Civilization, Colonialism, and Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty

[LATE ADDITION: after I published this piece, I learned from David Owen and Duncan Bell that much of it was anticipated in a paper by James Tully, “"Two Concepts of Liberty" in Context;” chapter 2 of Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ 50 Years Later, Edited By Bruce Baum, Robert Nichols (2013), Routledge. Indeed, Tully picks on many of the same passages and contextualizes them in fascinating fashion. In fact, I would say Tully’s criticisms go well beyond my own claims.]

At one point, in section I of his famous essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Berlin makes the following remark:

[T]he doctrine is comparatively modern. There seems to be scarcely any discussion of individual liberty as a conscious political ideal (as opposed to its actual existence) in the ancient world. Condorcet had already remarked that the notion of individual rights was absent from the legal conceptions of the Romans and Greeks; this seems to hold equally of the Jewish, Chinese and all other ancient civilizations that have since come to light. The domination of this ideal has been the exception rather than the rule, even in the recent history of the West. Nor has liberty in this sense often formed a rallying cry for the great masses of mankind. The desire not to be impinged upon, to be left to oneself, has been a mark of high civilization on the part of both individuals and communities. The sense of privacy itself, of the area of personal relationships as something sacred in its own right, derives from a conception of freedom which, for all its religious roots, is scarcely older, in its developed state, than the Renaissance or the Reformation. Yet its decline would mark the death of a civilisation, of an entire moral outlook.

Let’s leave aside that Berlin uses here and freely mingles a psychological register (“the desire not to be impinged upon…”; “the sense of privacy…”) alongside a conceptual one (“conception of freedom…” “the idea…”).

Berlin presupposes here not just a temporal contrast between ancients and moderns, but he is also working with an implied template of the growth and growing sophistication, and subsequent decline and death of civilizations that allows for comparison among them. Civilizations are relatively closed systems that function like organic entities that grow and die. In fact, Berlin is manifestly working with the late nineteenth century typology of several great civilizations (Roman, Greek, Chinese, etc.) that can be usefully contrasted with the modern ‘West.’ As I have noted (here) a similar echo runs through Russell’s History of western philosophy.* Civilizations are, at least, in part characterized by ruling ideals that have, say, prestige in it and these ideals are also held by the elites of such civilizations. The template is compatible with a kind of cultural relativism or historicism, but can also be used without such commitments.

I mention this because Berlin explicitly suggests that the existence of something like the doctrine of negative liberty is itself a feature (“a mark”) that one is near the zenith of the civilizational cycle: “The desire not to be impinged upon, to be left to oneself, has been a mark of high civilization on the part of both individuals and communities.”

It’s natural to treat this as an aside, or even part of a kind of extension of a (serious) joke by Heine that Berlin had quoted at the start of his lecture, “the German poet Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilization.” (As my regular readers know, I think it’s not merely a joke for Berlin, because the duty of philosophers to "disarm" dangerous ideas before they become too dangerous is the main theme of Berlin’s lecture and key to his explicit polemic with then analytic philosophy in it.)

One may even forestall any argument from me by claiming that in this paragraph Berlin is obviously riffing of Constant’s famous (1819) lecture, “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns.” For Berlin’s remark on Condorcet’s remark is almost verbatim copying of a sentence by Constant: “The ancients, as Condorcet says, had no notion of individual rights.”+ Constant most certainly is also working with the temporal contrast between ancients and moderns and an implied template of the rise and fall of civilization. Fair enough.

I would deny that Constant and Berlin use the same civilizational template, but I will leave that aside. My present interest is on the effect of such a template on Berlin’s larger argument. Because he returns to it later in the essay:

But the fathers of liberalism - Mill and Constant - want more than this minimum: they demand a maximum degree of non-interference compatible with the minimum demands of social life. It seems unlikely that this extreme demand for liberty has ever been made by any but a small minority of highly civilised and self-conscious human beings. The bulk of humanity has certainly at most times been prepared to sacrifice this to other goals: security, status, prosperity, power, virtue, rewards in the next world; or justice, equality, fraternity, and many other values which appear wholly, or in part, incompatible with the attainment of the greatest degree of individual liberty, and certainly do not need it as a precondition for their own realisation.

Let’s leave aside Berlin’s lack of interest in the mothers of liberalism (for polemics see here). Here Berlin explicitly treats Mill and Constant as exemplars of the kind of thing that are a mark of high civilization.**

Now, I am not averse to treating intellectual cultures as capable of rise and fall or to be elitist about some thinkers, but the civilizational template Berlin is working with has a dangerous temptation: there is often an implied contrast with peoples who are uncivilized (savage, child-like, course clay, etc.) We see a hint of this temptation already in Berlin’s contrast between a “small minority of highly civilised and self-conscious human beings” and “The bulk of humanity.”

