Beyond Liberalism

R. T. Allen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351290784
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In Beyond Nihilism, Michael Polanyi argued that a merely "negative" liberty of doing as one pleases so long as one does not impinge upon the equal liberty of others - must and has led to destructive nihilism and a fierce reaction to collectivism. R.T. Allen takes up this argument in Beyond Liberalism, and shows how Polanyi's political philosophy evolved into a more "positive" and distinctly conservative concept of liberty, converging upon the archetypal conservatism of Edmund Burke. Allen examines Polanyi's and F.A. Hayek's thinking with respect to the nature, value, and foundations of liberty.Negative and positive liberties are two sides of one liberty, and Allen believes negative conceptions of liberty are as dangerous as positive ones. He distinguishes among general and abstract definitions of liberty and shows how all, including that of Hayek, ultimately dissolve. According to Allen, only tacit conceptions of liberty, such as those of Burke and Polanyi, prove viable. This is because they rest on concrete tradition. Allen examines how the skeptical, rationalist, and utilitarian philosophies of Ludwig von Mises and Sir Karl Popper fail to support the value of liberty and even proved to be destructive of it. Allen argues that society cannot rely upon the classically liberal notion of contract but rather upon prescriptive and inherited obligations. In turn, this means that citizens have positive, as well as negative, duties to each other and the body politic of which they are part and upon whose support liberty depends.A free society is held together by emotional bonds and the traditions and rituals that sustain them. A free society also presupposes that the individual has inherent value in and for himself. For R.T. Allen, only Christianity, and certainly no modern philosophy, has a conception of the unique individual and his irreplaceable value and of a political order that transcends itself into the moral order. Even Polanyi's liberty is ultimately insufficient, for it gives no inherent value to the person himself but instead to the ideals which he serves. Beyond Liberalism challenges deeply ingrained notions of liberty and its meaning in modern society. It is a call for traditions of self-restraint and justice for their own sakes. This noteworthy volume is an essential addition to the libraries of political scientists, philosophers, and theologians alike.

Part I
The Nature of Liberty

There are people who have split and anatomised the doctrine of free government as if it were an abstract question concerning metaphysical liberty and necessity, and not a matter of moral prudence and natural feeling. They have disputed whether liberty be a positive or negative idea; whether it does not consist in being governed by laws without considering what are the laws or who are the makers; whether man has any rights by nature; and whether all the property he enjoys be not the alms of his government, and his life itself their favour and indulgence,

—Edmund Burke, A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, vol. 3, p. 184

1
Berlin and Positive and Negative Liberty

“Negative” Liberty

Liberty has been understood in several divergent ways, some of which work against others. One of the central tasks for classical liberalism in the twentieth century has been the clearer definition of its notion of liberty against other ones. We shall begin, as others have done, with Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in which he distinguished “negative” liberty and “positive” liberty. Classical liberalism’s idea of liberty is generally supposed to be a “negative” one. Berlin argued that “positive” conceptions have too easily been invoked to suppress genuine liberty, the “negative” liberty of the individual to live his own life in his own way.

We shall see that the distinction between two types of liberty cannot be sustained, and should be replaced by one between two inseparable aspects of liberty. Furthermore, as suggested in the Introduction, all forms of liberalism are liable to the temptation to “force men to be free.”

The negative concept is an answer to “What is the area within which the subject a person or group of persons is or should be left to do what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?” It is the idea of a minimum area of individual liberty necessary for a person to remain human. It is liberty from, from deliberate interference with, in J.S. Mill’s words, the individual “pursuing his own good in his own way.” Liberty is itself and not other goods, such as justice, equality, and culture. If it is curtailed to secure or promote other goods, then there is an absolute loss of freedom, and not a gain of freedom of another sort or by other persons. It is compatible with autocracy if the ruler leaves a wide area of freedom to his subjects. For the question, “Who governs me?” is separate from “How far does the government interfere with me?” (FEOL, pp. 121-31).¹

