READING 1 ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ Isaiah Berlin Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’* is one of the most important pieces of post-war political philosophy. It was originally given as a lecture in Oxford in 1958 and has been much discussed since then. In this extract from the lecture Berlin identifies the two different concepts of freedom – negative and positive – which provide the framework for his wide-ranging discussion. Negative freedom is, roughly, a matter of which doors lie open to you, it is concerned exclusively with opportunities; positive freedom is a question of whether or not you can go through the doors, whether you are master of your life. Berlin points out that historically the concept of positive freedom has been used to control and repress individuals in the name of liberty. I To coerce a man is to deprive him of freedom – freedom from what? Almost every moralist in human history has praised freedom. Like happiness and goodness, like nature and reality, the meaning of this term is so porous that there is little interpretation that it seems able to resist. I do not propose to discuss either the history or themore than two hundred senses of this protean word, recorded by historians of ideas. I propose to examine no more than two of these senses – but those central ones, with a great deal of human history behind them, and, I dare say, still to come. The first of these political senses of freedom or liberty (I shall use bothwords to mean the same),which (following much precedent) I shall call the ‘negative’sense, is involved in the answer to the question ‘What is the area within which the subject – a person or group of persons – is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?’ The second, which I shall call the positive sense, is involved in the answer to the question ‘What, or who, is the source of control or interference, that can determine someone to do, or be, one thing rather than another?’ The two questions are clearly different, even though the answers to them may overlap. 155 The notion of ‘negative’ freedom I amnormally said to be free to the degree to which no human being interferes withmy activity.Political liberty in this sense is simply the areawithinwhich a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by other persons from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind, or cannot understand the darker pages of Hegel, it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beingswithin the area inwhich I could otherwise act.You lack political liberty or freedom only if you are prevented from attaining a goal by human beings.1 Mere incapacity to attain a goal is not lack ofpolitical freedom.2 This is brought out by the use of such modern expressions as ‘economic freedom’ and its counterpart, ‘economic slavery’. It is argued, very plausibly, that if a man is too poor to afford something on which there is no legal ban – a loaf of bread, a journey round theworld, recourse to the law courts – he is as little free to have it as hewould be if it were forbidden him by Law. Ifmy poverty were a kind of disease, which prevented me from buying bread or paying for the journey round the world, or getting my case heard, as lameness prevents me from running, this inability would not naturally be described as a lack of freedom, least of all political freedom. It is only because I believe that my inability to get a given thing is due to the fact that other human beings have made arrangements whereby I am, whereas others are not, prevented from having enoughmoney withwhich to pay for it, that I thinkmyself a victim of coercion or slavery. In other words, this use of the term depends on a particular social and economic theory about the causes ofmy poverty or weakness. Ifmy lack ofmaterial means is due to my lack ofmental or physical capacity, then I begin to speak of being deprived of freedom (and not simply of poverty) only if I accept the theory.3 If, in addition, I believe that I am being kept inwant by a specific arrangement which I consider unjust or unfair, I speak of economic slavery or oppression. ‘The nature of things does not madden us, only ill will does’, said Rousseau.The criterion of oppression is the part that I believe to be played by other human beings, directly or indirectly, with or without the intention of doing so, in frustrating my wishes. By being free in this sense I mean not being interfered with by others. The wider the area of non- interference the wider my freedom. This is what the classical English political philosophers meant when they used this word.4 They disagreed about how wide the area could or should be. 156 ARGUMENTS FOR FREEDOM They supposed that it could not, as things were, be unlimited, because if it were, it would entail a state inwhich all men could boundlessly interferewith all other men; and this kind of ‘natural’ freedom would lead to social chaos in whichmen’s minimum needs would not be satisfied; or else the liberties of the weakwould be suppressed by the strong. Because they perceived that human purposes and activities do not automatically harmonizewith one another; and, because (whatever their official doctrines) they put high value on other goals, such as justice, or happiness, or culture, or security, or varying degrees of equality, they were prepared to curtail freedom in the interests of other values and, indeed, of freedom itself. For,without this, it was impossible to create the kind of association that they thought desirable.Consequently, it is assumed by these thinkers that the area of men’s free action must be limited by law. But equally it is assumed, especially by such libertarians as Locke and Mill in England, and