Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom

Freedom

ON 22 MAY 1958, Hannah Arendt delivered a lecture in Zurich on ‘Freiheit und Politik’ (‘Freedom and Politics’), later revised and published in English under the title ‘What Is Freedom?’ Simultaneously historical and philosophical, the twenty-five-page essay gives a panoramic view of differing understandings of freedom, from the pre-Socratics to the present. It also defends one particular understanding Arendt calls ‘political freedom’, whose essence she summarises in a proverbial form: ‘The raison d’être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action.’ According to Arendt, this idea is so deeply rooted in our culture that her discussion of the intricate connection between politics, freedom and action would strike her readers as immediately intelligible. In this sense, she claims, her discussion amounts to ‘no more than to reflect on [an] old truism’.

As Arendt’s lecture was going to press, to appear in the winter issue of the German journal Neue Rundschau, Isaiah Berlin, on the other side of the English Channel, gave a lecture on 31 October on ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, to inaugurate his Chichele professorship of social and political theory at Oxford. He was almost certainly unaware of Arendt’s lecture five months earlier. He had not attended it, and he had drafted and revised ‘Two Concepts’ before the publication of Arendt’s piece. At first glance, his lecture has several points of proximity to Arendt’s. Blending historical scholarship and philosophical argument, the fifty-seven-page text gives an overview of competing understandings of freedom, from ancient civilisations to the twentieth century, and defends one particular understanding Berlin calls ‘negative liberty’. He relies on some of the standard distinctions Arendt also uses in ‘What Is Freedom?’, including those between the ancient and the modern, and between freedom as a political concept and freedom as free will. He discusses key figures who are considered in Arendt’s text as well, including the Stoics, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Montesquieu and Mill. And, again like Arendt, he considers his preferred conception of freedom to be commonplace and immediately intelligible to his readers. In spite of these surface similarities, however, the substance of their arguments could scarcely be more different.

The aim of this chapter is to examine Arendt’s and Berlin’s rival theories of freedom. This is by no means the only point of disagreement between the two thinkers. However, it is the most fundamental of all their disagreements because, for both of our protagonists, to be free is to be human in the full sense of the term, and to deprive one of freedom is to deny one’s humanity. Consequently, to examine their disagreement over freedom is not only to consider what they meant by the term ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’ and what value they saw in it. It is also to tease out their competing conceptions of the human condition, which ultimately underpin their respective theories of freedom and of political thought as a whole. To anticipate my main argument, I hope to show in this chapter that the following observation by the British philosopher Martin Hollis was true when it came to Arendt and Berlin: ‘all political and social theorists, I venture to claim, depend on some model of man in explaining what moves people and accounts for institutions. Such models are sometimes hidden but never absent […]. There is no more central or pervasive topic in the study of politics.’

A further advantage of beginning our enquiry into Arendt’s and Berlin’s political thought with freedom is that both thinkers had reached a certain intellectual maturity by the time they presented their respective theories of freedom. Of course, they had many more years to live, and neither’s intellectual development stopped in the 1950s or the 1960s. Nevertheless, the backbone of each theorist’s thought was formed by the time Arendt published The Human Condition (1958), Between Past and Future (1961) and On Revolution (1963), and by the time Berlin published ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in 1958 and its revised version in 1969. To put it differently, both thinkers were still very much in the making even in the early 1950s. For example, although The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was undoubtedly a groundbreaking book, some of Arendt’s key ideas such as her flagship distinctions between force, violence and power, and between labour, work and action, were still missing from this early masterpiece. Similarly, while Berlin had been writing extensively on liberty and freedom since the early 1950s, it was only later in the decade that he came to formulate his flagship distinction between negative and positive liberty. Although both thinkers would add to, refine and develop their ideas on freedom and other issues subsequently, their mid-career writings serve as an ideal starting point for our enquiry in the rest of this book.

This chapter is in four main sections (besides this introductory one). The first introduces some basic analytic tools and terminological distinctions on which my subsequent discussion relies. I explicate how I use the terms ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’, and differentiate between ‘conceptions’, ‘concepts’, ‘ideas’ and ‘theories’. Next, I turn to Berlin’s theory of freedom. While he is best known for his dichotomous division between negative and positive liberty, each of these concepts may be subdivided. Consequently, his theory of freedom can be shown to be richer, more complex and more ambiguous than is commonly supposed. Nevertheless, all things considered, Berlin prioritises negative liberty over its positive rival—or, more precisely, rivals—on the basis of his conviction that the negative concept is truer to the essential aspect of the human condition: that the human being is a choice-making creature.

The following section turns to Arendt’s theory of freedom. It analyses this in comparison to Berlin’s theory on the one hand, and the neo-republican theory proposed by Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit on the other. It will be shown that Arendt’s political freedom is distinct from the negative, positive and neo-republican concepts, and is based on an alternative view of the human condition, whereby the human being is conceptualised as a political animal conditioned by plurality and natality. Finally, I examine Arendt’s and Berlin’s competing histories of freedom, especially their conflicting perspectives on ancient philosophy, to explicate further the central point of disagreement between the two thinkers.

Terms and Distinctions

First, a brief discussion of terminology is in order. There has been a long debate as to whether the words ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ are, or should be used as, exact synonyms. No single attempt is likely to bring an end to this dispute, and this book is not intended to do so. To minimise confusion and avoid misunderstanding, however, I shall use the following terminological devices in the pages that follow. First, I reject the idea that ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ ought to be strictly distinguished from each other. True, the two terms register slightly different nuances and connotations, elusively conveying ‘older tensions of meaning persist[ing] in the folk memory of English-speaking people’. Etymologically, ‘liberty’ originates from Latin and Old French, and ‘freedom’ from Germanic languages. One was brought into the English language by the Normans; the other, by the Anglo-Saxons. Consequently, it is more conventional to speak of Kant’s, Hegel’s or Marx’s theory of freedom than of liberty, as it is more straightforward to use ‘freedom’, rather than ‘liberty’, to translate or discuss what these German-speaking authors wrote about Freiheit. Similarly, one can at least make sense of, if not agree with, David Ritchie’s hyperbolic remark that liberty is ‘something French, foolish and frivolous’, whereas freedom is ‘English, solid and sensible, if just a trifle dull’. One may list many other instances in which ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ convey, or are said to convey, different connotations. However, as Hanna Pitkin demonstrates in her seminal essay ‘Are Freedom and Liberty Twins?’, such differences are very subtle and ultimately incoherent, and they get immensely more complex as we turn to the verbs ‘to free’ and ‘to liberate’, the adjectives ‘free’ and ‘liberal’ and the adverbs ‘freely’ and ‘liberally’. To follow the overly rigid terminological distinction between ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ hardly helps to capture these complexities, and it is advisable that we abandon the vain hope that clarity might be achieved if and only if the two terms are strictly distinguished from each other.

My present point is substantiated by none other than Hannah Arendt herself. As is well known, she underlines differences between ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ in the first chapter of On Revolution, challenging the modern convention that the two terms may be used as exact synonyms. But she does not follow her own distinction later in the same book. For example, she uses ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ interchangeably in its last chapter, entitled ‘The Revolutionary Tradition and its Lost Treasure’, characterising ‘the freedom of movement’ as ‘the greatest and most elementary of all negative liberties’. Similarly in other texts, for example in a piece composed in the late 1960s and published posthumously as ‘ “The Freedom to Be Free”’, Arendt observes that ‘liberty [in the late eighteenth century] meant no more than freedom from unjustifiable restraint’. A persistent pattern is discernible in her usage of the terms ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’. On the one hand, she repeatedly uses them interchangeably, especially in their adjectival and adverbial forms. On the other, she repeatedly attempts to highlight different nuances conveyed by the two terms. In short, Arendt is inconsistent, at least as inconsistent as ordinary language is, as to whether ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ are exact synonyms. This is hardly surprising, because the simplistic liberty/freedom dichotomy cannot do justice to the complexity of Arendt’s thought, or to the untidiness of ordinary language. A more promising approach, then, is to accept this untidiness, acknowledge the semantic overlap as well as differences between ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ and introduce a range of terminological distinctions to specify the precise sense of liberty or freedom under consideration.

For this purpose it is useful to build on H.L.A. Hart’s and John Rawls’s work and distinguish between a conception, a concept, an idea and a theory. The distinction between the first two is familiar enough. Concepts are basic units or ‘building blocks of thoughts’, whereas conceptions designate differing interpretations of a given concept when its meaning is open to contestation. For example, distributive justice is a highly contested concept and may be interpreted differently, giving rise to a range of conceptions, such as liberal egalitarian, welfare-based and desert-based, for example. Helpful though it is, however, the concept/conception dichotomy is still too crude to let us navigate through the highly complex debate over liberty and freedom (or over justice, for that matter). Two further terms may thus be added to enrich the dichotomy. One is idea, which is used as a generic category to group relevant concepts together. For example, while distributive justice and criminal justice may be seen as independent concepts, they may be grouped together as emanating from a more abstract idea of justice. To put it another way, the idea of justice breaks down into multiple concepts, such as distributive justice and criminal justice, each of which in turn breaks down into multiple conceptions, such as the welfare-based and desert-based conceptions of distributive justice, and the retributivist and consequentialist conceptions of criminal justice. Finally, I use the term theory to refer to a pattern of thought, rigidly systematic or relatively unsystematic, centring on a given concept and its conception, and accompanied by relevant considerations. For example, it is normally the case that one’s specific conception of distributive justice is accompanied by considerations on the appropriate role of the state, on the permissible level of socio-economic inequality, and so on. When one combines one’s conception of distributive justice with one’s conceptions of authority, equality and so on in this way, one is said to have a theory of distributive justice.

Let me emphasise that these terminological distinctions are no more than a heuristic device. Their value consists solely in their ability to help adjust one’s focus to see clearly what one would like to see; to assign greater value than this is to fetishise the heuristic device, that is, to misrecognise its instrumental worth as an intrinsic one. Let me draw an analogy by way of illustration. Consider a conversation you may have with a friend who recently moved to London. You may wish to ask him or her the precise address, or the nearest train station, or the neighbourhood, depending on what you would like to do with that information. For example, you would need to know the exact address if you are planning to send your friend a parcel, while you would only need to know his or her neighbourhood if you would like to meet him or her at a nearby café. A similarly pragmatic approach is advisable when fine-tuning the analytic lens with which to examine ideas. For example, I shall focus on the concept of negative liberty when outlining a way of thinking about freedom on a relatively general level, whereas I shall zoom in on one’s conception of negative liberty to analyse one’s particular interpretation of the concept. I am not concerned as to whether the conception/concept/idea/theory distinction is useful for considering general issues in linguistic philosophy or the philosophy of language. What matters in the present context is that the distinction is useful for the task at hand: to examine Arendt’s and Berlin’s competing theories of freedom.

