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The Psychological Dangers of Positive Liberty: Reconstructing a Neglected Undercurrent in Isaiah Berlin's “Two Concepts of Liberty”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2014

Gina Gustavsson
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Abstract

Berlin is often taken to have exaggerated his case against positive liberty, since contrary to what he seems to argue, several versions of it do not logically justify coercion. A more historical interpretation of his warnings may save him from this accusation, yet on the other hand suggests his message is of little relevance for contemporary liberalism. In contrast to both these approaches, this essay considers a third and largely neglected aspect of “Two Concepts of Liberty,” that speaks more directly to the challenges facing liberalism today: Berlin's warning that positive liberty invites the specific kind of coercion that parades as liberation, and that it does so according to a psychologically predictable pattern. After reconstructing this undercurrent in Berlin's critique of positive liberty, this essay also considers the relevance of Berlin's warnings to contemporary European debates on banning the Muslim veil in the name of liberation.

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Type
Research Article
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The Review of Politics , Volume 76 , Issue 2 , Spring 2014, pp. 267 - 291
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2014 

A good liberal must be constantly vigilant against threats to liberty, especially those that present themselves under the cloak of liberation. This was the main thesis in Isaiah Berlin's “Two Concepts of Liberty” (TCL), first delivered as a lecture in 1958. Firmly convinced that there must be some form of “absolute barriers to the imposition of one man's will on another,” Berlin famously argued that champions of the “positive” liberty of self-mastery tend to disregard the “negative” liberty of being unconstrained by others.Footnote 1

For decades to come, this essay gave rise to a vast debate among political theorists, most of whom understood Berlin as putting forward a philosophical argument to the effect that positive ideals of liberty justify coercion in the name of liberty; an argument that many pointed out was flawed, since there are in fact positive ideals of liberty that logically escape such a conclusion. The liberal versions of positive liberty held by Spinoza, Kant, and T. H. Green do not in fact entail the totalitarian conclusions so feared by Berlin, it was argued, and thus his concerns about positive liberty were dismissed as greatly exaggerated.Footnote 2 To this, other scholars objected that Berlin should rather be understood as making a historical observation concerning the way in which authoritarian regimes, and most importantly the Soviet Union, have de facto used the positive ideal of liberty as an excuse for tyranny.Footnote 3 Yet, although this latter reading certainly seems to rescue Berlin from the accusation of committing a logical fallacy, it instead risks making his warnings obsolete, “bound up with the ideological war of the fifties, attacking an enemy that is no longer recognizable.”Footnote 4 Over the past few decades, Berlin scholars have thus largely diverted their attention from his warnings in “Two Concepts of Liberty.”Footnote 5 Rather than studying his critique of positive liberty, which nonetheless remains the popularly most well-known aspect of his intellectual legacy, these researchers have instead focused on Berlin's defense of pluralism and its links to liberalism and multiculturalism.Footnote 6

Yet, this essay will argue that there is a neglected side of “Two Concepts of Liberty” that speaks directly to a highly relevant contemporary problem: the danger of repression that comes from liberalism itself.Footnote 7 Berlin's target is not, we will see, coercion as such, or even paternalism, but coercion disguised as liberation. According to Berlin, moreover, this risk went beyond both any logical argument regarding what positive liberty entails, and any historical observation regarding its actual association with coercion. In my reading, he also put forward a third and different type of argument, which in comparison has been largely ignored: an argument regarding certain cognitive patterns that he believed were likely to make the champions of positive liberty encourage coercion without acknowledging it. This risk pertains especially to liberals, who are likely to be already alert, although not always opposed, to coercion in general, and paternalistic coercion in particular, but less suspicious of coercion that sneaks in under the cloak of liberation.

The aim of this essay is to give the first thorough account of the psychological risks Berlin associated with positive liberty—the risks, that is, that he believed a commitment to this ideal was likely to invite because of certain deep-rooted tendencies of the human psyche, tendencies quite independent of logic. It has recently been suggested that both Berlin's value pluralism and his overall liberalism were greatly inspired by, or even emanated from, his insights into the human mind.Footnote 8 Yet Berlin's psychological case against positive liberty has received curiously scant attention. Even the few who recognize its existence have left its precise status and nature unspecified.Footnote 9 This gap in the literature seems especially important considering that Berlin, as Alex Zakaras has recently argued, believed he could serve liberal toleration best by identifying its “psychological prerequisites,” as opposed to constructing its most impermeable philosophical justification.Footnote 10

By reconstructing the neglected undercurrent in TCL, the present essay takes this psychological reading of Berlin's work even further, suggesting that his warnings against positive liberty have for too long been situated within the philosophical scholarship on the nature and value of freedom, when a more fruitful context can be found in the emerging literature on “repressive liberalism,” which sees seemingly illiberal policies, such as bans on the Muslim veil, as examples of an inherently authoritarian strand within liberalism itself.Footnote 11 After having reconstructed Berlin's psychological case against positive liberty, this essay thus also offers a brief excursion into the debate that preceded the ban on full veils in France in 2010. Berlin's theory, we will see, in fact sheds new light on an especially disconcerting aspect of this debate that previous research has failed to disentangle: the predominant understanding of the ban as a liberation even of those veiled women who claimed that they had freely chosen the veil, and the ideal of positive liberty that made this possible.

The Inversion of Liberty

Despite its close to hegemonic influence on theoretical discussions of freedom, TCL is notorious for its ambiguity and, at times, overt inconsistency. Before I put forward what I take to be Berlin's major concern with positive liberty, it is therefore helpful to explain my point of departure in relation to the most dominant interpretations of his essay. In the decades that followed its first publication, Berlin was read as a champion of “freedom from,” a negative concept of liberty defined by a lack of obstacles, against “freedom to,” a purportedly invalid positive concept, which equates liberty to the presence of possibilities.Footnote 12 However, Berlin was generally skeptical about philosophical abstractions ungrounded in political reality.Footnote 13 He also explicitly states that negative and positive liberty are “at no great logical distance from one another,” that their difference rather lies in having “historically” moved into divergent directions.Footnote 14

The point of departure for this essay is thus that Berlin did not intend for his distinction to apply only, or even primarily, to two formal concepts of freedom; nor between one he considered formal and one he considered substantial. Instead, he treated positive and negative liberty as two types of ideals, two conceptions of freedom that people might and indeed should value. Both, he recognized, have “an equal right to be classed among the deepest interests of mankind.”Footnote 15 Following John Gray, we may roughly say that the negative ideal of liberty denotes “non-interference by others when acting according to one's actual or potential desires,” while its positive counterpart “is the freedom of self-mastery.”Footnote 16 Admittedly, positive liberty sometimes rather seems to be the freedom of collective self-determination, or even the capacity to attain my goals. However, since our concern here is with the supposed link between positive liberty and coercion, and Berlin—as we will soon see in more detail—clearly connects this link to self-mastery, the present essay will focus only on this side of positive liberty.Footnote 17

The primary goal of philosophy, according to Berlin, is to reveal how the hidden categories and metaphors in which we think can be subject to distortion, and thereby help us avoid being deceived by ourselves as well as others—to know when people “are talking rot,” quite simply.Footnote 18 Considering that he also devotes three times as much space to criticizing positive liberty as compared to delineating negative liberty, we can plausibly assume that one of his main goals in this essay, if not the central one, is to warn against the particularly treacherous nature of positive liberty.Footnote 19 In the introduction that he added a decade later to his essays on liberty, Berlin indeed declares that if the two are not distinguished, “there will be a danger of confusion in theory and justification of oppression in practice, in the name of liberty itself.”Footnote 20 He also maintains that there is a “greater need” to expose the perversions of positive liberty than the admittedly “disastrous” consequences of negative liberty in “its unbridled forms.” The reason for this is that the latter has at least typically been seen for what it is. Positive liberty, however, can be more efficiently “turned into its opposite and still exploit the favourable associations of its innocent origins.”Footnote 21

This suggests something important that tends to be overlooked: Berlin's ultimate concern is not that positive liberty invites coercion as such, i.e., “the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act,” but that it invites us to see coercion as mere liberation:Footnote 22

It is one thing to say that I may be coerced for my own good, which I am too blind to see: this may, on occasion, be for my benefit; indeed it may enlarge the scope of my liberty. It is another to say that if it is my good, then I am not being coerced, for I have willed it, whether I know this or not, and am free (or “truly” free) even while my poor earthly body and foolish mind bitterly reject it, and struggle with the greatest desperation against those who seek, however benevolently, to impose it.

