Liberty, Liberalism, and Anti-totalitarianism
Kei Hiruta
Born in Riga in 1909 and an émigré to England at the age of eleven, Isaiah Berlin was a philosopher, political theorist, and intellectual historian famed for his breadth of learning, elegant prose style, and brilliance in conversation. Like Hannah Arendt, he began his academic career in philosophy but came to be preoccupied with politics as a result of the crises of the 1930s and the 1940s. He eventually claimed the history of political ideas as his vocation and spent most of his academic life at the University of Oxford. He travelled widely and socialized extensively. He met Arendt on a few occasions and they had friends in common, including W. H. Auden, Mary McCarthy, and Gershom Scholem. But the combination of philosophical differences, political disagreement, adverse personal chemistry, and unfortunate circumstances prevented the two thinkers from forming a friendship. On the contrary, the poor impression Berlin formed of Arendt at their first meeting in wartime New York developed into a lifelong hatred. Arendt did not respond in kind and remained personally indifferent to Berlin, seeing him as a respectable intellectual historian, if not as an original thinker. Although she did not engage with his work, some of Arendt’s key ideas and arguments should be seen as critical responses to the brand of liberalism that Berlin and his ideological allies developed in the mid-twentieth century.1
Berlin’s primary contribution to political thought is his theory of freedom, built on the distinction he made famous between “negative” and “positive” liberty. He did not invent this dichotomy. This had been deployed since the eighteenth century by a number of thinkers, including Martin Heidegger, who in a 1943 essay referred to “negative” and “positive” freedom as “common-sense” conceptions and dismissed both as equally inadequate.2 But Berlin forcefully reasserted the old distinction, most notably in his influential 1958 essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.”3 In his formulation, negative liberty is noninterference, and positive liberty is self-mastery. One is negatively free if one is not prevented by others from doing what one could otherwise do. This freedom is called “negative” because it is defined by the absence of that which hinders it: interference. One is positively free, by contrast, to the extent that one is able to exercise control over oneself and to be in charge of one’s life. Standardly, positive liberty takes a rationalist form, according to which one is (positively) free to the extent that one relies on reason to realize what is worth doing and to do it. Freedom in this sense “is not freedom to do what is irrational, or stupid, or wrong.”4
Berlin acknowledged the respectable intellectual heritage of positive liberty, running from ancient Stoic philosophers to Immanuel Kant and T. H. Green. Yet he considered this concept to be dangerous in that it could be abused to justify a politically disastrous form of paternalism. According to the inner logic of positive liberty, Berlin argued, an external interferer may claim to know what is the rational thing for one to do and coerce one into doing it, and then maintain that the one who is coerced has not been made unfree but, on the contrary, has been “forced to be free.”5 Furthermore, Berlin believed that positive liberty had in fact been perverted via paternalism into “something close to a pure totalitarian doctrine” in the mid-twentieth century, because totalitarian oppression, especially in the Soviet Union, had been carried out in the name of “true freedom.”6 He associated positive liberty with the communist East, and its negative counterpart with the liberal West, insisting on the normative primacy of the latter, especially in “Two Concepts of Liberty.” But he also expressed more ambivalent opinions elsewhere, noting that positive liberty in a non-perverted form could be a valid goal to pursue, while negative liberty could also be abused, giving rise to the “evils of unrestricted laissez-faire.”7 His ultimate assessment of the two concepts has been a matter of scholarly debate.
As is already clear, Berlin, unlike Arendt, did not distinguish between “liberty” and “freedom,” but used the two terms interchangeably. He claimed to be following the conventions of ordinary language, and many subsequent scholars have followed his example.8 Arendt was not one of them. According to her, liberty is inherently “negative,” as it is associated with liberation.9 Freedom, by contrast, connotes something more “positive.”10 It designates “a state of being manifest in action,” and consists in the exercise of the distinctively human capacity for participation in public affairs.11 It must immediately be noted that Arendt’s distinction between (negative) liberty and (positive) freedom does not correspond to Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty. For one thing, Arendt, unlike Berlin, typically speaks of “liberties” in the plural, primarily referring to legally guaranteed “rights and liberties” such as the right to assembly and free speech. As a consequence, she sees the value of negative liberties primarily in instrumental terms, whereas Berlin typically speaks of the ideal of negative liberty in the singular and defends it as an end in itself. More controversial is the relationship between Arendt’s (positive) freedom and Berlin’s positive liberty. While some scholars such as Philip Pettit see the former as a variant of the latter, others such as Richard H. King suggest otherwise, highlighting the uniqueness of Arendt’s conception vis-à-vis both the liberal empiricist tradition that runs from Bentham to Berlin and its idealist counterpart, originating from Kant and Hegel.12 Much of the dispute stems from Berlin’s work rather than Arendt’s. He uses negative and positive liberty as umbrella categories, each encompassing a family of conceptions. This usage has the advantage of allowing Berlin to sketch a broad semantic landscape. Yet it has also generated some ambiguities, including one concerning the precise extension of his notion of positive liberty.
