Four Essays on Liberty by Isaiah Berlin

First published: 1969

Type of Philosophy: Ethics, political philosophy

Context

Over a period of almost a decade, from 1949 through 1959, Isaiah Berlin turned his attention to the issue of individual liberty in an essay and three lectures that were later collected and published as Four Essays on Liberty. Each essay addressed a specific aspect or problem associated with liberty, such as whether history followed a predetermined course or how much power the state could or should have in a democracy. Collectively, the pieces form a coherent presentation of Berlin’s thoughts and observations on this topic.

Four Essays on Liberty is especially concerned with how the twentieth century treats the concept and practice of individual liberty. The opening essay, “Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century,” was published in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1949. World War II had recently ended, and the Cold War had just begun. The horrors of the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and militaristic Japan were still vivid, and the brutal repression of Stalinist Russia was becoming better known. In such a setting, the civil and political rights of individuals were seen to be extremely fragile and the concept of liberty in need of review and reinforcement.

The First Essay

In the opening essay, Berlin notes that how people look at history and what they regard as the facts change over time and reflect specific periods. During the nineteenth century, there was a belief in progress and in rational solutions to the problems affecting human beings and society. That belief disintegrated in the twentieth century, giving rise to what Berlin calls an intellectual barrier between the two centuries and their view of the world and history.

In the twentieth century, people came to understand and stress the importance of the unconscious and irrational forces in human beings, and many came to believe that the answer to most problems is to remove the problem rather than solve it through rational thought and argument. For example, the problems associated with human liberty (such as dissidents, extremist political groups, or demonstrations) can be removed by eliminating the desire for liberty among the people. This was a solution shared equally by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union when these governments denounced “bourgeois liberty” as hollow and useless.

Such an approach would create a perversely “ideal society” in which disturbing questions simply would not be raised because they could not even be conceived. This is the vision of George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and, slightly altered, that of Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932). Such a world can be achieved, Berlin argues, when there is a growing desire among people to accept security at the price of personal liberty. To avoid this fate, it is necessary to have less faith in systems and more trust in human intelligence operating in a condition of maximum freedom.

The Second Essay

Human freedom in a different context is the theme of the second essay, “Historical Inevitability.” Berlin, the biographer of Karl Marx and his ideas, knew very well that certain philosophers and historians believed that they had discerned large patterns in the procession of historical events, and from these patterns, they had deduced the laws that history was obliged to obey. The result was historical inevitability. For the Marxist, it was historically inevitable that once capitalism had reached the point where its internal contradictions were intolerable, the proletariat would spontaneously sweep away the old system, the state would wither away, and the socialist utopia would arrive. Other scholars and other factions had different versions of what was historically inevitable but shared the same underlying belief that they had discovered the laws of history.

This, Berlin writes, is not part of an empirical theory but a metaphysical attitude. Historical inevitability is much better at explaining the facts after they happen than in predicting them before they occur. Moreover, a belief in historical inevitability is not shared by most human beings, who normally act as if they retained the freedom to make choices and decisions unconstrained by abstract historical laws. Berlin is thankful for this because he believes that determinism “is one of the great alibis, pleaded by those who cannot or do not wish to face the fact of human responsibility.”

The Third Essay

Human responsibility is at the heart of the book’s third and most important essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Human beings can be responsible if and only if they have a certain amount of freedom to determine how they will think and act. Berlin posits that such liberty can be of two sorts. There can be “negative” liberty, which essentially asks the question, “How much can a person be left alone?” Contrasted to this is “positive” liberty, which asks “To what degree can a person influence his surroundings, especially the actions of others?”

Negative liberty is important because all people give up some personal liberty for social order but people must retain a minimum amount of liberty to preserve their humanity. The more a person is uncommanded by the state, organizations, or others, the more negative liberty he or she retains—in other words, the more the individual is left alone. The concept and practice of negative reality are most important in dealing with the modern state, which has increasingly sought to control the behavior of its citizens. Negative liberty can be a danger when individuals, businesses, or other groups are left free to do actual harm to others, as when industry unregulated by government pollutes rivers or when employers exploit their employees. As Berlin notes, “Freedom for the wolves means death for the sheep.”

Positive liberty comes from the wish of individuals to be their own masters, but it also can lead to a desire to be the master of others. Without a system that provides for checks and balances, this can lead to excessive control, even tyranny. As Berlin notes, positive liberty has more often been perverted than negative liberty, which is why he urges caution.

Both forms of liberty are good and desirable, but both can lead to situations where people desire equally valuable but irreconcilable goals. For Berlin, there is no absolute standard for setting the limits of negative or positive liberty; each society and ultimately each human being must decide where to draw that line.

The Fourth Essay

The book’s final essay, “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life,” looks at an individual who has drawn such lines. Mill, whose father’s teaching enabled him to read Greek at age five and to know algebra and Latin by the age of nine, established modern liberalism with the publication of On Liberty in 1859. Berlin’s study of Mill reveals the extent and expanse of the British philosopher’s contributions to the theory of liberty.

