Isaiah Berlin: Negative and Positive Liberty

Abstract

Liberty is defined in dictionaries as not being determined by anything outside of oneself. Despite the clarity of this definition, liberty has been one of the most debated concepts throughout history and still is today. Isaiah Berlin, one of the most significant political philosophers of the twentieth century, is an important architect of the negative-positive liberty dichotomy. Berlin created the opportunity of an assessment from a different perspective of moral and political contexts by considering the dual nature of liberty and using value plurality concept. By dividing liberty into negative and positive liberties, Berlin, with the classical liberal tendency, points to negative liberty, considered with the value pluralism, as the one that should be emphasized. Negative liberty is the “private” sphere which determines the borders and the purpose of liberties and in which people can take decisions without an external impact. Berlin specifically emphasizes that “negative” here does not indicate an unfavorableness but points to the sphere that “does not accept any impact”. He calls liberty which takes place in the public sphere as positive liberty. Positive liberty takes place in the outer atmosphere. It is very much related to democracy as the way of governance and also to liberal rights. The division of positive and negative liberties, as Berlin called his significant article in 1958, is still in use to define liberty. This division is also effective in the context of “substance” and “conceptual field” separation.