This is the familiar Anglo-Saxon idea of individual liberty. But I suggest that Berlin is wrong to define it as negative liberty. Rather, all liberty has its negative and positive aspects: a liberty from interference and a liberty to do certain things, the former being defined by reference to the latter.² We see this in the quotation from Mill. The liberty that is prized is a liberty to live one’s own life as one pleases, and therefore to be free from interference, especially by public authorities, in living as one pleases. Interference can be only interference with something, something active in its own right. I cannot interfere with the plans and actions of someone in a deep coma, but only with his bodily functioning. Political and civil liberty presupposes that persons and groups have, or can have, plans and intentions of their own which other persons and groups can allow or prevent.³

In his Introduction, written after the four essays themselves, Berlin replies to this objection. He states that one can struggle against something without a conscious aim at a definite further state, that someone may not know how he will use his freedom but only that he wishes to remove the yoke that constrains him (FEOL, p.xliii). That is very true, and often, when restraints have been removed, people find themselves at a loss as to what to do. Nevertheless implicit in the idea of a restraint is the idea of that activity which it restrains. If I feel something to be a yoke, then I feel that it restricts me in doing something which I wish to do. That, as with the prisoner and the slave, may be a general freedom to live as I choose, or to do a range of things rather than just one. Often attention is focused upon the constraint and the effort to remove it, rather than upon the freedom which it restricts and how one intends to use it. Similarly, someone trying to escape from danger implicitly seeks somewhere less dangerous, though he may pay no heed to where he is actually going. This Berlin recognised a few pages before when he corrected his definition of liberty as the absence of obstacles to the fulfilment of desires. For, as in Stoicism, one can extend liberty thus defined by eliminating frustrated desires as well as by removing what blocks them. Civil and political freedom is the absence of obstacles to possible choices and desires (FEOL, pp. xxxviii-ix). That redefinition of freedom still includes a reference to choices, desires, plans, and intentions. And particular restrictions and interferences can be characterised only with reference to classes of choices, desires, plans, and intentions. For example, American “liberals,” and the members of the British Liberal and Labour parties, favour removal of restrictions, governmental and social, upon one set of activities and wish to promote them upon others, respectively, private life and publication, on the one hand, and economic concerns on the other. Those in America who call themselves “libertarians” favour the removal of both sets of restrictions. And there has been a radical liberalism which has called for men to be liberated from restrictions per se, and not from specific ones, and thus to enjoy an indefinite and indeterminate liberty to do and to be anything.

What Berlin means by the “negative concept” of liberty is the general freedom to live as one pleases and therefore a general freedom from governmental and other forms of restriction upon it. It can be put equally in negative or positive terms: respectively, “freedom from interference by the state (and the public)” and “freedom to live as we please.” That the former was usually preferred was, I suggest, due to the historical situation of classical liberalism as it was formulated in Britain, where a desire for a general positive freedom of the individual could be taken for granted and where the attention of Liberal reformers could be focused upon the inherited restraints upon it, or the new ones of public opinion, which they wished to be removed.

But Gray denies that this conception of liberty was unequivocally upheld by classical Liberalism. Locke and Kant, he states, held liberty to be reduced by the imposition of arbitrary will and to be enlarged by conformity to rational law, while J.S. Mill was as much concerned with the autonomous man (who decides for himself and does not bow to public opinion).⁴ It is true that Mill was concerned not just with allowing individuals to live as they please free from governmental and other interference, but also with definitely encouraging nonconformity, diversity, and “experiments in living.” Voluntary and uncoerced convergence would not have gained his wholehearted approval. As for Locke and Kant, they took rational systems of law and absence of arbitrary will to be conditions of freedom: respectively, “for liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others, which cannot be where there is no law,”⁵ and the hindrance of another’s freedom, if it can coexist with that of others in accordance with universal law, is wrong.⁶ Locke presents more of the negative side (and denies, against Hobbes, that freedom is doing simply as one likes), and Kant more of the positive:

Any action is right if it can co-exist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with universal law.⁷

For there cannot be a merely negative, nor a simply positive, concept of liberty. The point is that Locke, Kant, Mill (but not all of the time) and other classical Liberals, favoured a general freedom of individuals to live as they wished within a system of law which made that possible for all and which protected them against arbitrary interference. That is what Berlin, on the whole, was also concerned to defend, as against conscription into a particular arrangement of society which is supposed to liberate one’s real or true self from enslavement to a lower or false self.

