Two Concepts of Liberty

Berlin's inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor at Oxford became the single most influential work of twentieth-century liberal political philosophy. Its central argument is that the word 'liberty' conceals two fundamentally different ideas. Negative liberty is the absence of external obstacles, barriers, or constraints imposed by other people — the freedom from interference. Positive liberty is the capacity for genuine self-direction, self-mastery, the realization of one's true or rational self — the freedom to achieve. Both concepts capture something essential about what it means to live a free life. Both answer to real human needs. And the two frequently conflict: the pursuit of positive liberty, if unchecked, can license the paternalism of those who claim to know what the true self requires, while the exclusive defense of negative liberty can abandon those without the resources to exercise their formal freedoms to lives that liberty cannot touch.