Constant and Tocqueville in France, that there ought to exist a certain minimum area of personal freedom which must on no account be violated; for if it is overstepped, the individual will find himself in an area too narrow for even that minimum development of his natural faculties which alonemakes it possible to pursue, and even to conceive, the various endswhich men hold good or right or sacred. It follows that a frontier must be drawn between the area of private life and that of public authority.Where it is to be drawn is a matter of argument, indeed of haggling. Men are largely interdependent, and no man’s activity is so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others in any way. ‘Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows’; the liberty of some must depend on the restraint of others.5 Still, a practical compromise has to be found. Philosophers with an optimistic view of human nature, and a belief in the possibility of harmonizing human interest, such as Locke orAdam Smith and, in some moods, Mill, believed that social harmony and progress were compatible with reserving a large area for private life over which neither the state nor any other authority must be allowed to trespass. Hobbes, and those who agreedwith him, especially conservative or reactionary thinkers, argued that if men were to be prevented from destroying one another, and making social life a jungle or a wilderness, greater safeguards must be instituted to keep them in their places, andwished correspondingly to increase the area of centralized control, and decrease that of the individual. But both sides agreed that some portion of human existencemust remain independent of the sphere of social control.To invade that preserve, however small,would be despotism. Themost eloquent of alldefenders of freedom andprivacy, BenjaminConstant, who had not forgotten the Jacobin dictatorship, declared that at the very least the liberty of religion, opinion, expression, property, must be guaranteed 157 READING 1 ‘TWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY’ against arbitrary invasion. Jefferson, Burke, Paine, Mill, compiled different catalogues of individual liberties, but the argument for keeping authority at bay is always substantially the same. We must preserve a minimum area of personal freedom if we are not to ‘degrade or deny our nature’. We cannot remain absolutely free, and must give up some of our liberty to preserve the rest. But total self-surrender is self-defeating. What then must the minimum be?That which aman cannot give upwithout offending against the essence of his human nature. What is this essence? What are the standards which it entails?This has been, and perhaps alwayswill be, amatter of infinite debate. But whatever the principle in terms ofwhich the area of non-interference is to be drawn,whether it is that of natural law or natural rights, or of utility or the pronouncements of a categorical imperative, or the sanctity of the social contract, or any other concept with which men have sought to clarify and justify their convictions, liberty in this sense means liberty from: absence of interference beyond the shifting, but always recognizable, frontier. ‘The only freedomwhich deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way’, said themost celebrated of its champions. If this is so, is compulsion ever justified? Mill had no doubt that it was. Since justice demands that all individuals be entitled to aminimum of freedom, all other individuals were of necessity to be restrained, if need be by force, from depriving anyone of it. Indeed, thewhole function of lawwas the prevention of just such collisions: the statewas reduced to what Lassalle contemptuously described as the functions of a night-watchman or traffic policeman. What made the protection of individual liberty so sacred to Mill? In his famous essay he declares that unless men are left to live as they wish ‘in the path which merely concerns themselves’, civilization cannot advance; the truth will not, for lack of a freemarket in ideas, come to light; there will be no scope for spontaneity, originality, genius, formental energy, formoral courage. Society will be crushed by the weight of ‘collective mediocrity’. Whatever is rich and diversifiedwill be crushed by theweight of custom, bymen’s constant tendency to conformity,which breeds only ‘withered capacities’, ‘pinched and hidebound’, ‘cramped and warped’ human beings. ‘Pagan self-assertion is as worthy as Christian self-denial.’ ‘All the errorswhich aman is likely to commit against advice andwarning are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem is good.’ The defence of liberty consists in the ‘negative’ goal of warding off interference. To threaten a man with persecution unless he submits to a life in which he exercises no choices of his goals; to block before him every door but one, no matter how noble the prospect upon which it opens, or how benevolent the motives of those who arrange this, is to sin against the truth that he is aman, a beingwith a life of his 158 ARGUMENTS FOR FREEDOM own to live. This is liberty as it has been conceived by liberals in the modern world from the days of Erasmus (somewould sayof Occam) to our own.Every plea for civil liberties and individual rights, every protest against exploitation and humiliation, against the encroachment of public authority, or the mass hypnosis of custom or organized propaganda, springs from this individual- istic, and much disputed, conception of man. Three facts about this positionmay be noted. In the first placeMill confuses two distinct notions.One is that all coercion is, in so far as it frustrates human desires, bad as such, although it may have