in public. Berlin, like Hobbes, deals with the republican conception of virtue by ignoring its key arguments. Individuals are free when they are unmolested by the state. When they are dependent on others for survival Berlin cannot see that they are unfree, since they are free to defy their betters and starve.
Berlin’s elaborates his case against positive liberty in a way that is, at best, eccentric. He begins sensibly enough:
The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object. . .24
He goes on to point out that positive liberty of this self-actualizing kind has sometimes turned into a blind faith in some abstract entity that realizes the true perfection of the imperfect human individual – the State, the Party, Reason, History, Human Nature. In the name of this abstraction the advocates of positive freedom can then coerce their fellows, secure in the knowledge that they are helping them to become truly free. Hence the Bolsheviks developed their enthusiasm for education and, especially, re-education and accepted the need to exterminate those social elements that incorrigibly stood in the way of the general freedom. Having discovered the nature of true freedom, Soviet communists were confident that they were justified in coercing those who opposed them.
But Berlin disastrously confuses the drive for effective autonomy with the desire to dominate others by allowing one possible development – or more accurately, one perversion – of positive liberty to stand for the concept as a whole. Berlin is thus able to conclude that those who seek to defend the freedom of the individual from external compulsion are ‘almost at the opposite pole’ from those who believe in positive liberty: ‘The former want to limit authority as such. The latter want it placed in their own hands.’25 This is suavely effective rhetoric but it allows Berlin to ignore centuries of republican practice as well as the substance of republican theory in the English tradition. The point for republicans is that ‘authority as such’ can only be limited effectively when a public of citizens is its sole source.
Berlin argued, for reasons that are essentially vapid, that the positive freedom to engage in the political process would inevitably conflict with the individual’s sphere of private immunity. But positive liberty, in the sense of freedom to engage in the formation and conduct of the state, does not entail any of the extravagances that he ascribes to it. The desire to be Somebody does not necessarily decay into the worship of Something.
Berlin is right to point out that democracies can sometimes act in illiberal ways. But he is wrong to claim that people can be free when they do not have the power to control and direct the state. Wrong too to imagine that people can be free when they cannot be confident in their material independence. Without secure access to the means of subsistence they will not be able to assert themselves fearlessly as citizens. Without political power they cannot defend the independence they have. And while the citizens of a Republic may never be invulnerable to the antics of an activist state, they will surely be more secure than those who must rely on the restraint and good manners of their rulers. To repeat, liberty in the republican sense of the word requires more than freedom from active coercion. It requires also the power to shape the state, and to do so from a position of material independence. A citizen who fears she may lose her livelihood if she speaks out is not meaningfully free unless she is a hero or a fool.
Perhaps Berlin’s distrust of positive liberty derives from his conviction that the population organized as a public cannot set limits to its own power. We are, according to this view, unable to discern and protect our private interests through public deliberation. Certainly the language of true liberty had been mightily abused in the decades before Berlin wrote in praise of negative liberty. But what Berlin sees as liberty is not liberty truly stated. The enjoyment of private property and the unmolested experience of life in a network of private relationships do not suffice as conditions for freedom. Without a public identity we are not free, any more than a free-range chicken is free. Indeed, though we may count ourselves lucky, and develop all manner of private properties of mind, we are not, in one sense, even fully human.
While Hobbes and his intellectual heirs denounced the English republicans for demanding too much, they were also attacked for demanding too little. Gerard Winstanley set out what he saw as the conditions of true liberty in The Law of Freedom. In the opening sections he sketches out the various ways of construing freedom. Freedom of trade, he says, is no more than ‘freedom under the will of a conqueror’ if it is conducted under the existing distribution of property. Freedom of religion would be an unsettled freedom, that is, men would have no security when they sought to assert their religious freedom. Sexual freedom was no more than the freedom of ‘wanton, unreasonable beasts’. And what of those who claim that ‘it is true freedom that the elder brother shall be landlord of the earth, and the younger brother a servant’?26
This is ‘but a half freedom’, says Winstanley, and one ‘that begets murmurings, wars and quarrels’. Winstanley believed that there could be no just basis for great inequalities of wealth and power. Rich men depend on the work of other men for their wealth: ‘if a man have no help from his neighbour, he shall never gather an estate of hundreds and thousands a year’. Great concentrations of wealth depend on capturing the value created by others. There had to be some trickery involved, thought Winstanley. The plain-hearted poor end up working for the idle rich only through the exercise of ‘covetous wit’. The pretensions of the propertied gentleman were no more than the swagger of a successful fraudster. At a time when covetous wit has brought vast wealth to a tiny number of knowledgeable operators and the prevailing descriptions have recast their work of upward distribution as a kind of productive labour, the contemporary implications must surely be obvious. True freedom could only be had, thought Winstanley, when men had equal, and equally secure, access to the means of subsistence, the land itself. ‘True Commonwealth’s freedom’, he declared, ‘lies in the free enjoyment of the earth.’27
If everyone could live independently then men could cooperate freely for their mutual advantage. Only then could men speak plainly to one another, without the fear that they would lose favour, livelihood, or life. A nation where only ‘older brothers’, the property-holding heads of households, were free would only be half free. Freedom required material independence as well as the formal enjoyment of rights and the absence of active coercion by the state or anyone else. Reluctantly or not, many of the republicans concluded that only a minority could therefore be free. Winstanley, on the contrary, decided that all must therefore become independent in order that all might be free. In the gap between those who sought a Republic built on a Roman conception of virtue and those, like Winstanley, who thought that to be human warranted liberation, we begin to see the shape of what haunts this book, the outline of a public that is at once sovereign and universal.
The older brothers of Cromwell’s Republic and the plain-hearted poor could not find common cause once the King had been defeated. In the century that followed the yeomen who had supplied the Parliamentary armies with their cavalry and the republicans with their constituency were driven into conditions of dependency as the great estates expanded. The poor, far from enjoying the common treasury of the earth, lost what common rights they had in a wave of enclosures. The magnates, who were terrified of radical democracy and could see no great protection from it in a Republic, instead brought back monarchy. An aristocracy that preferred order and the secure possession of private property to republican virtue installed first Charles II and then William III to be their King. The Bill of Rights, which set out the terms on which Parliament accepted William III, avoided the language of republicanism, and the successful conspirators in Parliament spoke instead of ‘asserting their ancient rights and liberties’.28
English republicanism provided an important resource for the framers of the United States constitution, but key principles have all but vanished from the openly stated political culture of both Britain and America, most notably the insistence that only a rough ‘equality of estate’ can
