The Shift From Negative Liberty to Positive Liberty

In one line

Negative liberty is freedom from interference, positive liberty is freedom to actually do something, and the whole argument is about whether the second is a genuine kind of freedom or a licence for somebody else to decide what you really want.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: negative liberty is the absence of external obstacles, coercion or interference, so that a person is free to the extent that others do not prevent them from acting; positive liberty is the presence of the capacity, resources and self-mastery required to act effectively on one's own purposes, so that a person is free to the extent that they are actually able to determine and pursue their own life; and the shift from the first conception to the second is what transformed classical liberalism into modern liberalism and what supplies the theoretical basis for the welfare state.

The two conceptions

The classic statement of the distinction is Isaiah Berlin's, in a lecture of 1958, and it is put as two different questions.

Negative liberty answers: what is the area within which I am left to do what I want, without interference by others?

Positive liberty answers: who or what is the source of control that determines what I do?

They are not opposites and they are not two names for one thing. They are answers to different questions, and a person can have a great deal of one and almost none of the other.

Negative liberty

Freedom is the absence of obstacles placed by other people. A prisoner is unfree because a person locks the door. A person who cannot fly is not unfree, because no one is preventing them.

Its characteristic questions. How wide is the area? Who may narrow it, and on what justification?

Its characteristic institutions. Rights against the state, limits on power, the requirement that restrictions be justified.

Its advocates. Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Mill and Berlin himself, who thought this the safer conception.

Its blind spot. It counts only obstacles that people put there. A person who is starving, illiterate and ill is, on this conception, perfectly free, because nobody is stopping them.

Positive liberty

Freedom is the capacity to act on one's own purposes. It has two related senses, and separating them is what makes an answer good.

Freedom as capacity. Having the means, education, health and resources to do the things one has a formal right to do. This is Green's sense at chapter 400.

Freedom as self-mastery. Being governed by one's own reason rather than by impulse, addiction, ignorance or manipulation. This is the older philosophical sense, and it is where the trouble starts.

Its characteristic questions. What can this person actually do? What prevents them?