ABSTRACT
In the introduction to the revised version of his lecture ‘Two concepts of liberty', Sir Isaiah Berlin seeks to correct what he judges to be an error in his original account. He suggests that his first definition of negative freedom as the absence of the interference of other agents in the area in which a man wishes to act has damaging and paradoxical implications. For, though it captures as a paradigm case of negative unfreedom the case of the imprisoned man who is prevented by the deliberate interferences of others from doing as he wishes, it makes the measure of a man's freedom relative to the nature of his desires. Indeed, it is an acknowledged feature of Berlin's original conception that, since we cannot know in advance of empirical research what it is that a man wants, negative freedom is consistent with any social circumstance. This is to say that attributions of negative freedom can (logically) tell us nothing informative about the alternatives actually available to anyone except in so far as they contain references to the state of mind or feeling of the agent, or presuppose the truth of some general propositions about human wants. Since the degree of a man's negative freedom is the extent to which his desires are frustrated by the interferences of others, he may always increase his freedom by trimming his desires. As he recognizes, Berlin's original account has the consequence (a consequence he regards as paradoxical and damaging in the case of ‘positive’ conceptions of freedom) that it precludes our characterizing as unfree a wholly contented slave.