to be applied to prevent other, greater evils; while non-interference,which is the opposite of coercion, is good as such, although it is not the only good. This is the ‘negative’ conception of liberty in its classical form. The other is that men should seek to discover the truth, or to develop a certain type of character of which Mill approved – fearless, original, imaginative, independent, non-conforming to the point of eccentricity, and so on – and that truth can be found, and such character can be bred, only in conditions of freedom. Both these are liberal views, but they are not identical, and the connection between them is, at best, empirical. No one would argue that truth or freedom of self-expression could flourish where dogma crushes all thought. But the evidence of history tends to show (as, indeed, was argued by James Stephen in his formidable attack on Mill in his Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) that integrity, love of truth and fiery individu- alism grow at least as often in severely disciplined communities among, for example, the puritanCalvinists of Scotland orNewEngland, or under military discipline, as inmore tolerant or indifferent societies; and if this is so accepted, Mill’s argument for liberty as a necessary condition for the growth of human genius falls to the ground. If his two goals proved incompatible, Mill would be facedwith a cruel dilemma, quite apart from the further difficulties created by the inconsistency of his doctrines with strict utilitarianism, even in his own humane version of it.6 In the second place, the doctrine is comparatively modern. There seems to be scarcely any discussion of individual liberty as a conscious political ideal (as opposed to its actual existence) in the ancient world. Condorcet has already remarked that the notion of individual rights is absent from the legal conceptions of the Romans and Greeks; this seems to hold equally of the Jewish, Chinese, and all other ancient civilizations that have since come to light.7 The domination of this ideal has been the exception rather than the rule, even in the recent history of the West. Nor has liberty in this sense often formed a rallying cry for the great masses of mankind. The desire not to be impinged upon, to be left to oneself, has been amark of high civilization both on the part of individuals and communities. The sense of privacy itself, of the 159 READING 1 ‘TWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY’ area of personal relationships as something sacred in its own right, derives from a conception of freedomwhich, for all its religious roots, is scarcely older, in its developed state, than the Renaissance or the Reformation.8 Yet its decline would mark the death of a civilization, of an entire moral outlook. The third characteristic of this notion of liberty is of greater importance. It is that liberty in this sense is not incompatiblewith some kinds of autocracy, or at any rate with the absence of self-government. Liberty in this sense is principally concerned with the area of control, not with its source. Just as a democracymay, in fact, deprive the individual citizen of a great many liberties which hemighthave in some other formof society, so it is perfectly conceivable that a liberal-minded despot would allow his subjects a large measure of personal freedom. The despot who leaves his subjects a wide area of liberty may be unjust, or encourage the wildest inequalities, care little for order, or virtue, or knowledge, but provided he does not curb their liberty, or at least curbs it less than many other regimes, he meets with Mill’s specification.9 Freedom in this sense is not, at any rate logically, connectedwith democracyor self-government. Self-government may, on the whole, provide a better guarantee of the preservation of civil liberties than other regimes, and has been defended as such by libertarians. But there is no necessary connection between individual liberty and democratic rule. The answer to the question ‘Who governs me?’ is logically distinct from the question ‘How far does government interfere with me?’ It is in this difference that the great contrast between the two concepts of negative and positive liberty, in the end, consists.10 For the ‘positive’ sense of liberty comes to light ifwe try to answer the question, not ‘What am I free to do or be?’, but ‘By whom am I ruled?’ or ‘Who is to say what I am, and what I am not, to be or do?’ The connection between democracy and individual liberty is a good deal more tenuous than it seemed to many advocates of both. The desire to be governed by myself, or at any rate to participate in the process bywhichmylife is to be a controlled,may be as deep a wish as that of a free area for action, and perhaps historically older. But it is not a desire for the same thing. So different is it, indeed, as to have led in the end to the great clash of ideologies that dominates our world. For it is this – the ‘positive’ conception of liberty: not freedom from, but freedom to –which the adherents of the ‘negative’ notion represent as being, at times, no better than a specious disguise for brutal tyranny. The notion of positive freedom The ‘positive’sense of theword ‘liberty’derives from thewish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces ofwhatever kind. Iwish to be the instrument of 160 ARGUMENTS FOR FREEDOM myown,not of other men’s acts ofwill. Iwish tobe a subject,not an object; tobe moved by reasons, by conscious purposes which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside. Iwish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer – deciding, not being decided for, self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of myown and