ABSTRACT
At the end of “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Isaiah Berlin addresses hastily the anticolonial struggles of non-Western peoples for self-determination. The aims of these struggles arguably are encompassed in part by his concept of positive liberty, which speaks to the question, “What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?” (TC, 169). Yet, as James Tully explains in chapter 1, Berlin insists that the twentieth-century anticolonial movement was not primarily concerned with freedom at all; rather, it was a struggle of colonized peoples for group recognition and “pagan self-assertion.” In his lecture, Berlin does not consider the views of anticolonial leaders, many of whom conceived of their movements in terms of the positive freedom of national self-determination. In a largely forgotten essay on the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore’s thoughts on nationalism, however, Berlin made a partial effort to understand what motivates such new nationalist movements. In what follows I will examine the limits of Berlin’s understanding of these struggles for freedom. I first turn to his brief essay on Tagore on nationalism, and then I explore more fully Tagore’s ethical critique of the modern state and his ideas about freedom. Tagore sketches a local, cooperativist, and anticolonial view of free human sociality without nationalism that points beyond Berlin’s two concepts of liberty.
