The Nature And Limits Of Freeedom

...But since this is not always possible, especially for example in the economic sphere, the issue of freedom becomes the reconciliation or accommodation of these different claims to particular freedoms...

...But if the right to be disagreeable, to bicker, and to be contentious is one of the hallmarks of a democratic state, by what standard may this right be limited...

...Nor, again, does Fellman face up to the old but still decisive query: is the American practice of judicial review consistent with the principle of democracy...

...No man can meet himself coming around a corner...

...lor tills one neeus not simply treeuoln of , choice but the wisdom to choose "rightly...

...And he asserts that "the freedom of a society, or a class or a group, in this sense of freedom, is measured by the strength of these barriers, and the number and importance of the paths which they keep open for their members—if not for all, for at any rate a great number of them...

...Moreover, the judges are deeply conditioned by membership in an institution bound by traditions and committed to constitutional principles...

...we must draw a dine between tile area of private lite and that of puolic allLilorlLy, for Only In tills way can we give scope to mail s quest for sett-realization...

...He holds that human values and human ideals are not all compatible, nor do they even entail one another...

...This is what led George Orwell to compose a grammar of doubletalk called "Newspeak" and to coin as a slogan of the new totalitarianism: "Freedom is Slavery...

...In language, words are used not merely to communicate but to veil or distort meanings...

...History and tradition would contribute part of the explanation...

...He correctly reminds us that "democracy is not so much concerned with correct answers as it is with a methodology for, reaching essentially tentative decisions in a workaday world...

...Because he values and would respect each man's humanity...

...Rutgers University Press...

...To compound this confusion, psychoanalysts like Erich Fromm tell us that positive freedom, as distinct from negative freedom, "consists in the spontaneous activity of the total integrated personality," thereby excluding from the term, we must presume, actions taken as a consequence of considered judgment or by neurotic or maladjusted men...

...The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced with choices between ends equally ultimate, the realization of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others...

...he needs, too, the will to act in accordance whin tills knowleuge...

...Man needs Knowledge both of his "sell...

...Thus his study of the limits of freedom, and of the principles appropriate to their determination, is a study of democratic theory and judicial practice, and of their...

...Consequently, the fulfilment of some of our ideals may well make impossible the fulfilment of others...

...But Lite quest for self-realization, it is often argued, is not the same thing as Its achievement...

...In fact, by eschewing the doctrine of natural right and arguing instead for the relative as against the absolute validity of his convictions, Berlin must ultimately fall back on a concept of humanism and on a defense of freedom essentially akin to Mill's...

...He insists on the recognition of "the moral validity—irrespective of the laws—of some absolute barriers to the imposition of one man's will on another...

...other men...

...IV A final word may be permitted me on the general debate over the nature and limits of freedom...

...And he emphasizes above all the often neglected fact that a free society is in= escapably a noisy and disorderly one, and hence psychically disquieting to those "to whom relaxation is man's...

...Carried to its logical limits, this proposition implies one or both of two things: (a) that the free man is one who lives alone, for when he lives in society he inevitably collides and thus interferes with • Two Concepts of Liberty, by Isaiah Berlin...

...Does the Court not in fact constitute an aristocracy of the robe, performing a legislative function, yet without responsibility to the people...

...and of the means appropriate to its realization...

...But it is precisely these "natural" limits that need to be demonstrated...

...Consequently, though he covers familiar ground, he does not always do so in familiar ways...

...deliberate distortion so as to enlist people's sympathies in a cause they might otherwise reject would also be in cluded...

...They thereby confuse the actual issue, which in the real world always arises from the fact that different men want not freedom as such but different and sometimes conflicting freedoms...

...Berlin rejects this idea of positive freedom and returns to the notion of negative freedom as an area within which no man can impose his will on another...

...In logic, as in common sense, we understand that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time...

...What distinguishes the essays we have examined here is their recognition of this vital fact and their willingness, despite their own clear commitments, to tolerate, even to encourage, the free competition of ideas, including the idea of freedom itself...

...No one can gainsay the sincerity, even nobility, of Berlin's plea for individual freedom...

...It is obedience to the right precepts, to law...

...As a result, we can no longer know what a man means when he speaks of freedom...

...while Soviet apologists insist that writers in the Communist world are free to say whatever they think, provided only that they first think the right things...

...We are thus driven back from the issue of freedom to the question of how we are to decide the issue of freedom...

...is one in which "Freedom is pitted against slavery") and to condemn the denial of certain political rights (Patrick Henry, who, though he had the freedom to proclaim his alleged unfreedom, nevertheless demanded "liberty or death...

...And here again we find a division, most broadly between those who look to democracy as the proper mechanism for the negotiation and resolution of this conflict and those who prefer some aristocratic or authoritarian alternative...

