Starting in 1774, John Adams wrote a series of essays, the Novanglus essays, to his fellow Massachusetts Bay Colony citizens, which were published in the Boston Gazette. Among other things, Adams stressed the inextricable relationship between liberty and virtue. He wrote: “Liberty can no more exist without virtue and independence, than the body can live and move without a soul. When these are gone, and the popular branch of the constitution has become dependent on the minister, as it is in England, or cut off, as it is in America, all other forms of the constitution may remain; but if you look for liberty, you will grope in vain; and the freedom of the press, instead of promoting the cause of liberty, will but hasten its destruction, as the best cordials taken by patients in some distempers become the most rancid and corrosive poisons.”11
In fact, the Virginia Declaration of Rights (June 12, 1776), drafted by George Mason, included this essential section: “That no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”12 The Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights (August 16, 1776), drafted primarily by Benjamin Franklin, similarly included a passage about virtue: “That a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles, and a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, industry, and frugality are absolutely necessary to preserve the blessings of liberty, and keep a government free . . .”13 And the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights (1780), whose authors included John and Samuel Adams, included a like provision: “A frequent recurrence to the fundamental principles of the Constitution, and a constant adherence to those of piety, justice, moderation, temperance, industry, and frugality, are absolutely necessary, to preserve the advantages of liberty, and to maintain a free government. . . .”14
As Russell Kirk (1918–1994), a major conservative thinker and historian, explained in his book The Conservative Mind—from Burke to Eliot (1953): “Liberty, in short, cannot be discussed in the abstract as if it were totally independent of public virtue and the framework of institutions. [John] Adams’s knowledge that freedom is a delicate plant, that even watering it with the blood of martyrs is dubious nutriment, impels him to outline a practical system for liberty under law. Liberty must be under law; there is no satisfactory alternative; liberty without law endures so long as a lamb among wolves. Even the compass of the civil laws does not sufficiently hedge liberty about: under cover of the best laws imaginable, freedom may still be infringed if virtue is lacking. What sort of government, then, will stimulate this indispensable private and public virtue comprehended in the golden rule?”15 A constitutional republic, of course.
Consequently, there must be a legal order, informed by a moral order, if the individual is to flourish. The wrong human-made law—which is contrary to or rejects natural rights—is oppressive. The right kind of law, adopted for the right reasons and in the right manner through republican institutions, can certainly help secure and even nurture individual and societal liberty, at least for a time.
Mill witnessed the growing influence and tyrannical threat of the so-called reformers and what would later include the progressives and he addressed them: “[S]ome of those modern reformers who have placed themselves in strongest opposition to the religions of the past, have been no way behind either churches or sects in their assertion of the right of spiritual domination. . . . [Their] aims at establishing . . . a despotism of society over the individual, surpass[es] anything contemplated in the political ideal of the most rigid disciplinarian among the ancient philosophers.”16 In fact, as Mill was writing his books and essays, the ideologies of Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx, among others, were taking tangible, political form at the urging of intellectuals throughout the world, including in the West. “Apart from the peculiar tenets of individual thinkers, there is also in the world at large an increasing inclination to stretch unduly the power of society over the individual, both by the force of opinion and even by that of legislation: and as the tendency of all the changes taking place in the world is to strengthen society, and diminish the power of the individual, this encroachment is not one of the evils which tend spontaneously to disappear, but, on the contrary, to grow more and more formidable. This disposition of mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow-citizens, to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others, is so energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings incident to human nature, that it is hardly ever kept under restraint by anything but want of power; and as the power is not declining, but growing, unless a strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised against the mischief, we must expect, in the present circumstances of the world, to see it increase.”17
In more recent times, the Russian-British political theorist and philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) examined liberty by dividing it into two general but distinct categories—positive liberty and negative liberty. As will become clear, these are easily confused terms, suggesting that “positive” liberty is something that is good and “negative” liberty is something that is bad; or perhaps that “positive” liberty establishes liberty and “negative” liberty denies it. That is not the case. Indeed, I would contend that the contrary is mostly true.
In various lectures and writings beginning in the 1950s, Berlin went further in developing these analytical devices. He explained that positive liberty “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, this rather than that?’ The two questions are clearly different, even though the answers to them may overlap.”18 Conversely, “liberty in the negative sense involves an 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.’ ”19 The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes the concepts straightforwardly: “Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting—or the fact of acting—in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.”20 “The reason for using these labels is that in the first case liberty seems to be a mere absence of something (i.e., of obstacles, barriers, constraints or interference from others), whereas in the second case it seems to require the presence of something (i.e., of control, self-mastery, self-determination or self-realization).”21
Throughout the discussion of progressivism—from Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx to Croly, Roosevelt, Wilson, Dewey, and Weyl—the core themes have evolved around defining individual worth, salvation, and liberation through the lenses of the collective, scientifically managed by and through a centralized, unified governmental construct (often referred to or compared to a living organism or body) said to represent the general will, general welfare, national interests, and working masses (proletariat). “This organism will only act rationally, will only be in control of itself, when its various parts are brought into line with some rational plan devised by its wise governors (who, to extend the metaphor, might be thought of as the organism’s brain). In this case, even the majority might be oppressed in the name of liberty.”22 However, what is missing all through is an appreciation for and the best interests of the sanctity and sovereignty of the unique, flesh-and-blood, individual human being.