Berlin’s Theory of Liberty

Isaiah Berlin’s interest in liberty/freedom lasted a lifetime. The evolution of this interest has been extensively studied, most notably in Joshua Cherniss’s intellectual biography of the young Berlin. It goes back at least to 1928, when the future philosopher wrote his earliest surviving essay on freedom at St Paul’s School. This was to be followed by his first book, Karl Marx (1939), which contained an analysis of Marx’s ‘purely Hegelian view of freedom’;19 by his immediate post-war writings on Soviet Russia, which analysed oppression, coercion, persecution and other forms of unfreedom;20 and by his various writings during the 1950s, when he struggled to form a satisfactory theory of liberty. This effort came to fruition in 1958, when he preliminarily presented his mature theory in ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. Although he continued to develop his ideas in subsequent years, the fundamentals of Berlin’s mature theory had solidified by 1969, when a revised version of ‘Two Concepts’ was published together with other essays in Four Essays on Liberty. In this chapter, I focus on those fundamentals.

Negative Liberty

Let me begin with negative liberty. Berlin characterises this as a concept that has been variously formulated by a group of theorists, including Hobbes, Bentham, Constant, Tocqueville and Mill. Part of Berlin’s goal in ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ is to give an overview of this intellectual tradition. But another part, which is more relevant to the current discussion, is to present what Berlin takes to be the most defensible conception of negative liberty, to show its superiority over its positive counterpart. This specifically Berlinian conception of negative liberty is conventionally characterised as ‘freedom as non-interference’. This is a good starting point, but it is not as illuminating as is often supposed, because interference is not a self-explanatory concept and may be interpreted in a variety of ways. One consequently needs to analyse what kind of interference and other pertinent concepts such as prevention, constraints, oppression and obstacles are relevant to Berlin’s freedom as non-interference. Some progress may be made on this issue if we characterise Berlin’s negative liberty as follows: one is negatively free if one is not prevented by others from doing what one could otherwise do. One type of prevention is physical. For example, one is negatively free to stroll if nobody physically prevents one from strolling when one wants to; whereas one is unfree to stroll if someone shoots one in the leg when one attempts to go for a stroll. But relevant prevention can also be psychological. One’s freedom to stroll may be negated if one is told by someone else that one will be shot in the leg if one goes for a stroll. Whether the shooting is actually undertaken is irrelevant, so long as the threat is taken to be serious and credible. To the extent that psychological constraints can in this way be no less effective than physical constraints, negative liberty ‘consists in not being prevented from choosing as I do by other men’. While the existence of negative liberty ‘depends ultimately on causal interactions among bodies’, some bodily interactions, for example A’s pointing a gun at B, can make B’s desired action ineligible and negate B’s negative liberty.

To be negatively free in Berlin’s sense is more than feeling free. One feels free if one’s desires are not frustrated, but this may be achieved ‘as effectively by eliminating desires as by satisfying them’. For example, a would-be writer who finds it difficult to complete his or her novel may end his or her frustration as well by abandoning his or her ambitions altogether as by getting his or her work published. Of course, some philosophers, such as the Stoics, have exploited this idea and conceptualised freedom as self-control, seeing the elimination of desires as a genuine path to freedom. According to this view, one is free if one masters the art of living such as to lead a peaceful and pleasant life regardless of the external circumstances in which one finds oneself. Berlin concedes that this view is coherent and intelligible. Yet he firmly rejects it as false, as amounting to an ‘unmistakable […] form of the doctrine of sour grapes’. The allusion here is to Aesop’s fable, in which a fox rationalises its inability to reach ripe grapes on a lofty branch by telling itself that the grapes must be sour and unworthy of attaining or even pursuing. Negative liberty rejects such rationalisation. To be negatively free is to be free; it is not to feel free.

To be negatively free to do or be X is different from being capable of doing or being X. One may not be able to fly, but this does not mean that one is unfree to fly. One may not be able to cross a road that has been destroyed by an earthquake, but this does not mean that one is unfree to cross the road. One is said to be unfree if and only if one’s desires are frustrated as a result of ‘alterable human practices’. Paradigmatically, one is made unfree by somebody’s deliberate interference; in this case one is said to be oppressed. But one may also be made unfree as an unintended consequence of ‘the operation of human agencies’. Consider poverty. One is unfree to obtain, as well as incapable of obtaining, food, water and other basic necessities if one’s poverty is caused by human-made arrangements. Such a situation is different from a food crisis directly caused by a natural disaster (provided that the disaster is not caused by human activities). In the latter situation, the victims are incapable of obtaining, but are neither unfree nor free to obtain, basic necessities. The concept of negative liberty is simply irrelevant here.

To substantiate this point, Berlin famously underlines the difference between negative liberty and ‘the conditions of its exercise’. A sick and starving citizen who has no shoes or clothes to wear is unlikely to go to a voting booth until his or her basic needs are fulfilled. This, however, does not mean that the citizen does not have the freedom to vote. What he or she lacks is a set of conditions for exercising that freedom; the citizen will, if he or she so wishes, exercise the freedom to vote that he or she already has once his or her more basic needs, such as food, shelter and security, are fulfilled. Is this a plausible claim? Not everyone thinks so. Berlin’s strict separation between freedom and its conditions has been criticised for amounting to ‘an unfortunate reversion’ towards libertarianism; that is, towards the inflation of the value of negative liberty at the expense of other considerations, especially economic equality. On this critical reading, Berlin is a marginally left-wing version of Friedrich Hayek, whose seemingly rigorous analysis of liberty effectively disguises the denial of liberty to the economically disadvantaged.

Is this a valid criticism? Is Berlin a libertarian pretending to be a liberal? On the one hand, this criticism is one-sided to the extent that Berlin’s endorsement of negative liberty is not unconditional. On the contrary, he concedes that negative liberty must be balanced against, and at times compromised by, other values such as equality, justice and solidarity. This means that Berlin’s distinction between liberty and its conditions is intended to be analytic, rather than social or political. He underlines this distinction because he believes that ‘nothing is gained by a confusion of terms’. On the other hand, however, critics are right to note that Berlin has little to say on economic inequality in general and the destructive forces of what we today call neoliberalism in particular. Although he acknowledges the importance of the latter issue and even warns of ‘the evils of unrestricted laissez-faire’ in his 1969 ‘Introduction’ to Four Essays on Liberty, Berlin does not discuss in detail how the unregulated exercise of negative liberty, especially in the economic sphere, could result in the violation of ‘basic human rights’ and of negative liberty itself. Nor does he have much to say on how ‘the evils of unrestricted laissez-faire’ might be contained. He came to regret this insufficiency of attention, and highlighted his awareness of the perils of neoliberal economy on later occasions, especially in interviews. The late Berlin’s effort has been assisted by similar efforts by his friendly readers, who insist on the difference between Berlin and libertarians on the value of negative liberty. Yet Berlin’s critics have never been persuaded, and some continue to claim that he was blind to, and indeed complicit in, the harm done by neoliberalism. A tone of resignation is discernible in a remark Berlin made in 1986: ‘What I’m accused of is always the same, which is some kind of dry, negative individualism.’

Non-Interference and the Ability to Choose

To complicate the matter further, Berlin does not always characterise his conception of negative liberty as non-interference. According to an alternative account he repeatedly provides, to be negatively free is to have opportunities. This is different from exercising or realising them. Berlin highlights this difference by repeatedly invoking the image of ‘open doors’. A free person has many open doors of various sorts in front of him or her. He or she may not be walking through a door, or may not have decided which door to walk through, but these do not make him or her unfree or less free. To be free consists first and foremost in one’s ability to choose between multiple options. Note that both the number and quality of options matter to Berlin’s negative liberty. By way of illustration, consider hypothetical detainees under four different situations, assuming that no one likes or wants to be detained:

α will be held in detention for thirty days.

β may choose between thirty- and thirty-one-day detention.

γ may choose between thirty-, thirty-one- and thirty-two-day detention.

δ may choose between thirty-day detention and immediate release.

According to Berlin, β and γ (as well as δ) are freer than α because they have more options; and δ is freer than β and γ (as well as α) because δ’s options are qualitatively better than the others’, although, numerically speaking, δ does not have more options than β or γ. Unfortunately, he does not specify exactly how the numerical and qualitative aspects of negative liberty may be compared with each other. Contrary to his critics’ allegations, however, he does not focus exclusively on the numerical dimension. He is certainly aware that immediate release is better than one fewer day in detention. Nevertheless, he places relatively strong emphasis on the numerical dimension, underlining that the availability of an additional option necessarily increases negative liberty, even if the option is not desirable. To have more options is one thing; whether the options are desirable is another; and both matter to negative liberty. Thus, in my example, β is not much freer than α but β is freer nonetheless. To cite Berlin’s more humorous example, to ‘stand on my head and crow like a cock if I feel so inclined’ may be wholly worthless; and yet to be able to do so is a genuine freedom.

The image of open doors is a vivid and forceful one, but it invites important ambiguity. In fact, it may be said that Berlin unintentionally presents two conceptions of negative liberty: non-interference and the ability to choose. Of course, the two have significant areas of overlap and sometimes even coincide, as in the case of the detainee, for example. A detainee’s ability to choose is limited because he or she is detained by an external interferer. In this case, liberty as non-interference and liberty as the ability to choose coincide. They do not necessarily coincide, however. For example, if one is monolingual, one is unable to do various things that a bilingual person can do, such as reading foreign language books in the original. Other things being equal, the monolingual person has many fewer options or open doors to choose from than the bilingual. This, however, does not necessarily mean that the former was subjected to external interference. Of course, such interference is in principle possible. If, for example, a child is prohibited from learning a foreign language by his or her eccentric ethno-nationalist parents, who believe that bilingualism amounts to national betrayal, then the child is negatively unfree in both senses of the term. First, the child is unfree, or at least less free than a bilingual person, in the ‘open door’ sense, because he or she has fewer options than the latter. Second, the child is also unfree in the ‘non-interference’ sense, for he or she has been prevented from acquiring a second language by external interferers, that is, the ethno-nationalist parents. Nevertheless, in other and more mundane cases, a monolingual person’s relative lack of options may not be due to external interference. One may, for example, be simply unable to acquire a second language in spite of one’s best efforts. In this case, one is negatively unfree in the ‘open door’ sense and yet negatively free in the ‘non-interference’ sense. Berlin’s two conceptions of negative liberty part company.

Which, then, is Berlin’s true conception of negative liberty? Is it non-interference, or the ability to choose? The former is often presented as shorthand for Berlinian negative liberty. It has the advantage of being consistent with the aforementioned distinction Berlin draws between freedom and power. If his conception of negative liberty is a pure choice or ‘open door’ conception, it is not clear why a person who is unable to fly should not be seen as unfree, for if one could fly one would surely have an additional option, another ‘open door’ to walk through (or fly through), and to this extent be ‘freer’. Does Berlin’s rejection of this reasoning indicate that his true conception of negative liberty is non-interference? Perhaps. But the problem with excluding the ‘open door’ definition altogether from Berlinian negative liberty is that his texts are in fact characterised by deep ambiguity, and his numerous accounts of negative liberty constantly oscillate between non-interference and the ability to choose. A more candid assessment of the matter, then, acknowledges this ambiguity and asks why it exists in the first place. To this question there is an unequivocal answer: although they are conceptually distinct, the two senses of negative liberty often coincide in empirical reality; and Berlin is concerned with those instances where individuals’ ability to choose is diminished as a result of external interference. This is nicely captured by one of his numerous formulations of negative liberty. ‘To be free’, he writes, ‘is to be able to make an unforced choice; and choice entails competing possibilities.’ This may be analytically frustrating, because it encompasses both liberty as non-interference and liberty as the ability to choose. It arguably indicates, however, that Berlin’s priority is not analytic clarity, pure and simple. It is, rather, to underline the indispensability of both non-interference and the presence of multiple options to human liberty in its most basic sense.