realizing them.This is at least part ofwhat Imeanwhen I say that I am rational, and that it is my reason that distinguishes me as a human being from the rest of the world. I wish, above all, to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for his choices and able to explain them by reference to his own ideas and purposes. I feel free to the degree that I believe this to be true, and enslaved to the degree that I ammade to realize that it is not. The freedom which consists in being one’s own master, and the freedom which consists innotbeingprevented from choosing as I dobyother men,may, on the face of it, seem concepts at no great logical distance from each other – no more than negative and positive ways of saying the same thing. Yet the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ notions of freedom historically developed in divergent directions not always by logically reputable steps, until, in the end, they came into direct conflict with each other. One way of making this clear is in terms of the independent momentum which the, initially perhaps quite harmless, metaphor of self-mastery acquired. ‘I am my own master’; ‘I am slave to no man’; but may I not (as, for instance, T. H. Green is always saying) be a slave to nature? Or to my own ‘unbridled’ passions? Are these not so many species of the identical genus ‘slave’ – some political or legal, othersmoral or spiritual?Havenotmen had the experience of liberating themselves from spiritual slavery, or slavery to nature, and do they not in the course of it become aware, on the one hand, of a self which dominates, and, on the other, of something in themwhich is brought to heel? This dominant self is then variously identified with reason, with my ‘higher nature’,with the selfwhich calculates and aims at what will satisfy it in the long run, withmy ‘real’, or ‘ideal’, or ‘autonomous’ self, or withmy self ‘at itsbest’; which is then contrastedwith irrational impulse,uncontrolled desires, my ‘lower’ nature, the pursuit of immediate pleasures, my ‘empirical’ or ‘heteronomous’ self, swept by every gust of desire and passion, needing to be rigidly disciplined if it is ever to rise to the full height of its ‘real’ nature. Presently the two selves may be represented as divided by an even larger gap: the real selfmay be conceived as something wider than the individual (as the term is normally understood), as a social ‘whole’ ofwhich the individual is an element or aspect: a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great societyof the living 161 READING 1 ‘TWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY’ and the dead and the yet unborn. This entity is then identified as being the ‘true’ self which, by imposing its collective, or ‘organic’, single will upon its recalcitrant ‘members’, achieves its own, and, therefore, their, ‘higher’ freedom. The perils of using organicmetaphors to justify the coercion of some men by others in order to raise them to a ‘higher’ level of freedom have often been pointed out. But what gives such plausibility as it has to this kind of language is that we recognize that it is possible, and at times justifiable, to coercemen in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or public health) which theywould, if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue, but do not, because they are blind or ignorant or corrupt. This renders it easy for me to conceive ofmyself as coercing others for their own sake, in their, not my, interest. I am then claiming that I knowwhat they truly need better than theyknow it themselves. What, atmost, this entails is that theywouldnot resistme if theywere rational, and aswise as I, and understood their interests as I do.But Imaygo on to claim a good deal more than this. Imay declare that they are actually aiming at what in their benighted state they consciously resist, because there exists within them an occult entity – their latent rational will, or their ‘true’ purpose – and that this entity, although it is belied by all that theyovertly feel and do and say, is their ‘real’ self, ofwhich the poor empirical self in space and timemay know nothing or little; and that this inner spirit is the only self that deserves to have its wishes taken into account.11 Once I take this view, I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes ofmen or societies, to bully, oppress, torture them in the name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal ofman (happiness, fulfilment of duty,wisdom, a just society, self-fulfilment) must be identical with his freedom – the free choice of his ‘true’, albeit submerged and inarticulate, self. This paradox has been often exposed. It is one thing to say that I knowwhat is good for X,while he himself does not and even to ignore his wishes for its – and his – sake; and a very different one to say that he has eo ipso chosen it, not indeed consciously, not as he seems in everydaylife, but in his role as a rational self which his empirical selfmay not know – the ‘real’ self which discerns the good, and cannot help choosing it once it is revealed. This monstrous impersonation, which consists in equating what X would choose if he were something he is not, or at least not yet,withwhatX actually seeks and chooses, is at the heart of all political theories of self-realization. It is one thing to say that Imay be coerced for myown goodwhich I am too blind to see: thismay, on occasion, be for my benefit; indeed it may enlarge the scope ofmy liberty; it is another to say that if it ismygood, then I amnotbeing coerced, for I havewilled it,whether I know this or not, and am free – or ‘truly’ free – evenwhilemypoor 162 ARGUMENTS FOR FREEDOM earthly body and foolishmind bitterly reject it, and