As a thinker, writer, and political leader, Mill was concerned above all with the extension of individual freedom, especially freedom of belief and speech. Time after time, he argued for the right of unpopular, even dangerous, groups and individuals to express their views freely and openly. Mill passionately believed that human society needed variety and that tolerance of the ideas of others was necessary for this variety.

Mill believed that human beings wish to curtail the liberties of others for one of three reasons: the desire for power, a wish for conformity, and the belief that there is a single, universal answer to each important question or issue. The first two reasons are irrational, Mill argues, and the third has been proven wrong by history. History has repeatedly demonstrated that human knowledge is never complete and that different individuals, nations, or civilizations can have different goals, equally valid but not necessarily in harmony with one another.

Mill’s most important and enduring contribution, Berlin believed, was his constant, untiring insistence that it is the freedom to choose and to experiment that distinguishes human beings from the rest of nature. This, above all else, is what liberty is expected to preserve.

Berlin’s Impact on Philosophy

Four Essays on Liberty is perhaps the quintessential Berlin work: not a sustained, full-length book, but a collection of essays focused on a few specific topics and approaching them from divergent directions that in the end find coherence and unity. As individual works, the parts of Four Essays on Liberty had caused considerable discussion, even controversy, among serious writers and thinkers. Berlin prepared a long and carefully written introduction for Four Essays on Liberty that addressed the points that had been raised. This was only one more stage of a philosophical dialogue that ran throughout Berlin’s life and career.

Two major ideas emerged from Four Essays on Liberty that have had profound and lasting impact on political philosophy. The first idea was the concept of “negative” and “positive” liberty—briefly, how much one can escape control contrasted with how much one can control others. Although this distinction has become commonplace since the publication of Berlin’s essay, he was the first major political thinker systematically and eloquently to articulate the distinction and its importance, and his discussion of this topic has been hailed as one of the major contributions of his career.

The second major idea, which was even more central to Berlin’s entire philosophy, was the view that human beings, whether as individuals or as members of a society, pursue goals that cannot be viewed as forming a unified whole. Goals equally valid for their particular groups often contradict one another. There is no single, universal truth that is valid for every society, in all places, and at any time (the concept of monism). Berlin demonstrated in terms of classical empiricism that monism is not a valid theory to explain human behavior and human history.

Four Essays on Liberty placed these two ideas on the philosophical record, where they have remained essential elements in the continuing development of political science. Their enduring impact has been to underscore the need for tolerance and generosity in debates on political goals and activities and to inject a healthy dose of skepticism about the reality of ultimate, universal truths for which individual human beings and their liberties must be sacrificed. After these two points were clearly stated by Berlin, they have come to form a part of any serious discussion of political philosophy or the rights and liberties of the individual in society.

Principal Ideas Advanced

•Historical determinism—the belief that events happen according to large historical patterns that individuals are incapable of changing or even influencing to any great degree—cannot be proven, and human beings intuitively ignore the concept in their actions.

•Historians use words full of value judgments (especially moral ones), and complete objectivity is not possible.

•“Positive” liberty allows one to influence the actions of others; by contrast, “negative” liberty reduces the influence of others over one.

•“Monism,” or the unity or harmony of human goals, is an illusion; there is no single, universal truth for all humanity; each individual, nation, and culture is different.

Bibliography

Berlin, Isaiah, and Ramin Jahanbegloo. Conversations with Isaiah Berlin. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992. In a question-and-answer format, Isaiah Berlin discusses a wide range of topics, including his personal history, intellectual development, and opinions on philosophy and philosophers. Berlin’s responses to questions on such topics as “two kinds of liberty” are direct and lucid, and the biographical sections, especially those dealing with Berlin’s life as a young boy in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, are fascinating.

Galipeau, Claude. Isaiah Berlin’s Liberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. A thoughtful consideration of Berlin’s version of liberalism and how it differs from and yet is linked to the traditions of classical liberalism. Galipeau is especially good at placing Berlin’s thought in relationship to modern world politics, the excesses of which were often in direct, if not brutal, conflict with his more humane and humanitarian stance.

Gray, John. Isaiah Berlin. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996. A thoughtful examination of Berlin’s belief in the existence of values that while different are equally important. The central thesis of the book is that Berlin’s work is based on a principle that might be called “value-pluralism,” meaning that ultimate human values are objective but diverse and may often conflict.

Margalit, Edna, and Avishai Margalit, eds. Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991. This collection draws together essays that touch on the wide range of Berlin’s interests, from opera to political science to philosophy. Although a number of the pieces included here are valuable, the essay by celebrated legal scholar Ronald Dworkin on “Two Concepts of Liberty” is especially illuminating for those wishing to understand the full impact of Four Essays on Liberty.

Ryan, Alan, ed. The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honor of Isaiah Berlin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. A useful collection of essays that shed light on Berlin’s philosophy of history and his views on the history of philosophy.