends to concentrate attention upon the terms of analysis, whereby the operation of concepts is explained, and the explanations are held to be logical rather than contingent and historical. Historians of political thought recognise how thinking about concepts changes over time, and look to make sense of past thought by reconstructing how past theorists imagined concepts. Historical explanations of past thinkers are not held to deny logic, but historians trace how concepts are envisaged at a particular time and in a specific context rather than furnishing logical explanations of past theories. Dimova-Cookson's book Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty is a brave attempt to bridge historical and logical analysis. It revisits the thought of Benjamin Constant, T. H. Green and Isaiah Berlin, reconsidering their conceptions of positive and negative liberty, while providing a novel and reimagined analysis of the notions of positive and negative liberty. In effect Dimova-Cookson undertakes at one stroke, and in one book, analytic political theory and the history of political thought.
Dimova-Cookson's achievement is multiple, because she reframes the thinking of three distinct historic political theorists, and in doing so restates, by reformulating, the case for imagining two concepts of liberty, one negative and the other positive, at a time when the bifurcated approach to conceptualising freedom is out of fashion. Dimova-Cookson succeeds in doing what she attempts, because she brings a freshness and determination to her work, while possessing a detailed historical understanding of past thinkers and hard-edged logical skill in reimagining the concepts of positive and negative liberty. What is notable in her work is her reformulation of versions of positive and negative liberty by reconstructing the concepts via critical reflection on past theories. She recognises the pros and cons of the analyses of Constant, Green and Berlin, and reframes their conceptual understanding of notions of freedom, so as to arrive at a more nuanced and persuasive account of the dual concepts of liberty.
The preceding historic thinkers whom Dimova-Cookson examines are seen as framing accounts of freedom, in which one of the dual concepts of positive and negative freedom is favoured. The upshot is that the unfavoured concept tends to lack credibility, even if the unfavoured concept has the potential to be refashioned so as to be more valuable as a term of analysis. Constant is seen to identify ancient liberty as repressive, in a dualistic view of liberty, whereby the modern freedom of the individual is favoured. Dimova-Cookson disturbs this univocal reading of Constant on liberty by perceiving how Constant is prepared to accommodate ancient liberty within a modern context. She observes how in the course of his famous essay ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns’ (1819) Constant allows a role for public liberty, a reconstituted version of ancient liberty. Likewise, in Green's work on liberty, possibilities are identified for reframing his account of liberty so as to yield an effective role for negative liberty. In her own analysis of freedom, Dimova-Cookson builds upon Green's formulation of positive liberty, and in particular his recognition of the possibility of human development so that an individual can achieve freedom by identifying with and participating in the moral formulation of the common good. Alongside this recognition of the value of positive liberty in Green, Dimova-Cookson urges that a viable version of negative liberty can be extracted from Green's writings, which allows for a sense of freedom as covering the pursuit of personal well-being and the personal development of moral agency. In reviewing Berlin's famous formulation of the notions of positive and negative liberty, Dimova-Cookson is critical of the way in which he identifies negative freedom with non-interference and positive liberty with political repression. She sees Berlin's discussion of value pluralism as allowing for appreciation of how negative freedom relates to the development of human values, and of how positive freedom is important in setting out what is valuable in participating in the development of the common good.
In developing her own reformulated concepts of positive and negative liberty, Dimova-Cookson develops the insights that are to be gained by critically revisiting Constant, Berlin and Green. She maintains that both concepts are significant in relating to values that are worth developing. In particular she recognises and builds upon Green's articulation of the value of positive liberty in pointing to the developmental possibilities of freedom. Like Green she allocates a fundamental role in the economy of human flourishing to positive liberty. Positive liberty highlights how freedom is concerned with valued activities and presumes a notion of developmental agency. The desirability of positive freedom, it is argued, informs the advocacy of the value of negative liberty in Berlin and Constant, while the possibilities of positive liberty can be identified even amidst the critiques of the concept in Berlin and Constant. In Dimova-Cookson's reformulation of the nature of positive and negative liberty, she allows for a developmental view of the self whereby ‘negative freedom should be understood as advancement of one's own well-being, while positive freedom should be understood as acquisition of moral agency or attainment of excellence in a recognised field’ (p. 7). The two concepts capture different ways of viewing well-being. The negative concept focuses narrowly on the individual's well-being, whereas the positive concept relates individuals’ well-being to their capacity to develop a moral conception of the common good and their subscription to the common good. It represents a development in freedom. Negative freedom involves the routine satisfaction of personal well-being and the value of personal development and moral action. Hence Dimova-Cookson moves the concept of negative freedom away from Berlin's stipulation that it stands for non-interference in an individual's chosen actions. Positive freedom represents the actual achievement of moral agency, a higher level of commitment to moral action.
Central to Dimova-Cookson's reformulation of the concepts of positive and negative liberty is a conceptualisation of how individuals relate to moral and political authorities. Both concepts of liberty are seen as involving individuals’ engagement with political and moral authorities, though being negatively free guards against liberty being overturned by authorities. Retaining the two concepts of liberty, for Dimova-Cookson, allows for a recognition of the several ways in which we can be seen as operating freely. It allows for caution against undue political interference in individual conduct, while also recognising how individuals can develop morally and politically so as to act for the common good and so to perceive their actions as both virtuous and free.
Overall, Dimova-Cookson's book offers a great deal to political theorists and historians of political thought. She undertakes a critical and rigorous reading of historic theorists and uses the insights gained from this reading to provide a convincing analysis of negative and positive liberty and to argue strongly for the value of retaining the two concepts. She convincingly shows how past theories are not to be seen as museum pieces that do not contribute to our ongoing understanding of the political world. She shows how analysis of freedom in our contemporary world can be predicated upon a critical reading of past theorists. She also makes the case for a continued use of the dual concepts of negative and positive liberty. Her reformulation of the concepts removes the ideological dismissal of one of the pair of concepts that affects the previous formulations of the concepts. The preceding strong favouring of one of the concepts of liberty over another has tended to reduce our understanding of the possibilities of freedom. The retention of the two concepts, however, has the advantage of restating clearly the sharply differentiated ways in which we see and operate with notions of freedom. If one were to jettison the two concepts, as has been advocated by MacCallum (MacCallum, ‘Negative and Positive Freedom’, 1967), the sharpness of the contrasts between, say, routine and exceptional practices of freedom would be lost in a generalised understanding of how freedom involves various conceptions of agency and constraints. Dimova-Cookson has written a book which will be of great value to political theorists and historians of political thought. It sheds much-needed light on our contemporary political world.