Positive Liberty

On a general level, Berlin characterises positive liberty as a reply to the question, ‘By whom am I to be governed?’ To this the advocate of positive liberty replies, ‘Myself.’ Again, however, to define positive liberty as self-mastery does not illuminate much, because, like interference, mastery is not a self-explanatory concept, may be variously interpreted and can consequently generate a wide range of conceptions. Berlin is not interested in compiling a comprehensive list of these diverse conceptions. Instead, he focuses on two in particular—the Stoic and the rationalist—to underline the vulnerability of positive liberty to political abuse to discredit its normative appeal. There is thus asymmetry between his discussions of negative and of positive liberty. When he discusses the former, he is concerned to articulate and defend his own conception; when he discusses the latter, he considers various conceptions suggested by others, and criticises them.

The first conception of positive liberty Berlin focuses on is the Stoic one, which associates self-mastery with self-control, abstinence, discipline and, ultimately, self-abnegation. Stoics and negative liberty theorists agree that A is not free to do X if A is prevented by others from doing X. But they disagree as to how A may be freed in this situation. According to negative liberty theorists, the only way to end A’s unfreedom is to remove or override the relevant obstacles. According to the Stoics, by contrast, A’s unfreedom ends 1) if the relevant obstacles are removed or overridden; or 2) if A gives up his or her desire to do X. The distinct claim of the Stoic conception, according to Berlin, is that it considers those two options equally valid. The logical conclusion of this claim is the equation of absolute freedom and total self-abnegation—that is, suicide. As one’s desires can always be frustrated and one ‘can never be wholly secure’ so long as one is alive, ‘[t]otal liberation in this sense […] is conferred only by death.’ This idea is coherent, but strikes Berlin as highly unappealing. As I noted earlier, it reminds him of Aesop’s self-deceiving fox.

The other conception of positive liberty Berlin focuses on is the rationalist one, which associates self-mastery with self-direction guided by the reflexive use of reason. This conception holds that to do something freely is not merely to satisfy the preferences one happens to have. ‘Freedom is not freedom to do what is irrational, or stupid, or wrong.’ To do X freely in the positive sense consists in knowing that X is worth doing, as well as in actually doing it. One advantage of this reasoning is that it can account for the sense of ‘false liberty’ one may have when one reflects on something one did to one’s later regret, or when one is doing something while being vaguely aware that one will later regret the action that one is currently undertaking. Consider a smoker who has been unable to quit smoking, while he or she knows he or she must quit because smoking is bad. The smoker is not unfree to quit smoking in the negative sense because, first, he or she has the option of quitting as well as that of not quitting and, second, he or she is not externally prevented by others from doing what he or she could otherwise do, that is, quit smoking. By contrast, the smoker is unfree to quit smoking in the positive sense because he or she is internally prevented by his or her uncontrolled desires from doing what he or she knows is the right thing to do, that is, quit smoking. Negative liberty theorists can of course concede that it is unfortunate, bad and so on that the smoker should keep doing what he or she later regrets; but they are unable to call the smoker unfree, for neither external interference nor the absence of multiple options is involved in this case. The concept of positive liberty sees internal constraints as a genuine obstacle to human liberty. Its negative counterpart does not.

‘Mythology of the Real Self’

Why does Berlin consider positive liberty to be susceptible to political abuse? Wherein lies its weakness? His answer is that it contains within itself a vulnerable component that he calls the ‘mythology of the real self’. To conceptualise liberty as self-mastery entails the distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ ends of action, pursued by two corresponding selves, because the idea of one’s being a master of oneself would otherwise be unintelligible. Berlin concedes that this idea could be politically risk-free. In the case of Stoicism, for example, the self is divided between one that pursues frustratable desires and the other that has the prudence and the strength of will to abandon them. Here, the division is strictly individualist and occurs within a single person. It entails no obvious political implications.

Nevertheless, Berlin continues, a highly undesirable development occurred in Kant’s moral philosophy, in which the division between the two selves took a stronger form. As self-mastery came to be conceptualised as rational self-direction, the two selves were equated with the rational–irrational pair. Consider the case of the smoker again. From the Kantian point of view, the smoker is divided between his or her ‘rational self’ that knows he or she should quit smoking and his or her ‘irrational self’ that is unable to do what its rational counterpart knows he or she ought to do. To be free, then, means to subordinate one’s irrational desires to the demands of one’s rational self, so as to achieve self-mastery. Herein lies, according to Berlin, the vulnerability of positive liberty. Notwithstanding the aforementioned advantage of being able to account for the sense of ‘false liberty’, the rationalist version of the mythology of the real self has the disadvantage of allowing the deprivation of the fulfilment of one’s actually held desires to be seen as compatible with freedom. In fact, such deprivation may be seen as liberating, so long as the desires are deemed irrational or otherwise unworthy of pursuit. This reasoning allows would-be interferers, including tyrants, to claim that they are helping one realise one’s ‘true freedom’ when they in fact coerce one into doing something one would not otherwise do. Similarly, it allows interferers to claim that they are merely blocking the exercise of one’s ‘false liberty’ when they in fact prevent one from doing what one actually and expressly wants to do. The concept of positive liberty can in this way be appropriated by external interferers to deprive one of negative liberty in the name of ‘true freedom’. Self-mastery gives way to mastery by others.

According to Berlin’s controversial interpretation, the seeds of tyrannical oppression sown in Kant’s moral philosophy fully matured in Rousseau’s political theory. Both thinkers conceptualised freedom as ‘obedience to self-imposed injunctions’. However, while Kant’s conception of freedom remained individualist, Rousseau collectivised it by integrating the rational self into a larger whole of the general will, dismissing the irrational self as merely pursuing one’s private and particular interests. Expressed in his well-known phrase in The Social Contract, ‘forcing men to be free’, Rousseau offered a theoretical justification for the subordination of individuals’ actually held wishes and desires to the collective demands of the state. This Berlin criticises in the strongest possible terms, going so far as to write that ‘there is not a dictator in the West who in the years after Rousseau did not use this monstrous paradox in order to justify his behaviour’. Berlin’s genealogy of positive liberty beginning with the Stoics thus culminates in Rousseau via Kant, paving the way for positive liberty-based tyrants and totalitarian leaders, including Lenin and Stalin. This might strike readers today as exaggerated, even ridiculously so, for Berlin effectively suggests that Kant anticipated Stalin. Nevertheless, his argument is based on two ideas that were popular in the mid-twentieth century, if not today: first, that Rousseau, Hegel and Marx were precursors to twentieth-century totalitarians; and second, that Rousseau bridged Kant and Hegel (and by implication Marx) theoretically. Both claims were indeed made by Bertrand Russell, who wrote that ‘Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau’ and that Rousseau and Kant unintentionally ‘gave rise to’ both Hitler and Stalin. Berlin’s genealogy of positive liberty works out the full implications of those two claims combined.

The Primacy of Negative Liberty

As must already be clear, one important line of argument Berlin deploys in defence of negative liberty is an indirect one: negative liberty is less vulnerable to abuse than its positive counterpart. He makes the historical observation that, as a matter of fact, tyrants and dictators have appropriated positive liberty to such an extent that the concept by the mid-twentieth century had morphed into ‘something close to a pure totalitarian doctrine’. Here, Berlin undoubtedly has Soviet leaders in mind as his principal target of criticism, and commentators are right in detecting a hint of ‘the “us” and “them” logic animating the Cold War’ on the relevant pages. Berlin himself is candid about his political commitment. For example, he acknowledges in a later interview that, when he wrote ‘Two Concepts’, he ‘was maddened by all the marxist cheating which went on, all the things that were said about “true liberty”, Stalinist and communist patter about “true freedom”’. This is hardly a projection of his later interests onto his past. His 1969 ‘Introduction’ already made it clear that his strong emphasis on the downside of positive liberty was to a significant extent circumstantial, writing that ‘whereas liberal ultra-individualism could scarcely be said to be a rising force at present, the rhetoric of “positive” liberty […] continues to play its historic role […] as a cloak for despotism in the name of a wider freedom’. To this extent, ‘Two Concepts’ is indeed what its readers often take it to be: a Cold War text.

This, however, does not mean that the negative/positive distinction corresponds to the liberal/communist distinction or even the liberal/illiberal one. While Berlin’s list of positive liberty theorists includes ‘the last disciples of Hegel and Marx’ as well as their politically dubious predecessors, including Fichte and Rousseau, it also includes the politically quietist Stoics, Kierkegaard and ‘Buddhist sages’, and Kantian liberals such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet. In fact, Berlin goes so far as to argue that positive liberty via Kant ‘enters into the tradition of liberal individualism at least as deeply as the “negative” concept of freedom’. In short, some advocates of positive liberty are anti-liberal; others are not. Berlin’s list of negative liberty theorists is similarly a mixed bag, containing authoritarian Hobbes and the liberal-authoritarian hybrid Jeremy Bentham, as well as classical liberals such as Constant, Mill and Tocqueville. It is notable in this context that Berlin used the liberal/romantic dichotomy to classify various conceptions of liberty in his work prior to ‘Two Concepts’. But he came to realise by 1958 that not all liberals endorsed negative liberty (consider Green), and that not all negative liberty theorists were liberals (consider Hobbes). Consequently, he abandoned the liberal/romantic distinction for the negative/positive pair, to which he adhered for the rest of his life.

Observe, further, that Berlin’s theoretical critique of positive liberty is not predicated on his historical observations about the abuses of this concept in empirical reality. Of course, the force of his critique would have been significantly diminished if his historical observations were inaccurate. However, even if he were wrong about the historical connections between positive liberty and actually existing tyrannies, dictatorships and totalitarianisms, the central argument he makes would be valid as a stand-alone theoretical argument: positive liberty as self-mastery is vulnerable to political abuse to the extent that it contains within itself the idea of a divided self that may be appropriated by external interferers. Negative liberty is superior to its positive counterpart at least insofar as it is exempted from the risk of such abuse. ‘To stress negative freedom’, he later said, ‘is never to deny positive freedom. To stress positive freedom is often to deny negative.’

Nevertheless, the more important argument Berlin makes in defence of negative liberty is distinct from his claims about the vulnerability of positive liberty. It is anchored in his flagship idea that has come to be known as ‘value pluralism’. The core of this idea consists in the observations that the number of ultimate and objective values that human beings pursue and live by is neither one nor infinite, but plural; and that those values are not always harmonisable or commensurable with each other, so that conflict between good and good (apart from conflict between good and evil) often necessarily takes place and loss is sometimes inevitable. In Berlin’s words,

The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced with choices between ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute, the realisation of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others. Indeed, it is because this is their situation that men place such immense value upon the freedom to choose […]. If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict—and of tragedy—can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Acton conceived of it—as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need.