...Hence the conflict between them is often, though not of course always, more verbal than real...

...It is clear, for example, that Fellman values democratic principles and wants the law to adhere to them...

...Feliman is concerned not with philosophic speculation about the many and diverse ideas of freedom, for he recognizes at the outset that liberties in society necessarily jostle each other and thus require choices to be made...

...But the rationale supporting their decision, he thinks, is both a product of and an appeal to reason...

...He deals, more narrowly but not less importantly, with political principles and legal practices in the American democracy, which is constitutionally committed to the preservation of at least some freedoms...

...To respect the fundamental needs of men, we must learn, with...

...It these latter are to realize their "true" selves, they must consequently be guided by those better than themselves...

...But despotism, even if paternalistic, is still despotism...

...To ignore this truth is but to manirest one's moral and political immaturity...

...In this latter case only the strong of course can hope to be free, and then only until the emergence of a stronger...

...which is hardly a desirable situation...

...to describe actions taken in the silence, or even defiance, of the law (Bentham and Thoreau) as well as actions taken in obedience to law (v1ontesquieu and Hegel...

...And what is most striking is the fact that the standard of the Court is not a precise formula, nor the words employed to transIate the Court's judgment into an opinion, but what Fellman calls "the judicial feel for a situation" and the "necessarily vague" rule of reason...

...Human life and human activities are not divisible in such comupartmentalrzed terms...

...It remains but an exposition of contemporary American constitutional law and not what the perceptiveness of the author might lead us to expect: an exposition as preliminary to serious theoretical inquiry...

...Theologians like Jacques Maritain and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen apply freedom only to acts that constitute "right" choices, i.e., acts that conform to the good, or the truth, or God's will (all of which, in this conception, amount to the same thing...

...The quest for this standard, Fellman shows, carries us away from the Constitution to that body which, in the American system of government, has the decisive say as to what the Constitution means—the Supreme Court...

...From this it follows that the wider the area of non-interference, the wider the area of my freedom...

...But it is not altogether convincing, for Berlin concedes, too, that no man can be completely autonomous, and that "no society literally suppresses all the hoerties of its members...

...Moreover, to say that there are frontiers of freedom "not artificially drawn" is but another way of saying that there are "natural" limits to social and political regulation...

...interrelatedness...

...Moreover, not all freedoms are equally desired, and some men desire some things even more than they desire freedom...

...If I wish to preserve my liberty," he writes, "I must establish a society in which tnere must be some frontiers of freedom which nobody should ever be permitted to cross...

...Kant, "the truth that out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made...

...In each case Fellman carefully shows that despite the constitutional wording surrounding these freedoms, wording which would seem to throw a blanket protection against legislative infringement on any of them, the realities of political life have compelled a more or less rather than an either/or approach to their practical implementation...

...To be free to do some things, legal or social, restraints must be unposed on those wno would otrlerwise prevent others ttoln uoulg the uungs men ought to be tree to uo...

...and he defines these frontiers in terms similar to those set forth in Erich Kahler's The Tower and the Abyss and Erich Fromm's The Sane Society: as "rules so long and widely accepted that their observance has entered into the very conception of what it is to be a normal human being, and, therefore, also of what it is to act inhumanly or insanely...

...They talk past each other rather than to each other...

...Unlike the advocates of positive freedom, who would place authority in their own hands, Berlin argues for negative freedom, for the curbing of authority as such...

...In fact, paternalistic despotism, as Mill and Kant rightly argued, is more oppressive than naked tyranny...

...for a plea for freedom made by X may in fact be nothing less than a call for the exercise of coercion over Y, as Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor made plain when he observed that men "will only become free when they renounce their freedom to us and submit to us...

...The Limits of Freedom, by David Fellman...

...Here Fellman reverts to the work of the Court, for it is the business of the judiciary to apply general principles to concrete situations...

...for It alone makes posslule the achievement...

...and the proposition that if it is my good, I am not being coerced, for I have willed it, whether I know this or not...

...This is why freedom is disturbing to some men and appealing to others...

...His central thesis had already been set forth and admirably argued by Dorothy Fosdick some twenty years before in her book What Is Liberty...

...And if this is so, why should the Court have the final say as to what is reasonable or not...

...But in language, especially the language of politics, words often seem to defy this simple law...

...it is also desirable, "for the only freedom we can possibly live with is one in which an equilibrium is found between competing interests, all of which carry great validity taken singly...

...But despite the regularity with which such a plea is made, they persist in a refusal to do so...

...But there is no more agreement on such a standard than there is on the meaning of freedom itself...