struggle against thosewho seek however benevolently to impose it, with the greatest desperation. Thismagical transformation, or sleight of hand (forwhichWilliam James so justly mocked the Hegelians), can no doubt be perpetrated just as easily with the ‘negative’ concept of freedom, where the self that should not be interfered with is no longer the individual with his actual wishes and needs as they are normally conceived, but the ‘real’ man within, identified with the pursuit of some ideal purpose not dreamed of by his empirical self.And, as in the case of the ‘positively’ free self, this entity may be inflated into some super-personal entity – a state, a class, a nation, or the march of history itself, regarded as a more ‘real’ subject of attributes than the empirical self. But the ‘positive’ conception of freedom as self-mastery, with its suggestion of a man divided against himself, has, in fact, and as amatter of the history of doctrines and of practice, lent itself more easily to this splitting of personality into two: the transcendent, dominant controller, and the empirical bundle of desires and passions to be disciplined and brought to heel. This demonstrates (if demonstration of so obvious a truth is needed) that the conception of freedom directly derives from the view that is taken ofwhat constitutes a self, a person, a man. Enough manipulation with the definition of man, and freedom can be made to mean whatever the manipulator wishes. Recent history has made it only too clear that the issue is not merely academic. Notes * This version of the essay is from A. Quinton (ed.) Political Philosophy, Oxford University Press, Oxford Readings in Philosophy, 1967, pp.141–52. The quotations from ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in the main text sometimes have a slightly different wording from this version of the essay. 1 I do not, of course, mean to imply the truth of the converse. 2 Helve´tius made this point very clearly: ‘The free man is the man who is not in irons, nor imprisoned in a gaol, nor terrorized like a slave by the fear of punishment ... it is not lack of freedom not to fly like an eagle or swim like a whale.’ 3 The Marxist conceptions of social laws is, of course, the best-known version of this theory, but it forms a large element in some Christian and utilitarian, and all socialist, doctrines. 4 ‘A free man’, said Hobbes, ‘is he that ... is not hindered to do what he hath the will to do.’ Law is always a ‘fetter’, even if it protects you from being bound in chains that are heavier than those of the law, say, arbitrary despotism or chaos. Bentham says much the same. 5 ‘Freedom for an Oxford don’, others have been known to add, ‘is a very different thing from freedom for an Egyptian peasant.’ This proposition derives its force from something that is both true and important, but the phrase itself remains a piece of political claptrap. It is true that to offer political rights, or safeguards, against intervention by the state, to men who are half-naked, illiterate, underfed, and diseased is to mock their condition; they need medical help or education before they can 163 READING 1 ‘TWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY’ understand, or make use of, an increase in their freedom. What is freedom to those who cannot make use of it?Without adequate conditions of freedom what is the value of freedom? First things come first: there are situations, as a nineteenth-century Russian radical writer declared, in which boots are superior to the works of Shakespeare, individual freedom is not everyone’s primary need. For freedom is not the mere absence of frustration of what ever kind; this would inflate the meaning of the word until it means too much or too little. The Egyptian peasant needs clothes or medicine before, and more than personal liberty, but the minimum freedom that he needs today, and the greater degree of freedom that he may need tomorrow, is not some species of freedom peculiar to him, but identical with that of professors, artists and millionaires. What troubles the consciences of Western liberals is not, I think, the belief that the freedom that men seek differs according to their social or economic conditions, but that the minority who possess it have gained it by exploiting or, at least, averting their gaze from the vast majority who do not. They believe, with good reason, that if individual liberty is an ultimate end for human beings, none should be deprived of it by others; least of all that some should enjoy it at the expense of others. Equality of liberty, not to treat others as I should not wish them to treat me; repayment of my debt to those who alone havemade possible my liberty or prosperity or enlightenment; justice, in its simplest and most universal sense – these are the foundations of liberal morality. Liberty is not the only goal of men. I can, like the Russian critic Belinsky, say that if others are to be deprived of it – if any brothers are to remain in poverty, squalor, and chains – then I do not want it for myself. I reject it with both hands and infinitely prefer to share their fate. But nothing is gained by a confusion of terms. To avoid glaring inequality or wide-spread misery I am ready to sacrifice some, or all, of my freedom: I may do so willingly and freely: but it is freedom that I am giving up for the sake of justice or equality or the love of my fellow men. I should be guilt-stricken, and rightly so, if I were not, in some circumstances, ready to make this sacrifice. But a sacrifice is not an increase in what is being sacrificed, namely freedom, however great the moral need or the compensation for it. Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture or human happiness or a quiet conscience. If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral. But if I curtail or lose my freedom, in order to lessen the shame of such inequality, and do not thereby materially increase the individual liberty of others, an absolute loss of liberty occurs. This may be compensated for by a gain in justice or in happiness or in peace, but the loss remains, and it is a confusion of values to say that although my ‘liberal’, individual freedom may go by the board, some other kind of freedom – ‘social’ or ‘economic’ – is increased. Yet it remains true that the freedom of some must at times be curtailed to secure the freedom of others. Upon what principle should this be done? If freedom is a sacred, untouchable value, there can be no such principle. One or other of these conflicting principles must at any rate in practice yield: not always for reasons which can be clearly stated, let alone generalized into rules or universal maxims. 6 This is but another illustration of the natural tendency of all but a very few thinkers to believe that all the things they hold good must be intimately connected, or at least compatible, with one another. The history of thought, like the history of nations, is strewn with examples of inconsistent, or at least disparate, elements artificially yoked together in a despotic system, or held together by the danger of some common enemy. In due course the danger passes, and conflicts between the allies arise, which often disrupt the system, sometimes to the great benefit of mankind. 7 See the valuable discussion of this in Michael Villey, Lec¸ons d’Histoire de la Philosophie du Droit, who traces the embryo of the notion of subjective rights to Occam. 164 ARGUMENTS FOR FREEDOM 8 Christian (and Jewish or Moslem) belief in the absolute authority of divine or natural laws, or in the equality of all men in the sight of God, is very different from belief in freedom to live as one prefers. 9 Indeed, it is arguable that in the Prussia of Frederick the Great or in the Austria of Josef II, men of imagination, originality, and creative genius, and, indeed, minorities of all kinds, were less persecuted and felt the pressure, both of institutions and custom, less heavy upon them than in many an earlier or later democracy. 10 ‘Negative liberty’ is something the extent of which, in a given case, it is difficult to estimate. It might, prima facie, seem to depend simply on the power to choose between at any rate two alternatives. Nevertheless, not all choices are equally free, or free at all. If in a totalitarian state I betray my friend under threat of torture, perhaps even if I act from fear of losing my job, I can reasonably say that I did not act freely. Nevertheless, I did, of course, make a choice and could, at any rate in theory, have chosen to be killed or tortured or imprisoned. The mere existence of alternatives is not, therefore, enough to make my action free (although it may be voluntary) in the normal sense of the word. The extent of my freedom seems to depend on (a) how may possibilities are open to me (although the method of counting these can never be more than impressionistic: Possibilities of action are not discrete entities like apples, which can be exhaustively enumerated); (b) how easy or difficult each of these possibilities is to actualize; (c) how important in my plan of life, given my character and circumstances, these possibilities are when compared with each other; (d) how far they are closed and opened by deliberate human acts; (e) what value not merely the agent, but the general sentiment of the society in which he lives, puts on the various possibilities. All these magnitudes must be ‘integrated’, and a conclusion, necessarily never precise, or indisputable, drawn from this process. It may well be that there are many incommensurable degrees of freedom, and that they cannot be drawn up on a single scale of magnitude, however conceived. Moreover, in the case of societies, we are faced by such (logically absurd) questions as ‘Would arrangement X increase the liberty of Mr A more than it would that of Messrs B, C, and D between them, added together?’ The same difficulties arise in applying utilitarian criteria. Nevertheless, provided we do not demand precise measurement, we can give valid reasons for saying that the average subject of the King of Sweden is on the whole, a good deal freer today than the average citizen of the Republic of Rumania. Total patterns of life must be compared directly as wholes, although the method by which we make the comparison, and the truth of the conclusions are difficult or impossible to demonstrate. But the vagueness of the concepts, and the multiplicity of the criteria involved, is an attribute of the subject-matter itself, not of our imperfect methods of measurement, or incapacity for precise thought. 11 The ideal of true freedom is the maximum of power for all the members of human society alive to make the best of themselves’, said T. H. Green in 1881. Apart from the confusion of freedom and equality, this entails that if a man chose some immediate pleasure – which (in whose view?) would not enable him to make the best of himself (what self?) what he is exercising is not ‘true’ freedom: and, if deprived of it, he would not lose anything that mattered. Green was a genuine liberal but many a tyrant could use his formula to justify his worst oppression., Oxford University Press, Oxford Readings in Philosophy, 1967, pp.141– 52. The quotations from ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in the main text sometimes have a slightly different wording from this version of the essay. 165 READING 1 ‘TWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY’