Contemporary political philosophers discuss the idea of freedom in terms of two distinctions: Berlin’s famous distinction between negative and positive liberty, and Skinner and Pettit’s divide between liberal and republican liberty. In this essay I proceed to recast the debate by showing that there are two strands in liberalism, Hobbesian and Lockean, and that the latter inherited its conception of civil liberty from republican thought. I also argue that the contemporary debate on freedom lacks a perspicuous account of the various conceptions of freedom, mainly because it leaves aside the classic contrast between natural liberty and civil liberty. Once we consider both the negative/positive distinction and the natural/civil one, we can classify all conceptions of freedom within four basic irreducible categories. In light of the resulting framework I show that there are two distinct conceptions of republican liberty, natural and civil, and that the former is coupled with an ideal of individual self-control.
Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1969).
2.
T. H. Green, "Lecture on ‘Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract,’" in Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Writings, ed. Paul Harris and John Morrow (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 199. Though Green speaks of "positive liberty" and not of "negative liberty," it is clear that he is trying to mark the division. In doing so, Green was following a similar distinction made in regard to free will by Kant in 1785 and Schelling in 1809. See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 52; Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, "Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit," available at: http://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/ germanica/Chronologie/19Jh/Schelling/sch_frei.html (accessed January 3, 2010): "Allein wenn er nur diese Indifferenz nicht bloß negativ denkt, sondern als ein lebendiges positives Vermögen zum Guten und zum Bösen" (italics added). Yet Bentham had used the negative/positive terminology earlier. In a letter of 1776, Bentham says that the idea of liberty, "imported nothing in it that was positive: that it was merely a negative one"; see: Douglas G. Long, Bentham on Liberty, Jeremy Bentham’s idea of liberty in relation to his utilitarianism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 54.
3.
José Ortega y Gasset characterized the two problems in similar fashion in his 1941 essay "Historia como sistema y del Imperio Romano": "it is worth stressing our concern toward one of these two utterly different issues: one, who is to govern us, another, whoever governs us, how much should he, or should he not, govern us. The former is the question about the subject of public power; the latter is the question about public power’s limits," in Obras Completas, Vol. VI (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1961), 79.
4.
Hannah Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" in Between Past and Future ( London, UK: Faber and Faber, 1961 ), 148.
5.
Quentin Skinner, "The Paradoxes of Political Liberty," in Equal Freedom, ed. Stephen Darwall (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), referenced hereafter as PPL; Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), hereafter LBL; Quentin Skinner, "A Third Concept of Liberty" (The Isaiah Berlin Lecture), Proceedings of the British Academy 117 (2001), hereafter ATC; Quentin Skinner, "The Idea of Negative Liberty: Machiavellian and Modern Perspectives," in Visions of Politics, Vol. II (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Quentin Skinner, "Hobbes on the Proper Signification of Liberty," in Visions of Politics, Vol. III (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), hereafter PS; Quentin Skinner, "Classical Liberty and the Coming of the English Civil War," in Republicanism, A Shared European Heritage, Vol. II, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Quentin Skinner, "States and the Freedom of Citizens," in States & Citizens, ed. Quentin Skinner and Bo Stråth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), referenced hereafter as S; Quentin Skinner, "Freedom as the Absence of Arbitrary Power," in Republicanism and Political Theory, ed. Cécile Laborde and John Maynor (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2008), hereafter FA; Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), hereafter H; Quentin Skinner, "On Trusting the Judgement of Our Rulers," in Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss (eds.), Political Judgement: Essays for John Dunn (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), hereafter OT; Philip Pettit, Republicanism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), hereafter R; Philip Pettit, A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), hereafter ATF; Philip Pettit, "The Domination Complaint," Nomos 46 (2005), hereafter DC; Philip Pettit, "Liberty and Leviathan," Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 4 (2005), hereafter LL; Philip Pettit, "Republican Freedom: Three Axioms, Four Theorems," in Republicanism and Political Theory, hereafter TA.
6.
Felix E. Oppenheim, Dimensions of Freedom (New York: St. Martin’s, 1961); Hillel Steiner, "Individual Liberty," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, NS, 75 (1974-5); J. P. Day, "Individual Liberty," in Of Liberty, ed. A. Phillips Griffiths (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Hillel Steiner, "How Free: Computing Personal Liberty," in Of Liberty; Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994); G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Ian Carter, A Measure of Freedom (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), hereafter MF; Matthew Kramer, The Quality of Freedom (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), hereafter QF.
7.
Long, Bentham on Liberty, 25.
8.
I will examine this notion in the next section.
9.
Jeremy Bentham, "Anarchical Fallacies," in The Works of Jeremy Bentham , ed. J. Bowring (Edinburgh , 1995), vol. II, 503. The same point is made in Jeremy Bentham, Of Laws in General, ed. H. L. A. Hart (London, UK: Athlone Press and University of London, 1979), 54.