If pluralism in this sense is true and not all values are in principle compatible or commensurable with each other, human beings must of necessity choose between objective and ultimate values: for example, between liberty and equality, and between efficiency and spontaneity. Since negative liberty (unlike its positive counterpart) assigns fundamental normative significance to the freedom of the individual to choose for him- or herself what is good for him or her, it is better attuned to the unavoidability of value conflict and must therefore be considered a ‘truer and more humane ideal’ than positive liberty. While Berlin would have more to say on his conception of pluralism in his subsequent career, ‘Two Concepts’ already makes it clear that the value of negative liberty is ultimately grounded in the key implication of what he takes to be the truth of value pluralism: that the human being is a choice-making creature. As he puts it later, ‘making choices is intrinsic to being a human being’. Conversely, to ‘refrain from choosing […] would make you inhuman’.

Berlin’s value pluralist defence of negative liberty may be seen more clearly if we turn to his critique and appropriation of Mill’s work. He draws a sharp contrast between the liberal and consequentialist sides of Mill’s thought to downplay the significance of the latter. Pace Mill the consequentialist, Berlin argues, the primary reason why negative liberty is valuable is not that it is instrumental in the development of men and women’s individuality, which in turn promotes the diversity of interests and opinions that is supposed to be instrumental in the collective progress of civilised society. Berlin’s objection is twofold. First, the consequentialist reasoning is empirically unfounded, because individuality can flourish to the highest degree in ‘severely disciplined communities’ as well as in ‘more tolerant or indifferent societies’. Berlin believed that he saw strong, possibly conclusive, evidence to demonstrate this during his visit to the Soviet Union in 1945–46, when he met the poet Anna Akhmatova, the writer Boris Pasternak and others who defended their artistic integrity under Stalinist rule. Their freedom of expression was significantly restricted and yet their creative powers remained undiminished. The vitality of these Russian artists showed that Mill had overstated his case when he wrote that ‘[g]enius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.’ Second, Mill’s consequentialist argument is redundant, because what ultimately makes negative liberty intrinsically valuable is the implication of value pluralism for human life: that human beings are destined to choose between ultimate and objective values. This makes the freedom of choice an essential part of what it means to be human. Mill the defender of liberty saw this, Berlin suggests, although Mill the consequentialist failed to see it. This is why Berlin presents his defence of negative liberty as a restatement of Mill’s argument in On Liberty. The truth that the human being is a choice-making creature is the ultimate foundation of the value of negative liberty.

As Berlin himself acknowledges, his discussion of Mill’s conception of liberty is not an impartial explanation. Rather, it is a reconstruction of Mill’s main argument, which he incorporates into his own theory of freedom. However, he does not explicate precisely where he departs from Mill. Nor does he fully acknowledge the degree of interpretive violence that he inflicts on Mill’s work. In fact, while Berlin gives the impression that he does not alter the substance of Mill’s conception of liberty while modifying Mill’s justification for it, his own conception of negative liberty is not as Millian as he presents it to be. It is certainly true that Mill has Berlinian negative liberty partly in mind when he characterises freedom as consisting in ‘pursuing our own good in our own way’. Nevertheless, as Michael Freeden observes, Mill’s emphasis is not only on the ability to choose but also on the exercise of the chosen act, and his conception of liberty is ‘not merely the passive condition of not being interfered with, but the active one of cultivating valuable behaviour and purposes’. In short, it integrates both negative and positive components. Berlin’s negative liberty, by contrast, is more unequivocally negative. True, as I have discussed, it displays important ambiguities and complexities, as his emphasis oscillates between the number and quality of options available to the liberty-holder on the one hand and the absence of relevant interference on the other. This oscillation does not stem from his ambivalence towards negative liberty, however, but from his ambition to form the most satisfactory conception of it, grounded in the idea that the human being is a choice-making creature.

Finally, let me emphasise that Berlin does not dismiss positive liberty as invalid or worthless. It is true that ‘Two Concepts’ on its own is a rather partisan piece, concerned to highlight the susceptibility of the positive concept to appropriation and political abuse. Nevertheless, responding to his critics’ charges, Berlin repeatedly emphasised in his post-1958 work that he was aware of the validity of positive liberty. He said, for example, that ‘[p]ositive liberty […] is a valid universal goal’ and that it ‘is fundamentally a metaphor based on the idea of negative freedom, but it’s a metaphor for something absolutely genuine.’ One should not take remarks such as these as mere afterthoughts that occurred to the author under attack. Berlin’s unpublished and posthumously published papers in fact show that, prior to 1958, he had felt even stronger ambivalence towards what he would later call positive liberty. This is not to say, however, that Berlin appreciates positive and negative liberty equally. Rather, he sees the former as one option, and the latter as that on the basis of which one may choose between multiple options. To extend his own imagery, positive liberty is one of the many open doors one may walk through if one chooses to, whereas negative liberty designates the prior condition of having various open doors in the first place. The life of a person who does not exercise positive liberty may be impoverished. But the life of a person who does not have a measure of negative liberty is unbearable—in fact, it is inhuman. To this extent, negative liberty has primacy over positive liberty.

Arendt’s Theory of Freedom

Hannah Arendt was fifty-two years old when she gave her lecture on ‘Freiheit und Politik’ in Zurich in 1958. It is only to be expected that she would have more to say on freedom, both before and after the lecture. Still, the durability of her interest in the topic may surprise us. Her first substantive discussion of freedom is found in her doctoral dissertation on Augustine, completed in 1929. Her initial interest in the specifically political concept of freedom emerged in the turbulent 1930s. Her wartime essays repeatedly discussed the ‘struggle for freedom’ against Nazism;78 and her subsequent work contained important analyses of various forms of unfreedom under totalitarian rule, culminating in The Origins of Totalitarianism. As I shall elaborate in the next chapter, this was followed by her extensive study of the history of Western political thought during the 1950s, when she worked towards a book on Marx and Marxism that she never completed. This effort, however, gave rise to her mature political theory, at the heart of which lies her view of politics, freedom and action and their intricate connections. It is to this view that I now turn.

Arendt on Negative Liberty

It is not known whether Hannah Arendt ever read Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. The Stevenson Library of Bard College preserves a part—consisting of four thousand items—of her personal library. This contains a highly abridged version of ‘Two Concepts’, included in Anthony Quinton’s anthology of essays, Political Philosophy, published in 1967. But Arendt’s copy of this book shows no sign of extensive use: in fact, it could be sold as ‘very good’ at a second-hand bookstore notwithstanding being over fifty years old. Of course, it is possible that Arendt read a library copy of Berlin’s Four Essays on Liberty or had a copy of it that has been lost. Nevertheless, there is no known evidence to indicate that she was familiar with Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts’. She never mentioned the essay. Nor did she ever refer to other writing by Berlin on liberty/freedom. While she relied on his work to navigate her way through Russian intellectual history, she chose other interlocutors when it came to liberty/freedom.

This is not to say that Arendt was unfamiliar with the distinction between negative and positive liberty. As many scholars have noted, Berlin did not invent, but appropriated, this distinction, which dates back at least to the late eighteenth century. Arendt herself contrasted ‘psychologically negative’ and ‘psychologically positive’ freedom in a Denktagebuch entry dated as early as June 1951—that is, seven years before Berlin’s delivery of ‘Two Concepts’ as a lecture. More interesting still is her Denktagebuch entry of July 1953, in which she contrasts the Christian and Greek conceptions of freedom, characterising the former as ‘negative’, as ‘frei von …’ (free from …), and the latter as ‘positive’, in terms of ‘ein πολίτης sein, nicht Sklave sein’ (to be a citizen, not be a slave). In addition, she was familiar with other pre-Berlinian uses of the negative/positive distinction, including Martin Heidegger’s in ‘On the Essence of Truth’, originally composed as a lecture in 1930 and later published in 1943. Freedom, Heidegger writes, is not what ‘common sense’ would have us believe. It is neither ‘negative’ nor ‘positive’, neither the ‘mere absence of constraint with respect to what we can or cannot do’ nor ‘mere readiness for what is required and necessary’. Prior to these two concepts, Heidegger declares, is a third concept of freedom. This is ontological freedom as ‘engagement in the disclosure of beings as such’.

How Arendt appropriated Heidegger’s discussion of ‘the disclosure of beings’ in her theory of freedom will be discussed shortly. For now, consider her comments on negative liberty. One thing to note is that she typically uses ‘negative liberties’ in the plural to designate specific items such as the ‘freedom of movement’ and ‘free[dom] from want and fear’. But this does not mean that she never discusses negative liberty in the singular. She occasionally does so to refer to something akin to Benjamin Constant’s ‘liberty of the moderns’, associating it with ‘freedom from unjustified restraint’, and seeing the state as the principal entity liable to impose such restraint. Importantly, she is not hostile to either negative liberty in the singular or negative liberties in the plural. Her tone of discussion is more or less neutral, attributing the negative concept to thinkers to whom she is broadly sympathetic, such as William Blackstone, Montesquieu and the American Framers. Nevertheless, she considers negative liberty or liberties to be inadequate, and sees them in instrumental terms, as something that is necessary for pursuing higher goals or ideals. Among these is what she calls ‘political freedom’, which she claims as her own conception.

Political Freedom

What, then, is Arendt’s political freedom, and wherein lies its value? On a general level, one is politically free in Arendt’s sense when one is acting and interacting, and speaking and deliberating with others about matters of public concern in a formally or informally institutionalised public realm. To be free is to exercise an opportunity for political participation. To use Berlin’s imagery, a free person in Arendt’s sense is not somebody standing in front of numerous attractive open doors, but somebody actually walking through a door to politics. Freedom, for her, is ‘a state of being manifest in action’.

To be politically free requires a set of preconditions. One needs to eat, drink, sleep and satisfy basic biological needs prior to participating in politics. In addition, political participation typically assumes the existence of a network of fairly stable and durable institutions, from the constitution and other laws of the land to non-legal customs and practices, regulating political conduct, governing the deliberative process and decision-making procedures and overseeing the proper implementation of agreed policies. Men and women enter such a network of institutions as citizens. Citizenship makes people equal for political purposes, abstracting various natural differences that they have as human beings. It enables citizens to construct public personae to appear before and among their fellow citizens. Those who do not have citizenship—slaves, women and manual labourers in antiquity and refugees and the stateless in modern times, among others—are excluded from an established public realm and hence lack an elementary condition for political freedom. Arendt consequently uses the term ‘liberation’ to refer to the lifting of both biological and legal barriers to entering the public realm. To be ‘liberated’ is to have a status for political participation. To be free is to make use of that status.