Only the latter understanding of coercion allows the coercer to think he is “in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies” on behalf of their “‘true,’ albeit often submerged and inarticulate, self.”Footnote 23

“Ignore,” I would argue, should here be understood in the weaker sense: Berlin does not mean that men's “actual wishes” must be always encouraged, or even tolerated, only that they should be acknowledged as theirs. In fact, he clearly states that the liberty to choose to live as one desires “must be weighed against the claims of many other values.”Footnote 24 His target is not, then, coercion in general, nor even paternalistic coercion in particular, but specifically the “monstrous impersonation” of saying that when we do force others to do what we think is right, we are in fact acting in line with their real wishes and therefore not really coercing them.Footnote 25 The “monstrous” aspect of this impersonation can perhaps be best understood in the light of Berlin's understanding of humanity as the capacity to understand other persons. In an insightful account of Berlin's insistence on this rather challenging task of imaginative empathy, Zakaras has argued that the understanding that Berlin is after does not require us to condone views which we find appalling—we may very well end up condemning them—but it does oblige us to suspend our moral judgment temporarily while we genuinely try to grasp how a person could hold such views, as Berlin indeed exemplified in his own attempts to enter the mind of the enemies of liberalism. In short, we should never dismiss another's values as pathological or inhumane without first having made this effort to understand him.Footnote 26

The last pages of TCL in fact suggest Berlin thought such a blanket denunciation denies not only the potential truth of the values we dismiss, but also the dignity of the person who holds them. It is not only more “true,” he declares, but also more “humane” to acknowledge that “men choose as they do because their life and thought are determined by fundamental categories and concepts that are, at any rate over large stretches of time and space, and whatever their ultimate origins, a part of their being and thought and sense of their own identity; part of what makes them human.”Footnote 27 Quite independently, then, of whether or not a person's ideals were his own to begin with, Berlin seems to think that once they have become a part of his own sense of self we must at least recognize them as his. He readily grants us the right to condemn them, in some cases even to prohibit him from pursuing them. Yet he insists that we may not impersonate him by completely dismissing them as not really his at all. This is why the inversion of liberty at the heart of TCL, and of this essay, is not coercion, nor even paternalistic coercion, as such, but the specific kind of coercion that comes disguised as liberation. This view of coercion, namely, allows the coercer to completely dismiss the self-understanding of the very persons he presumes to liberate.

Why, then, should we return to consider positive liberty as the main culprit behind such an inversion of liberty? Previous research has certainly shown that many champions of positive liberty—such as Spinoza—in fact deny that a truly autonomous individual must reach one specific conclusion, and thus steer clear of the logical risk of advocating coercion in the name of liberty after all.Footnote 28 My point, however, is not to dispute this conclusion, but to suggest that as an objection to Berlin, it may be somewhat off the mark. Berlin clearly admits that negative and positive liberty “developed in divergent directions, not always by logically reputable steps.” Positive liberty, he nevertheless insists, has “in fact, and as a matter of history, of doctrine and of practice, lent itself more easily” than negative liberty to coercion under the name of liberation. In his later introduction, he also repeats that his goal is to reveal “the kind of specious arguments and sleights-of-hand habitually used by the champions of ‘positive’ liberty.”Footnote 29 His warnings thus clearly go beyond the logical implications of positive liberty—and yet this part of his undertaking remains largely uncharted territory in the secondary literature.

While it has sometimes been recognized that Berlin also suggests a path from positive liberty that is, as C. B. Macpherson put it, not “logically immanent,” but about the beliefs it is “likely” to induce, previous research offers no reconstruction of this path, nor indeed any longer consideration of its nature.Footnote 30 Consider for example George Crowder, who at one point claims that Berlin put forward “the inversion thesis”: the argument that positive liberty lends itself to perversion by a process that is “historically contingent” yet not “merely accidental.”Footnote 31 In the same chapter, Crowder nevertheless concludes that, because “the passage from Stoic self-mastery to Stalinist submission is in fact broken by several logic pot-holes,” Berlin overstated his case against positive liberty—as if his only concern were the logical implications of positive liberty after all.Footnote 32 Yet such conclusions neglect that, although positive conceptions of liberty indeed do not by necessity entail illiberal conclusions, they may still invite them through the other path that Crowder previously recognized in TCL, the one that is “historically contingent” yet not “accidental.” Especially if this warning against positive liberty is never “completely explicit but evident nonetheless,” it seems that we cannot dismiss Berlin's concerns before this “undercurrent” has been brought to light.Footnote 33 In what follows, I shall therefore first consider the more specific nature of this inversion thesis, as I shall call it, and then attempt its reconstruction.

Positive Liberty as Frankenstein's Monster

One of the first claims with which Berlin chooses to begin TCL is that it is “dangerous” to neglect the study of ideas, for ideas left unscrutinized may “sometimes acquire an unchecked momentum and an irresistible power over multitudes of men that may grow too violent to be affected by rational criticism.”Footnote 34 Interestingly, when first trying to explain the conflict between positive and negative liberty, he again invokes the image of the idea with an energy of its own: “One way of making this clear is in terms of the independent momentum which the, initially perhaps quite harmless, metaphor of self-mastery acquired.”Footnote 35 In other words, he seems concerned that positive liberty can become a “Frankenstein's monster,” to use his terminology from an essay on Kant, where he suggests that “ideas do, at times, develop lives and powers of their own and, like Frankenstein's monster, act in ways wholly unforeseen by their begetters, and, it may be, directed against their will, and sometimes turn on them and destroy them.”Footnote 36

Berlin's belief that certain ideas contain an energy of their own, because of their seductive power over the human psyche, thus seems central for his case against positive liberty. Indeed, he openly states that the steps by which positive liberty leads to inversion are “historically and psychologically intelligible.”Footnote 37 He also insists that, in order to understand the danger of positive liberty, we must recognize a “psychological and political fact (which lurks behind the apparent ambiguity of the term ‘liberty’),” namely, that even the most brutal revolutionaries “have usually felt it necessary to argue that … they represented the party of liberty, or ‘true’ liberty.”Footnote 38 In his later introduction to the essay, he maintains that positive liberty “must be distinguished” from negative liberty by referring to a study of the psychoanalytical roots of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. He concludes this note by claiming that, although there are great internal differences between, for example, Stoic and irrationalist ideals of positive liberty, nevertheless their “psychological machinery is similar.”Footnote 39

All this suggests that an essential part of Berlin's aim is to make an argument about an empirical, more specifically a psychological, connection: to warn against a movement from positive liberty that is likely to take place through certain mental mechanisms. The inversion of liberty into its opposite, we shall now see, relies on certain empirical assumptions that Berlin believed the human mind is inclined to make, and which lead us half way towards concluding that coercion is an empirically necessary part of liberation.

