Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty

Maria Dimova-Cookson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429766190
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book argues that the distinction between positive and negative freedom remains highly pertinent today, despite having fallen out of fashion in the late twentieth century. It proposes a new reading of this distinction for the twenty-first century, building on the work of Constant, Green and Berlin who led the historical development of these ideas.

The author defends the idea that freedom is a dynamic interaction between two inseparable, yet sometimes fundamentally, opposed positive and negative concepts – the yin and yang of freedom. Positive freedom is achieved when one succeeds in doing what is right, while negative freedom is achieved when one is able to advance one's wellbeing. In an environment of culture wars, resurging populism and challenge to progressive liberal values, recognising the duality of freedom can help us better understand the political dilemmas we face and point the way forward.

The book analyses the duality of freedom in more philosophical depth than previous studies and places it within the context of both historical and contemporary political thinking. It will be of interest to students and scholars of liberalism and political theory.

1 Benjamin Constant on modern people and their two liberties

Introduction

Constant’s essay ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns’ (hereafter LACM) is one of the most significant texts in the conceptual history of liberty. It should stand together with the most celebrated works on freedom like Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, Mill’s On Liberty, Green’s ‘Lecture on Liberal Legislation’, Rawls’s Theory of Justice and Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Freedom’. Undoubtedly, its most notable affinities are with the last. Berlin’s unreserved celebration of Constant’s ideas is not accidental. Constant’s essay anticipates some of the most innovative themes of Berlin’s famous inaugural lecture. Both thinkers endeavour to put centre stage a freedom concept which is morally controversial, unstable and incomplete, yet which aims to capture in toto some of the fundamental normative concerns of modern citizens who value personal independence and live in the political conditions of popular sovereignty. Constant’s concept of modern liberty and Berlin’s concept of negative freedom both operate on two levels, questioning simultaneously political and moral authorities. Indeed, it is this shared ambition for a comprehensive account of freedom that combines political and moral justificatory narratives that makes their respective concepts so hard to define in precise terms and so complex and controversial.

I will try to show in this book that it is not simply by chance that these concepts – Constant’s modern liberty and Berlin’s negative liberty – appear in a conceptual duality of either ancient and modern or positive and negative liberties. The story which ‘modern’ and ‘negative’ liberties are telling on their own is incomplete without their conceptual counterparts: indeed, Constant and Berlin cannot sustain without contradiction that modern and negative liberties, respectively, capture the more significant aspects of freedom. The opposite is not sustainable either. Despite T.H. Green’s powerful defence of positive liberty,¹ I will show that the ‘ancient’ and ‘positive’ freedom counterparts of modern and negative freedoms also cannot capture, on their own, all the significant aspects of freedom as experienced in the modern conditions of political equality.

Before it was first published in 1820 LACM was given as part of a lecture series on the English constitution in the Royal Athenaeum of Paris. This particular lecture was given in December 1819. Key themes of this speech appear in Constant’s previous political writings, including his Spirit of Conquest (1814) and Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments (1815), but none of his other works put his ideas together in the elaborate and compelling theoretical design of two contrasting yet mutually supporting liberties. The lecture deserves acclaim for both its rhetorical qualities and its analytical ambition. The difference between ancient and modern liberty is introduced in strictly opposing and relatively simple terms, and the complexity of their relationship is only gradually revealed. The lecture makes some dramatic and rather generalised historical observations straddling two millennia of historical development, but it also reflects, in a rather subtle fashion, the fast-changing political landscape of the French Revolution. It was given only 30 years after the start of the revolution in 1789, but those 30 years had witnessed the coup d’état of 18th Brumaire (1799), the rise of the First French Empire under Napoleon I (1800–14, 1815) and the Bourbon Restoration under Louis XVIII (1814). Constant had to keep up with the changes within the French political establishment – changes that would put to stringent test the resilience of any thinker’s political and philosophical ideas.² The quality of Constant’s conceptualisation of freedom can be appreciated against this backdrop: it was sophisticated enough to be valid in the days of the democratic terror as well as in the days of royal authoritarianism.³

Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) was born in Switzerland and took French citizenship in 1798 in order to enter French politics. In 1799 he was appointed to the new Tribunate. Constant was keen to protect the spirit of liberty and equality championed by the French Revolution but wanted to avoid the authoritarian tendency of the new political establishment. By 1802 his liberal views and association with Germaine de Staёl⁴ had alienated Napoleon, and in 1803 he went to exile in Germany and Switzerland. For the next 12 years, he was an outspoken critic of Napoleon. However, during his brief return to power in 1815, Napoleon invited Constant to be conseiller d’état (a counsellor of state). Constant then drafted a new constitution known subsequently as the ‘Benjamine’. Constant and Madame de Staёl were, in contemporary terms, progressive liberals who dedicated their intellectual energy to explaining how Rousseau’s revolutionary ideas of the general will and liberty had been used by Robespierre and others to transform the French Revolution into a reign of terror. How to protect liberty from the onslaught of a violent revolution fought in its name? Constant’s essay gives some of the most insightful answers to this question.⁵ In LACM Constant is critical of Rousseau’s reinvention of ancient liberty which aimed to set the agenda of modern times. Constant offers the alternative of modern liberty. The full set of conclusions we can draw from his lecture, however, show that it offers much more than a new concept of liberty: it offers two concepts of liberty which can be understood if we study them in political and moral contexts. Constant offers a dynamic, as opposed to an inconsistent, conceptualisation of freedom which reflects rather well the historical dynamism of his political landscape: the ideal political laboratory for moral ideas.

The parallel between Constant’s and Berlin’s dual concepts of liberty has not always been seen as advantageous to the legacy of Constant’s ideas, but here I argue that this parallel is justified. If positively interpreted, it reinforces the significance of his legacy by adding a new dimension to it. Constant’s dual conceptualisation of liberty has been celebrated and dismissed in a trajectory that curiously reflects the level of popularity of Isaiah Berlin’s positive/negative freedom duality. In the 1980s Dodge argued that ‘Constant’s distinction between ancient and modern liberty is the same as Sir Isaiah Berlin’s between positive and negative freedom’ (Dodge, 1980: 42, emphasis added), and this was said as an attempt to assert the significance of Constant’s political theory. Following Gauchet’s comment that Constant became ‘liberal’ only in 1806, scholars argued that Constant’s critique of republicanism and political liberty made him a true exponent of Berlin’s negative freedom (Rosenblatt, 2004: 28).⁶ However, Constant scholars of the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century like Holmes, Jennings, Vincent, Pitt and Rosenblatt are unanimously sceptical about adopting Berlin’s distinction as the lens for interpreting Constant’s liberalism.⁷ This scholarship wants to distance Constant from conclusions reached exclusively on the bases of his understanding of modern liberty. For example, Rosenblatt warns that those who see Constant as an exponent of negative liberty, economic liberalism and laissez-faire and limited government risk missing his ‘essential message’ in support of political institutions (Rosenblatt, 2004, 29).⁸

In tune with this scholarship I argue that Constant is not merely an exponent of modern liberty, but I also believe that his dual conceptualisation of freedom is significant as it succeeds in capturing the moral and political concerns of modern people in a holistic fashion. Constant shows that modern people need modern and political (or ancient) liberties. The reading of the positive/negative freedom duality offered in this monograph addresses the concerns of Constant’s critics who warn against one-sided interpretation of his ideas. In this line of reasoning, we can note that Constant’s terminology puts him in an advantageous position compared to Berlin. The name ‘modern liberty’ is better than ‘negative liberty’ even though the two concepts share deep similarities. ‘Modern’ is a richer term than ‘negative’, and it indicates Constant’s intention to explain the psychology and ethics of modern citizens in more comprehensive terms. However, I argue that, like Berlin’s negative liberty, Constant’s modern liberty cannot tell the full story of the freedom sought in modern times. The ‘modernity’ which Constant aims to capture through the concept of modern liberty proves to incorporate essential aspects of the ancient past.

In this chapter I aim to show the conceptual development of Constant’s dual account of liberty throughout LACM. I divide the lecture into two parts, arguing that while the clarification of the natures of the ancient and modern liberties occurs in the first part, the real issues that necessitate a dual account of liberty only emerge in the second part. Therefore, the grounds for a consistent, as opposed to a historically contingent, distinction between two concepts of liberty can be elicited through some additional analysis. It is only in the second part of the lecture that it becomes clear that modern people have two freedoms, but Constant does not explain how political (or ancient) freedom, which was initially introduced as the freedom of the ancients, will fit with the conditions of modernity: conditions which in the first part of the lecture were exclusively associated with modern liberty.

