positive and negative liberty

One time in high school I was talking to my friend Jay, who like a lot of my friends growing up was from a more politically conservative household. I casually mentioned that I was waiting for a library book that was being shipped from another library the next county over. When Jay learned that the local library system had a fleet of trucks that brought books from one library to another every day, he said, “I wonder how much that costs the taxpayers.” I argued that whatever the cost was in taxes, it was probably worth it to give kids access to every library book in the area, instead of just the library books available in their town.

Jay and I were arguing about two different types of freedom, defined by Isaiah Berlin in his essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Jay was arguing in favor of negative liberty, which can be broadly defined as “freedom from”--in this case, freedom from taxes. I was arguing in favor of positive liberty, “freedom to”--in this case, freedom to access a wealth of knowledge. The United States was founded on both concepts of freedom: the freedom from tyranny and oppression, along with the freedom to “the pursuit of happiness”; freedom from arbitrary government, along with a freedom to govern one’s self. The difficult task of a democracy is to maintain a balance of both, because too much of one without the other can be a dangerous thing.

John Locke is regarded as the father of negative liberty. Locke’s writings are a little difficult to get a handle on today, because at the time he was arguing with people who genuinely believed that monarchy was the only legitimate form of government, and that monarchs derived their right to rule from God. At the time, Locke’s idea that people should be free from the rule of a monarch was pretty radical.

One of Locke’s key concepts was the idea that the law should protect an individual’s rights to land ownership. This had a big influence on Thomas Jefferson during the conception of the United States government (Locke wrote that people have the right to “life, liberty and property”--Jefferson replaced “property” with “the pursuit of happiness”) . Property rights are central to our idea of freedom, and for good reason. Privately-owned farms are more productive than communal ones. The pride of home ownership is important to vibrant neighborhoods. Intellectual property rights are vital to a dynamic business economy.

But if government’s only job is to protect property rights and avoid constraining individual liberty, then what happens if one successful businessperson starts buying all the land in town and charging rent to tenants? The tenants may want to become landowners, but even though there are no legal constraints preventing them from doing so, there are economic constraints imposed by their having to pay rent to the landlord, and the landlord owning all of the good land in the area. They are free from arbitrary laws preventing them from owning their own land, but they are not free to actually become landowners.

This brings us to the problems with negative liberty. The political activist Emma Goldman wrote:

“True liberty...is not a negative thing of being free from something, because with such freedom you may starve to death. Real freedom, true liberty, is positive: it is freedom to something; it is the liberty to be, to do; in short the liberty of actual and active opportunity.”

Political theorist Hannah Arendt demonstrates the historical importance of positive liberty in her essay “The Freedom to be Free,” in which she compares the American Revolution with the French Revolution, and asks why one led to the foundation of a lasting democracy while the other descended into chaos and gave rise to an empire. She argues that France’s problem lay in the fact that it’s people were so poverty-stricken that when they were freed from tyranny, they had no interest in sitting down and debating the best way to form a republic--they needed food and clothes first. As Arendt put it:

“The men of the first revolutions, though they knew well enough that liberation had to precede freedom, were still unaware of the fact that such liberation means more than political liberation from absolute and despotic power; that to be free for freedom meant first of all to be free not only from fear but also from want.”

In short, freedom means more than opening someone’s prison cell and saying, “you’re free!” They need more than freedom from, they need freedom to. If you kill the king but don’t build a new form of government, you’ll just end up with a different king. Democracy actually requires the positive freedom of self-government, whereas negative freedom alone can be provided by a benevolent dictator. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it when summarizing Isaiah Berlin’s essay:

“As Berlin admits, on the negative view, I am free even if I live in a dictatorship just as long as the dictator happens, on a whim, not to interfere with me (see also Hayek 1960).”

This brings us to the concept of positive liberty: the freedom to. If John Locke is the father of negative liberty, then the father of positive liberty is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau believed that individual freedom was achievable through the community, with everyone working together toward a common goal, or “general will.” The Articles of Confederation, the first constitution of the United States, begins with a declaration of a general will:

“Whereas we all came into these parts of America with one and the same end and aim, namely, to advance the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ and to enjoy the liberties of the Gospel in purity with peace; and whereas in our settling (by a wise providence of God) we are further dispersed upon the sea coasts and rivers than was at first intended, so that we can not according to our desire with convenience communicate in one government and jurisdiction…”

The framers of the Articles of Confederation were agreeing that they didn’t want Emma Goldman’s negative freedom “to starve to death.” By entering into “a firm and perpetual league of friendship and amity for offence and defence, mutual advice and succor upon all just occasions,” they were agreeing to be free of hunger, want, and fear.

So what could possibly be controversial about this kind of freedom? Well, Rousseau gets into trouble with this passage from his book “The Social Contract”:

“Whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body; this means merely that he will be forced to be free.”

The contradiction here is obvious: how can someone be “forced to be free”? How do we decide what the “general will” is?

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a champion of positive liberty and opponent of negative liberty, took things a step further by saying:

“The state does not exist for the citizens; on the contrary, one could say that the state is the end and they are its means.”

To Hegel, we achieve freedom only by fulfilling our role within the state. This is nationalism, and it should come as no surprise that Hegel was a great admirer of conquerors and emperors, including Napoleon.

So now we’ve seen both extremes. If our only ideal is negative liberty, we can end up with a government that refuses to protect people from being enslaved by one another (by the way, John Locke, despite all his talk about freedom, was an investor in the slave trade through the Royal African Company). On the other hand, if we only believe in positive liberty, we can end up throwing ourselves at the mercy of an emperor. How do we balance the two?

Let’s go back to my conversation with my friend Jay. I was the one arguing against the negative freedom from taxes, in favor of the positive freedom to check out library books, so I obviously lean a little more toward one type of liberty than the other. I personally tend to be a little bit skeptical of champions of negative liberty. I grew up with a lot of friends like Jay, and in their arguments I heard a desire for a type of freedom that I don’t think is really reasonable to expect, or even desirable--a freedom from other people, a cabin in the woods where they will never be bothered by anyone ever. I think this kind of libertarian ideal of negative liberty is pretty much impossible to achieve in a world as densely populated and technologically advanced as ours.

On the other hand, I certainly don’t think guys like Jay need to be somehow “forced to be free,” whatever that means. I think they can enjoy a lot of the freedoms they value by participating in the democratic system and civil society that safeguard those freedoms. This lies in exercising the positive freedoms that I think we sometimes take for granted in America: the freedom to assemble; the freedom to associate with whomever we want; the freedom to vote; the freedom to participate in a civic society that is separate from both business and government.

There’s another quote from Rousseau that I think gets to the point of my idea of positive liberty:

“Every man is virtuous when his particular will is in all things conformable to the general will, and we voluntarily will what is willed by those whom we love.”

It might sound corny or naive, but I honestly think it’s the part about “those whom we love” that’s crucial. It’s one thing to watch pundits and politicians debate about this or that legislation and then cast our vote, but it’s another thing to talk about issues with friends, family and neighbors. Having friends like Jay growing up helped me understand political conservatism and libertarianism a little better than I would have if I had been insulated from different opinions. I was able to bring Jay around to my side of our little library disagreement not necessarily because I’m a great debater, but because we already had an established friendship based on trust and respect.

Not to sound overly alarmist, but I think this is something we’re losing in America right now - a sense of mutual respect, community, and common interest, for and with one another. I personally think we’ve gotten a little too fixated on negative liberty at the expense of positive liberty. As much as we all might want to sometimes, we’ll never be free from other people. But maybe that’s a good thing.