Positive Liberty

Positive liberty Berlin defines as an answer to, “What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?” (FEOL, p.122). It is the answer that I myself should be that source, that I should be my own master (FEOL, p. 131).

That can be understood in at least two ways: “politically,” I as distinct from others, and, “psychologically,” I as distinct from forces acting within me and perhaps originating from forces without me. The former sense can itself be developed in two ways: that of individualist liberalism, I individually by charting my own way through society and life making free contracts with other individuals and groups as I meet them; and that of collectivist liberalism and totalitarian democracy, I with everyone else negotiating a common pattern of life which we shall all then lead together. But Berlin largely neglects the “political” interpretation, and especially the collectivist version of it, and goes straight into a discussion of the “psychological” answer and of how it has been interpreted so as to come into conflict with “negative” liberty. Or, perhaps, he assumes that the political interpretation has already been taken care of in the concept of “negative” liberty. For the moment, I shall set aside the “political” interpretation and follow Berlin’s “psychological” account of “positive” liberty. In fact he develops several concepts of “positive” liberty, and, as we follow him, we shall find that there are others.

The basic formula of positive freedom is self-mastery. I feel free when I am conscious of directing myself by my own will, and feel unfree if and when I realise that my choices are after all made for me. I, as master of myself, distinguish a higher self, free and rational, which I truly am, over a lower self through which I can be enslaved. Such is a common pattern of thought.

Now, argues Berlin, that higher self can be identified as a “real self’ as already knowing and choosing a real good rejected by the lower self. Consequently, coercion by another of that lower self in order to adapt it to the higher self is no restriction of one’s freedom. Indeed, someone may be too blinded by his lower self that he cannot even see what is really good for him, and so coercion for his own good would not really be coercion after all. These dialectical transitions from freedom to coercion and back again (freedom for the lower self is freedom to coerce the higher self; the right form of coercion of the lower self means freedom for the higher and real self) could, says Berlin, be applied to “negative” freedom, but have in fact occurred in respect of “positive” freedom. And there they have taken two directions: self-abnegation to attain independence, and self-realisation or total self-identification with a specific principle to attain the same end (FEOL, pp. 132-3).

In the Introduction (FEOL, pp. xliv-xlv) Berlin states that it was mostly the real and higher self which was seen as realised in institutions, traditions, and forms of life wider than the individual, and thus it was mostly the “positive” conception of freedom that lead to tyranny via the compulsion of men to fit the requirements of those institutions, traditions, and forms of life wherein they would find their real selves. Only infrequently, as by some early liberal, anarchist, and populist writers, was the “lower self’ thought to be incarnated in institutions that enslave the real self. That was a way in which the “negative” concept could have led to the destruction of freedom. Presumably, that would have been via the forcible liberation of men from such institutions.

Now it strikes me that this is, in most cases, the “positive” concept and its threat seen from the other side. For what is Marxism but the claim that present institutions indeed, all institutions, all divisions of labour “alienate” mankind and engender forms of “false consciousness” in which we endorse our slavery, and the promise of liberation from them into a completely unstructured liberty to be and to be anything we wish, but together and collectively? Likewise Rousseau revolted against man’s enslavement by institutions and traditions and sought only a vaguely structured liberty in the “general will.” The straightforward anarchist seeks immediate “liberation” from institutions now and directly, though that often leads him to use force and terror in an effort “to smash the system” and to force men to be free of what oppresses them.

