David Sidorsky

The Third Concept of Liberty and the Politics of Identity

Interpretations of freedom have been perennially contested and continuously changing throughout history even though the idea of freedom has been constant as a rhetorical ideal for human aspirations and as a source of social values. The interpretation of freedom in any particular age can serve as an index of the issues that are central to the political culture: when slavery was ubiquitous, the issue of freedom was focused upon emancipation from slavery; when imperial colonization was a dominating political fact, the question of freedom was formulated in terms of national independence. The great force of the idea of freedom in contemporary political controversy still reflects its fundamental priority derived from the struggle against the blight of slavery in antiquity or from the confrontation with the ravages of imperial domination in the ancient world.

Since the 1960s, the right and the ability to choose to create one’s own self, that is, to construct a preferred identity, whether of the individual or of the group, has become a primary interpretation of the idea of freedom. This reinterpretation corresponds to the new politics of identity—where a plethora of liberation movements have found new ways of redefining, asserting, and reinforcing the claims of particular groups as a demand for the realization of freedom. These claims are derived from the chosen or recreated identity of the constituted group, whether that group be ethnic, religious, national, racial, or sexual. Accordingly, the 1960s marked the emergence of a new interpretation of freedom, with decisive implications for redirecting the political agenda for the ensuing decades.

The right to create the identity of the self was to take its place as a third concept of liberty alongside the other interpretations of freedom in the modern period, which had received their paradigmatic formulation in Isaiah Berlin’s "Two Concepts of Liberty." Berlin’s interpretation was formulated near the end of the 1950s and represented a rare moment of balance in the contest over the priority of each of these concepts that had marked modern European and American history.

The first concept of liberty, termed "negative liberty" by Berlin, identified and demarcated the sphere of the individual from the sphere of political authority. The burden of Berlin’s elucidation of the concept of negative liberty was to reassert the ongoing value and legitimacy, through the postwar 1950s, of the traditional liberties of the individual.

Berlin was able to limn the ways through which many of the classic philosophical and religious foundations for the justification of the negative liberties of the individual had been eroded in the ideological and political conflicts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These liberties were no longer granted the status of inalienable natural rights that had marked their secular canonization in the political theories of the founding fathers of liberal democracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nor did doctrines of individual negative liberty retain the widespread support they had once enjoyed as a formulation of the necessary conditions for economic progress through the operation of free markets.

Yet, looking back from the apparent respite afforded by the 1950s at the catastrophes and disasters of modern European history, Berlin’s conceptual analysis reinforced the recognition of the role of negative liberty. Whatever its foundational justification, a free political culture required institutions that would provide immunity or protection for the individual from the coercions and constraints exercised by the State or other social authority.

The second concept of liberty, termed "positive liberty" by Berlin, linked the idea of freedom with the concept of self-realization. The individual or group was to be considered free if it could realize its potentialities, and it was not free if either internal inhibiting conditions or environing historical factors placed impediments on self-realization.

This concept of positive liberty could trace its roots to an alternative religious and philosophical tradition of liberty in which a person was not free if his will was not liberated from the compulsions of uncontrolled passion, enslaving addictions, or the shackles of ignorance and false belief. This tradition provides a basis for a conceptual reformulation of freedom as positive liberty in which a person who is not coerced by the State may still not be free. In terms of positive liberty, the sovereign individuals of the modern State were not free if poverty and lack of opportunity or their subjugated status would block their ability to develop their potentialities.

The political consequences of these two divergent concepts of liberty can be found in the conflict over the social and institutional framework of Western states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Partisans of negative liberty continued to support limitations upon state power, including the maintenance of free market economies without significant governmental control or regulation.

Champions of positive liberty sought to use the power of the state in diverse ways, including intervention on behalf of those classes or groups in the society which they believed to be suffering from coercion as a result of historical societal structures or the operation of free markets. The concept of positive liberty became enshrined in the vision of self-determination of subjected European nationalities and formed part of the ideology of various nationalist and pan-nationalist movements.

In the nineteenth century, the concept of positive liberty became part of the ideological foundations of international socialist movements and enabled their advocacy of egalitarianism to be reformulated in terms of human liberation. Analogously, movements for national independence and sovereignty in the colonial regions of the world adopted the idiom of positive liberty in their self-perception as liberation movements.

Berlin’s retracing of the career of these two concepts involved an analysis of the vicissitudes of each. Accordingly, it provided a critical index of the status of freedom in the political world of the 1950s, as well as a sense of the agenda of societies seeking to protect or extend freedom at that time.