While it has already been suggested that much of Berlin's philosophy emanated from his insights regarding the temptation to the human mind of certain ideas which are in fact unwarranted, yet for some reason particularly alluring, the specific psychological argument he makes against positive liberty has only been hinted at, never fully articulated or developed into a positively formulated claim, as I will try to do in the remainder of this section.Footnote 40 Above all, previous research leaves the reader wondering why Berlin would insist that positive liberty makes us feel one thing rather than another.Footnote 41 Why indeed, we may ask, does Berlin expect human beings to pervert it not only into any fallacious conclusion, but specifically into the dangerous one that coercion is in fact liberation? I believe this can be answered by returning to Berlin's discussion of monism, the meta-ethical notion that there is one single rational ordering of different values, and that we can escape tragic choices between ultimate values, such as independence and loyalty, or education and play; the very choices that a value pluralist such as Berlin would insist are an inescapable element of the human condition.

Over the past few decades, much of the literature on Berlin's thought has turned away from his distinction between positive and negative liberty, and instead directed its attention to his rejection of monism on behalf of value pluralism, an early version of which can be found in the last section of TCL.Footnote 42 However, while there has been ample discussion of whether Berlin is right in assuming that monism is false, and that pluralism entails a certain measure of negative liberty,Footnote 43 less attention has been devoted to his claim in TCL that monism also represents an empirically popular belief.Footnote 44

Yet Berlin insists in TCL that it is a grave mistake to underestimate, as “some contemporary liberals” have done, “the ingenuity with which men can prove to their own satisfaction that the road to one ideal also leads to its contrary.”Footnote 45 In the last section of the essay, he even declares that he has “no doubt” that it is “some such dogmatic certainty that has been responsible for the deep, serene, unshakeable conviction in the minds of some of the most merciless tyrants and persecutors in history that what they did was fully justified by its purpose.”Footnote 46 Not much later, Berlin also repeats that “monism, and faith in a single criterion, has always proved a deep source of satisfaction both to the intellect and to the emotions.”Footnote 47 The very last paragraph of the entire essay, finally, not only urges us to realize the relative validity of our convictions while standing up for them unflinchingly, but also recognizes that “to demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need.”Footnote 48

Why, then, is Berlin so anxious to underscore the popularity of monistic beliefs? Or, to be more precise regarding monism than Berlin himself, why did he repeatedly point out the psychological pull of what we might call self-righteous monism: the conviction that one's own ordering of values must be the only rational one?Footnote 49 The answer to this, I suggest, is that Berlin feared the combination of this stance with the commitment to positive liberty.Footnote 50

Consider a self-righteous monist who is convinced that piety is the ultimate value in life. It is not entirely unlikely that he may wish to impose his own ideal of piety on those who give higher priority to, say, individual self-expression, since they are in his view mistaken about the true ends of life. However, at least such a monist has no reason to deny that the wish he nurtures is indeed to coerce those who have chosen the wrong values by their own free will, and to do so in the name of the values he has instead chosen, and which are on his conviction more rational than theirs. He does it for their own good, for the sake of their piety, or their salvation—not, however, for their freedom.

This picture changes radically when we add an attachment to what Berlin calls “the positive conception of self-mastery, with its suggestion of a man divided against himself.”Footnote 51 For reasons that will become clearer in the next section, he seems to have feared that the self-righteous monist who also champions positive liberty is not likely to think that those with whom he disagrees are mistaken in their free choice of values, but rather that they are mistaken for the very reason that their choice of values was never really made freely to begin with. Interference with their actual, empirical choices thus no longer appears as a way of steering them away from their erroneous values, but rather as the empirically necessary means for liberating them from what were never really their values to begin with. Positive liberty therefore “renders it easy” to conclude that the ends I impose on others are really their own, not mine, and that their empirical wishes are in fact not really the expression of their free choice after all.Footnote 52 Thus, while the conviction that my own ordering of values is the only rational one may invite me to see coercion as necessary, it is only when combined with a commitment to positive liberty that this kind of monism makes me think it is in fact a part of liberation.

Similarly, believing in positive freedom as self-mastery but not monism is not enough; since if I do, and I try to impose my will on others, Berlin notes that I remain open to the objection that by doing so “I alone am free, while they are slaves.” Although I may insist that this is for their own good, it will at least be difficult for me to deny that this is the fact of the matter and what I am defending is nothing short of coercion, albeit of a righteous kind.Footnote 53 A pluralistic supporter of positive liberty might for example support a ban on binge drinking for the reason that such behavior leads to regrettable decisions that disrupt our long-term commitments, and thus hinder us from achieving self-realization.Footnote 54 Being a pluralist, however, he would nevertheless admit to being engaged in coercion, and openly acknowledge that he believed that our positive liberty in this case required a sacrifice of our negative liberty. By contrast, a monistic champion of positive liberty would be more likely to deny the coercive side of such a ban. For if “the universe is governed by reason, then there will be no need for coercion; a correctly planned life for all will coincide with full freedom—the freedom of rational self-direction—for all. This will be so if, and only if, the plan is the true plan—the one unique pattern which alone fulfills the claims of reason.”Footnote 55 In other words, if the monist believed that banning binge drinking was part of the one true plan, then he would likely deny that this decision required any kind of absolute and regrettable costs in terms of other values, such as negative liberty.Footnote 56

In sum, I have proposed that Berlin recurrently emphasized the popularity of self-righteous monism in TCL because he feared its combination with the ideal of positive liberty. I thus suggest his inversion thesis amounts to the empirical claim that if we already believe we must coerce others for their own sake because they are too irrational to see their own good, then cherishing positive liberty is likely to make us see our coercion as nothing but a part of their liberation, and thus to believe ourselves to be “in a position to ignore the actual wishes” of the people whom we are coercing.Footnote 57

Recent psychological research, finally, gives us several reasons to suspect that Berlin may not have been entirely wrong in seeing self-righteous monism as a general human tendency. Admittedly, no empirical studies have to my knowledge examined the extent to which people accept the monistic assumptions about the true nature of values. However, a considerable amount of psychological research does confirm that most people have a tendency to react to opposing moral views by dismissing them as not only different or wrong, but irrational. This is because we are inclined to assume that our own “social attitudes, preferences, and the like follow from a relatively dispassionate, unbiased, and essentially ‘unmediated’ apprehension of the information or evidence at hand.” When confronted with the differing attitudes of someone else, we thus tend to assume that these differing conclusions must be the result of misinformation, laziness, bias, or simply a lack of rationality.Footnote 58

Other studies have also established that although we often process new information regarding a moral matter in line with our prior beliefs, in far from objective and sometimes even “insidious” ways, we nevertheless tend to assume that our own attitudes are the result of an impartial procedure.Footnote 59 These findings appear especially disconcerting when coupled with the literature on “epistemic egocentrism,” which shows that we routinely infer the mental states of others from our own desires, knowledge, and beliefs.Footnote 60 If I am inclined both to overimpute my own beliefs to others, and to see myself as more rational than they are, then it certainly seems tempting to conclude that anyone who thinks he holds other beliefs than mine must in fact be mistaken—not only about what is rational, but also about himself. There seems to be an imminent risk, in other words, of concluding that, deep down, the values of everyone else must surely be the same as mine, and if they claim otherwise, this only proves their present state of confusion.

The upshot of this is that it is indeed not entirely unlikely that we are at times already inclined to impose our values on others for the sake of their own good, because we believe their own reasoning powers are temporarily overshadowed by their own confusion and irrationality. It therefore seems to be of no small relevance to expose why Berlin believed that positive ideals of liberty are likely to lead us from the belief that such coercion is empirically necessary to the conclusion that it is not, then, in fact coercion.