Another possibility, invoking the notion of what people really want, is the argument presented by von Mises that a liberal social order, of private property, the private control of capital and no government interference in the market, is in people’s own interests, that what most people want is peace and prosperity and that is how to secure both (HA, pp. 154,156). Von Mises holds that, if men do not see that Liberal policies and a free market are in their own long-term interests, then no more can be done. But it could be argued that, if necessary, people should be forced to accept such an order. As already suggested, limited democracy has proved quite compatible with dynamic market economies in several parts of the Far East, while in Russia Mr. Yeltsin’s government has had to rule mostly by decree in order to replace the centralised command economy by private ownership and a free market.

Conversely, conceptions of “positive” freedom can be combined with limited government, and need not lead to the coercive realisation of a specific state of affairs. For example, Bosanquet argued that the implications of what a person actually wants require an organised and cooperative social life, maintained by public authority, a “real” will which he may not recognise and against which his “average” or “indolent” self may rebel, but which, as rational, we all recognise as imperative upon us and as what we are trying to become. Liberty, as the condition of being ourselves and therefore of becoming more what we have already become, is thus a structured, ordered, and social liberty.⁸ But, he continued, the State cannot directly bring this about by its distinctive activity of the use of force which can secure only “external actions,” those which are necessary whether or not performed from the motives which would give them “immediate value and durable certainty.” Hence the State’s activity is inherently limited to “hindering hindrances,” although it can secure those material conditions of a better life, such as housing, wages, and the apparatus of education, which are between the hindering of hindrances and the “actual stimulation of mind and will.”⁹ Although Bosanquet represented and helped to bring about that shift in British Liberalism from a policy of removing existing restrictions to one of the active pursuit of specific goals, he nevertheless, by his doctrine of the limits of State action, reared a largely liberal politics upon Hegelian foundations, and he went in his recommendations for policy no further than Hayek.

We now return to Berlin’s discussion and the specific forms of “positive” freedom which he distinguishes.

Self-abnegation

There are two ways of overcoming the frustration of unsatisfied desires: to act upon the world so as to make it meet or at least approximate to what one wishes; and to act upon oneself so as to reduce and finally to eliminate the frustrated desire. If you no longer want X, you will not be upset or disappointed at not obtaining it nor at losing it. The former is the “naive” or “natural” attitude of mankind. The latter is that of a world-weary sophistication, which has given up the hope of fulfilment and seeks only to avoid suffering. It is the perennial teaching of Hindu asceticisms and Buddhism, and, in Europe, appeared in the Hellenistic world as the common doctrine of Epicureans, Cynics, and Stoics. It is primarily apolitical, a retreat into the self, a withdrawal from attachment to the world so as not to be affected and disturbed. The sage wishes for privacy to cultivate his Epicurean garden, or to go into the forest to prepare himself for final release from the world. If freedom is, as Leibniz and Voltaire defined it, the power to do as one wants, or as Rousseau put it, desiring what one can perform and doing what one desires, then it can be increased either by acquiring more power or by wanting less.¹⁰ Berlin comments that a tyrant, if he could manipulate his subjects into giving up their original desires and into embracing his own, would on these definitions, echoed by Mill, have liberated them. They would certainly feel free, as, we may add, do the citizens of Brave New World. Berlin considers that this retreat of the ascetic may be a source of integrity or inner strength but is hardly an increase of freedom and its logical conclusion is the contraction of the self to zero and thus to death. (That was precisely the conclusion drawn by Hindu asceticism, especially Advaita Vedantism, and Buddhism: what causes suffering is attachment to the world and, ultimately, to the illusion of one’s own reality.) But, Berlin notes, one political con...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I The Nature of Liberty
• Part II The Value of Liberty
• Part III The Foundations and Presuppositions of Liberty
• Appendix: The Conservatism of Aurel Kolnai
• Bibliography
• Index