Berlin reviewed the two major criticisms of the concept of "negative liberty" which had brought it into disrepute since its beginnings in the rhetoric of champions of natural rights like Locke or Jefferson. One line of criticism, developed within Western liberal parties, seeking to move beyond the defense of individual liberties in the canonic writings of Locke or John Stuart Mill, contended that the rights of the individual should not be a bar to governmental policies which were intended to benefit the weaker or deprived groups of the society. Policies of state intervention could limit individual liberties if the social welfare of large groups were to be enhanced. In the United States, the social legislation of the New Deal represented this type of amendment of the theory of negative liberty. Its ultimate legislative and judicial accomplishment involved the reversal of the classic doctrine of natural rights in the economic sphere that had been defended by the pre-Roosevelt Supreme Court.

The second line of criticism, fostered by Marxism, was that natural rights and negative liberty represented a rationalization for the exploitative power of the dominating bourgeois and corporate interests against the working class. In that view, when the class structure of capitalist society would be transformed, the conceptual superstructure of capitalist culture, including the very language and concept of negative liberty, would cease to have any function and would wither away. It would be replaced by less individualistic or possessive forms of speech to reflect the solidarity of comradeship and fraternity in a classless and egalitarian society. Despite this formulation of the "withering away" of the need or use for negative liberties, when Josef Stalin decided to promulgate a new constitution for the USSR in the late 1930s, he reverted rhetorically to the idiom of the protection of the rights of the individual. In the immediate postwar period, the decision of the Soviet Union to abstain from voting for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would appear to reflect an approach that is more consistent with Marxist theory. Yet the grounds for this abstention were not the classic Marxist criticism of the language and theory of rights, but that positive liberty was not sufficiently emphasized in the formulation of human rights for economic and social development.

Berlin’s historical sketch of the need for balance between positive and negative liberty reasserted the continuing function and need for negative liberty in both liberal welfare states and socialist societies. He did not pursue his defense of negative liberty along the Hayekian line of a necessary connection between a market economy and political liberty. He contended that the potential for the erosion of freedom in the absence of institutions protecting the negative liberties of the individual had been documented in the history of the twentieth century. Berlin was prepared to project this historical lesson into the immediate future, and, taking note of the direction of political change after the Second World War, he warned that a stress upon the value of negative liberty would continue to be necessary for the welfare states, socialist governments, and emerging postcolonial nations.

Berlin reviewed the record of various nationalist movements which had incorporated the concept of positive liberty. The fulfillment of the goals of an integral nationalism, in which freedom was identified with the realization of national sovereignty, had marked the restructuring of European society for more than a century. In Europe, the question of the transition from trans-ethnic empires to sovereign nation-states, with some significant exceptions, particularly in the Soviet bloc, had been completed. The debate had begun to shift toward the need for trans-national institutions in light of postwar economic and military realities.

By the end of the 1950s, the claims for political independence and sovereignty by many countries that had been imperial colonies were rapidly being realized. Thus, Berlin was able to celebrate the fulfillment of positive liberty in the achievement of governments of popular sovereignty in the new nation-states of Asia and Africa. Yet his delineation of the two concepts of liberty provided an implicit argument for the necessity of the countervailing balance of negative liberty. Without institutions and traditions that would protect negative liberties, the promise of the postcolonial states would not be realized.

Berlin’s approach to the emergence of socialist states in the twentieth century was characterized by a similar balance, derivable from his structuring of freedom as requiring both positive and negative liberty. He assessed the transformational vision and the utopian illusion of socialist ideologies and recognized the ways in which such a vision could obscure the errors, brutalities, and other abuses of individual rights on the ideologically charted road to freedom. His lecture came within a few years of Khrushchev’s public admission of Stalin’s crimes, and took special note of totalitarianism with its record of repression and genocide during the 1930s and 1940s. This context heightened the impact of Berlin’s formulation of the importance of "negative liberty," even within movements dedicated to social or economic progress.

The international context of the 1950s was marked by the division of the world into two consolidated strategic alliances, as well as by the Bandung effort to develop a Third World neutralist coalition which tilted ideologically toward the socialist bloc. Berlin’s delineation of the two concepts of liberty, while avoiding appeasement or endorsement of any political camp, formulated in a non-ideological and nuanced way the stakes for human freedom that were present in international conflict.

While recognizing the basis in human aspiration and human history for a concept of "positive liberty," Berlin asserted the constant, unerodable need for "negative liberty" with its demarcation of the wall that protects or insulates the individual from the forces of coercive power. Thus, the connection between the interpretations of freedom and major sources of political conflict had been identified and clarified as a potential guide to the political agenda of the twentieth century.