However, the significance of formal institutions for Arendt’s conception of political freedom should not be overstated. For one thing, she argues that one could be politically free even when formal institutions are not (yet) in place. For example, those who revolted against British rule in colonial America enjoyed limited legal protection to exercise their freedom to act, but this did not prevent them from acting freely to declare independence, write and ratify a new constitution and lay the foundation for a new free republic. Similarly, those who rose against Soviet domination in Hungary in 1956 had no legal right to do so, but this did not prevent them from exercising their political freedom to act in concert to protest against communist rule (see further Chapter 6). Besides, Arendt is insistent on the defectiveness of laws unsupported by a matching political culture, echoing the wisdom of sociologically oriented mid-twentieth-century political scientists such as Robert Dahl, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba. This is not to say that this body of work directly influenced Arendt. She was too hostile to the idea of applying scientific methods to the study of politics to appreciate these political scientists’ contributions in an impartial manner. Nevertheless, her view was closer to theirs than she cared to admit, not least because both looked to aspects of American practices to theorise democratic politics. She cites John Adams to make her point: ‘a constitution is a standard, a pillar, and a bond when it is understood, approved and beloved. But without this intelligence and attachment, it might as well be a kite or balloon, flying in the air.’ While political freedom is significantly promoted by formal institutions, it is not guaranteed by them and can sometimes manifest itself without them.

What ultimately enables political freedom, then, is what Arendt calls the ‘in-between’, or the space that simultaneously ‘relates and separates’ people. More specifically, it is the politicised ‘in-between’, or the ‘space of appearance’, where men and women as citizens gather together, show the courage to speak and act in public, express the willingness to hear what others have to say and see what others have to do, and form and exchange opinions about others’ words and deeds. Arendt repeatedly claims that human beings have the built-in potential to speak and act to bring the space of appearance into being in this way, and calls this potential ‘human plurality’. This is, in Arendt’s words, ‘specifically the condition—not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—of all political life’.

To see her conception of political freedom in more detail, consider the analogy that Arendt repeatedly draws between performing arts and freedom experienced in political action. She claims that the analogy is hardly new because ‘Greeks always used such metaphors as flute-playing, dancing, healing, and sea-faring to distinguish political from other activities’. That said, she still proposes a recognisably ‘Arendtian’ interpretation of the Greek past to present her conception of political freedom. Consider by way of illustration an artist whose life is devoted to dance. Wherein lies his or her freedom? The dancer is free, according to the Berlinian negative conception, if he or she is not prevented, physically or psychologically, or directly or indirectly, by others from dancing when he or she chooses to dance. According to Arendt’s Greek-inspired conception, by contrast, the dancer is free when he or she is actually dancing in such a way that he or she may be meaningfully described as realising what his or her life is for, namely, dance. This normally requires certain preconditions and settings, from a proper pair of shoes to a stage and an audience. Similarly, Arendtian political action takes place in ‘a kind of theater’ regulated by laws, citizenship and other institutional settings. In both performing arts and politics, Arendt observes, excellence or ‘virtuosity of performance’ is ‘decisive’.

Like all analogies, that of Arendt between politics and performing arts is not without limitations. In fact, it is misleading in one respect: while a dancer may be able to dance alone, an Arendtian freedom-holder cannot be alone to make use of his or her freedom and take political action. This is the case because to act politically in Arendt’s sense is always to act in concert with others. The image of the artist that Arendt tacitly assumes is that not of a lone performer, but of a member of a company. Notwithstanding this limitation, however, her analogy effectively highlights one central feature that political freedom shares with performing arts: namely, that ‘the accomplishment lies in the performance itself and not in an end product’. Of course, a great dancer’s or a flute-player’s performance may be instrumental in improving individuals’ wellbeing, enriching human culture, stimulating the economy and so on. But it seems perverse to say that these results or end products exhaust the value of performing arts. The same is true of Arendtian politics. She does not deny that it is ideal if one’s exercise of political freedom results in desirable consequences, such as a written constitution, but she refuses to equate the significance of an action with the consequences of it. That is why she praises stillborn revolutions such as the Hungarian uprising no less than the more successful American Revolution. Commenting on the ‘most glorious hours’ of the ‘Hungarian people’ in 1956, she writes that the ‘stature’ of the revolutionary uprising ‘will not depend upon victory or defeat’. Whether an action is successful is one thing; whether it is great is another. The former depends on the consequences; the latter, on virtuosity.

Political Freedom and Positive Liberty

Should Arendt’s political freedom be seen as a subspecies of positive liberty? The answer is an unambiguous ‘no’ if we mean by ‘positive liberty’ Berlinian freedom as self-mastery. This, as I discussed earlier, may be interpreted in various ways and yet always refers to mastery over one’s internal desires, wishes and preferences. Contrary to some critics’ allegations, Arendt’s conception of political freedom is emphatically not this type of self-mastery. This is the case because the exercise of Arendtian political freedom is possible only in the sphere of intersubjectivity. If one is to be an Arendtian political actor, one needs others before and among whom one exercises freedom. The Arendtian actor never attains self-mastery, firstly because what he or she can do depends on the deeds of others (fellow citizens qua co-actors), and secondly because what his or her action means depends on the opinions and judgements of others (fellow citizens qua spectators). Berlinian positive liberty, by contrast, may be exercised in complete solitude. One does not rely on others to be a master of oneself. Moreover, one does not even need oneself to be one’s own master because, as I have discussed, the surest way of controlling one’s frustratable desires is suicide. It is no coincidence that Arendt thinks poorly of Berlinian positive liberty theorists from the Stoics to Hegel and Marx. Among this group of thinkers Kant alone attracts Arendt’s sympathy and admiration, but the aspect of his work she appreciates is not his moral philosophy but his aesthetics and theory of judgement. Although Arendt does not use the term ‘self-mastery’ to challenge Berlinian positive liberty, she effectively challenges it by way of criticising what she calls ‘sovereignty’ or ‘sovereign freedom’, understood as the ability of an individual or a collectivity to exercise exclusive control over oneself or itself. Slight differences of emphasis notwithstanding, what is wrong with freedom as sovereignty and with freedom as self-mastery alike is the failure to see that freedom is crucially dependent on the presence of others. ‘If men wish to be free’, Arendt writes, ‘it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce.’ To rephrase this in Berlinian terms, if men wish to be free, it is positive liberty as self-mastery they must renounce.

This, however, is not to say that Arendt’s conception of political freedom may not be called ‘positive’ in a broader, non-Berlinian sense. In fact, it is a positive conception to the extent that it cannot be adequately characterised (negatively) as the absence of unfreedom, as non-X. Furthermore, it might be seen as a highly idiosyncratic member of the family of conceptions known as ‘freedom as self-realisation’. This family conceptualises freedom in terms of ‘a pattern of action of a certain kind’, rather than the absence of constraint or interference by others. In its strong form, it equates freedom with ‘the fulfilment of one’s possibilities’. More specifically still, the subspecies—or, perhaps, cousin—of self-realisation integral to Arendt’s political freedom is self-disclosure. She herself uses this and related terms, including the ‘disclosure of who somebody is’, the ‘disclosure of the subject’ and the ‘disclosure of the agent’. Her rationale for preferring the term ‘self-disclosure’ to ‘self-realisation’ seems to be that the former, unlike the latter, implies the presence of others. To disclose oneself is always to disclose oneself to somebody else. It is worth noting in this context that Arendt discusses performing arts in stark contrast with craftsmanship, associating the former with ‘acting’ and the latter with ‘making’. A carpenter absorbed in his or her work alone may be realising him- or herself. But he or she cannot be said to be disclosing him- or herself because there is nobody to whom the carpenter discloses him- or herself. By contrast, a dancer performing in the presence of an audience is disclosing as well as realising him- or herself. The same is true of the Arendtian political actor. Whenever one exercises the political freedom to act, one discloses oneself to those who witness what one does and who one is. ‘Speech and action’, Arendt writes, ‘are the modes in which human beings appear to each other […] qua men.’

A further advantage of ‘self-disclosure’, from Arendt’s point of view, is that it is not tainted by deterministic connotations that the term ‘self-realisation’ might evoke. Consider the classic teleological metaphor of the acorn and the oak tree, applied to the idea of self-realisation. According to Arendt, human beings are like acorns to the extent that they have the potentiality to develop and flourish under suitable conditions; and if they do, she writes, they flourish in ‘the shining brightness we once called glory’. But human beings differ from teleologically conceptualised acorns in two crucial respects. One concerns individuality. When a human being exercises his or her freedom to act and realises his or her potentiality in full, he or she discloses his or her unique identity. By contrast, when an acorn matures into an oak tree, it remains an anonymous member of the species, indistinguishable from and interchangeable with other oak trees. Second, while we know in advance that an acorn will mature into an oak tree if it realises its potentiality, nobody knows in advance who an Arendtian actor will be until he or she discloses him- or herself. Only after the fulfilment of one’s potential does one find, in retrospect, who one (potentially) was and now is. As Bonnie Honig perceptively writes, paraphrasing Arendt, the unique identity one acquires as a result of free action is a ‘reward’ for one’s performance.

Political Freedom and Republican Liberty

Although it is sometimes described as ‘republican’, Arendt’s political freedom should also be distinguished from the neo-republican concept of liberty recently developed by Quentin Skinner, Philip Pettit and others. According to this group of theorists, liberty should be conceptualised as non-domination, rather than non-interference. The former is more satisfactory than the latter because one may be made unfree even if one is entirely free from actual interference, so long as one is aware that someone else is in a position (potentially) to interfere with one—so long as, that is, somebody else is in a position to dominate. On this understanding, one’s awareness that somebody can exercise arbitrary power over one is enough for one to stop acting or thinking freely, for this awareness prevents one from thinking or acting in ways that could trigger actual interference by one’s master. Freedom as non-domination is a social ideal that demands a degree of equality among relevant parties.

It is true that Arendt and neo-republicans can be meaningfully contrasted with negative liberty theorists, such as Berlin, to the extent that both see an essential connection between political participation and individual freedom. Nevertheless, they differ from each other in two crucial respects. First, Arendt criticises both the substance of negative liberty and the means of securing it, whereas neo-republicans protest solely at the means. Arendt (unlike neo-republicans) sees intrinsic value in political participation. Neo-republicans (unlike Arendt) consider political participation important only insofar as it is instrumental in ‘avoiding the evils associated with interference’. It may be said that Arendt makes a positive-incentive argument for political participation, emphasising how rewarding it is to act in concert with others. As Jeremy Arnold nicely puts it, Arendtian freedom experienced in political participation ‘often induce[s] the feeling or thought that one would rather not be anywhere else or doing anything else than just being where one is or doing what one is doing’. Neo-republicans, by contrast, make a negative-incentive argument for political participation. They warn us about the risk that the relations of domination may arise if we do not take part in politics to a sufficient extent.

The other major point of disagreement between Arendt and contemporary neo-republicans concerns who should or would participate in politics. The latter generally think that all citizens should serve the republic if they wish to secure individual liberty, because a failure to do so would provide room for the rise of dominating power. Arendt, by contrast, suggests that the self-chosen few would voluntarily participate in politics because they ‘have a taste for public freedom and cannot be “happy” without it’. She believes that everyone should be given the opportunity to participate in politics. But she is aware that some people will choose not to make use of that opportunity, and insists that they ought not to be coerced into political life. Arendt’s political theory may be less realistic than its neo-republican counterpart to the extent that it assumes that political participation can make people ‘happy’ in a strong, eudaemonic sense. Nevertheless, her theory is more realistic in another respect, in that she does not, unlike Machiavelli and his successors, demand that unwilling citizens perform public duties. In Arendt’s view, ‘the task of good government’ is no more than ‘to assure [the self-chosen few] of their rightful place in the public realm’. Exclusion from the public realm should always be self-exclusion.

