103 — A Genealogy of the Idea of Freedom (1–2)
Isaiah Berlin and Two Concepts of Liberty

Some time ago I posted the first part—the introduction—of a series entitled “A Genealogy of the Idea of Freedom.” If you wish, you can retrieve and watch that short video, which introduced the series, from the channel's Shared Media section.

In the second part of the series, offered below, I begin with Isaiah Berlin and his two definitions of positive and negative liberty.

In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche, in my view rightly, argues that concepts that have a history cannot simply be defined; rather, one can study the course through which their meanings have developed over time in order to gain a historical understanding of them, an understanding that may lead to a deeper grasp of both the concept and the process of its evolution.

Freedom too, as a historical concept, cannot simply be defined, but we can study the historical development of its meaning. The concept and its definition have repeatedly been challenged throughout the history of philosophy, and studying that evolution is what I intend to do in this series.

In this inquiry we will examine three hundred years of thinking about freedom in the West. Focusing on the Anglo-Saxon tradition of classical liberalism, we begin in the first part with the views and ideas of Isaiah Berlin, the twentieth-century philosopher of freedom whom we may regard as one of the last great classical liberal philosophers and, indeed, as a bridge between classical liberalism and neoliberalism. In later parts we will return to the mid-seventeenth century and Thomas Hobbes, continue with his highly influential work, then examine the thought and writings of John Locke and Rousseau in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, followed by Jeremy Bentham and, finally, John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century.