Latin American Liberation and the Polysemy of Positive Liberty — Epoche C1
Berlin's two concepts, and the claim under dispute In his 1958 inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, published as 'Two Concepts of Liberty', Isaiah Berlin separated two things the word 'free' is used to say. Negative liberty is the extent of the area in which a person can act without being obstructed by others: I am free in this sense to the degree that no one interferes with me. Positive liberty answers a different question — not 'how far am I left alone?' but 'who is master?' — and consists in self-direction, in being moved by one's own reasons rather than by causes one does not endorse. Berlin's celebrated warning concerns the second. He traces a sequence of steps, each individually plausible, from self-mastery to tyranny. To be one's own master is to distinguish the self that governs from the self that is governed — the deliberating self from the appetites it restrains. That division invites the thought that the governing self is the real one, and the governed self a mere bundle of impulses. The real self, so conceived, can then be identified with something larger than the individual: a nation, a class, a church, the rational order of history. And once that identification is made, coercing the empirical, protesting individual can be represented as the liberation of their true self. This is why Berlin thought positive liberty had lent itself to the vocabulary of despotism as negative liberty had not. The received reading takes this as a proof of the conceptual and normative superiority of negative liberty. The thesis of this essay is that the received reading is wrong in one respect and right in another, and that the difference matters. It is right that Berlin preferred negative liberty; he says outright that it is a truer and more humane ideal than the aims of those who would remake people in the light of a rational plan. It is wrong that he showed positive liberty to entail despotism. What he offered was a genealogy of a slide, and a slide is not an entailment: each step is a substantive further claim that can be refused. The Latin American liberation traditions matter to political theory precisely because they refuse different steps, in ways that let us state the condition under which the slide occurs — and, in one case, in ways that do not refuse it at all. One concept with three variables Before turning to those traditions, the analytic tool that makes the comparison possible. The undergraduate version of the topic is Berlin's dichotomy: two concepts, choose one. Gerald MacCallum's 'Negative and Positive Freedom' (1967) argued that there are not two concepts but one, with three places to fill. Every intelligible statement about freedom has the form $$F(x, y, z): \text{ agent } x \text{ is free from } y \text{ to do or become } z.$$ Berlin's negative liberty results from filling $y$ with deliberate interference by other people and $z$ with whatever the agent happens to want; positive liberty results from filling $y$ with internal or structural obstacles and $z$ with a specified condition such as self-government. On this account, disputes that look conceptual are disputes about what belongs in the variables — which is a substantive political question, not a matter of the meaning of a word. This is what the polysemy of liberation amounts to, and it can be set out plainly rather than gestured at: Claim Agent $x$ Obstacle $y$ End $z$ Berlin, negative the individual interference by others whatever one wants Berlin, positive the individual or collective irrationality, ignorance, passion rational self-direction Bolívar, 1815 the American peoples Spanish rule and the political inexperience it produced competent self-government Freire, 1970 the oppressed, acting together a social order internalised as natural critical consciousness and transformative action Gutiérrez, 1971 the poor economic dependence; sin material sufficiency; communion Two things follow immediately. The claims are not rival answers to one question, so 'positive liberty' is not a single doctrine that stands or falls together. And nothing in the table's structure produces coercion; if coercion enters, it enters through a further premise about who is entitled to fix $z$. Bolívar: the case that does not prove what it was asked to prove Simón Bolívar's writings are the usual first exhibit, and this section examines them because they do not in fact support the conclusion they are normally recruited for. In the Letter from Jamaica of 1815, written in exile in Kingston, Bolívar argued that Spanish America's subjection was not merely a matter of being ruled from Madrid. The colonies had been excluded from the higher offices of their own administration, and so had been denied any practice in public affairs — kept, in his image, in a prolonged political infancy. Independence therefore could not consist in the removal of Spanish officials alone. It required the acquisition of a capacity that colonial rule had deliberately withheld. That is a positive-liberty claim in Berlin's sense, with the obstacle $y$ located partly inside the population itself. The earlier version of this essay treated Bolívar as evidence that such a claim need not lead to authoritarian conclusions. That is the wrong example, and the point should be conceded rather than smoothed over. Bolívar himself drew the authoritarian inference, and drew it explicitly. Addressing the Congress of Angostura in 1819, he argued that peoples unprepared for liberty must be given institutions that compensate for their unpreparedness, and proposed a hereditary senate. In the constitution he wrote for Bolivia in 1826 he proposed a president serving for life with the power to designate his successor. The reasoning is exactly the one Berlin reconstructed: the true will of the nation is self-government; the nation as it actually is cannot yet perform it; therefore an authority that already grasps that will must act for it until the nation cat