The Psychological Machinery of Positive Liberty

Because Berlin included a number of disparate examples under the banner of positive liberty, and replaced some of them in the revised 1969 version, some of his critics question the category altogether, suggesting that he seems “not really concerned to establish any particular date” from which positive liberty has been claimed to support coercion.Footnote 61 Yet his lack of precision may indicate that he was not only concerned with any of the explicit or implicit examples in and of themselves, but also with the underlying psychological model that united them. After all, Berlin chooses to discuss the two notions of liberty that he believes have “a great deal of human history behind them, and, I dare say, still to come.”Footnote 62 This certainly suggests he believed these examples had something in common that went beyond history, some kind of psychological pattern that made positive ideals of liberty, however different in other respects, empirically likely to bring with them a risk for the inversion of liberty—historically, today, and in the future as well.

What is the nature, then, of the shared “psychological machinery” that despite all their differences risks leading those ideals of liberty that Berlin calls positive liberty to the same dangerous consequences?Footnote 63 In an essay that is clearly the main precursor to TCL, Berlin says that “the only common meaning which the word bears in all these differing, and indeed vehemently opposed, traditions is concerned with the elimination of obstacles to something, which they each believe to be the most important ends of life.”Footnote 64 This suggests that by asking what obstacles are dangerous for positive as opposed to negative liberty, and what activities the two notions specify as important, we might find the risky pattern he had in mind. Gerald MacCallum in fact suggested something rather similar when saying that Berlin's two notions of liberty can be understood as two different ways of specifying not only who is to be free, but also from what constraints, and to what activities.Footnote 65 While previous research has certainly explored the two implicit notions of self in positive and negative liberty, it has not provided us with any thorough analysis of their difference in terms of MacCallum's other two variables: constraints and activities.Footnote 66 Perhaps, then, shifting our focus to these aspects of positive and negative liberty can yield a clearer picture of the roots of inversion.

Liberation from Internal Constraints

Positive liberty, Berlin says, is risky because it relies on a notion of “freedom as self-mastery, with its suggestion of a man divided against himself.” The notion of self-mastery, he continues, was “initially perhaps quite harmless,” but nevertheless acquired a treacherous power of its own. This happened in the following way:

“I am my own master”; “I am slave to no man”; but may I not (as Platonists and Hegelians tend to say) be a slave to nature? Or to my own “unbridled” passions? Are these not so many species of the identical genus “slave”—some political or legal, others moral or spiritual? Have not men had the experience of liberating themselves from spiritual slavery, or slavery to nature, and do they not in the course of it become aware, on the one hand, of a self which dominates, and, on the other, of something in them which is brought to heel?

If we perceive freedom in this way, Berlin continues, we risk saying that we may deprive our opponent of his actual wishes as a step in his liberation, for by doing so we would in fact not deprive him of “anything that mattered.”Footnote 67

Thus, one of the dangers with positive liberty is that it may be portrayed as the struggle against passions, nature, and spiritual slavery. Later in the essay, Berlin also adds love, fear, “the desire to conform,” and “obsessions, fears, neuroses, irrational forces” to the list of potential obstacles to positive liberty. The common denominator appears to be the fight against obstacles to freedom that are perceived as internal to the agent at hand; whereas negative liberty is concerned with constraints that are considered external, such as the law, or other persons.Footnote 68

Berlin's point, then, seems to be that when we allow freedom to become an internal relation, a fight against constraints within rather than outside ourselves, we open ourselves up to the disturbing possibility of dismissing other people's current will as irrelevant to their freedom. If we already want to hinder them politically from acting in line with their actual, empirical wishes, for the sake of some other goal that we believe is more important, we now risk going even further, concluding that by doing so we would not even be coercing them, but rather liberating them from themselves, as it were.Footnote 69

The perils with positive liberty are thus not exhausted by the danger in stressing the rule of reason, rationality, or reflection over desire, as is often assumed in previous research on Berlin.Footnote 70 Internal obstacles are just as common among romantic ideals of freedom, which Berlin refers to as the striving to fulfil an “inner desire,” to obey the “inner necessity” to create, or even the “inner sources of my being.”Footnote 71 Just as Berlin was critical of the Enlightenment philosophers' quest for inner liberation, he also cautioned against the romantic version, which typically seeks liberation of our inner genius from the parts of our self that seek to please and conform.Footnote 72 This liberation easily turns into an “unceasing civil war” within the soul, he fears, since it consists of removing the internal obstacles to “the natural man, struggling to get out of the outer man, the product of civilization and convention.”Footnote 73

Indeed, this explains why, in “Two Concepts of Freedom: Romantic and Liberal,” the precursor of TCL, Berlin originally categorized positive liberty as a romantic ideal, rather than an autonomous one, directed against, not in favor of, “too much critical reflection.”Footnote 74 In this essay, Berlin explicitly warns us about the romantic notion of liberation, perhaps most vividly expressed by Fichte, which has little to do with being rational or contemplative, but all the more with “ruthless self-realization of whatever burns within one.”Footnote 75 For if I am convinced that others fail to achieve this true liberty because they are held back by their own fears, or their narrow everyday concerns, then there seems to be a risk that I take it upon myself to help liberate them from themselves by going against their explicit wishes; to “lift others to a level beyond any which they could have reached by their own efforts, even if this can be achieved only at the cost of the torment or death of multitudes.”Footnote 76 If I already assume that they are at present too confused to be swayed by rational arguments and must instead be forced to see the truth, then I am now also likely to conclude that I am not in fact coercing them in any meaningful sense. Surely, their philistine concerns that I now obstruct are only “the bonds of dreary everyday concerns,” from which their true selves must first be liberated before they can reach their full potential.Footnote 77

Thus, Berlin seems certain that, if I am already a self-righteous monist who believes that her own ordering of values is in fact valid for her opponents who are just too blind to see it, then the added conviction that they are in fact unfree because of inner obstacles—deaf to the voice of universal reason, on the Enlightenment version, or blind to their unique inner spark, on the romantic one—becomes dangerous. For it now becomes all too easy for me to conclude that I should overrule their wishes in order to help in their very liberation; suddenly, their liberty no longer requires me to try to persuade them as they are now, but on the contrary to ignore their current wishes for reasons that they will only later come to understand for themselves.

Mastering One's Will

Self-mastery, we will now see, is risky not only because of its focus on the self, but also because of its emphasis on mastery. Although this has gone largely unnoticed in previous research, Berlin repeatedly specifies negative and positive ideals differently with regards to what one should be free to do. Negative freedom denotes interference “within the area” in which “man can act,” and a state in which no one is “frustrating my wishes” or “desires.”Footnote 78 Positive ideals, by contrast, stress the freedom to “develop a certain type of character,” “be governed by myself,” “be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes … which are my own,” “conceive my own goals and policies and realize them,” and to be “conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for my choices and able to explain them by references to my own ideas and purposes.”Footnote 79

Thus, apart from focusing on external as opposed to internal constraints, the two also emphasize different activities: acting upon our actual wishes (negative liberty), and forming these wishes to begin with (positive liberty). The latter draws on the assumption that “some element in man—the ‘inner fastness of his mind’—could be made secure against conditioning,” a psychology that Berlin attributes to Kant, the Stoics, and Christian thinkers alike.Footnote 80 This activity, we might say, is the ability to change one's preferences for the better. I shall refer to this as mastering one's will, quite simply.

Berlin certainly acknowledges that this “ethical creed” enters “into the tradition of liberal individualism at least as deeply as the ‘negative’ concept of freedom.”Footnote 81 He nevertheless fears that, as soon as it enters the realm of politics, the Kantian belief “that what made men free was not acting in certain self-improving ways, which they could be coerced to do, but knowing why they ought to do so, which nobody could do for, or on behalf of, anyone else,” risks becoming much less liberal than it may initially seem, despite its individualistic underpinnings. For “even Kant, when he came to deal with political issues, conceded that no law, provided that it was such that I should, if I were asked, approve of it as a rational being, could possibly deprive me of any portion of rational freedom. With this the door was opened wide to the rule of experts.”Footnote 82 This is not the result of any logical steps, Berlin concedes, but simply the sad empirical consequence of what happens when the ideal of “individual responsibility and individual self-perfection” meets political reality. For if I am a politician, “I cannot consult men about all enactments all the time,” he suggests. “The government cannot be a continuous plebiscite. Moreover, some men are not as well attuned to the voice of their own reason as others: some seem singularly deaf.” Of course, I may try to educate them to take individual responsibility over their own will, for the sake of their self-perfection.

But I am responsible for public welfare, I cannot wait until all men are wholly rational. Kant may protest that the essence of the subject's freedom is that he, and he alone, has given himself the order to obey. But this is a counsel of perfection. If you fail to discipline yourself, I must do so for you; and you cannot complain of lack of freedom, for the fact that Kant's rational judge has sent you to prison is evidence that you have not listened to your own inner reason, that, like a child, a savage, an idiot, you are either not ripe for self-direction, or permanently incapable of it.Footnote 83

Berlin's suspicion here is not, we should note, that a proponent of Kantian liberty could ever come to equate coercion with freedom, but that he might reformulate coercion as an empirically necessary (albeit insufficient) step in the larger project of liberation for those who he believes are in their present state “singularly deaf” to the voice of reason. We might recall here that Kant concludes his famous defense of freedom of thought, in An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?, by observing a “strange and unexpected tendency in human affairs”: that freedom of action in reality creates “insuperable restrictions” to freedom of thought.Footnote 84 As he notes earlier in the essay, the thoughtless masses are too immature to use their own reason, and will simply abuse their freedom to find new prejudices.Footnote 85 Kant thus claims that “a lesser degree of civil freedom, by contrast, creates the room for spiritual freedom to spread to its full capacity,” and through this coercion they will finally become “capable of acting freely” as well. Thus, although Kant does not explicitly deny that his recommendation is indeed coercion, even he comes rather close: though “paradoxical” as he admits that it may sound, his conclusion is that the negative freedom of his contemporaries to act upon their actual preferences should be restricted by the authorities, for the very sake of both their freedom of thought and action.Footnote 86

Berlin, we must also note, further suggests that the romantic quest to conceive our own, authentic goals, to master our will in line with our true personality, is just as amenable to inversion as is the Kantian ideal of autonomy. He therefore cautions against the romantic assumption that “I must do for men (or with them) what they cannot do for themselves, and I cannot ask their permission or consent, because they are in no condition to know what is best for them; indeed, what they will permit and accept may mean a life of contemptible mediocrity, or perhaps even their ruin and suicide.” For whereas some put forward the value of reason, “romantic authoritarians may worship other values, and see in their establishment by force the only path to true freedom.”Footnote 87 The “liberator” need not be the Enlightenment's philosopher king; he might just as well be the romantic artist, poet, or “superman who rises above, and mocks at, the petty vision and sordid calculations of men and women bound by the sense, by attachments which spring from conventions or methods which they practice without understanding, and cannot ‘free’ themselves from.”Footnote 88 Again, then, we see that Berlin's critique is not only aimed at the Enlightenment ideal of liberation by reason, as is often assumed.

In sum, Berlin seems to have feared that the positive liberty of mastering one's will becomes dangerous when it enters the political realm. Those in political power might subscribe to the Enlightenment ideal of forming one's choices in obedience to universal reason, and believe that I fail in this because of my emotionality or ignorance. Or, alternatively, they might think my failure lies in a lack of romantic passion and self-creation, because they see me as excessively governed by habits and conformity, or some other perverting influence over the latent will that ought to be my sole sovereign. Either way, if they also believe I am helplessly blind to these true ends, Berlin's fear is that their commitment to freedom as changing one's will for the better may lead them to conclude that my liberation requires not only education or discussion, but also the active obstruction of my current, unfree preferences altogether.

The French Ban on Full Veils

I have argued that a neglected yet pivotal part of Berlin's inversion thesis in “Two Concepts of Liberty” is to identify a repressive impulse within liberalism itself. In the previous section, we traced the steps by which Berlin seems to have believed that positive ideals of liberty—whether enlightened or romantic—may lead to such coercion in the very name of liberation. Let us now compare his theory to contemporary practice, by turning to consider a currently heated political concern: the French ban on full Muslim veils (burqa and niqab) in public. This, we shall discover, not only provides a vivid illustration of Berlin's thesis and its relevance for us today.Footnote 89 Looking at the veil debate in France through Berlin's theoretical lens also allows us to pinpoint an especially disturbing aspect of it that previous research has yet to disentangle.

Berlin's main concern, I have suggested, was that positive liberty might lead its advocates to see their own coercion as nothing but liberation, with the complete denial of the self-understanding of the coerced, as they are here and now, that this implies. Translated to the veil debate, this prompts us to look beyond the arguments for the ban itself, and instead examine the reasoning of those who understood the ban as an act of liberation even of those women who claimed they wanted to wear the veil. A case in point, I would argue, is the investigation of the Information Committee that recommended the ban on full veils in their long report to the National Assembly in 2010. One of its main conclusions was that “more than an attack on laïcité, this practice is a negation of the principle of liberty, because it is a manifestation of oppression.”Footnote 90 There was thus a major difference, the report underlined, between the ban on headscarves in public schools of 2004 and the ban on full veils. While the former was indeed a matter of securing laïcité, the classic French understanding of secularism, the latter was rather about safeguarding liberty against oppression. Yet how could the commission conclude that the veil was a “manifestation of oppression” that required to be banned in the very name of liberty, when, at the very same time, it recognized that most women who wear the full veil “affirm that they want to do so?”Footnote 91

One of the most frequently cited hearings in the report, that of Abdennour Bidar, a philosopher and specialist in Islam, suggests positive liberty may have something to do with this conclusion. Bidar presented the full veil as a sign of many underlying problems, above all of which, however, he put the “formalistic” tendency of Islam to repress the expression of individual freedom. This freedom of the veiled women, he argued, needed to be safeguarded by a ban on full veils.Footnote 92 Yet at the same time, Bidar also advised the commission to avoid completely the “subjective perception” held by the veiled women of why they want to veil, and instead to focus exclusively on the “objective perception” of the nonveiled majority—which, incidentally, was also his own.Footnote 93 His main reason for arguing that “the swamp of individual motivations” must be avoided altogether was that we cannot trust the veiled women to know what is in fact their own free choice:Footnote 94

In reality, that which is perceived by the individual as liberty can be nothing but the interiorization of pressure. It would be suitable to interrogate a psychologist or psychoanalyst on this subject. A norm that comes to be held by the majority in the social environment can undergo a process of culpabilization in the individual's mind. The individual believes to have chosen freely, but if one traces the genealogy of this choice, one realizes that an external pressure has been able to give rise to the very idea that the norm is there at all. One can thus, paradoxically, have to do with alienated subjectivities or liberties.Footnote 95

The women may thus be externally free, yet internally imprisoned by norms that are not truly theirs, although they themselves certainly think so:

More precisely, one can, from a subjective point of view, call a behavior free that is in fact not at all free. It is the same for an adolescent integrated in a group: even if he can be under the illusion of acting as his own master, one can sometimes see, with a little distance, that the self-affirmation and the pressure of the group get tangled up in his mind.Footnote 96

