Isaiah Berlin’s Negative Liberty Now Fetters Progressive Politics

The flaws, strengths, and future of liberalism have been discussed from various angles on Social Europe, against the backdrop of the crises that have beset western societies since 2008. Bo Rothstein, in particular, offered fresh arguments for liberal socialism. I would like to suggest a different line, based on a conception of freedom that differs from the dominant one.

I first voiced that argument in these pages in 2018. Here I wish to say a little more, drawing on a recent book which the Financial Times has appreciated.

I begin with a comparison as stark as it is rarely noted. The neoliberal turn followed the crisis of the 1970s, which undermined trust in post-war “embedded liberalism”: two decades later, by the late 1990s, western societies had been profoundly changed by bold, systematic, and sustained programmes of reform. The 2008 crisis was harsher and deeper, and it made several serious defects of neoliberalism manifest; 18 years later, however, western societies have not changed much, for reforms were generally timid, episodic, and few.

Why this contrast? If we do not wish to hand power to the demagogic right, we must understand why so few reforms proved possible during the past two decades.

One reason, certainly, is the political influence of economic elites, which benefited from neoliberal policies and tend to defend the status quo. But in a democracy elites can hardly impose their interests so thoroughly, and for so long, unless they can plausibly claim that the policies they prefer serve the public interest. So there must also have been an ideological obstacle to reform.

The idea that did most to defend the status quo is the liberal conception of freedom, the pillar upon which neoliberal doctrine ultimately rests.

Freedom as non-interference

Known also as “negative liberty”, after a celebrated lecture delivered by Isaiah Berlin in 1958, that conception defines freedom as the absence of interference: neither being stopped from doing what we want, nor being forced to do what we would not otherwise do. This view — “non-interference” — is shared by the whole liberal tradition, including its egalitarian strands, and is dominant in western societies.

Indeed, that conception will sound obvious. Seldom remarked upon, however, its implications raise tall normative and rhetorical obstacles to progressive reform — and entail that liberal socialism, taken literally, is a contradiction in terms. For non-interference disjoins freedom from democracy, implies that any law is a fetter on our freedom, and is blind to the asymmetry of power, which can compromise our freedom even in the absence of interference.

Berlin was very clear on the first two implications: “every law is an infraction of liberty”, he repeated after Bentham, for the simple reason that it binds us; so a “liberal-minded despot” may well grant citizens greater freedom than an interventionist democracy.

To appreciate the third, think of the relationship between a precarious worker and her employer, who has the discretion either to renew her short-term contract or to let it lapse. If she has no immediate prospect of re-employment, she might spontaneously waive her rights — on working hours, for example, or workloads — in order to ingratiate herself with the employer. This would be the direct effect of an asymmetry of power, one that seems vast enough to conclude that, in this domain of her life, that worker is not really free.

Liberals may well be moved by her plight, but to claim that her waivers were not free they must find evidence of interference, such as explicit demands or veiled threats — which they will typically not find, for the wider the asymmetry, the more silently it operates. Indeed, public discourse treats precarious work as a problem of social protection or economic efficiency, not primarily as a question of freedom, as it manifestly is.

The dearth of reforms over the past two decades is therefore hardly surprising, since liberty is the value that western societies tend to regard as supreme, and the liberal conception of it is widely shared by progressives themselves — because it is properly hegemonic.

Facing challenges that threaten both democracy and freedom, and that visibly require remedies coordinated or enforced by the state, those three implications of non-interference are now fettering our efforts to stem the drift towards oligarchy, to fight inequality, and to preserve the very legacy that liberalism drew from the Enlightenment and bequeathed to our democracies: the equal dignity of persons, the rule of law, the separation of powers, constitutionalism, pluralism, universalism, and tolerance.

Freedom as non-domination

Non-interference is not the only conception of freedom, however. Two centuries ago it displaced a sharply different one, which had been hegemonic for two millennia and has recently been revived in political philosophy. In this other view, liberty means the absence of domination: being free means not being subject to the uncontrolled power — and therefore the will — of others, be they our peers or a public authority. Liberty means independence, in other words, or self-mastery.

This conception — usually called “non-domination”, or “republican” freedom — opposes not just interference but subjection to a power of interference. It therefore requires that every citizen be assured a robust sphere of self-determination, within which one may be one’s own master: a sphere defined by the fundamental rights of citizens, and buttressed by sufficient public resources — health, education, social protection, information — to allow each to exercise those rights according to their own volition, unlike the precarious worker of my example.

From this ideal a theory of justice, social and political, has been drawn. It offers us the image of a state whose citizens have equal and effective control over political power, and of a society whose members can walk tall among their peers, holding their heads high, and can “look others in the eye without reason for fear or deference”.

Higher and stronger than the liberal one, the republican conception — I need hardly add that it has nothing to do with the US Republican Party — requires democracy, posits that liberty is a creation of laws and public policies, and allows us to fight both oligarchy and excessive inequalities — that is, excessive asymmetries of power — in the name of liberty.

My contribution to republican theory is the argument that a strong synergy exists between that view of freedom and the most persuasive theory of long-term growth: Schumpeterian theory, named after the economist Joseph Schumpeter, according to which prosperity is driven by technological innovation.

Innovation is ultimately the offspring of individual talents, which are distributed randomly across the population. Hence the first facet of that synergy: the gradual strengthening of the republican sphere of self-mastery would foster the flourishing of citizens’ talents, and the universalistic reach of this process would widen the pool of talents from which society benefits.

For fresh ideas to turn into material progress, however, markets must be open to them. Schumpeterian theory tells us that established firms — typically, the successful innovators of the past — fear new innovations, which could displace them: this is what “creative destruction” means. If such firms dominate their markets, therefore, and can influence political authorities, innovation will be stifled. Hence the second facet of that synergy: in a democracy in which citizens have reasonably equal and effective control over political power, economic elites will not be able to protect themselves from creative destruction.

By reversing the drift towards oligarchy and reducing excessive asymmetries of power, we would thus accelerate innovation and the rise in living standards. Unlike liberal socialism, in sum, the republican-Schumpeterian synthesis offers progressives a coherent basis on which to build attractive and realistic programmes of reform, which could defeat both the demagogic right and neoliberal conservatives.