...Because of this confusion, or manipulation of terms, it is possible for the philosophers of positive freedom to argue that a man is free even while his poor earthly body and foolish mind bitterly reject the act of coercion, and struggle desperately against those who [I7 seek to impose it...

...We need, therefore, in addition to a meaningful definition of freedom, a standard of value in terms of which we can order and adjust these conflicting claims...

...This is why such immense value is properly placed on the freedom to choose, why negative liberty is "a truer and more humane ideal" than the authoritarian structures of positive freedom...

...In this sense "real" or positive freedom, tar from being opposed to authority, is submission to authority...

...This is not, of course, a bad place on which to rest one's argument, but it is considerably short of Berlin's pretensions...

...Berlin, I am bound to report, adds nothing of consequence that is new...

...Where it is possible for men to pursue or to practice different things or beliefs in such a way that the practice of one does not militate against the practice of another, we have, in general, a prima facie case for allowing them to do so...

...while democratic theorists like John Stuart Mill and R. M. Maclver apply the term without regard to the ethical quality of the action chosen...

...1 nus We nave ale hrst and greatest parauox of ireeuoun: restraints restrict )reedoin, but without restiucnts tneie can be little or no ejjective freedom, at least not for most rymien...

...He dwells appropriately on the importance to this method of the freedom to differ—in thought, in speech, and...

...It is the virtue of the books considered here* that the term "free dom" (or "liberty") is unambiguously employed...

...This is persuasive doctrine, and much can be said in its defense...

...Thus the term "freedom" is employed to mean both the absence of restraint (Hobbes) and submission to restraint (Rousseau...

...It necessary, they must tie "breed to be free...

...For Berlin, this standard is the idea of a common human identity...

...For most commonly, they want not merely a definition of freedom but a definition that will identify freedom with other things, things they conceive to be good—e.g., reason or duty or power...

...With Mill, ne seeks to establish the permissible limits of social and political coercion over a person or group of persons...

...It is truer, Berlin argues, because it builds on the fact that human goals are many and in perpetual rivalry with one another, and since often incommensurable they cannot be graded ac...

...Hence, he concludes, the standard of reasonableness, which in any case cannot be defined in the abstract with any precision, is not as arbitrary as it might otherwise seem...

...The Clarendon Press...

...It regards him only as an instrument to anther's purpose, not as an end in himself...

...cording to some mathematical scale...

...trout Lite standpoint of the negative idea of huerty, we nett to UeInnle at least tile tlltUt1llum area of personal treeUUln wh1lcn must Oil no account be violated...

...Both writers know what they mean when they use the word, and they say what they mean —without cant or humbug or recourse to esoteric terminology...

...But unlike Mill, he seeks to draw the line not at the point where the activities of one man directly or significantly hinder or aitect the activities of another...

...By negative freedom—the first of his two concepts of liberty—Berlin means, at the outset, no more than the absence of human restraint...

...I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no human being interferes with my activity...

...Most of these (and many other) definitions of freedom are incompatible with each other...

...He draws the line, instead, at that point where the denial of privacy, or of personal rights, is calculated to prevent the individual from living as a man, as an autonomous human being...

...But he does not confront the question whether the law as it has been and now is, does in fact conform to those principles...

...But in his account of the evolution of our constitutional law he does not ask why the Court has acted as it variously, and not always consistently, did...

...it must rather be stated as the determination of which complex of particular liberties and concomitant restraints is most likely to promote those values that, in Berlin's theory, are distinctively human...

...and the U.S.S.R...

...From all this it follows that the idea of freedom will continue to evoke, and to provoke, disagreement...

...He does not inquire into the economic and political interests represented, or at least reflected, by individual judges...

...It is more humane because it does not deprive men of what is indispensable to their lives as human beings...

...supreme achievement...

...nor can he serve, much as it might amuse him to do so, as a pallbearer at his own funeral...

...But since men differ as much in their conception of what constitutes human nature as Berlin admits they differ in their conception of human goals, it requires too a determination of the nature of man that transcends what he calls "long and widely accepted" rules...

...It would take us too far afield to enter into the reasons for this curious diversity of meanings...

...tile prob lem then is to ueternnne winch conmuinatlou of 11be1Lles and reslldnits best assures mole attainment of the goon lute...

...But such knowledge and will, it is contenuea, are possessed by only a tew men, not by the masses of mankind, wno are LOU blind to see and too weak to do what is "right...

...Political Iiberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can do what he wants...

...2.75...

...The law of contradiction imposes an unavoidable, if regrettable, limitation on human life...

...But he is a superb craftsman: he is in command of the issues, at home in the language, and very much aware that he is writing in the shadow of Mill's celebrated essay On Liberty, published just a century ago...