In the 1960s, a third concept of liberty related to the changing political agenda achieved prominence within radical movements, both in the West and in developing countries. This different interpretation of human freedom involved a new set of political priorities that shifted the focus of concern away from the search for balance between "positive" and "negative" liberty.

A significant change in the understanding and interpretation of human nature differentiates the third concept of liberty from both positive and negative liberty. For both "negative" and "positive" liberty presuppose that the individual or the group possesses or develops a fixed character and a determinate history: The individual has an integral self just as the group is constituted by the given properties which have formed its identity throughout its history. In "negative liberty," it is that integral self that is to be protected from governmental intervention or societal coercion. In "positive liberty," it is the historically formed individual or group whose potentialities are to be actualized and whose ends are to be realized. The third concept of liberty, however, was to reject the idea of a given identity of the self or of the group. Instead, it focused on the ways in which the self would be chosen or constructed and group identity would be created or defined. Accordingly, freedom is understood in terms of the rights of the individual and of the group to select, create, define, or redefine their own identity.

The connection between the interpretation of freedom and the agenda of political action since the 1960s is demonstrable. The new politics of identity on such diverse issues as gender, ethnicity, race, nationalism, and multiculturalism has aimed at social transformation based upon the freedom to form new patterns of self and group identification.

The third concept of liberty did not originate as an instrument of the social and political movements of the 1960s, although it was adopted and adapted by them. Like any concept of liberty, its origins can be traced back to ancient myth and metaphor. In particular, the third concept of liberty relates to a tradition which is anti-fatalistic, either because there is a denial that the future can ever be fated, predestined, or predetermined, or because there is an affirmation that the free agent can and should defy the decrees of Fate, regardless of the consequences. Thus, the model of freedom is illustrated by Prometheus in his defiance of the gods, or by Bertrand Russell in A Free Man’s Worship. Russell described the duty of a free person: "To defy with Promethean constancy a hostile universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively hated" and "not bow before the inevitable."

This concept of liberty, in which a person’s free choice does not depend upon an evaluation of the consequences of his decision, was given philosophical elaboration in existentialist thought. For Martin Heidegger, human beings are differentiated from all other species of beings because they have no essential nature or given ends but are constituted by their acts of free choice and arbitrary commitment. The Heideggerian thesis that "Man alone exists" involves his deconstruction of the prevailing metaphysical view that human beings, like all other species of animals, possess essential properties. In declaring that humans are existential beings, Heidegger is asserting that only humans exercise free choice, including the choice of the kind of self that they can become. A characteristic existentialist theme is the claim that only human beings are free to decide in favor of suicide, while all other beings are determined to pursue their given biological ends.

To a degree, Heidegger’s conception of liberty influenced his political decision to support the National Workers’ Socialist Party in the early 1930s. His choice did not represent a utilitarian calculation of the consequences of each of the political options confronting the Weimar Republic. He considered the root of both international communism and international capitalism to be ways in which the capacity for human choice would be subverted by the imperatives of technology. Consequently, national socialism, in rejecting both options, represented a "third way" in which a search for authentic human expression in the political life of the nation could be furthered.

The interpretation of liberty does not univocally dictate any specific political commitment. The existentialist concept of liberty also had a significant role in the ideology of parts of the French Resistance movement against Nazi occupation in the 1940s. This movement portrayed itself as a commitment to resistance against overwhelming power at a time when the successful results or beneficial consequences of such a commitment were not predictable. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s play The Flies, which was staged in Paris during the Occupation, the hero decides to defy the omnipotent deity, Zeus, in the absurdist belief that the arbitrary exercise of free choice can be carried out in a divinely determined universe. The political implication of Sartre’s play was that even if the decrees of the Occupation had the force of the ordainments of Zeus, French citizens could decide to commit acts of resistance.

The interpretation of freedom as the arbitrary exercise of choice reflected the perception of the historical circumstances of resistance to Nazi authority. In these circumstances, it seemed that the consequences of the decision to resist were not calculable, for any act of resistance did not demonstrably represent an incremental step toward the realization of its goal, the overthrow of Nazi power. Further, such acts did not result in predictable retribution against their agents, but could be met by random and disproportionate violence against large numbers of innocent persons, including children.

Generalizing from this extreme situation, the existentialist concept of freedom serves to vindicate the choice for action, independent of any rational estimation of its consequences or of the probabilities that it will achieve its desired ends. The agent makes the choice of participating or desisting from an action that may well be counterproductive, because he recognizes that he is engagé in this situation, and is free to choose. His acts of free choice, even if they are arbitrary commitments which do not reflect the historical givens of the situation or form part of a coherent purposive design, mark the creation of an authentic self.

