ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the distinction between negative and positive liberty. It examines Isaiah Berlin's analysis of the difference underlying positive and negative liberty. The chapter shows how positive liberty reflects rationalism and allegiance to a self-developmental view of human nature. This combination of rationalism and self-development views of human nature characterized much of the "new liberalism" that arose at the beginning of the twentieth century, thus helping to explain why new liberal theorists tended to adopt positive conceptions of liberty. To constitute a limitation of freedom, Berlin suggests in his famous essay, "Two Concepts of Liberty", the obstacle must not only be created by humans, but it must be a deliberate or intentional obstacle to a person's activity. Classical liberalism is built on a negative conception of freedom. A person, on the negative conception, is free when others are not erecting obstacles in his path or rendering some of his options ineligible.
