Two Aspects of Liberty

Isaiah Berlin was a wonderful writer about political theory, the author of a number of essays we still read. Upon assuming the Chichele Chair at All Souls College in 1958, he gave a lecture entitled Two Concepts of Liberty. Berlin described the two concepts as "negative" and "positive." The negative concept of liberty (he sometimes called it "freedom from") is a classical liberal ideal, one we associate with Locke and Mill, Constant and Tocqueville. It is simply the "absence of interference." (1) People who are free from all constraints can do as they like--an idea that appealed to Berlin, a great believer in value pluralism. (2) Berlin's positive concept of liberty (or "freedom to") "derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master." (3) Any number of things might frustrate that desire: an economic system that reduces me to servitude; the waywardness of my own passions; or a dominant social institution (a church, an aristocracy) that propagates false consciousness. Berlin associated this concept of freedom with Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx. Its proponents maintain that a law does not restrict my freedom if I impose it on myself or accept it freely. The important thing is that I should be able to act in accordance with the wishes of my true self. I'm a big fan of Berlin as an essayist and a writer of intellectual history, but I think his analysis of liberty is muddled. "Freedom from" and "freedom to" are not two different concepts of liberty. They are different parts of the same idea. We can't talk sensibly about liberty without invoking both of them. Liberty in the constitutional sense is always a right against state interference (a "freedom from"). (4) The First Amendment begins by saying that "Congress shall make no law"; it forbids Congress to license or fine or jail people for speaking, or publishing, or assembling. (5) Liberty is also, always, a right to do something (a "freedom to"); to speak, to assemble, to practice religion, to get married, etc. So "freedom from" and "freedom to" are always parts of the same idea, just as "flying from" and "flying to" are aspects of the same airplane trip. Freedom is always the right to do some particular act without government restraint. I mention Berlin's confusion because I think that a focus on these two aspects of liberty (freedom from state interference and freedom to practice religion) can help us understand the battles we are currently having about religious liberty. There have been two phases in this modern fight. In the first phase, opponents of religious freedom have focused on the freedom from state interference. They have argued that although religion is an important social (and theological!) good which deserves our utmost respect, nevertheless in this or that particular case the state should prevail because its concerns are especially weighty--more weighty than the plaintiffs religious concerns. In the second phase, people have argued that the religion that we should be free to practice is a more limited idea than we might suppose. In this phase, it is not a matter of weighing private concerns against public ones and finding the public ones more weighty. The private concerns simply don't count as religious, so we don't get to the point of balancing them against concerns of state. I. "FREEDOM FROM" Let me begin with the first phase. I have said that freedom has two aspects. It is always a right to act in some way (the "freedom to") and a "freedom from" state interference. But saying that I have a right to freedom is just the beginning, not the end, of a legal argument. Because it is a right to act, people can invoke it in an infinite variety of cases. Someone might falsely shout "fire" in a crowded theater and cause a panic, then defend his behavior as an exercise of free speech. Someone else might argue that freedom of religion excuses him from paying taxes. For this reason, freedom is a defeasible right, as the philosophers say. …