Berlin, I have argued, was suspicious of the assumption that our own ideals are the only objectively rational ones, combined with a commitment to liberty from internal rather than external constraints, and liberty in the process of forming one's will rather than in acting upon it. Bidar's reasoning fits rather well with this pattern. Not only does he exemplify self-righteous monism by assuming that his own view of the veil is the “objective perception,” while that of the veiled women is by definition “subjective.” Considering how concerned he is with constraints internal to the self, and the activity of mastering one's will, he is also a clear proponent of positive liberty. He presents the negative liberty of being able to act as one's empirical self wishes as not really freedom after all, but “subjectivity”—and “all subjectivity is not sound in spirit.”Footnote 97 Bidar shows how, through steps that are not logically compelling but psychologically understandable, positive liberty does indeed lead to the disguise of coercion as liberation. Because he seems to presume the women who wish to wear the veil cannot be made to see the truth unless they are forced to distance themselves from their group, and because his ideal of freedom is positive rather than negative, he completely dismisses and indeed actively urges us to disregard the “subjective perception” of the very persons whose liberty he sets out to defend by coercion.

Finally, the type of positive liberty at play here, I would argue, belongs more to the romantic camp than to that of the Enlightenment. Bidar does not portray veiling as heteronomy, the failure to impose reason upon oneself. Instead, he condemns the veil as a “suffocating” sacrifice of the internal life to external uniformity. He even likens this tendency to a mill that “grinds down the individual personality, imprisoning the individual in a homogenous, collective behavior.”Footnote 98 The report similarly complains in its own conclusions that the veil is “a veritable denial of the person with regard to that which makes her the most unique.” A person who must hide his face, it declares, “loses all his specificity and in a certain manner part of his humanity.”Footnote 99 Although I cannot assess the entire report definitively here, these statements seem to reveal a commitment to unique self-expression and individuality as the epitome of humanity—a view typically espoused by German Romantics such as Friedrich Schlegel, which however stands in stark contrast to the more typical Enlightenment ideal of humanity residing in a capacity which we share, such as for Kant our capacity to govern ourselves by reason.Footnote 100

Previous research on the French opposition to veils has often treated liberty as little more than a rhetorical cover-up for postcolonial prejudice, orientalism, and pure sexism.Footnote 101 Recently, however, it has been convincingly argued that the philosophical arguments invoked in favor of the French ban need to be given more attention, especially since its most vehement supporters have championed liberty consistently and seemingly sincerely throughout the years.Footnote 102 While this section has of course only scratched the surface of this debate, it does suggest that Berlin can contribute with three valuable insights in this endeavor. First, Berlin helps us isolate the perhaps most disconcerting aspect of the ban, namely, how the women who wished to wear the veil were completely dismissed in the very name of their own liberation. Second, he draws our attention to the central yet paradoxical role of positive liberty in this understanding of the ban. Third, Berlin also reminds us that romantic ideals of positive liberty are just as vulnerable to inversion as are Enlightenment ideals. This is especially relevant given that the report of the French Information Committee appears far from alone in accusing the veil of suffocating individual uniqueness. Other critics of the veil, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Pascal Bruckner, also invoke the romantic concern that the full veil crushes all personal differences and hinders the liberty of self-revelation.Footnote 103 Indeed, it has recently been suggested that the many influential public opinion-makers and intellectuals who call themselves “Enlightenment liberals” may sometimes be better described as “Romantic liberals,” since their resistance to, for example, Muslim veils often seems to rely on their commitment to self-expression and individuality, rather than to the capacity for enlightened self-reflection and autonomy.Footnote 104 Future research is thus likely to find it fruitful to approach these debates with the framework from Berlin that this essay has reconstructed, suggesting that romantic notions of liberty, in spite of their sometimes treacherous softness, are psychologically as likely to invite the inversion of liberty as is the Enlightenment ideal of liberation by reason.

Conclusions

Although the central role of human psychology in the work of Isaiah Berlin is often recognized, this insight has hitherto never been brought to bear on his attack on positive liberty in TCL. This essay has thus attempted the first reconstruction of the psychological process through which Berlin believed that champions of positive liberty end up welcoming coercion under the name of liberation. The resulting picture gives us reason to question the conventional truth in two different literatures: the one seeking to understand Berlin, and the one grappling with contemporary debates over immigration and integration, such as that over the Muslim veil.

First, it seems that previous research on Berlin's thought has been too quick in dismissing his case against positive liberty as either logically flawed or historically outdated. In order to know whether he was right to warn us against the potential inversion of liberty, we must also submit his suggestions to empirical scrutiny. Although this essay has focused on reconstructing rather than testing his warnings, there seems to be no reason to dismiss them out of hand.Footnote 105 One of the most heated contemporary debates not only in France but throughout Western Europe—the one concerning the full Muslim veil—testifies to the continued, indeed perhaps increasing, relevance of Berlin's warnings.

Second, this essay gives us reason to question the emerging consensus in the empirical research that sees veil bans and other similar trends as cases of “illiberal liberalism.”Footnote 106 The overwhelming assumption in this field is that, if there are contemporary tendencies towards repression in the name of liberty, these must stem from “Enlightenment liberalism,” and its focus on one kind of positive liberty: liberation by reason.Footnote 107 Yet, although Berlin is sometimes invoked as the source of inspiration for the critique of Enlightenment liberalism, this essay shows that he by no means saw the risk of inversion in the name of liberty as exhausted by Enlightenment ideals of liberation. In fact, he seems convinced that this process was as likely to be rooted in romantic ideals of liberty, such as self-expression, self-realization, and authenticity, which elevate the life lived from within, unhindered by internalized convention, duties, or commitment. Berlin's warnings regarding the romantic sides of positive liberty carry special relevance today, when the results of many empirical studies suggest that romantic notions of liberty such as “authentic self-expression” or “maximum personal development and self-realization” are likely to be more popular in contemporary Western culture than are Enlightenment ideals, and certainly more widespread than Berlin imagined when writing “Two Concepts of Liberty” in 1958.Footnote 108

Footnotes

1 Berlin, Isaiah, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Liberty, ed. Hardy, Henry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 211 (hereafter referred to as TCL). Following Berlin, I here use “liberty” and “freedom” synonymously; see TCL, 169.

2 Macpherson, C. B., “Berlin's division of liberty,” in Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval, ed. Macpherson, C. B. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 110–13; Christman, John, “Liberalism and Individual Positive Freedom,” Ethics 101, no. 2 (1991): 359; Simhony, Avital, “On Forcing Individuals to be Free: T. H. Green's Liberal Theory of Positive Freedom,” Political Studies 39, no. 2 (1991): 305; West, David, “Spinoza on Positive Freedom,” Political Studies 41, no. 2 (1993): 296.

3 Galipeau, Claude J., Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 85; Gray, John, Isaiah Berlin (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 18; Crowder, George, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 84–85.

4 Franco, Paul, “The Shapes of Liberal Thought: Oakeshott, Berlin, and Liberalism,” Political Theory 31, no. 4 (2003): 490. Also see Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism, 85; and Kenny, Michael, “Isaiah Berlin's Contribution to Modern Political Theory,” Political Studies 48, no. 5 (2000): 1037.

5 Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 149.

