Originally Posted by pjanus

Sir Isiah Berlin defined two types of liberty. Positive and Negative Liberty.

Positive liberty, he said, was born out of individuals wanting to free themselves from tyrants and despots. The problem was that people who led these revolutions believed that to be truly free, people had to be transformed. They had to become better, rational beings and only the leaders knew what that ideal was. This, he said, led to a terrible illogic in all revolutions. The masses who did not realise what true freedom was had to be coerced, 'we must force the people to be free.'

This logic, he argued, always led to horror and the very opposite of freedom. Positive liberty would always fail because it was driven by a false belief that there was one true answer to all human ills - 'If you believe that, then no sacrifice is too great for it. If you believe that there is only one answer, and you think you have it, there is a temptation to do awful things.'

Negative liberty did not have such ideals, it stood for nothing. It was simply the freedom of all individuals to do what they wanted and nothing more. They should be governed by laws to ensure that individuals actions do not interfere with each others freedoms, but other than that power should be restrained. Negative liberty was a society deliberately without ideals other than individuals desires and freedoms to indulge them. He warned that Negative liberty would be difficult to achieve and maintain.


What appears to now have happened is a corruption of negative liberty. Over recent years the Western World has attempted to export and impose our negative liberty to other countries around the globe, sometimes by force, as in Iraq, and sometimes by economic sanctions, backed up by the powers of the United Nations the European Union and organisations such as the World Bank. However, the use of force has not always been unanimous. In other words we, by one means or another, forcing them to be free.

The attempts to enforce negative liberty on other countries has resulted in a back lash in some quarters and has brought terrorism to our countries. The Politicians paint nightmare scenarios to frighten us to agree to laws that take away our freedoms.

'How do we reconcile our liberties with our security,' Tony Blair asked before introducing laws that give our Political leaders the power to decide what is the right kind of free individual and to punish those who do not conform to it.

It seems negative liberty has been transformed into positive liberty. A Socialist/Feminist Utopia perhaps?