Isaiah Berlin’s inaugural lecture to the University of Oxford and associated essay has been credited with much influence, and it is an interesting and worthwhile piece to analyse not only because of its content but also its context and how its context has shaped its content, and, in a sense, dated it. Though the critique contained in the essay is timeless and the definition of liberty useful, the conclusions that Isaiah Berlin draws are not necessarily universally applicable through time - as Berlin himself acknowledges towards the end of his essay - and a critical reanalysis of Berlin’s conclusions almost sixty years after his work is timely in light of the new digital technologies that alter the ways in which freedoms can be expressed and collide.

The most important part of Berlin’s essay is his conclusion, which is that without “an a priori guarantee of the proposition that a total harmony of true values is somewhere to be found - perhaps in some ideal realm the characteristics of which we can, in our finite state, not so much as conceive - we must fall back on the ordinary resources of empirical observation and ordinary human knowledge” (1958: 31), and that because our empirical knowledge offers no evidence for this harmony of values and considerable evidence against it, then we ought to operate on the assumption that there are a plurality of conflicting goods, all valid even though they conflict, because they are the ends of men, determined by those men freely, and men are ends in themselves, so that the end of a man is his right to pursue and that freedom is a state where men are free to pursue their own ends absence of interference. For the purposes of this, Berlin separates liberty into two concepts, described simplistically as negative liberty being ‘freedom from’ interference in achieving your ends, and positive liberty being ‘freedom to’ be your better self, unaffected by base nature or desires, or: “[negative libertarians] want to curb authority as such. [positive libertarians] want it placed in their own hands,” (1958: 28). He arrives at this conclusion through a thorough analysis of the many schools of thought on both types of liberty, beginning at Mill and ranging through Kant, Hegel, Marx, and others, and by demonstrating either the faulty first principles at the heart of these conceptions, or the undesirable final ends that they bring about. The attack on these thinkers is uncompromising, and wholly compelling, and the essay well-deserves its prominent place for this alone

It would seem therefore that the conclusion ought to follow as compellingly, and considered in the perspective of 1958 I have no doubt that it would. Though it was not yet a walled world physically the Cold War was well underway and without the necessity of wartime co-operation maintaining it the veneer of civility that had been applied to Stalin by the US government had well and truly cracked, and the entire USSR project was beginning to stink. Faced with contemptible evidence of the dangers of positive liberty fear alone, if not principle or reason, would drive any man into the reassuring clutches of a government that didn’t govern. Today we are faced with an opposite situation, where the recalcitrance and intransigence evident in the US approach to financial regulation domestically and abroad is driving vast segments of American minnows into the dirt while globalist pikes grow ever fatter. In his defence, Berlin does allow for the government to regulate and legislate in limited areas to defend “what constitutes a fulfilled human life” (1958, 30). However, he goes on to define this area nebulously, except to restrict it to the relatively fundamental values that an equally nebulous “we” (1958, 30) consider more important than freedom. Though Berlin espouses this idea of compromise there has been very little of that on matters which prevent a great deal of American workers from fulfilling even their basic needs without government transfer payments - despite being in full-time employment (Cooper, 2016).

Berlin’s conceptualisation of liberty has evident merit, and his history of others’ is detailed and worthwhile. But it is equally meritorious and worthwhile for his ideas to be critically examined at much greater length in the context of international finance and the new global financial elite. If it is true that money talks then the inequitable distribution of currency is an inequitable distribution of power, and inequality today is vastly greater than inequality in 1958. Where a night watchman state might have been able to govern fairly over rich and poor alike in the post-war economy, where fortunes were not so large and lobbies not so powerful, that same night watchman state might struggle today. Especially if he is also on the take.


Berlin, I. (1958) “Two Concepts of Liberty.” In Isaiah Berlin (1969) Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cooper, D. (2016) “A majority of low-wage workers earn so little they must rely on public assistance to make ends meet.” Washington: Economic Policy Institute.
http://www.epi.org/publication/a-majority-of-low-wage-workers-earn-so-little-they-must-rely-on-public-assistance-to-make-ends-meet/
(Accessed 19/8/2016)