We are now quite recognizably in the ambit of Mill’s views about civilizational hierarchies in which only a few civilizations themselves can give rise to the most sophisticated and enlightened pleasures. Even so, one may be tempted to treat the passage I just quoted from Berlin as a kind of clumsily worded sociological generalization. After all, the point of the passage (and the wider argument in context) is to posit pluralism over fundamental ends not express civilizational superiority.

But it’s not a mere aside, because Berlin returns to the civilizational template in the rousing closing paragraph. In it he deploys the objectionable contrast (also familiar from Mill) between civilization and intellectual immaturity/childhood/primitive peoples. In it he also introduces what we may call a second mark of high civilization:

It may be that the ideal of freedom to choose ends without claiming eternal validity for them, and the pluralism of values connected with this, is only the late fruit of our declining capitalist civilisation: an ideal which remote ages and primitive societies have not recognised, and one which posterity will regard with curiosity, even sympathy, but little comprehension. This may be so; but no skeptical conclusions seem to me to follow. Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. 'To realise the relative validity of one's convictions', said an admirable writer of our time, 'and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.’ To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity.

The admirable writer is Schumpeter. In Schumpeter, the context is about commitment to democracy.

What’s peculiar here is that the recognition of the relative validity of other people’s convictions is itself a trait that Marx and Engels attribute to the bourgeois in chapter 2 of the Communist Manifesto in order to criticize it. Berlin bites the bullet, and accepts the (potential) relative validity of his own convictions in an existential fashion (the “freedom to choose ends”). And this kind of existentialism is itself for Berlin the height of sophisticated (and, perhaps, fragile) civilization.

This is all I really wanted to show in this post.++ Yet, there is a passage that is sufficiently jarring in isolation, and that reflects, I fear, the downside risks I have been hinting at in an insidious fashion:

It is this desire for reciprocal recognition that leads the most authoritarian democracies to be, at times, consciously preferred by their members to the most enlightened oligarchies, or sometimes causes a member of some newly liberated Asian or African State to complain less today, when he is rudely treated by members of his own race or nation, than when he was governed by some cautious, just, gentle, well-meaning administrator from outside. Unless this phenomenon is grasped, the ideals and behaviour of entire peoples who, in Mill's sense of the word, suffer deprivation of elementary human rights, and who, with every appearance of sincerity, speak of enjoying more freedom than when they possessed a wider measure of these rights, becomes an unintelligible paradox.

Let’s grant Berlin that the desire for reciprocal recognition is a real phenomenon, and that it may well explain why sometimes people are willing to put up with otherwise bad government. I am completely agnostic to what degree that explains some of the phenomena of post colonial politics. (Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth has much to say on these.) But it is wholly unnecessary to Berlin’s argument to insert that colonialism itself was government “by some cautious, just, gentle, well-meaning administrator from outside.” Even Mill was cautious and realist enough to claim that this ideal was very rarely reality!

It’s odd Berlin would make the claim because part of the larger point of his lecture is to argue

Berlin himself was capable of making the claim about the desire for recognition among colonized peoples without suggesting that their administration had been gentle. For, in 1972, writing in Foreign Affairs, Berlin returned to the idea of the desire for recognition; he wrote, “In poor or ex-colonial territories the desire of the majority to be treated as equals of their former masters — as full human beings — often takes the form of nationalist self-assertion. The cry for individual and national independence — the demand not to be interfered with or dictated to or organized by others — springs from the same sense of outraged human dignity.” (27)

Be that as it may, in context “Of Two Concepts of Liberty,” Berlin’s claim is startling, even scandalous. By 1958, the British had already done their mass deportations of Kikuyu to the reserves and were winding down their brutal war with the Mau-Mau. This was all familiar enough that (recall my post) in 1956, Oakeshott presupposes it without making a fuss about it as common knowledge in his lecture “On being conservative.”

Let me close. Back in May, Duncan Bell let me read a draft of his then upcoming John Stuart Mill Lecture. One thing I learned, as I wrote Bell in an appreciative note, is that Mill's endorsement of the civilizing mission really impacts a lot of his political thought, and so ends up undermining many of Mill’s best insights from the perspective of a liberalism worth having.

I don’t know of evidence that Berlin was ever tempted to adopt a civilizing mission for liberalism. But it’s an open, even urgent question to what degree his willingness to accept many of its key premises shapes some of his best insights.

*I don’t mean to suggest Berlin and Russell working with exactly same typology: in his book Russell was (despite his focus on western philosophy) quite alert to the philosophical significance of Buddhist civilization, and would not have been inclined to allow for a Jewish civilization.

+I learn from Biancamaria Fontana’s annotations in her edition of Constant’s Political writings this is a quote from L'instruction publique,

** In fact, in so doing Berlin ends up subtly misrepresenting Constant’s position. After all, Constant closes his essay with the idea that “far from renouncing either of the two sorts of freedom which I have described to you, it is necessary, as I have shown, to learn to combine the two together.” And this would involve non trivial exercise of what Berlin calls positive freedom.

++Some other time I will return to Constant and Berlin’s account of the ancient absence of what Berlin calls negative freedom.