The commitment to arbitrary choices is an expression of the self through which it becomes an authentic self. The connection between the concept of liberty and the creation of the authentic self can be understood as a continuum between the "given" and the "taken." The sphere of the "given" consists of those features of the individual which are determined by nature, history, and society; the sphere of the "taken" consists of those aspects of the individual or his environment which are open to transformation by the exercise of free choice. The way this line is drawn serves as a general indicator of the distinction between liberalism and conservatism.

For the conservative, the area ascribed to the "given," whether this be the constraints of nature, the burdens of history, or the obligations of a tradition, occupies a crucial portion of the continuum. For the liberal, there is a belief that the choices available to the individual, either in fact or in possibility, extend over virtually the whole of the continuum.

The distinction can be clarified by simple illustrations. In an extremely traditionalist society, for example, the choice of a spouse and the decision for a vocation may be prescribed by the social order rather than taken by the agent. Marriages are arranged for the succeeding generation by the parents, often before the birth of the children. The vocation of a child may be hereditary or given by the vocation of his parent or the group into which he is born. A liberal conception moves the determination of choice of vocation and of spouse away from the obligations or prescriptions of the tradition to the domain of individual choices.

The ascription of nationality or religion provides a second and more controversial example in the continuum of the "given" and the "taken." In both traditionalist or moderately liberal societies, the individual is obligated to accept as a given the religion or the nationality of the family or group into which he is born. The abdication or refusal to accept the obligations of nationality that derive from origins or roots is viewed as treason in a traditionalist framework. The violation of obligation to the religious bonds with which one is tied at birth is considered apostasy or a form of betrayal of one’s own soul within traditional religions. (The harsh edict against the life of Salman Ahmed Rushdie is not derived from his criticisms of Muslim sancta, which would be judged as blasphemy or heresy, but is based upon the fact that these derogations by a person born into Islam represent the more severe crime of apostasy.)

In tracing the spectrum along the direction of liberalism, the decisions of nationality or of religion are conceived as voluntary choices which may overcome any historical givens in the situation. The transfer of national allegiance or of religious bonds is permissible and even obligatory from a liberal perspective if it reflects the free commitments of the agent. From this perspective, the obligations that are binding by reference to one’s nationality or "station and its duties" are to be accepted or rejected in the light of the individual’s own sense of moral standards that transcend the historically given condition.

The third concept of liberty emerges even more clearly through sketching the polarity between the liberal and the conservative ends of the spectrum in the context of educating the succeeding generation. The conservative stresses the importance of education as binding the next generation to the traditions and values of its heritage. The liberal emphasizes education as a way of developing an individual who will freely create his own identity. An extreme end of the spectrum from the liberal perspective would assert that just as a child is brought up without an inherited decision on choice of spouse or vocation, he could be raised "neutrally" on options of religion and nationality. Thus, in accordance with the third concept of liberty, the child should be raised "neutrally," without being previously obligated, conditioned, or compelled by a particular tradition, so that he would be free to choose his own national self-identification and his own religious identity.

In a further extension, the third concept of liberty would allow for choices of one’s language, gender, genes, or history. Thus, in replacing to the highest degree possible the "given" by the "taken," an educational strategy could be to try to raise the child in a neutral language (like a universal language of mathematical logic) so that the choice of this important shaper of identity could be freely exercised. (The greatest modernist novelist of the twentieth century, James Joyce, sought vainly to free himself from service to the King’s English by writing his last work, Finnegans Wake, in his own, created, multilingual vocabulary.)

There is an emerging consensus that children should not be educated in ways which brand sexual stereotypes into their work and play. On the other hand, the idea that the formation of sexual identity itself should be neutralized so as to allow the exercise of free choice of gender at maturity would be strongly contested as a proposal for educational reform.

Recent scientific advances in the understanding of genetics have also become grist for the mill of competing ideological perspectives. Conservative theorists may interpret the ways in which genetic factors influence outcomes as a significant substantiation of the Burkean thesis of the lack of realism about human nature in theories of political utopianism and in liberal projections of radical and rapid improvement of societal conditions.

On the other hand, the expansion of the area of the "taken" or chosen by the development of techniques of genetic modification may reinforce an expansive conception of liberty as the freedom to create the self. An extreme version of the third concept of liberty would be the vision of the species of homo sapiens as possessing a plastic self, open to different ways of being shaped by the exercise of free choice, with no given constraints on the grounds and reasons for choice in creating one’s own character. The belief that genetic modification would allow a person to reinvent his biological identity goes beyond the scope of scientific practice into the realm of science fiction.