In his 1958 Inaugural Lecture on the two concepts of liberty, and its follow-up essays, Berlin explained that studies about politics and philosophy in academia “spring from, and thrive on, discord. Someone may question this on the ground that even in a society of saintly anarchists, where no conflicts about ultimate purposes can take place, political problems, for example constit
utional or legislative issues, might still arise. But this objection rests on a mistake. Where ends are agreed, the only questions left are those of means, and these are not political but technical, that is to say, capable of being settled by experts or machines, like arguments between engineers or doctors. That is why those who put their faith in some immense, world-transforming phenomenon, like the final triumph of reason or the proletarian revolution, must believe that all political and moral problems can thereby be turned into technological ones. That is the meaning of Engels’ famous phrase (paraphrasing Saint-Simon) about ‘replacing the government of persons by the administration of things,’ and the Marxist prophecies about the withering away of the State and the beginning of the true history of humanity. This outlook is called Utopian by those for whom speculation about this condition of perfect social harmony is the play of idle fancy. Nevertheless, a visitor from Mars to any British—or American—university today might perhaps be forgiven if he sustained the impression that its members lived in something very like this innocent and idyllic state, for all the serious attention that is paid to fundamental problems of politics by professional philosophers.”23
In this, Berlin said that the people ignore the academics and intellectuals at their own peril since it is they who devise and develop the philosophical and political notions upon which politics is practiced. And politics, in turn, is the means by which institutions govern and affect society and the individual. Consequently, Berlin exhorted that not enough attention is paid to this debate and the debaters despite the fact that the outcome will determine the future of humanity. “Yet this is both surprising and dangerous. Surprising because there has, perhaps, been no time in modern history when so large a number of human beings, in both the East and the West, have had their notions, and indeed their lives, so deeply altered, and in some cases violently upset, by fanatically held social and political doctrines. Dangerous, because when ideas are neglected by those who ought to attend to them—that is to say, those who have been trained to think critically about ideas—they sometimes acquire an unchecked momentum and an irresistible power over multitudes of men that may grow too violent to be affected by rational criticism. Over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study could destroy a civilization.”24
In further describing negative liberty, Berlin argued: “I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others 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 beings within the area in which I could otherwise act. You lack political liberty or freedom only if you are prevented from attaining a goal by human beings. Mere incapacity to attain a goal is not lack of political freedom.”25
Berlin then analyzed the state of mind motivating modern progressives: “What troubles the consciences of Western liberals is . . . the belief, not 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 have made possible my liberty or prosperity or enlightenment; justice, in its simplest and most universal sense—these are the foundations of liberal morality. . . . But nothing is gained by a confusion of terms. To avoid glaring inequality or widespread 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. . . . 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 rules or 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. Still, a practical compromise has to be found.”26
Turning to the positive liberty concept, Berlin asserted: “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. For the ‘positive’ sense of liberty comes to light if we 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 by which my life is to be controlled, may be as deep a wish as that for 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—to lead one prescribed form of life—which the adherents of the ‘negative’ notion represent as being, at times, no better than a specious disguise for brutal tyranny.”27
Moreover, and notably, Berlin describes the mind-set of modern progressives and their philosophical patrons, declaring that in exercising the positive freedom idea to be all you want to be, the danger is that “the real self may be conceived as something wider than the individual (as the term is normally understood), as a social ‘whole’ of which the individual is an element or aspect: a tribe, a race, a Church, a State, the great society of the living 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 organic metaphors [general will of the people, general welfare of the people, etc.] 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 coerce men in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or public health) which they would, 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 of myself as coercing others for their own sake, in their, not my interest. [. . .] [T]hey would not resist me if they were rational and as wise as I, and understood their interests as I do.”28
As Berlin explained further: “I may go on to claim a good deal more than this. I may declare that they are actually aiming at what in their benighted state they consciously resist, be
cause 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 they overtly feel and do and say, is their ‘real’ self, of which the poor empirical self in space and time may know nothing or little; and that this inner spirit is the only self that deserves to have its wishes taken into account. Once I take this view, I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men 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 of man (happiness, performance of duty, wisdom, a just society, self-fulfillment) must be identical with his freedom—the free choice of his ‘true,’ albeit often submerged and inarticulate, self.”29
Berlin was also well aware of the calculating psychology and behavior of the autocratic masterminds, among whom I include the progressives. “[T]he ‘positive’ conception of freedom as self-mastery, with its suggestion of a man divided against himself, has in fact, and as a matter of history, of doctrine 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. It is this historical fact that has been influential. This demonstrates (if demonstration of so obvious a truth is needed) that conceptions of freedom directly derive from views of what constitutes a self, a person, a man. Enough manipulation of 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.”30
Irish philosopher and Princeton University professor Philip Pettit has also spent considerable time examining and writing about the issue of freedom. In his book Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (1997), Pettit, among other things, examined certain ancient thinkers as well as American Revolutionary period writers. He asserts: “The important point to notice . . . is that the writers . . . take liberty to be defined by a status in which the evils associated with interference are avoided [negative liberty] rather than by access to the instruments of democratic control [positive liberty], participatory or representative. Democratic control is certainly important in the tradition, but its importance comes, not from any definitional connection with liberty, but from the fact that it is a means of furthering liberty.”31