10.
For Locke’s adoption of the republican theory of resistance, see Julian H. Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978). The thesis about Locke’s reception of some republican ideas must not be confused with Sullivan’s contention that some republican authors borrowed liberal ideas from Hobbes and Locke: Vickie B. Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Republican Liberalism in England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
11.
Both Pettit and Skinner say that Locke held a republican view of liberty (R 40; S 16-17; OT 126). The point was also made by Charles Larmore; see Charles Larmore, "Liberal and Republican Conceptions of Freedom," in Republicanism: History, Theory and Practice, ed. Daniel Weinstock and Christian Nadeau (London, UK: Frank Cass, 2004), 108-9, and The Autonomy of Morality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 185-86.
12.
In this section, I use "non-domination" in a loose way. For a more precise usage, see the third section below.
13.
Locke’s argument is probably addressed to Robert Filmer, who held that positive laws cannot limit kingly power; see, e.g., Jean-Fabien Spitz, John Locke et les fondements de la liberté moderne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), 132-39; 148-49. My interpretation is consistent with Pasquale Pasquino’s: "Locke on King’s Prerogative," Political Theory 26 (1998): 203. However, John Dunn-whom Skinner quotes in OT-paints Locke in anti-republican colors; see, e.g., The Political Thought of John Locke, An Historical Account of the Argument of the "Two Treatises of Government" (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 148-56.
14.
Céline Spector argues that Montesquieu rejected the republican conception of liberty, but by "republican conception" she means political liberty; see: Céline Spector, Montesquieu: Critique of Republicanism? in Republicanism: History, Theory and Practice, ed. Weinstock and Nadeau, 44-45.
15.
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 154. I will address "liberty in its relation with the citizen" in the third section.
16.
Benjamin Constant, "The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation and Their Relation to European Civilization," in Political Writings, ed. B. Fontana (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 114; italics added.
17.
The Autonomy of Morality, 186.
18.
Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, 126, italics added.
19.
In the third section I will note Constant’s endorsement of an ideal of positive liberty. Andrew Jainchill concludes that Constant’s thought in Republican Constitution "was deeply inflected with republican principles": Reimagining Politics after the Terror, The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 285.
20.
Maurizio Viroli also asserts that "liberal political theory has inherited a number of political ideas from classical republicanism," but his examples are constitutional limitations and individualism; see: Maurizio Viroli, Republicanism, trans. Antony Shugaar (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 6.
21.
Skinner also notes that John Stuart Mill defended a nuanced view of liberty that contemplated "the inhibiting effects on individual freedom of growing demands for social conformity" (S 19).
22.
On Mill’s opposition between liberty and control, see Joseph Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
23.
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism , Liberty, and Representative Government (London, UK: J. M. Dent, 1910).
24.
L.T. Hobhouse , Liberalism and Other Writings, ed. James Meadowcroft (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 10; italics added.
25.
Karl R.Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 124.
26.
F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960). Pettit concedes that Hayek "may be an example of someone who takes this view" (i.e., the republican view): Republicanism, 89 (italics added). Raymond Aron erroneously regards Hayek’s concept of freedom as a negative one; see Raymond Aron, "La définition libérale de la liberté," in Etudes politiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 196-97. In the past I was led to the same error: Autonomy and Rights, The Moral Foundations of Liberalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1992), 10. Chandran Kukathas rightly notes that Hayek’s is not the negative concept of freedom, but he attributes to him "a positive libertarian thesis": Hayek and Modern Liberalism (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1989), 164.
27.
Joel Feinberg, Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 11.
28.
J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
29.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice 202 (first edition); 177 (revised edition).
30.
Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, lvi; italics added.
31.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 283.
32.
John Winthrop , Little Speech on Liberty ( Boston: Old South, 1896).
33.
See, e.g., Charles Taylor, "What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty," in The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, ed. Alan Ryan (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1979); C. B. Macpherson, "Berlin’s Division of Liberty," in Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1973); Tom Baldwin, "MacCallum and the Two Concepts of Freedom," Ratio 26 (1984); John Christman, "Saving Positive Freedom," Political Theory 33 (2005): 79-88; Mario Ricciardi, "Berlin on Liberty," in The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin, ed. G. Crowder and H. Hardy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007).
34.
Georg Henrik von Wright calls "strong permission" the existence of a permissive norm, and "weak permission" the absence of a forbidding norm: Norm and Action, A Logical Enquiry (London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 86.
35.
Thomas Hobbes , Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1991), 216.
36.
Thomas Hobbes , Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 91.
37.