Yet there seems to be no empirical limit to the ways in which persons and groups have invented a past history for their chosen identity. Such invention, which usually involves historical revisionism, has been prominent in the politics of identity since the 1960s, but it has significant antecedents in the past. Fascist Italy, for example, chose to perceive itself as the inheritor of imperial, rather than Christian, Rome just as National Socialist Germany viewed itself as the reincarnation of a Wagnerian version of an ancient Teutonic past. From a traditional point of view, such inventions represent fictions which will not withstand ultimate confrontation with the givens of reality. From a more radical point of view, which seeks authority in the character of the future, a person or group’s adoption of an alternative past history represents a decision to creatively transform its identity. The third concept of liberty involves the legitimation and justification of the effort at creation or transformation of individual or group identity.

The exploration of the third concept of liberty, particularly in its existentialist version of the 1940s, receded under the impact of the political developments of the postwar period. By the 1950s, the scope and depth of the confrontation between political systems championing forms of totalitarian socialism against variations of capitalist democracies formed the background for Isaiah Berlin’s delineation of the two concepts of positive and negative liberty. The third concept of liberty has reemerged in the politics of identity since the 1960s.

The rediscovery of the third concept of liberty took place with the change in political climate that characterized the dramatic and self-declared revolutionary activities of the 1960s. The sanctioning of an intellectual revolt against all forms of established authority makes possible the rejection of the two more traditional concepts of liberty with their reliance on the givens of self and of history. In a philosophical and literary context, the view that history is a "given" has been confronted by the postmodernist thesis of Jacques Derrida that any historical narrative can be "deconstructed" so that the record of the "given" is open to contrary interpretation. Similarly, in the postmodernist investigations of Michel Foucault, any norm which is sanctioned by authority can be considered arbitrary because of its connection to a historical culture of domination.

The political context for such a concept of freedom is no longer that of the division between two power blocs that could be identified with championing either negative liberty or positive liberty. Rather, it points to the rejection of both camps in their ideological confrontation. With the actual end of this confrontation, the fixed lines of cohesion lessened, giving more scope to the possibilities of the new politics of identity.

An interpretation of liberty derived from the legitimacy of human choice moved to the foreground. The legitimation of these new patterns of identification has been the focus of political change in diverse areas, including (1) new directions in sexual or gender politics, (2) new patterns in nationalist movements, and (3) the advocacy of multicultural educational curricula against the tradition of teaching the historical cultural heritage.

1. New Directions in Sexual or Gender Politics

The traditional political agenda of the movement for women’s emancipation had stressed the continuity between the rights which the State should grant to women and the natural rights ascribed to all human beings in a free society. The right to women’s suffrage or the right of women to inherit and control property, for example, was viewed as a rectification of the exclusion of women as bearers of rights accorded to all other human beings or to fellow citizens. Within this agenda of formal equality, there was also a demand for the recognition of the special needs or welfare rights of women, as a group, in light of the history of their previous deprivation. Yet the societal determination of characteristically male or female relationships and roles and the cultural definition of feminine identity were not, in the main, challenged.

With the third concept of liberty there is a new emphasis on the "option right" to freely select one’s sexual identity and orientation. The formal egalitarianism of the liberal state had required that there be no discrimination among persons on irrelevant grounds such as race, religion, or gender. The ideal of sexual liberation, in the idiom of this formal egalitarianism, can be formulated as requiring that sexual orientation should be added to the list of irrelevant grounds for discrimination. The political agenda of a movement for sexual liberation, however, has gone beyond the rhetoric and idiom of the formal egalitarianism of nondiscrimination. As a political corollary of the third concept of liberty, the claim is that a free or pluralist society should move beyond nondiscrimination toward the recognition that freedom for the individual requires that the State and the culture positively support the freedom of choice of persons in their sexual self-identification.

One special area for probing the significance of different concepts of liberty is that of legislative reform on the proscription of various forms of sexual behavior. In the late 1950s, the Wolfenden Commission in England represented the new frontier in sexual politics when it advocated the overturning of previous laws which had proscribed homosexual practice among consenting adults. The argument of the Wolfenden Commission was essentially Millian so that the concept of liberty was interpreted as "negative liberty." From this perspective, proscription of private sexual practice was an unjustified intervention by the State into the domain of the individual. The rights of the formed, adult individual who is capable of acts of free consent should not be invaded by governmental legislation. It was this form of argument which was decisive for the legislative reforms that ensued.