This means that Arendt, like Berlin and other liberals, recognises the negative liberty ‘to choose not to engage in politics’ as an important option. To have no such liberty is to live under tyranny, and she does not fail to underline the significant difference between tyranny and ‘constitutional, limited government’, where citizens have the right, but are under no legal obligation, to participate in politics. Recall in this context my earlier discussion about Arendt’s appreciation of the (instrumental) value of negative liberty/liberties. According to her, ‘freedom from politics’ is ‘one of the most important negative liberties we have enjoyed since the end of the ancient world’. It is no small achievement for people to liberate themselves from tyrannical rule, and Arendt does not belittle the significance of such liberation. This, however, hardly makes her a supporter of the anti-perfectionist liberalism running from Berlin to Rawls. On the contrary, she departs from the liberal conventions in insisting that freedom from politics is normatively inadequate and in claiming that human beings can realise their potential in full only in political action. To use Berlin’s imagery again, on Arendt’s view, a person in liberal society must be able to have many open doors of various kinds in front of him or her, including the bourgeois door to withdrawal from politics and enjoyment of privacy and family life. However, there is only one door to choose to walk through if a person is to be genuinely free and to lead a fulfilling life. That is the door leading to ‘the political way of life’. This is the case because, according to Arendt, to be human is to be free, and to be free is to act.

Political Freedom and Natality

Why does Arendt privilege politics over other human activities? Why does she repeatedly underline the intrinsic connection between political freedom and ‘a truly human life’?126 The answer is found in her understanding of the human condition—of what it means to be human. True, she is reluctant to discuss ‘human nature’ in general or ‘Man’ in the abstract. But what she rejects is a static conception of human nature. She does not refrain from making important general claims about human beings, so long as the claims are about a stable and yet changeable, ‘quasi-transcendental’ set of conditions. These conditions reveal a general, albeit non-absolute, structure of human beings’ concrete existence.

To some extent, it is a matter of mere semantics whether the term ‘human nature’ should be avoided due to its unfortunately essentialist connotations. Few serious thinkers in modernity, and surely none after Darwin, have considered nature—let alone human nature—to be static, fixed or unchangeable. Nevertheless, the term ‘human nature’ is often seen as implying such essentialism, and Arendt proposes, in The Human Condition, to use the term ‘human condition’ to pre-empt confusion. Her terminological preference, however, is more than a simple effort to pre-empt confusion. It also signals her broadly Heideggerian orientation that draws our attention to ‘conditions’ understood as defining limits. At every moment of their lives men and women find themselves amid a set of conditions that they neither created nor are able to overcome or transcend. This does not only mean that they, as bodily beings, cannot escape certain physical conditions and cannot, for example, release themselves from gravity. It also means, more importantly, that each and every human being at the moment of birth enters a world that is already inhabited by other human beings, permeated by their relationships and filled with human-made objects, institutions, cultures and so on. This texture of human life exists not because of what one does but because of what generations before one was born have done. Whatever one does in one’s life cannot undo this pre-existing texture; it can only add new threads of meaning to it. In this sense, Arendt writes, ‘human existence is conditioned existence’. It is important to keep in mind in this context that conditions are not the same as constraints, and limits are not the same as limitations. On the contrary, conditionality in Arendt’s sense demarcates the realm of possibility; what men and women can do, as well as cannot do, depends on the human condition. To understand how men and women are conditioned in this sense is to understand what it means to be human.

Arendt builds on Heidegger and Aristotle to theorise the human condition. To begin with, consider her characterisation of the human being in quasi-Heideggerian terms as a ‘natal’. This is a direct and explicit response to Heidegger’s conception of mortality as a fundamental existential condition of ‘man’, or Dasein in Heidegger’s terminology. According to Heidegger, three central features of death make mortality, or the possibility of death, differ from all other possibilities open to human beings. First, mortality is omnipresent, in that one may die literally at any moment. Second, it is unavoidable, in that each and every one of us must die one day. Third, however, death is unrealisable or ‘distinctly impending’, in that one is no longer there to experience it when the possibility of one’s own death materialises. So understood, mortality informs human beings of their fundamental finitude: that ‘[o]ur birth was not necessary; the course of our life could have been otherwise; its continuation from moment to moment is no more than a fact; and it will come to an end at some point.’ This being so, it is difficult for human beings to face and bear their own mortality. However, one does not live authentically unless one comes to terms with one’s own limits and becomes appropriately responsive to one’s being-unto-death. In this sense, as Peter Gordon puts it, Heidegger’s ‘normative image of humanity’ consists above all in finitude and responsiveness.

Arendt inherits this theme from Heidegger and subverts it to develop her own understanding of the human condition. She certainly does not deny that mortality is a fundamental human condition. Nevertheless, she has remarkably little to say on death or mortality per se, and the little she has to say often concerns the immortality of the great deeds and words that outlast the relevant actor’s own death. The reason for this apparent omission is that mortality is irrelevant to the political mode of being to which much of her work is devoted. To understand this mode, she draws our attention to the other end of the human life that terminates with death: to birth. According to Arendt, natality, the possibility of birth, sets a defining limit no less fundamental than mortality to the being of human beings. Simply put, each and every one had to be born in order to be. Like Heidegger, Arendt considers human beings to be fundamentally conditioned, and (again like him) she wants men and women to become appropriately responsive to human finitude. But the responsiveness she wants them to cultivate is the responsiveness to natality, rather than to mortality. This requires men and women to become attuned to their capacity for action because to ‘actualiz[e] the human condition of natality’ means ‘to act […], to take an initiative, to begin […], to set something into motion’. To refrain from acting is not like refraining from taking up any other random option available to human beings. On the contrary, it means a failure to properly appreciate the human condition. In this sense, she writes, ‘no human being can refrain [from acting] and still be human.’

In this way, Arendt extracts a highly un-Heideggerian lesson from her critical engagement with Heidegger’s work. On her view, action qua the actualisation of the human condition of natality is not one of many (of what Heidegger termed) existentiell possibilities that the world has to offer us. On the contrary, she writes,

With words and deeds we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance. [… The] impulse [of this insertion] springs from the beginning which came into the world when we were born and to which we respond by beginning something new on our own initiative. […] Because they are initium, newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action.

Arendt has a specific type of beginning in mind when she discusses beginning in relation to natality: beginning as interruption. Here again, she relentlessly appropriates her former teacher’s work, firstly reiterating Heidegger’s cyclical conception of nature. All creatures in nature, including plants, animals and Homo sapiens as biological species, endlessly reproduce themselves, following their own species-wise instincts and behavioural patterns. We cannot in a proper sense speak of ‘individual’ flowers, ‘individual’ bees or even ‘individual’ members of Homo sapiens, because these are mere instantiations of their respective species-beings. They are essentially replaceable with other members of the same species. Human beings qua human beings, by contrast, are ‘unique, unexchangeable, and unrepeatable entities’. Each and every one of them leads his or her own life linearly, beginning with his or her own singular birth and ending with his or her own singular death. When a human being is born, the cycle of nature is interrupted by the physical appearance of an irreplaceable being who lives such a linear life; and when this being acts to begin something new and to interrupt the cycle of nature, he or she is said to have responded to his or her human condition of natality qua the original fact of physical appearance. To recall, it is the appreciation of the omnipresent, unavoidable and yet unrealisable possibility of death that allows Heidegger’s Dasein to be aware of his or her own finitude, to take responsibility for his or her own life, and to give him or her the chance to lead an authentic life. By contrast, it is the appreciation of the necessity of birth that allows Arendt’s ‘natal’ to be aware of his or her conditionedness, to recognise his or her ability to act and to take part in political life to respond to his or her natality. If one is to live authentically, one must respond to the call of natality and its demand for actualisation. In this sense, Arendt writes, ‘men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.’

Political Freedom and Plurality

Let me turn to another crucial instance of Arendt’s appropriation of Heidegger’s philosophy, which informs her discussion of plurality. She basically accepts his analysis of Dasein as a being-in-the-world and being-with. That is, first, one always already finds oneself in a web of relations within which one encounters entities as they present themselves to one, such as benches to sit on and cutlery with which to eat. Second, one always already finds oneself in a world inhabited by others like oneself, because otherwise such a web of relations would be inconceivable. Even that which one supposedly does ‘by oneself’ presupposes one’s being-with-others, such as when one sits on a bench maintained by somebody else (the relevant city authority, for example), or uses cutlery manufactured by somebody else (a private company that produces household goods, for example). Arendt, in short, shares Heidegger’s anti-Cartesian ontology. Furthermore, she partially agrees with his view that ‘man’ in his average everydayness shows no individuality, conforming to and being lost in the collective and unanimous ‘they’. In fact, according to Arendt, Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology of average everyday life in terms of the ‘they’ ‘offer[s] most penetrating insights into one of the basic aspects of society’.

This, however, is not to say that she uncritically accepts his diagnosis. On the contrary, she modifies and complements it in a variety of ways—for example, by bringing her own critical perspective to show how ‘man’ in his average everydayness is increasingly lost in socio-economic activities, rather than in ‘idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity’, as Heidegger originally suggested in Being and Time. In other words, she introduces an innovative conception of ‘the social’ to enrich Heidegger’s analysis of the ‘they’. But the point at which Arendt departs from Heidegger most decisively concerns not so much diagnosis as prescription. Heidegger’s response to the problem of the inauthenticity of the ‘they’ is to encourage Dasein to step back from the everyday environment, appreciate his or her finitude, hear the call of conscience and resolutely confront his or her being-unto-death. What this precisely means and practically demands is a matter of much debate, which need not concern us here. The relevant point is that Arendt finds Heidegger’s suggestions solipsistic. In her view, he at best reiterates philosophy’s age-old (Platonic) hostility towards living among and thinking with others, and at worst gives philosophical licence to groundless decisionism, for ‘no idea of man guides the selection of the modes of being’ in Heidegger’s philosophy.

Arendt’s critical engagement with Heidegger’s being-in-the-world and being-with spanned several decades. Unsurprisingly, she had varying things to say, and she explicitly asked herself in 1970 if she had been right to criticise Heidegger for solipsism in her earlier work. Subsequent scholars have been confronted with a number of interpretive difficulties as a result. Some, such as Seyla Benhabib and Richard Bernstein, have underlined Arendt’s harsher comments on Heidegger’s supposed solipsism. According to them, Heidegger’s existential analytic is solely concerned with forms of ‘relating-oneself-to-oneself’, and ‘there is [nothing] in Heidegger that even approximates what Arendt means by plurality’. Others, such as Dana Villa, argue that even Arendt’s most charitable comments on Heidegger do not do justice to the full complexity of Heidegger’s attitude towards the ‘they’. Contrary to Benhabib and Bernstein, Villa argues that Heidegger’s proposal for ‘the “transcendence” of fallen everydayness […] can imply the achievement of a more authentic form of community life’. Important though it is, this interpretive debate may be set aside for our present purpose, for much of the debate concerns Heidegger’s work rather than Arendt’s attitude towards it. As for the latter, she on balance expressed rather strong reservations about Heidegger’s purported solipsistic tendencies, notwithstanding the aforementioned self-doubt that she came to entertain during the final years of her life. In much of her academic career, she made a sustained effort to appropriate Heideggerian themes to develop her own phenomenology of plurality ‘to break with [Heidegger’s] own philosophy’.