For the distinction between internal and external constraints, see Isaiah Berlin, "‘From Hope and Fear Set Free,’" in Concepts and Categories, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 173, 190.
38.
See e.g. Oppenheim, Dimensions of Freedom, 33-37. But Hillel Steiner adopts the late Hobbesian approach of excluding threats as constraints on freedom: "Individual Liberty," 33; An Essay on Rights, 28-32.
39.
Hannah Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" 143; C. B. Macpherson, "Berlin’s Division of Liberty"; Lawrence Crocker, Positive Liberty: An Essay in Normative Political Philosophy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980); Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 311-17; Amartya Sen, "Well-Being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984," Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985):169-221; Amartya Sen, The Standard of Living (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Amartya Sen, "Capability and Well-Being," in The Quality of Life, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1993); Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books, 1999).
40.
Green, "On the Different Senses of ‘Freedom’ as Applied to Will and to the Moral Progress of Man," in Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Writings, 241. As I will note later on, Charles Taylor holds that all conceptions of positive freedom require actual realization.
41.
Chaim Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome during the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 1.
42.
Ibid.
43.
See Gerald C. MacCallum, "Negative and Positive Freedom" Philosophical Review 76 (1967): 312-34; John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 202; Revised Edition (1999), 177; Eric Nelson, "Liberty: One Concept Too Many?" Political Theory 33 (2005): 63-73.
44.
For a criticism of MacCallum’s attempt, see Tom Baldwin, "MacCallum and the Two Concepts of Freedom." For a criticism of Nelson’s, see John Christman, "Saving Positive Freedom," Political Theory 33 (2005).
45.
Pettit’s notion of "absence of alienating control" is a natural conception that fits in cells 1 and 2 (TA). Skinner is still committed to the civil notion of republican liberty, which goes into cells 3 and 4 (FA).
46.
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 91. Arthur Ripstein also says that Kant embraces republican non-domination: Force and Freedom, Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 42-43.
47.
H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1961), 28.
48.
Pettit’s analysis of republican liberty as absence of alienating control could be regarded as a form of external type II reductionism.
49.
As legal philosophers know, H. L. A. Hart has shown that law includes an "internal aspect" that cannot be reduced to an external physicalist language. Hart, The Concept of Law, 55.
50.
Hohfeld does not take step (1′), but it has been taken in: Andrew Halpin, Rights & Law, Analysis & Theory (Oxford, UK: Hart, 1997), 43-47.
51.
The case of immunities is different because they might be seen as negations of powers, i.e., as negations of conditional duties. However, I don’t think that immunities are just negations of powers because I take them to include powers to obtain their enforcement.
52.
Taylor, "What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty."
53.
J. P. Day, "Threats, Offers, Law, Opinion and Liberty," American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977): 257-72. I too analyzed the loss of freedom resulting from threats in terms of the removal of complex options in Spector, Autonomy and Rights, 17-19.
54.
Nelson, "Liberty: One Concept Too Many?" 73; Nelson’s quotation of Skinner is different from mine.
55.
However, Pettit says that "the controlled agent . . . need not be aware of the controller" (TA 107).
56.
Berlin considers fears as psychological constraints: Isaiah Berlin, "From Hope and Fear Set Free," 190-91. See also Robert E. Goodin and Frank Jackson, "Freedom from Fear," Philosophy & Public Affairs 35, no. 3 (2009), 250.
57.
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 157.
58.
Céline Spector, "Montesquieu: Critique of Republicanism? " 44.
59.
On the role of civic virtue in a republic, see Viroli, Republicanism, 69-78, and Jean-Fabien Spitz, La Liberté Politique, Essai de généalogie conceptuelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), 167-77.
60.
Various authors stress Constant’s commitment to political participation and moral self-development; see: Lionel Gossman, "Benjamin Constant on Liberty and Love," in Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment, ed. Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 2003), 145-47; Dario Castiglione, "‘That Noble Disquiet’: Meanings of Liberty in the Discourse of the North," in Economy, Polity, and Society, British Intellectual History 1750-1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 50; Jeremy Jennings, "Constant’s Idea of Modern Liberty," in The Cambridge Companion to Constant, ed. Helena Rosenblatt (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 70.
61.
James Tully, "Locke on Liberty," in Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy, ed. Zbigniew Pelczynski and John Gray (London, UK: The Athlone Press, 1984), 71.
62.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, section 57; italics in the original.
63.
John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1975), 241.
64.
Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 40-41.
65.
Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 30.
66.
On the centrality of a positive idea of freedom (i.e., the capacity for self-development) in Mill’s thought, see: John Gray, Mill on Liberty, a defence (London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), chap. IV; G. W. Smith, "J. S. Mill on Freedom," in Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy; John Gray, "On Negative and Positive Liberty," in Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (London, UK: Routledge, 1989).
