Contemporary discussions of social and political organization are dominated by a distinction which Isaiah Berlin (1958) made famous. This is the distinction between what he, following a late-eighteenth century tradition, describes as negative and positive liberty.
Negative liberty, as Berlin conceives of it, involves the absence of interference, where interference is a more or less intentional intervention of the sort exemplified, not just by the physical coercion of kidnap or imprisonment, but also by the coercion of the credible threat ('Your money or your life'; 'Your money or the bailiff'). I am negatively free 'to the degree to which no human being interferes with my activity' (Berlin 7): to the extent that I enjoy unimpeded and uncoerced choice.
Positive liberty, according to Berlin, requires more than the absence of interference, more than just being let alone by others. It requires the agent to take an active part in gaining control or mastery of themselves: the self with which they identify must take charge of the lesser or more partial selves that lurk within every individual. I am positively free to the extent that I achieve 'self-mastery, with its suggestion of a man divided against himself' (Berlin 19).
Berlin shaped the allegiances of contemporary theorists in marking out negative liberty as a sensible ideal and in raising serious doubts about the credentials of positive. The self-mastery ideal of positive liberty may seem attractive, he argued, but it easily gets interpreted in an ominous fashion: say, as the ideal of becoming able, perhaps with the help of state discipline, to master one's lower self; as the ideal of transcending the divided, atomistic self by assimilation to the greater whole of the national spirit; or as the ideal of suppressing decentralized, individual will by becoming part of a self-determining polity which reveals and......