I will show that from start to finish, Constant’s analysis of liberty takes place in two contexts: political and non-political. It is the non-political context which is the centre ground of modern liberty, and it is this context that itself undergoes development throughout the lecture. This context initially appears to be the ‘personal’ context: indeed, the association between modern liberty and the private sphere is there from the beginning until the end. But I argue that Constant’s arguments in the second part of LACM suggest that this context should be better understood as the ‘moral’ context. We will not understand modern liberty if we associate it with the private sphere only. Modern liberty uncovers the significance of a non-political moral domain. My main argument in this chapter is that the conceptual battleground in which the duality of liberty emerges as necessary is that of the moral domain. The political domain is present and relevant throughout the lecture, but we will not understand the need for two concepts of liberty unless we pay close attention to the parallel moral one. This chapter will show that for Constant, enjoyment, satisfaction and the fulfilment of duty are interconnected, and the study of these is crucial in understanding the process which makes freedom complex and results in two liberty concepts.

The chapter has five sections. Section 1 starts the analytical reconstruction of LACM by focusing in more detail on the first part of Constant’s lecture. Although it seems that the key differences between the two concepts are sketched there, in fact, the first part of LACM does not make the case or give a justification for the need for two freedoms. What it achieves, however, is to show why and how modern people are different from their ancient counterparts. It also shows that the analysis of liberty will occur in two contexts – a personal and a political one – and takes the first steps in fleshing out the personal context. Section 2 turns to the unexpected twist at the end of LACM. Although Constant is critical of ancient liberty throughout his lecture, at the end he rehabilitates it and declares that modern people have to attend to the two liberties, not just to the modern one. I review the changes in the historical context that explain this alteration of emphasis, but I argue that it fits with the conceptual transformation of the two liberties which occurs in the second part of LACM where ancient liberty is no longer the liberty of the ancients, but, in a transformed shape, it becomes one of the two liberties of the moderns. Section 3 examines in detail this transformation of ancient liberty: it reviews three types of critique which Constant wages against it, but it also shows that two legitimised versions of ancient liberty reappear in modern times. Section 4 examines the consequences for modern liberty once it stops being the sole liberty of the moderns and becomes one of their two liberties. This discussion foregrounds the significance of the theme of satisfaction that runs throughout LACM, which, in turn, helps show the significance of the moral context for the understanding of modern liberty. Section 5 turns to a statement where Constant connects modern liberty with ‘individuality’. I argue that the theme of individuality throws light on how modern and ancient liberties can be balanced in practical terms. I conclude the chapter by spelling out the grounds which Constant has given us for a dual conceptualisation of liberty.

1 Constant’s arguments in Liberty of the Ancients as Compared with That of the Moderns

This section starts the analytical reconstruction of Constant’s ideas in LACM. It will focus more closely on the first part of the lecture where Constant lays out the differences between the liberty of the ancients and that of the moderns. The second part of his lecture turns to the modern employments of ancient liberty and concludes with the argument as to why modern people need two freedoms.⁹ The reason why in this section I pay closer attention to the first part of the lecture is that here Constant introduces the distinction between the two liberties in a particular two-context setting. Later, we will need this setting in order to explain the more radical conceptual transformation that takes place in the second part of the lecture.

In the first part of LACM, the distinction between modern and ancient liberties is not based on a particular criterion: it is simply temporal. Ancient liberty is the liberty of the ancients, and modern liberty is the liberty of the moderns. We could, of course, deduce a criterion on the basis of the particular differences he points out. I argue that a consistent criterion e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Benjamin Constant on modern people and their two liberties
• 2 T.H. Green’s true freedom as the paradigm positive liberty concept
• 3 T.H. Green and negative freedom as well-being improvement
• 4 Isaiah Berlin, positive freedom and the impact of moral authorities on human agency
• 5 Berlin’s negative freedom and the conceptual work of the boundaries of liberty
• 6 Value pluralism and the duality of freedom
• Conclusion
• References
• Index