Of particular relevance to the theme of plurality are the two theoretical moves Arendt makes in opposition to Heidegger. First, she suggests that men and women should embrace their being-in-the-world-with-others: that they should recognise that the world consists not only in useful, ‘ready-to-hand’ things and their functional relations but also in the ‘in-between’ of acting men and women; and that they should act together to create such an in-between amid the publicness of the ‘they’. Second, she identifies the political realm as the space in which men and women can relate to each other as human beings, disclose their identities to each other and act together not only to create, but also to preserve and institutionalise, the in-between. In short, if one is to live authentically, one ought not to confront death alone and run ‘into existential solitude’; rather, one ought to move ‘into the light of the public’. In making these suggestions, Arendt follows Karl Jaspers and, behind him, the Kant of the third Critique. Her characterisation of Jaspers’s philosophy indeed strikes an autobiographical note. It attempts, Arendt writes, to ‘accommodate […] the modern desire to create, in a world that is no longer a home to us, a human world that could become our home’. Arendt agrees with Heidegger that one could be lost in one’s being-with. But she insists, challenging Heidegger and building on Jaspers, that the loss could be remedied by learning to respond properly to the human condition of plurality. In other words, she proposes that we should appreciate the fact that ‘men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world’.

The Political Animal

It is against this background of critical inheritance of Heidegger’s insights that Arendt’s restatement of the Aristotelian notion of the political animal should be understood. As Jeremy Waldron observes, what Arendt means by ‘political animal’ is very different from some of the major senses that the term signifies in ordinary language, such as a person who relentlessly seeks power, or one who turns everything into an issue of political dispute, or one who likes to talk about politics in order to show off his or her oratorical talent. Rather, what Arendt means is the ideal of a person who comes to the public realm out of a concern for the world, and deliberates and exchanges opinions with his or her fellow citizens about the common good—about what a polity should strive for as well as how to achieve agreed ends. In engaging in this kind of activity, men and women are rewarded with self-disclosure and the happiness of living with and among their fellow political animals. A person who chooses to withdraw from politics altogether, by contrast, lives an impoverished life. Such a person fails to respond appropriately to his or her natality and plurality, and leaves his or her full potentiality unrealised and his or her identity un-disclosed. Judith Butler’s summary of Arendt’s thought is to the point: ‘No human can be human alone. And no human can be human without acting in concert with others and on conditions of equality.’

Let me return to Mill’s discussion of liberty to see in more detail how Arendt’s Aristotle-inspired notion of the political animal underpins her conception of political freedom. As I discussed earlier, Mill is more sympathetic to non-negative conceptions of liberty than Berlin is, effectively endorsing aspects of freedom as self-realisation. But he is still strongly committed to a liberal individualism that affirms the multiplicity of ways in which men and women develop their individuality, conceptualise valuable goals and reconceptualise them in light of new experiences, and lead fulfilling lives accordingly. To use Rawlsian terminology, Mill is a pluralist with respect to the competing conceptions of the good. Arendt, by contrast, shows no comparable commitment to liberal moral pluralism. Rather, her conception of the political animal tacitly assumes a monist view of the good, giving normative authority to the political mode of being over the alternative modes. The political mode is conceptualised as the privileged mode of being in which men and women, both as individuals and as a collective ‘we’, may realise their highest possibilities. Conversely, to be thoroughly apolitical is to have one’s natality and plurality dormant. It is to be deprived of the opportunity to lead a truly meaningful life, in which one lives with others ‘as a distinct and unique being’ with a fully disclosed identity.

It is worth recalling in this context that Arendt makes a highly controversial claim that a ‘life with no speech and action’ is less human than ‘the life of an exploiter or a slaveholder’. As we all know today, the ability of ancient Athenian citizens to participate in politics depended on the exploitation of women on the one hand, and the appropriation of slave labour on the other. This, Arendt concedes, makes Athenian citizens’ lives ‘unjust’, but she insists that the unjust lives ‘certainly are human’. They are different from the life of a person who never takes the initiative to act and speak in public because ‘no human being can refrain [from this initiative] and still be human’. On Arendt’s view, to own a slave is to commit a grave injustice, but to refrain from speech and action altogether amounts to a failure of an entirely different order: it is to renounce humanity. She writes, ‘A life without speech and action is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men.’ In her words, ‘to be human and to be free are one and the same.’

Let me add a word of caution to avoid misunderstanding. I am aware that my use of the term ‘monism’ to characterise an important aspect of Arendt’s political thought is likely to make some scholars feel uneasy, because much of her work is devoted to the affirmation of plurality. This, together with natality, may be seen as a master concept of Arendt’s thought. If so, one may wonder, how can any aspect of her work be described as monist? This is an understandable reaction, but it is based on a confusion. It stems from the unfortunate and yet unalterable fact that terms such as ‘monism’, ‘pluralism’ and ‘plurality’ have a number of meanings, some of which have nothing to do with each other. Although Arendt is certainly a pluralist in many senses, she (or anybody else, for that matter) is not a pluralist in each and every known sense of the word. For example, she is committed to what might be called an ontological pluralism that affirms the irreducible differences among human beings, their perspectives and the ways in which they relate to the world. She is also committed to a political (Tocquevillian) pluralism that highlights the significance of vibrant civil society and associational life for democratic politics; and she is additionally committed to another type of political (Schmittian) pluralism that challenges the idea of a homogenising world government and affirms the multiplicity of political units comprising global politics. One could add more items to this list to specify the multiple senses in which Arendt is a pluralist.

However, those types of pluralism to which Arendt is committed are distinct from the liberal moral pluralism at issue here: the affirmation of the plurality of conceptions of the good, entailing the categorical denial of the idea that one particular way of life is more human or more fulfilling than others. Arendt is not committed to this type of pluralism. She does not believe that the life of a consumer who chooses to do nothing but maximise his or her hedonistic pleasure is as valuable as the life of a citizen who at least occasionally participates in politics. Similarly, Arendt does not think that the life of a risk-taking and initiative-taking entrepreneur, endowed with heroism and the frontier spirit, can be on a par with the life of a citizen who channels his or her energy into politics. As Margaret Canovan observes, if Arendt thought that such an entrepreneur—an energetic and imaginative homo economicus—could be as free as the active citizen enjoying public happiness, her theory would have shown important similarities to that of Ayn Rand. But Arendt is not an Ayn Rand. She defends a hierarchical division between the political and the economic.

For liberal moral pluralists, what gives worth and dignity to the life of the consumer or that of the entrepreneur is the sheer fact that it is the life that he or she chose to live. Arendt does not accept this. In her theoretical framework, the only mode of being that could possibly match the active, political mode is the contemplative one. Her assessment of this mode is deeply ambivalent, for it changes considerably as her career progresses. While the early Arendt was rather hostile to the bios theoretikos, the late Arendt came to ‘reassess[…] some of her harsh rejections’ of it, especially in The Life of the Mind. Consequently, it is possible that the late Arendt was moving in the direction of dualism (rather than pluralism), to recognise the vita contemplativa and the vita activa as equally valuable, equally fulfilling and equally human. But I doubt that she ever completely abandoned her ambition to subvert, rather than simply to flatten, the traditional hierarchy in which the vita contemplativa is given supremacy over the vita activa. I doubt, in other words, that she ever gave up her project to restore the dignity of the vita activa against the weight of the tradition. As Dana Villa writes, Arendt ‘does want a world in which strong citizenship, and the “free moeurs” that sustain it (Tocqueville), have a clear and distinct moral priority.’

To summarise my argument so far, Arendt endorses political freedom because it is only in political action and speech that the human being can appropriately respond to the human conditions of natality and plurality, realise his or her potential in full, disclose him- or herself, acquire his or her unique identity and have his or her being-in-the-world-with-others reaffirmed. Berlin, by contrast, considers negative liberty to be ‘a truer and more humane ideal’ because the human being, due to the truth of value pluralism, is a choice-making creature and cannot be otherwise. According to Arendt, freedom in her distinctly political sense ‘is the quintessence of the human condition’; according to Berlin, it is the liberty to make unforced choices between multiple options that ‘is intrinsic to being a human being’. The two thinkers agree that freedom is essential to humanity. But they disagree on the most satisfactory meaning of freedom, as their views of the human condition significantly differ from each other. What lies beneath their dispute over freedom is therefore a deeper disagreement over the human condition itself—over, that is, what it means to be human. One proposes the vision of the human being as a political animal conditioned by natality and plurality. The other proposes an alternative vision of the human being as a choice-making creature. This is the most fundamental theoretical difference that divides Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin.

Negative Liberty, Political Freedom and Individuality

One scholar who spent much time reflecting on and responding to both of our protagonists’ work was Bernard Crick. Thirteen and ten years younger than Arendt and Berlin respectively, Crick was one of the first British scholars to recognise the originality and importance of Arendt’s work. Berlin liked and admired Crick, despite the latter’s explicit intellectual debt to Arendt, especially in his influential 1962 book In Defence of Politics. The two men regularly corresponded with each other in the early 1960s, when Berlin helped Crick to find an academic job in the UK. When Crick was appointed in 1965 as professor of political theory at the University of Sheffield, he gave an inaugural lecture entitled ‘Freedom as Politics’, in which he respectfully and yet vigorously challenged Berlin’s endorsement of negative liberty and defended an Arendtian conception of ‘freedom as politics’. Berlin received a copy of Crick’s lecture, to which he responded critically in both his private letters and his 1969 ‘Introduction’ to Four Essays on Liberty. As Berlin hardly made any direct comments on Arendt’s own writings on freedom, it is worth considering his response to Crick as a proxy for his opinion on Arendt. This allows us to put Arendt’s and Berlin’s ideas into further conversation.

One interesting question Berlin asks Crick in one of his letters concerns Aristotle’s Politics. He asks whether Crick ‘would not wish to distinguish [his] view from Aristotle’s’ because the Greek philosopher is more monist than Crick appears to think. Berlin writes that

when [Aristotle] says […] that liberty (or freedom) is doing as one likes […] he condemns it and recommends states in which men are educated by the State to pursue virtuous ends: men are imperfect; there are classes, with differing interests; so equilibrium has to be powerful; but there is only one end proper to men; eudaimonia (happiness) and human nature is one and definable, and so the differences between men and groups are, if not actually regretted, not regarded as either natural or sources of vitality and pleasing variety. Variety is a very late ideal!175

Berlin was probably unaware that Arendt in ‘What Is Freedom?’ referred to the same part of Aristotle’s Politics to illustrate the idea of political freedom. At first glance, her reading differs little from Berlin’s. She writes that ‘the statement “Freedom means the doing what a man likes” is put [by Aristotle] in the mouths of those who do not know what freedom is’. But the lessons Arendt and Berlin extract from Aristotle could scarcely be more different. Whereas Arendt approvingly refers to the Politics to remind her readers that the ‘original field’ where freedom was experienced was ‘the realm of politics and human affairs’, Berlin disapprovingly cites Aristotle to question whether Crick is or would like to be as Aristotelian as he says he is. Then, in the same letter, Berlin contrasts Aristotle with Diogenes and Epicurus, who dismissed the significance of the polis, refused to take part in public life and yet, on Berlin’s view, remained free. The fact that men like Diogenes and Epicurus did not use their freedom to participate in politics by no means meant that they were unfree, on Berlin’s view (though not on Aristotle’s). Freedom is a precondition for politics—not vice versa. Berlin’s comments on Crick may be read as his comments on Arendt too: ‘why are creativity, self-realization etc, liberty?’