At that time, Justice Patrick Devlin based his criticism of the Wolfenden Commission, to a great degree, on its Millian view of the relationship between the individual and society. According to Devlin, when the State or other societal institutions change the boundaries of their intervention against the liberty of action or freedom of choice of the individual, then the State has also changed the cultural conditions for the development of individuality. Devlin’s point was that legislative reform that affects the freedom of the private person in relation to the environing society also affects the norms and conditions for social expression in the public culture. Consequently, in Devlin’s view, the Wolfenden Commission was deceiving itself, either unintentionally or by design, when it argued that its reforms would involve no change in the patterns of culture or public behavior, but only a change in the legal rights of freely consenting, private individuals to enter into interpersonal relationships.

This connection between negative and positive liberty means, according to Devlin, that proposals for new legislation of private sexual practices can be identified and evaluated as hypotheses for the conditions for the development of culture and morality. Such an evaluation need not represent an opposition to reform legislation, but can be used in support of the cause of reform. The proponents for the legalization of homosexuality could have pointed to potential improvements in the patterns of the social culture, such as increased pluralism in cultural expression, which would be the consequence of the replacement of proscription and repression by the recognition of the range of human sexuality. In any event, there is a consensus that significant and far-reaching changes have taken place in the public culture which can be attributed, in some measure, to legislative changes on the rights of the individual to freely consent to private acts of sexual practice.

In contrast to the views of both Wolfenden and Devlin or, as it were, to partisans of either negative or positive liberty, the framing of the question has shifted. Freedom of the individual is not formulated in the traditional idiom of the right of the formed, adult self who can consent to or resist the intervention of the sovereign state into a private domain. Nor is the realization of freedom identified with the power of the group to determine or legislate the forms and limits of social expression within the culture. Rather, the concept of liberty involves the freedom of the protean individual to create his own forum of selfhood or sexuality and his own lifestyle independent of the rooted claims of a prior or predetermined selfhood or the historical constraints of cultural norms. This individual is a cultural anarchist, relative to the presupposed structures that condition the forms of individuality in the conceptual framework of positive liberty; he is a formless pluralist, relative to the given inherited boundaries of the integral self that are assumed in the negative concept of liberty. The value ascribed to the creation of plural selves goes beyond resistance to governmental coercion or opposition to discrimination in the areas of private choice.

The third concept of liberty has had a particular impact on the political agenda because of its stress on pluralism and the inherent value of diversity. The changing political agenda requires that historical cultural institutions, such as traditional churches or conventional networks of voluntary association, should be reformed to enhance the possibility of plural lifestyles. Thus the issue in dispute in gender politics is no longer the right of consenting adults to enter into private sexual relationships, but the need to reform major institutions of the culture to enhance freedom of choice. Thus, one example is the claim that limiting the institution or sacrament of marriage to heterosexual individuals is a historical norm of the culture which involves an essential discrimination against freedom as the choice of plural lifestyles. Consequently, the legitimation of gay or lesbian marriage rites is asserted as an extension of nondiscrimination and as a requirement of liberty.

In the traditional view, based upon alleged biological facts of a given human nature, the procreation and associated rearing of children were related to heterosexuality. In terms of the third concept of liberty, with human nature represented as a product of choice rather than a biological given, this would be a discrimination against, or denial of, the free choice of gay or lesbian individuals. The legal reforms suggested are the legitimation of adoption or other strategies for parenting by nonheterosexual families. In one branch of feminist theory, the lifestyle of marriage asserts a choice which excludes any need for male participation. Thus, two women with access to a sperm bank or sperm donor could freely choose or create the process of partnership, deciding which partner should be obligated to give the fertilized ovum and which partner should be obligated to carry the fetus to term.

The interpretation of liberty as the freedom to create the self brings with it a change in the application of the concept of equality. In both liberal and conservative traditions of Western society, equality has been identified with a demand that there can be no discrimination based on irrelevant reasons, such as, as the formula goes, race, religion, or gender. Under this interpretation, egalitarianism would not be denied by a political order which discriminated for reasons such as talent, ability, performance, or even prior deprivation.

In Western societies, reasons that may be rooted in the recognized "givens" of biology or history have been judged to be relevant. Consequently, there has been a pattern of discrimination against the participation of women in combat infantry units or in the selection of families that lack a male father and a female mother to adopt infants. The third concept of liberty renders any proposed reasons rooted in biology or history irrelevant relative to the right of the person to exercise free choice in the creation of his identity. An extension of social egalitarianism follows from denying the relevance of biology or culture as grounds for discrimination. The consequent limit upon what may be considered relevant reasons for discrimination sets a political agenda which seeks to confront and revise the justification of traditional patterns, ranging from marriage and child-rearing to leadership in scouting, participation in athletics, or the obligations of military service. Thus, the replacement of a negative or positive concept of liberty by the third concept supports an alternative interpretation of equality.

2. New Patterns in Nationalist Movements

With each of the three concepts of liberty, there is a parallel justification of modern and contemporary nationalist movements. Excepting the conceptual perspective of negative liberty, the individual sovereign state assumes the role of the individual person whose integrity is to be protected from external coercion. In the theories of political sovereignty that emerged with the beginnings of the modern nation-state, a sovereign state was identified as an integral and inviolable member of an international system of recognized states. Each state had a fundamental right of self-defense against an aggressor. The fundamental duty of the sovereign state was defined in terms of the exercise of this right of self-defense and the protection of the national interest. This exercise was considered to be sufficient reason for the abrogation of the liberties of many citizens and individuals. Accordingly, the primacy of political freedom was identified with the preservation of the independence of the sovereign state from external acts of incursion or aggression. Within the international system, the idea of negative liberty is expressed in the formulation of non-aggression pacts among all established states whose sovereignty is absolute.

The shift from a negative to a positive concept of liberty can be traced in the changing political visions of the nature of the sovereign state. The seventeenth-century Enlightenment ideal was the achievement of a balance-of-power system among integral sovereign states. This rationalist idea was replaced by the nineteenth-century Romantic vision of the nation-state as the embodiment of the aspiration for self-determination of a historic People. The focus shifts from the protection of the existing sovereign states to the development of new states from their embryonic nationhood as derived from a common language or shared collective experience and memory. The processes which give birth to the new nation-state may involve acts of secession from the established political order, particularly against the traditional European multiethnic or multinational empires. The ideal of positive liberty is invoked in the justification of wars of national liberation and may be used to legitimate territorial transgression against established sovereignties. The justification of the newly created sovereign state is that it advances the positive liberty or self-realization of the group by expressing in political forms the latent identity of the historical people.

With the third concept of liberty, the possibilities of "constructed" nationalism have emerged. For this liberty involves the right to define oneself, leaving the group free to choose its own form of self-identification. On the basis of this self-identification, it can assert its claims for national self-determination with the accompanying claim for international recognition of its existence and rights. Accordingly, in national contexts, the conceptual interpretation of freedom as the right to create, invent, or choose one’s identity can serve to legitimate the aspiration to territorial sovereignty of the self-defined group.

In practice, the construction of a group identity often involves elements of continuity with historical origins. The demand for recognition of the rights of the newly self-defined group is usually connected to aspects of its historical experience and particularly with its assertion of its collective status as a victim of history. The understanding of the ideological shift to the third concept of liberty is relevant to the recent surge in new nationalist, as well as new secessionist, movements. While many of these are faithful to the pattern of nineteenth-century nationalism which embodied the positive concept of liberty, whether in Croatia or Slovakia, Kurdistan or Chechnya, other cases reflect the significance of constructed nationalism involving the third concept of liberty.

Among the diverse contemporary nationalist movements, two of the most prominent cases that exhibit the use of the third concept of liberty are the movements for Quebecois secession and for Palestinian statehood. Although these reflect very different historical experiences, a crucial element in each is the legitimation of the right to define forms of group identity.

The French population in Canada had, for centuries, asserted its role as an integral member of the Canadian nation. From its formation, the Canadian confederation was to be a bilingual state whose founding laws recognized the right to a separate cultural and religious development of the French-Canadian population. Within the Quebecois secessionist movement, there has been a denial or revision of that historical self-identification and the assertion of a right to develop a new group identity. The secessionist movement asserts a new identity for the Quebecois which rejects their continuation as a participant in the Canadian confederation and requires the creation of a new national sovereignty. There is, in part, a confirmation of the implicit recognition of a third concept of liberty in the nearly universal acceptance of the right of Quebec to secede from Canada subject to a popular referendum. There has been virtually no Lincolnesque anti-secessionist assertion of the indivisibility of the historic Canadian State and no manifestation of rhetoric about Canadian national destiny. The absence of principled objections to the right of a new national self-definition has not led to a secession since the practical realities of economic viability and political restructuring have raised barriers against such an accomplishment.