6 Mack, Eric, “Isaiah Berlin and the Quest for Liberal Pluralism,” Public Affairs Quarterly 7, no. 3 (1993): 215–30; Gray, Isaiah Berlin; Tamir, Yael, “A Strange Alliance: Isaiah Berlin and the Liberalism of the Fringes,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1, no. 2 (1998): 279–89; Galston, William A, “Value Pluralism and Liberal Political Theory,” American Political Science Review 93, no. 4 (1999): 769–78; Gutmann, Amy, “Liberty and Pluralism in Pursuit of the Non-ideal,” Social Research 66, no. 4 (1999): 1039–62; Honneth, Axel, “Negative Freedom and Cultural Belonging: An Unhealthy Tension in the Political Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin,” Social Research 66, no. 4 (1999): 1063–77; Riley, Jonathan, “Interpreting Berlin's Liberalism,” American Political Science Review 95, no. 2 (2001): 283–95; Franco, “The Shapes of Liberal Thought: Oakeshott, Berlin, and Liberalism”; Gaus, Gerald F., Contemporary Theories of Liberalism (London: Sage, 2003), chap. 2; Crowder, George, “Two Concepts of Liberal Pluralism,” Political Theory 35, no. 2 (2007): 121–46; Myers, Ella, “From Pluralism to Liberalism: Rereading Isaiah Berlin,” Review of Politics 72, no. 4 (2010): 599–625.

7 Cf. Galston, William A., Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chap. 2; Mookherje, Monica, “Affective citizenship: feminism, postcolonialism and the politics of recognition,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 8, no. 1 (2005): 33; Tebble, Adam, “Exclusion for Democracy,” Political Theory 34, no. 4 (2006): 474; Joppke, Christian, Veil: Mirror of Identity (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 2; Adamson, Fiona B., Triadafilopoulos, Triadafilos, and Zolberg, Aristide R., “The Limits of the Liberal State: Migration, Identity and Belonging in Europe,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37, no. 6 (2011): 843–59.

8 Zakaras, Alex, “Isaiah Berlin's Cosmopolitan Ethics,” Political Theory 32, no. 4 (2004): 515; Müller, Jan-Werner, “Fear and Freedom: On ‘Cold War Liberalism,’” European Journal of Political Theory 7, no. 1 (2008): 58–59; Zakaras, Alex, “A Liberal Pluralism: Isaiah Berlin and John Stuart Mill,” Review of Politics 75, no. 1 (2013): 91–92.

9 Crowder, Isaiah Berlin; Ricciardi, Mario, “Berlin on Liberty,” in The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin, ed. Crowder, George and Hardy, Henry (New York: Prometheus Books, 2007).

10 Zakaras, “A Liberal Pluralism,” 92. Also see Crowder, George, “Justification and Psychology in Liberal Pluralism: A Reply to Zakaras,” Review of Politics 75, no. 1 (2013): 103–10; Zakaras, Alex, “Reply to Galston and Crowder,” Review of Politics 75, no. 1 (2013): 111–14.

11 See references in footnote 7, above.

12 Cf. McCloskey, H. J., “A Critique of the Ideals of Liberty,” Mind 74, no. 296 (1965): 483–508; Ryan, Alan, “Freedom,” Philosophy 40, no. 152 (1965): 93–112; Macfarlane, L. J., “On Two Concepts of Liberty,” Political Studies 14, no. 1 (1966): 77–81; Gray, Isaiah Berlin; and Taylor, Charles, “What's Wrong with Negative Liberty?,” in Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. Goodin, Robert and Pettit, Philip (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). For an overview of this vast debate, see Harris, Ian, “Berlin and his Critics,” in Liberty, ed. Hardy, Henry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

13 Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 69; Joshua Cherniss, “Berlin's Early Political Thought,” in The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin, 95; Ricciardi, “Berlin on Liberty,” 126.

14 TCL, 178–79.

15 TCL, 212. This reading is also found in Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism, 8–9; Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 17; Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 78.

16 Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 15–16.

17 Berlin, Isaiah, “Introduction,” in Liberty, ed. Hardy, Henry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 179. For an insightful account of these different sides of positive liberty, see Miller, David, editor's introduction to The Liberty Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 10. Berlin, moreover, clearly refers to “individual liberty, in either the ‘negative’ or in the ‘positive’ senses of the word” (TCL, 204). Thus, although he blames positive liberty for being more easily perverted into an idea of freedom as merging one's individual self into “some super-personal entity,” it seems fair to say that he does not identify positive liberty with any collectivist notion. This reading is argued for in further detail in Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 68; and Ricciardi, “Berlin on Liberty,” 132.

18 Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism, 36; Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 188.

19 This reading is also found in Macpherson, “Berlin's division of liberty,” 95; Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism, 104; Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 22; and Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 68–69.

20 Isaiah Berlin, “Introduction,” 32.

21 Footnote Ibid. 39 (emphasis added).

22 TCL, 169.

23 TCL, 180–81.

24 TCL, 215.

25 TCL, 180.

26 Zakaras, “Isaiah Berlin's Cosmopolitan Ethics,” 504–7. Cf. Berlin, Isaiah, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Hardy, Henry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 11; Berlin, Isaiah, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. Hardy, Henry (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 49.

27 TCL, 216–17.

28 Christman, “Liberalism and Individual Positive Freedom,” 359; Simhony, “On Forcing Individual to be Free: T. H. Green's Liberal Theory of Positive Freedom,” 305; West, “Spinoza on Positive Freedom,” 296; Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 86.

29 TCL, 179, 181. Berlin, “Introduction, 37.

30 Cf. Macpherson, “Berlin's division of liberty,” 110–11.

31 Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 69–70. The notion of the “inversion thesis” is also used in Ricciardi, “Berlin on Liberty,” 121.

32 Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 84.

33 Footnote Ibid., 69.

34 TCL, 167.

35 TCL, 179.

36 Berlin, Isaiah, “Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Nationalism,” in The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History, ed. Hardy, Henry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 237.

37 TCL, 198 (emphasis added).

38 TCL, 207–8 (emphasis added).

39 Berlin, “Introduction,” 31–32.

40 Zakaras, “Isaiah Berlin's Cosmopolitan Ethics,” 515; Müller, “Fear and Freedom,” 59; Zakaras, “A Liberal Pluralism.”

41 Cf. Cherniss, Joshua L., “Isaiah Berlin's Political Ideas: From the Twentieth Century to the Romantic Age,” in Political Ideas in the Romantic Age, ed. Hardy, Henry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Graeme Garrard, “Strange Reversals: Berlin on the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment,” in The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin; Ricciardi, “Berlin on Liberty.”

42 Gray, Isaiah Berlin; Galston, “Value Pluralism and Liberal Political Theory”; Riley, “Interpreting Berlin's Liberalism”; Franco, “The Shapes of Liberal Thought: Oakeshott, Berlin, and Liberalism.”

43 Macfarlane, “On Two Concepts of Liberty,” 79–80; Christman, “Liberalism and Individual Positive Freedom,” 359; West, “Spinoza on Positive Freedom,” 288; Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism, 101–2.

44 His more general concern that, as Galston puts it, “the totalitarian temptation is an enduring feature of the human mind” has often been recognized, however. See Galston, William A., “Moral Pluralism and Liberal Democracy: Isaiah Berlin's Heterodox Liberalism,” Review of Politics 71, no. 1 (2009): 99; and Zakaras, “A Liberal Pluralism,” 86.

45 TCL, 208.

46 TCL, 214.

47 TCL, 216.

48 TCL, 217.

49 As an anonymous reviewer brought to my attention, a monist could of course merely assume that there is one rational ordering of human values, but doubt that there can be any positive access to this knowledge. By repeatedly lumping together monism, certainty, and self-righteousness, Berlin thus neglects this much less comforting version of monism. Cf. Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” 13–14.

50 Note that this differs from the more common interpretation of Berlin as seeing monism as a consequence of positive liberty, which has recently been discussed by Kis, Janos, “Berlin's two concepts of positive liberty,” European Journal of Political Theory 12, no. 1 (2013): 38–39.