The contrast between Aristotle on the one hand, and Diogenes and Epicurus on the other, is an issue that Berlin discusses in detail in his 1962 lecture entitled ‘The Birth of Greek Individualism’. One might say that this is an archaeological piece, as distinct from the genealogical ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. The latter tracks the evolution of two rival concepts of liberty over centuries. The former, by contrast, focuses on a more limited period when a major change, or a Nietzschean ‘transvaluation of values’, took place. The period in question is the fourth century BCE. At this ‘turning-point in the history of political thought’, the classical outlook of Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Thucydides and Herodotus came to be eclipsed by the Hellenistic outlook of Epicurus, Zeno of Citium, Chrysippus and Carneades. Berlin’s analysis of this shift is rich and complex, but on the issue of freedom he makes three historical observations reminiscent of Arendt’s comparable analysis in ‘What Is Freedom?’. First, Arendt and Berlin agree that the concept of negative liberty as something to cherish, rather than to condemn, was entirely unknown in the classical period. Both concur with Benjamin Constant’s view that the liberty of the ancients was essentially collectivist, ‘consist[ing] in an active and constant participation in collective power’. If Athens was freer than Sparta, Berlin observes, it was freer strictly in this classical sense: Athenians were more willing to ‘perform their civic duties [without being coerced into doing so] out of love for their polis’. Arendt similarly characterises the classical conception of freedom as ‘an exclusively political concept, indeed the quintessence of the city-state and of citizenship’. Second, both Arendt and Berlin downgrade the differences between Stoicism and Epicureanism to contrast these together with their classical rival. Moreover, they paraphrase Epictetus almost verbatim to illustrate the anti-classical and subjectivist conception of ‘freedom as self-abnegation’ (Berlin) or ‘inner freedom’ (Arendt): to be free, according to this conception, consists in limiting oneself to what is in one’s power. Finally, both Arendt and Berlin insist on the uniqueness of Hellenistic liberty. They similarly characterise this as ‘a total reversal’ (Berlin) or ‘the very opposite’ (Arendt) of the classical concept on the one hand; and they both contrast it with the modern concept represented by Mill’s On Liberty on the other. They agree, in other words, that the Hellenistic concept is neither the liberty of the ancients nor that of the moderns; it is neither collectivist nor negative.

Behind those points of historical agreement, however, lies profound normative disagreement. Berlin, for his part, shows deep ambivalence towards the legacy of Hellenism, and more specifically towards the Stoic conception of freedom. As I discussed earlier, he interprets this as a form of positive liberty in ‘Two Concepts’, in which the Stoics are presented as precursors to Kant and Rousseau and, by extension, Lenin and Stalin. ‘The Birth of Greek Individualism’, by contrast, discusses the Stoic conception more approvingly. It highlights the ability of the Stoic conception to subvert what Berlin considers to be the excessive moralism of the classical outlook, which ‘today is called an engagé attitude to politics’. In this outlook, the life of the individual was always considered in functional relation to the life of the polis, and politics as a means of pursuing private goals simply did not exist. A defender of negative liberty, concerned with the excessive power of the state to interfere with individual conduct, Berlin finds the classical outlook hardly appealing and expresses his doubt that ‘the decline of the “organic” community’ in the fourth century BCE was ‘an unmixed disaster’. On the contrary, he suggests, it may have liberated individuals from ‘a sense of suffocation in the polis’. Arendt, by contrast, finds no such positivity in the Hellenistic outlook. She dismisses the subjectivist or inner conception of freedom as ‘derivative’, as little more than a reflection of ‘estrangement from the world’ following the decline of Greek city-states. Central to her history of freedom are the twin achievements of classical Greece and republican Rome, in which ‘freedom was an exclusively political concept’. Compared to these two periods, Hellenistic Greece was a dark age, when freedom came to be dislocated from its proper place, that is, the polis. Where Berlin sees the birth of a new individualism and indeed ‘a new conception of life’, Arendt sees nothing other than freedom’s retreat from the world to the self—safe and comforting but solitary, invisible and inauthentic.

The two thinkers’ normative disagreement entails what might be called their ‘methodological’ differences. Berlin, on the one hand, challenges the materialist approach that explains the transvaluational change in the fourth century BCE as straightforwardly reflecting the decline of Greek city-states following the battle of Chaeronea. Ever insistent on the autonomous power of ideas irreducible to external factors, Berlin argues that the materialist view is not adequate to ‘explain so abrupt, swift and total a transformation of political outlook’. He consequently speculates that anti-classical ideas might have been more widespread than the surviving historical evidence would have us believe, highlighting the fact that ‘[t]he vast bulk of our information’ comes from the enemies of the anti-classical camp, namely, Plato and Aristotle. Having to rely solely on them to learn about Sophists, Cynics, Sceptics and ‘other so-called minor sects’ is, Berlin humorously writes, analogous to having to rely solely on Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy to learn about medieval thought. Berlin thus discusses anti-classical thinkers, such as Diogenes, Crates of Thebes, Antisthenes, Aristippus and the Aristophanic Socrates, at considerable length and with evident fascination in ‘The Birth of Greek Individualism’. Arendt, on the other hand, shows no comparable interest in these marginalised figures. She summarily dismisses Stoics and Epicureans as mere ‘popular and popularizing sectarians of late antiquity’. In her eyes they are insignificant figures who made modest contributions to the philosophical tradition that ‘has distorted, instead of clarifying, the very idea of freedom’. To study Stoicism and Epicureanism, in her view, would help us little to understand what freedom is. A more promising approach is to ‘go back’ to classical antiquity and ‘pre-philosophical’ experiences, so as to restore the original meaning of freedom, which had sunk into oblivion with the decline of Greek city-states.

Finally, Berlin’s appreciation of Greek individualism does not necessarily mean that he is more deeply committed than Arendt to the normative value of individuality. Arendt’s point is precisely that individuality cannot be fully realised if one assigns excessive value to ‘freedom from politics’ and stays outside the public realm. If men and women wish to ‘show who they really and inexchangeably’ are, they must enter the public realm to take the initiative to act in concert with others. Only in the specifically political mode of being can the human condition be truly appreciated; and only through such appreciation can men and women express their individuality to the full. On her view, it is not liberal individualism, but the Aristotelian defence of the public realm that provides a route to the agonistic individuality that was more common among the ancients than among the moderns. Berlin profoundly disagrees. He believes that the political is but one sphere of human life, and that the political way of life is but one way of leading a truly human life. The ways in which men and women express their individuality must be manifold, because human values are irreducibly many and not all of them are political. The incapacity to appreciate such deep pluralism is, in Berlin’s view, one of the chief weaknesses of ‘the engagé attitude to politics’, to which Arendt’s political theory (and Crick’s) is susceptible. To the extent that Hellenism challenged this attitude and made room for individuals to choose ‘freely’—in the negative sense of the term—what ends to pursue and what life to live, Berlin welcomes the Hellenistic contributions to human liberty. In his view, a monist conception of the good, Aristotelian or otherwise, does not provide a route to Millian individuality, ‘diversity, versatility [and] fullness of life’. Only liberal individualism, anchored in value pluralism, does so. In short, what Arendt and Berlin disagree over is not the value of individuality as such, but what kind of individuality humanity should strive for.

Conclusion

In 1986, in response to a question by Beata Polanowska-Sygulska, Berlin expressed his belief that ‘at the base of ethical, political and every other normative idea is always one’s […] conception of man’. This proposition, so long as ‘man’ (or human) is understood in non-essentialist terms, is true when it comes to Arendt and Berlin: their rival theories of freedom are indeed anchored in their conflicting views of the human condition. That said, it is worth highlighting that, in his reply to Polanowska-Sygulska, Berlin adds the further thought that one’s ‘conception of man’ is ‘usually not too empirical’. This is a revealing remark. As I discussed earlier, Berlin presents his value pluralist defence of negative liberty in distinctly empiricist terms, as grounded in his observations about ‘[t]he world that we encounter in ordinary experience’. But he is also aware that no particular ‘conception of man’ automatically follows from a mere accumulation of empirical facts. To form such a conception one needs both empirical observation and some speculative thought. If one’s political thought, based on one’s ‘conception of man’, is to be plausible, one must strike the right balance between the empirical and the speculative.

With this in mind, it is worth recalling that Berlin repeatedly dismisses Arendt’s political theory as ‘metaphysical’ in the pejorative sense: underpinned by nothing other than her ‘transcendental’ vision. In other words, Berlin deems Arendt to have got the balance between the empirical and the speculative disastrously wrong. What is interesting about this harsh criticism is that it shows no regard for Arendt’s own understanding of her theoretical enterprise. According to her, the phenomenological tradition to which she (somewhat ambiguously) belongs ‘begin[s] with the smallest and seemingly most modest of things, with unpretentious “little things”, with unpretentious words’. This basic stance is discernible in virtually all of Arendt’s writings, including her most theoretical work The Human Condition, whose aim is claimed to be ‘very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.’ In short, what Berlin takes Arendt to be doing flatly contradicts her own account of what she is doing. This is a curious misrepresentation on Berlin’s part. No less curious is his obliviousness to the similarity between his and her sceptical stances on theoretical system building devoid of an experiential basis. Whether he likes it or not, the following oft-cited words by Arendt strike a Berlinian note: ‘What is the subject of our thought? Experience! Nothing else! And if we lose the ground of experience then we get into all kinds of theories. When the political theorist begins to build his systems he is also usually dealing with abstractions.’ Despite Berlin’s claim to the contrary, Arendt is no less willing than he is to face reality as it is, unobstructed by excessively abstract, speculative or ‘metaphysical’ theories.

The difference between Arendt and Berlin with regard to the significance of empirical experience for thought, then, does not concern the willingness or lack thereof to face reality as it is and reflect on ‘the world that we encounter in ordinary experience’. Rather, it concerns what experiences to draw on to undertake theoretical work, for there are numerous aspects of empirical reality one could look at, and various perspectives from which to look at them. Here again, Arendt’s and Berlin’s ideas display both important similarities and intriguing differences. On the one hand, they agree that the defining experience with which twentieth-century political theorists are confronted is the emergence of totalitarianism, and more specifically of the twin evils of Nazism and Stalinism. On the other hand, the two thinkers’ perspectives on the empirical reality of totalitarianism starkly differ from each other, giving rise to a number of differences between their competing political theories. The next chapter tells this story—the story of how Arendt’s and Berlin’s rival theories of freedom, underpinned by their differing views of the human condition, reflect their conflicting understandings of the unfreedom and inhumanity of totalitarianism.