Negative freedom is freedom from coercion. It costs nothing in the sense of positive action. It only requires that one refrain from killing, stealing, assaulting, kidnapping etc. negative freedom necessitates the demarcation of a frontier of privacy that must remain inviolate. But there are other values which require action to achieve (such as collective security, health, convenience etc. and also ways of life). Access to a way of life (both personal and collective) and these collective values is positive freedom: freedom to … They require positive action to achieve. Getting people to take the action that brings about these collective values requires persuasion or force to do so. Persuasion usually means providing them with an income from taxes taken from all. To achieve any amount of positive freedom requires a sacrifice of each individual’s negative freedom.
There is a phenomenon that has been noticed as decolonization began. Many peoples in newly independent states have lost freedom (in both the positive and negative sense) after independence but still give every indication that they feel more free. Some have theorized of a third sense of freedom often calling it ‘social freedom’ but the author rejects this as too vague. He labels this phenomenon as the quest for recognition. It is distinct from liberty. “There is yet another historically important approach to this topic which, by confounding liberty with her sisters, equality and fraternity, leads to similarly illiberal conclusions. Ever since the issue was raised towards the end of the eighteenth century [the Haitian revolution] the question of what is meant by ‘an individual’ has been asked persistently, and with increasing effect.” On the one hand we are all individuals, atoms, in the negative freedom sense on the other we are part of a society (like ingredients in a cake) and our identity is almost entirely social. “I am a social being in a deeper sense than that of interactions with others.” If we ask ourselves ‘who am I?’ all the answers have a social component. “[T]o possess these attributes entails being recognised as belonging to a particular group or class by other persons in my society….The lack of freedom about which men or groups complain amounts, as often as not, to the lack of proper recognition….What I may seek to avoid is simply being ignored, or patronised, or despised, or being taken too much for granted – in short, not being treated as an individual”. Every revolution or liberation movement necessarily sacrifices freedom in both senses for recognition as it cuts itself off from old ties and exerts its sovereignty at least in the short term. In the longer term most societies find that they have merely switched one dominant class for another. The winners always paint a rosier picture as it is winners of conflicts that write their history.
Practically the problem for liberty comes from government (provisional, despotic, or democratic) and every government’s claim of absolute sovereignty. Absolute sovereignty is theoretically held by any entity be it the people, elected representatives in parliament, the King, or the King in parliament etc. but in practice is held by executive bureaucracy. Absolute sovereignty is a tyrannical doctrine. “Few governments, it has been observed, have found much difficulty in causing their subjects to generate any will that the government wanted.” The uncomfortable truth of all governments today is that they have the legal authority and the power to do whatever they want including subverting any and all freedoms.
Since sovereignty is so strong and freedom so precarious, what, the author invites us to contemplate, is how can societies secure freedom? “[N]o society is free unless it is governed by at any rate two interrelated principles: first, that no power, but only rights, can be regarded as absolute, so that all men, whatever power governs them, have absolute right to refuse to behave inhumanly; and second, that there are frontiers, not artificially drawn, within which men should be inviolable, these frontiers being defined in terms of rules so long and widely accepted that their observance has entered into the very conception of what it is to be a normal human being, and, therefore, also of what it is to act inhumanly or insanely; rules of which it would be absurd to say, for example, that they could be abrogated by some formal procedure on the part of some court or sovereign body….The freedom of a society, or a class or a group, in this sense of freedom, is measured by the strength of these barriers, and the number and importance of the paths which they keep open for their members”. Note that the strength of these barriers is not dependent on the form they take (for example is a written or unwritten constitution better?) but on the effectiveness of whatever form is there.
These two principles embody the contradictions of positive and negative freedom – each puts checks on the other. If conventions are strong and effective neither will dominate or move to an extreme. The first principle is positive freedom as self-direction; the second is pure negative freedom. The absoluteness of rights is paramount and implies that responsibilities are a very distant second. This is pluralism: the understanding that there are more than one final or highest end, goal, purpose to life and further that these ends, goal, or purpose are or may be in contradiction or opposition.
The biggest obstacle to pluralism and the greatest source of slaughter for a greater good is the belief that there must be one finial solution. “This ancient faith rests on the conviction that all the positive values in which men have believed [such as justice, progress, happiness, even liberty] must, in the end, be compatible, and perhaps even entail one another.” Part of the seductive nature of this false belief is the fearful thought that if it is not true then there can only be perpetual conflict between individuals, groups, peoples, nations, and civilizations; that both sides of these perpetual conflicts can be justified, rational, and true. “[F]or unless this [false belief] is so, the universe is not a cosmos, not a harmony; unless this [false belief] is so, conflicts of values may be an intrinsic, irremovable element in human life. To admit that the fulfilment of some of our ideals may in principle make the fulfilment of others impossible is to say that the notion of total human fulfilment is a formal contradiction, a metaphysical chimera….If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict – and of tragedy – can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social.”
The virtue of pluralism is in checks to extremes. If we have two or more opposing principles then, in theory the more we as individuals and as societies head down one path (that is, the more extreme we go) the greater will grow the opposition based the other principle. The anti-pluralist sentiment that we must always guard against is the discounting of the other side as not being justifiable, rational, or true. In most cases the other side is justifiable, rational, and also true – we may just not want to see it. “To assume that all values can be graded on one scale, so that it is a mere matter of inspection to determine the highest, seems to be to falsify our knowledge that men are free agents”. Pluralism means that there is never just one scale to rank values. Pluralism in some form or another has been around for a while in the form of toleration, Berlin’s major contribution is the move from toleration because one does not know for sure to the notion that both sides are rational and true.
“Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past….To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity.”