four essays on liberty summary

This 57-page pamphlet is the text of the lecture Sir Isaiah Berlin (hereafter to be referred to simply as “Mr. Berlin”) gave last fall at Oxford on assuming the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory. It is the latest in the series of tracts for the times—others were The Hedgehog and the Fox and Historical Inevitability—with which Mr. Berlin has been demonstrating the case for a skeptical and pluralistic approach and against the faith-full monism which is still strong in our age. It is a necessary and important work, and Mr. Berlin has been performing it with brilliance, wit, and imagination. The two concepts of liberty—or freedom (he uses the words interchangeably)—are the “negative” and the “positive.” The former, generally professed in the West and to some extent even practised there, deals with the question: “What is the area within which the subject is or should be left to do or be what he wants to do or be, without interference by other persons?” The latter, universally professed and practiced in the Sino-Soviet East, deals with a very different question: “What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, one thing rather than another?” “Negative” freedom is a familiar enough concept, defined by liberal and conservative theorists, from Locke and Hobbes to Mill, Constant, Bentham, and Tocqueville. They have disagreed as to the area to be left to the individual free of society’s control (Hobbes thought damned little) but they all have agreed that something must be left— “To invade that preserve, however small, would be despotism.” “The doctrine is comparatively modern,” Mr. Berlin writes: There seems to be scarcely any consciousness of individual liberty as a political ideal in the ancient world. The domination of this ideal has been the exception rather than the rule, even in the recent history of the West.
Mill's mission in writing On Liberty can perhaps be best understood by looking at how he discussed his work in his Autobiography. Mill wrote that he believed On Liberty to be about the importance, to man and society, of a large variety in types of character, and of giving full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions. This celebration of individuality and disdain for conformity runs throughout On Liberty. Mill rejects attempts, either through legal coercion or social pressure, to coerce people's opinions and behavior. He argues that the only time coercion is acceptable is when a person's behavior harms other people--otherwise, society should treat diversity with respect. Mill justifies the value of liberty through a Utilitarian approach. His essay tries to show the positive effects of liberty on all people and on society as a whole. In particular, Mill links liberty to the ability to progress and to avoid social stagnation. Liberty of opinion is valuable for two main reasons. First, the unpopular opinion may be right. Second, if the opinion is wrong, refuting it will allow people to better understand their own opinions. Liberty of action is desirable for parallel reasons. The nonconformist may be correct, or she may have a way of life that best suits her needs, if not anybody else's. Additionally, these nonconformists challenge social complacency, and keep society from stagnating. Mill's argument proceeds in five chapters. In his first chapter, Mill provides a brief overview of the meaning of liberty. He also introduces his basic argument in favor of respecting liberty, to the degree it does not harm anybody else. His next two chapters detail why liberty of opinion and liberty of action are so valuable. His fourth chapter discusses the appropriate level of authority that society should have over the individual. His fifth.
1. Two Concepts of Liberty Imagine you are driving a car through town, and you come to a fork in the road. You turn left, but no one was forcing you to go one way or the other. Next you come to a crossroads. You turn right, but no one was preventing you from going left or straight on. There is no traffic to speak of and there are no diversions or police roadblocks. So you seem, as a driver, to be completely free. But this picture of your situation might change quite dramatically if we consider that the reason you went left and then right is that you're addicted to cigarettes and you're desperate to get to the tobacconists before it closes. Rather than driving, you feel you are being driven, as your urge to smoke leads you uncontrollably to turn the wheel first to the left and then to the right. Moreover, you're perfectly aware that your turning right at the crossroads means you'll probably miss a train that was to take you to an appointment you care about very much. You long to be free of this irrational desire that is not only threatening your longevity but is also stopping you right now from doing what you think you ought to be doing. This story gives us two contrasting ways of thinking of liberty. On the one hand, one can think of liberty as the absence of obstacles external to the agent. You are free if no one is stopping you from doing whatever you might want to do. In the above story you appear, in this sense, to be free. On the other hand, one can think of liberty as the presence of control on the part of the agent. To be free, you must be self-determined, which is to say that you must be able to control your own destiny in your own interests. In the above story you appear, in this sense, to be unfree: you are not in control of your own destiny, as you are failing to control a passion that you yourself would rather be rid of and which is preventing you from.
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.