...To the first of these questions Professor David Fellman of the University of Wisconsin addresses himself in his brief but sensible book, The Limits of Freedom...

...But if it is truly the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into or perpetuating error, and not the reverse, we ought never to ignore, or cease to protest against, so important an institutional obstacle to the performance of this democratic function...

...It would be excessive, and in one case misleading, to say they are also both orig inal resolutions of the problems and paradoxes of freedom...

...It is unfair, perhaps, to demand of an author that he deal with issues he has not himself posed in his book: yet, without a consideration of certain relevant and pressing questions, Fellman's study is of limited value...

...and much of what he does add raises as many problems as it resolves...

...but since few works can make such a claim, we must be grateful for what we have: a pair of serious explorations into the nature and limits of freedom...

...What governs the judges, he believes, is their reaction to the concrete facts of each particular situation, their "feeling" that Congress has or has not acted unreasonably, or that there is or is not a clear and present danger to the safety of the state sufficiently acute and urgent to justify a restriction on speech...

...It is possible to treat men as objects without wills of their own, "to use them as means for my, not their own, independently conceived ends," and by thus treating them as sub-human creatures to degrade them, to deny them their human essence...

...It is one thing to argue that this is the way things are, and that they are not likely to be altered soon...

...or (b) that the free man is one who can interfere as much as he might like with other men, for the principle of non-nrt.erterence would prohibit the imposition of any restraints even upon one who would fancier the activities of another...

...5d ($.70...

...for he conceues that everything that one does may have results which will harm other human beings...

...It is possible, ultimately, to assert even the barbarous doctrine that despotism, or slavery, is freedom...

...Among these are three which he makes the focus of his discussion: religious freedom, the freedom to communicate, and the freedom to talk politics...

...There are frontiers," he believes, "not artificially drawn, within which men should be inviolable...

...This, he holds, is not only inevitable...

...But once it is recognized that no freedoms are absolute, that even those freedoms essential to democracy can and indeed must be limited to some degree, we require a standard in terms of which that determination is properly to be made...

...Coercion then is not one's incapacity to attain his goal but "the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I wish to act...

...If this is so, the issue is not properly posed as a conflict between the negative and positive concepts of liberty, between an area of freedom anu an area of constraint...

...To avert the ensuing chaos or rule of the strongest, it is necessary therefore that some liberties be curtailed—either In the service of other goals (e.g., security, happiness, varying degrees of equality) or in the cause of certain tleeuoins ueenled to be Mole valuable than others...

...With respect to democratic theory, Fellman says little that is new...

...Such coercion, since it compels Uleul to do only what they would themselves choose to do It they were more enlightened than they are, is not "really" coercion but freedom...

...in political activity...

...but the few pages devoted to this subject constitute as admirable a statement of the meaning and free speech implications of democracy as can be found, in the literature...

...of their "true" selves, their "true" desires...

...and we would have to consider the honest but misguided ef forts of those who seek to identify the things they believe to be good with words commonly accepted as good, on the principle that noble causes merit honorific names...

...Now THIS ARGUMENT, as Berlin properly points out, confuses two things: the proposnion that I may be coerced for my own good which I am allegedly too blind to see...

...for by ignoring the reason that resides in even the ordinary man, and by denying his conception of himself as a human being, as a man seeking to make his own life in accordance with his own purposes, whether these are rational or "right" or otherwise, it treats him as less than a fully independent human being...

...And if such limits are not to be determined by the individual, what is he to do when in his (or Berlin's) judgment the legitimate fron tiers of his freedom are violated...

...It leaves open, too, the crucial questions: who is to determine the proper limits of the exercise of public authority—the individual himself or society or a dominant group (be it majority or minority) within that society...

...Has it made no difference to the content of liberty, for example, that the vast bulk of our Supreme Court justices between the Civil War and the New Deal came from the ranks of corporation lawyers...

...If it does, no change is signified or called for...

...For Fellman, it is the principle of democracy...

...In thus opting for a pluralism of goals, Berlin repudiates the belief in a single final solution...

...As one surveys the literature, the most striking single fact that emerges is that men mean by freedom a variety of things...

...But if it does not, we need to know what changes are required and how these are likely to be achieved...

...If men are to debate the problems of freedom seriously, they need therefore to agree first on a common meaning of the term...

...They exchange soliloquies rather than ideas...

...to account for a way of life (President Eisenhower, who in his first Inaugural Address declared that the conflict between the U.S...

...It is clear, too, that while Fellman recognizes the fallibility of the judges, he values the role of the Court in our political system...

...11 Two Concepts of Liberty is Isaiah Berlin's inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford...

...For others it is God's will, or nature, or tradition, or some other subjective or allegedly objective criterion...