Berlin’s theory of freedom may be seen as part of a wider contribution to the revival of liberalism in the mid-twentieth century. Liberalism is a broad ideological church encompassing a range of denominations, but the most influential variant that emerged in Arendt’s lifetime was Cold War liberalism. Its chief architects included, in addition to Berlin, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, and Jacob Talmon. Less communitarian than their New Liberal predecessors such as L. T. Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson, and less committed to economic egalitarianism than their American successors such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, Cold War liberals were primarily concerned with minimizing cruelty, “to avoid a summum malum, not the realization of any summum bonum.”13 While Arendt shared this concern to some extent, she never accepted the stark contrast that Cold War liberals drew between the decency of liberalism and the inhumanity of Nazism and Stalinism. On the contrary, she highlighted various ways in which liberalism inadvertently contributed to the emergence of totalitarianism. For example, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she repeatedly associated liberalism with the bourgeoisie and held both accountable for the development of imperialism, which was in her view instrumental in the subsequent rise of totalitarianism. It is true that she appreciated some of the key liberal principles, such as the rule of law, that she shared with classical liberals a concern with the tyranny of the majority, and that she had charitable things to say about some liberal thinkers, such as Tocqueville and Hobson. However, she was generally hostile to, and somewhat prejudiced against, liberalism, and distanced herself from her contemporary Cold War liberals. She knew where she stood, saying in 1972, “I never was a liberal. . . . I never believed in liberalism.”14
There are other common issues that both Berlin and Arendt addressed. One is the critique of scientism, tied to the further critique of rationalism that animates much of the Western philosophical tradition. The two thinkers basically agreed on this set of issues. Skeptical of postwar enthusiasm for an objective social science, they both argued that the simple application of the methods of the natural sciences to the study of human affairs, including politics, was neither feasible nor desirable. A related shared issue is the nature of political judgment. On this the two thinkers subtly disagreed. They theorized the same concepts, such as imagination and empathy, yet they theorized differently and drew on different sources, including Aristotle and Kant in Arendt’s case, and Vico and Herder in Berlin’s. Another common issue is nationalism, about whose pros and cons they fundamentally disagreed. Berlin attempted to rehabilitate the nation-state system by distinguishing a benign form of nationalism from its inflamed and aggressive cousins. Arendt, by contrast, was deeply skeptical of the constructive potential of nationalism, attempting to formulate a new form of government and a new international order to replace the nation-state system.15 This disagreement gave rise to a further dispute about the Zionist movement. While Berlin consistently endorsed liberal Zionism, Arendt was profoundly ambivalent about, and expressed conflicting opinions on, various kinds of Zionism.16 Finally, both thinkers excelled as essayists, and their literary styles might be fruitfully compared in order to evaluate their contributions to rhetoric and the art of persuasion.
Berlin never formally published his opinions on Arendt’s work and personality, although he had much to say in private. We now have a fair sample of his views, thanks to the posthumous publication of his letters.17 A new wave of scholarly work has emerged in recent years, offering a comparative examination of the two thinkers’ lives and works.18 Most contributors to the debate agree that much of what Berlin had to say about Arendt was biased, and that some of his criticisms were based on sheer misunderstanding.
Notes
1 For Berlin’s life see Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998).
2 Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1943), 16.
3 Revised and reprinted in Isaiah Berlin, Liberty, ed. H. Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 166–217.
4 Ibid., 194.
5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, vol. III, ed. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 364; and Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, ed. H. Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 49.
6 Berlin, Liberty, 198.
7 Ibid., 38.
8 For a notable exception to the rule see H. F. Pitkin, “Are Freedom and Liberty Twins?,” Political Theory 16 (1988): 523–52.
9 Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 29.
10 Ibid., 234.
11 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 163.
12 Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); R. H. King, Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1996), 12–28.
13 J.-W. Müller, “Fear and Freedom: On ‘Cold War Liberalism,’” European Journal of Political Theory 7, no. 1 (2008): 45–64, 48.
14 Hannah Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. M. A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 301–56, 334.
15 Kei Hiruta, “‘An Anti-Utopian Age?’: Isaiah Berlin’s England, Hannah Arendt’s America, and Utopian Thinking in Dark Times,” Journal of Political Ideologies 22 (2017): 12–29, 23–24.
16 On this issue see A. M. Dubnov, “Can Parallels Meet?: Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin on the Jewish Post-Emancipatory Quest for Political Freedom,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 62 (2017): 27–51.
17 See Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, ed. H. Hardy and J. Holmes (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009); Building: Letters 1960–1975, ed. H. Hardy and M. Pottle (London: Chatto and Windus, 2013); Affirming: Letters 1975–1997, ed. H. Hardy and M. Pottle (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015).
18 E.g., S. E. Aschheim, Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 113–18; Ronald Beiner, Political Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), xv–xxii; David Caute, Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 262–72; Joan Cocks, Passion and Paradox: Intellectuals Confront the National Question (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 71–91; Dubnov, “Can Parallels Meet?”; Hiruta, “‘An Anti-Utopian Age?’”; Kei Hiruta, “The Meaning and Value of Freedom: Berlin contra Arendt,” European Legacy 19 (2014): 854–68; and Kei Hiruta, “A Democratic Consensus?: Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, and the Anti-totalitarian Family Quarrel,” Think 17 (2018): 25–37.