Two Concepts of Liberty

Berlin drew the distinction that organizes the whole modern argument about freedom. Negative liberty is freedom from interference, the space left to do as you choose. Positive liberty is freedom to realize yourself, to become what you might be. Both are real goods, Berlin argued, but the second, pushed hard, can justify coercion in freedom's own name, forcing people to be free as someone else defines it. The essay is a warning written by a man who had watched the warning come true.

The Riga-born Oxford philosopher who drew the distinction that organizes the modern argument about freedom. Two Concepts of Liberty separates negative liberty, freedom from interference, from positive liberty, freedom to realize oneself, and warns how the second, pushed hard, can justify coercion in freedom's name. He wrote as a historian of ideas who believed that the great values genuinely conflict, and that pretending otherwise is the root of much tyranny.