Then Now
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Isaiah Berlin: Two Concepts of Liberty
Posted
August 27, 2020
Views
80,910
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August 27, 2020
80,910
2,293
108
2.97%
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15:53Now PlayingAn introduction and overview of the British/Latvian philosopher, Isaiah Berlin's 1958 classic lecture on Two Concepts of Liberty.
Berlin thought that where philosophers, politicians, and commentators had talked about the idea of freedom as one definable concept, throughout the history of modern thought you could identify two different ideas about what freedom or liberty meant.
He called them negative and positive liberty. And in short, they’re the freedom from, and the freedom to.
Negative freedom is the freedom from coercion, interference, authority.
But positive liberty, he writes, 'derives from the desire on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and my decisions to depend on myself and not on external forces of whatever kind.’
It’s the desire to Self-directed, self-determined, independent, competent; it's the the will to self-mastery, to autonomy. I want to be the master of my own life, to choose for myself.
I also look briefly at critiques, including Gerald MacCallum's triadic formulation of liberty.
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