51 TCL, 181.

52 TCL,179–80.

53 TCL, 192.

54 Berlin seems to have thought of himself as a pluralistic supporter of positive liberty: Berlin, “Introduction,” 50; Cherniss, “Berlin's Early Political Thought.”

55 TCL, 193.

56 TCL, 213.

57 TCL, 180.

58 Ross, Lee and Ward, Andrew, “Naive Realism in Everyday Life: Implications for Social Conflict and Misunderstanding,” in Values and Knowledge, ed. Reed, Edward, Turiel, Elliot, and Brown, Terrance (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), 110–11. Also see Griffin, Dale W. and Ross, Lee, “Subjective Construal, Social Inference, and Human Misunderstanding,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 4 (New York: Academic Press, 1991), 319–59.

59 Taber, Charles S. and Lodge, Milton, “Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs,” American Journal of Political Science 50, no. 3 (2006): 767. Also see Kunda, Ziva, “The Case for Motivated Reasoning,” Psychological Bulletin 108, no. 3 (1990): 480–98.

60 Nickerson, Raymond S., “How we know—and sometimes misjudge—what others know: Imputing one's own knowledge to others,” Psychological Bulletin 125, no. 6 (1999): 739–59; Royzman, Edward B., Cassidy, Kimberly Wright, and Baron, Jonathan, “‘I Know, You Know’: Epistemic Egocentrism in Children and Adults,” Review of General Psychology 7, no. 1 (2003): 38–65; Epley, Nicholas, Keysar, Boaz, Van Boven, Leaf, and Gilovich, Thomas, “Perspective taking as egocentric anchoring and adjustment,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87, no. 3 (2004): 327–39.

61 Arblaster, Anthony, “Vision and Revision: A Note on the Text of Isaiah Berlin's Four Essays on Liberty,” Political Studies 19, no. 1 (1971): 86.

62 TCL, 169.

63 Berlin, “Introduction,” 32.

64 Berlin, Isaiah, “Two Concepts of Freedom: Romantic and Liberal,” in Political Ideas in the Romantic Age, ed. Hardy, Henry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 205.

65 MacCallum, Gerald, “Negative and Positive Freedom,” The Philosophical Review 73, no. 3 (1967): 312–34.

66 Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 78; Christman, John, “Saving Positive Freedom,” Political Theory 33, no. 1 (2005): 81.

67 TCL, 179–80.

68 TCL, 185, 204, 195, 169.

69 TCL, 180–81.

70 Christman, “Liberalism and Individual Positive Freedom,” 354–55; Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism, 101; Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 21.

71 Berlin, “Two Concepts of Freedom: Romantic and Liberal,” 185, 89 (emphasis added). The term “romantic” is of course notoriously difficult to define. I here simply follow Berlin in using it to refer to ideas he associates with early German Romanticism. See Berlin, Isaiah, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

72 Berlin, Roots of Romanticism, 50–51.

73 Isaiah Berlin, “The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 229.

74 Berlin, “Two Concepts of Freedom: Romantic and Liberal,” 201.

75 Footnote Ibid., 197.

76 Berlin, “The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will,” 231.

77 Berlin, “Two Concepts of Freedom: Romantic and Liberal,” 201–2.

78 TCL, 169, 70, 79, 75.

79 TCL, 175, 78, 81–82.

80 TCL, 184.

81 TCL, 185.

82 TCL, 198–99.

83 TCL, 199.

84 Kant, Immanuel, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?, in What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. Schmidt, James (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 63.

85 Footnote Ibid, 59.

86 Footnote Ibid., 63.

87 TCL, 197.

88 Berlin, “Two Concepts of Freedom: Romantic and Liberal,” 202.

89 Zakaras has suggested this in passing, yet no one has yet to my knowledge actually tried to bring together the two (Zakaras, “A Liberal Pluralism,” 94).

90 André Gerin and Eric Raoult, Document no. 2262: Rapport d'information au nom de la mission d'information sur la pratique du port du voile intégral sur le territoire national, Assemblée Nationale, 29 January 2010, 87; retrieved from http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/rap-info/i2262.asp, last accessed on 18 November 2013. All quotes from this document were translated by the author.

91 Footnote Ibid., 93.

92 Footnote Ibid., 287–88, 291. He also raised other concerns, for example that the unveiled majority needed protection from the “symbolic violence” inherent in the full veil (ibid., 286).

93 Footnote Ibid., 291.

94 Footnote Ibid., 286.

95 Footnote Ibid., 291.

96 Footnote Ibid.

97 Footnote Ibid.

98 Footnote Ibid., 287. Also see his insistence on the face as the expressive mirror of the soul (ibid., 286).

99 Footnote Ibid., 98, 118. Also see the reasoning of the Sufi poet and intellectual Abdelwahab Meddeb, cited at116–17.

100 For a lucid account of Schlegel's sometimes opaque critique of Kant on this matter, see Gorodeisky, Keren, “(Re)encountering Individuality: Schlegel's Romantic Imperative as a Response to Nihilism,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 54, no. 6 (2011): 576–79.

101 Cf. Fekete, Liz, “Enlightened fundamentalism? Immigration, feminism and the Right,” Race & Class 48, no. 2 (2006): 1–22; Wallach-Scott, Joan, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 16, 121, 135; Winter, Bronwyn, Hijab and the Republic: Uncovering the French Headscarf Debate (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008), chap. 6; Al-Saji, Alia, “The Racialization of Muslim veils: A philosophical analysis,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 36, no. 8 (2010): 875–902. A notable exception is Laborde, Cécile, Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Yet Laborde only considers the ban on headscarves on minors in public schools, not the more recent and substantially different issue of banning full veils on adult women in the public sphere. Nor does Laborde mention Berlin or his warnings against the positive liberty of self-mastery; her concern is instead with republican freedom as nondomination, which is considerably different (cf. Miller, introduction to Liberty Reader, 10).

102 Baehr, Peter and Gordon, Daniel, “From the headscarf to the burqa: The role of social theorists in shaping laws against the veil,” Economy and Society 42, no. 2 (2013): 253, 255.

103 Ali, Ayaan Hirsi, The Caged Virgin: A Muslim Woman's Cry for Reason (London: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 32; Bruckner, Pascal, “Unveiled: A Case for France's Burqa Ban,” World Affairs 173, no. 4 (2010): 61–65.

104 Gustavsson, Gina, “Romantic Liberalism: An Alternative Perspective on the Muhammad Cartoons Controversy,” Political Studies 62, no. 1 (2014): 66–67.

105 Also see Gustavsson, Gina, “Freedom in mass values: egocentric, humanistic, or both? Using Isaiah Berlin to understand a contemporary debate,” European Political Science Review 4, no. 2 (2012): 241–62.

106 Adamson, Triadafilopoulos, and Zolberg, “The Limits of the Liberal State.”

107 Galston, William A., “Two Concepts of Liberalism,” Ethics 105, no. 3 (1995): 516–34; King, Desmond, In the Name of Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Gray, John, Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: New Press, 2000); Kukathas, Chandran, The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Also see the references in note 7, above.

108 Flanagan, Scott C. and Lee, Aie-Rie, “The New Politics, Culture Wars, and the Authoritarian-Libertarian Value Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies,” Comparative Political Studies 36, no. 3 (2003): 238; Bellah, Robert N., Madsen, Richard, Sullivan, William M., Swidler, Ann, and Tipton, Steven M., Habits of the Heart, Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 130–33, 333–34; Stoltzenberg, Nomi Maya, “Liberalism in a Romantic State,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 5 (2009): 194–215.

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