Historically, the Arab communities that inhabited the southern half of the Ottoman villayette of Bayreuth, which later became the Western half of the British mandate of Palestine, had rejected any attempt to separate them from Arab and Muslim communities in adjacent territories. Politically, their solidarity with the Arab and Muslim world with which they shared bonds of language, culture, and religion with the accompanying rejection of any self-identification as Palestinians led to their refusal to recognize a special status for the evolution of the British mandate of Palestine. Since the 1960s, however, this community has formulated a self-identity as the Palestinian people. The significance of this self-definition is recognized both by those who champion the new nationalist claims that are implied by such self-identification as well as by those who resist them. The widespread acceptance of their claims represents in part an implicit recognition of the right of any community, as in the third concept of liberty, to choose its own form of self-identification. The legitimation of that self-definition provides the basis for the expression of national self-determination in a new sovereign state. The absence of principled objections to the right of a new national self-definition does not resolve the practical dangers and problems which inhibit the successful emergence of new political arrangements in the Middle East.

The complex case histories of Quebecois secessionism or Palestinian nationalism are only two of a large number of nationalist movements that seem to have proliferated in the recent past. There are, of course, many diverse causes other than a change in the conceptual interpretation of freedom for the proliferation of these nationalist movements. No single cause could explain the persistent regeneration of historic nationalist movements such as the Basques and Corsicans in Europe, the Polisario and Ibo in Africa, the Timorese, the Tamil, the Sikhs, and the Uigur in Asia. The new international disorder that followed upon the breakdown of the binary blocks of the postwar world may represent a more significant causal factor. Yet the recognition that freedom involves a right to the adoption of national self-identification is a relevant factor in the growth of new, nationalist movements.

The philosophical anthropologist Ernest Gellner had speculated on the possibility that the number of members of the United Nations would eventually rise from the current 180 toward 8000, the number of identifiable language groups of the world. Gellner’s assumption is that language provides a basis for asserting a right to national self-definition. With the acceptance of a third concept of liberty, national self-determination could be claimed for an even greater number since historical and religious factors, as well as linguistic ones, could provide the basis for a group’s choice for self-definition.

Less abstractly, the third concept of liberty provides a basis for opposition to the obligations of identification with historically established states. In accordance with it, such obligations can be construed as acts of coercion by the ruling powers against the right of groups to assert their free choice of self-definition. This has led to the generation of continuing political conflict.

In a small number of cases, such conflict will be resolved by the emergence of new sovereign states. In others, the cultural assimilation of the minority to the majority will provide the resolution of the conflict. For the largest number of cases, the political arrangement will involve the recognition of plural ethnicities and cultures within the historical State. Consequently, the third concept of liberty finds its expression not only in nationalist movements for self-determination, but in the rights of groups to seek linguistic or cultural autonomy. The force of such a reinterpretation of freedom is to justify cultural autonomy for minority groups to the point of suggesting the reformulation of the terms of the social contract within traditional unitary nation-states.

3. The Third Concept of Liberty and Multiculturalism

Apart from the issues involved in the rise of new or "constructed nationalism" with their accompanying political controversies over the legitimacy of secession and of reconstituted State boundaries, the third concept of liberty has had a significant role in the cultural domain of single nation-states. An interpretation of liberty which stresses the right to create or choose the self without the constraints of a given tradition can justify an extension of cultural pluralism within the framework of a historical nation-state.

The three different patterns that have been noted in the politics of gender and in new forms of nationalism can also be exhibited in the sphere of contemporary cultural politics. According to the first pattern, the sovereign state asserted a claim of neutrality regarding the sphere of public culture. The liberal social contract was formed among individual citizens who possessed negative liberty, that is, the right to defend their own private self, property, religion, or culture. The sovereign exercised legitimate authority in the minimal spheres of governmental administration, but could not invade, in accordance with negative liberty, the sphere of the private individual. Consequently, culture or religion were, in theory, banished from the public domain but reserved for private expression. Every private individual and the voluntary associations constituted from such individuals were free to pursue their preferences in religion or their choices in education and culture.

Such a founding political theory which required the absence of any state-recognized religion or state-supported culture with the concomitant, naked public square was championed in theory but never realized in practice in many Western liberal states, including the United States of America. Despite the theory which assigned culture to the private domain, the language and religion of the historical majority occupied a dominant place in the public culture, which accommodated varying degrees of public expression of minority, religious, and social groups. Whatever the abstract theory of the social contract, the initiation of the individual into the obligations of citizenship involved a high degree of assimilation or integration into the common culture.

According to the second pattern, with the concept of positive liberty, the focus shifts away from preserving the wall of separation between the public and private domain toward a concern with the free development of the group which is identified as the bearer of historical self-consciousness. Characteristically, in liberal theories of democracy, this group is identified as the nation or the "People." The social contract was rewritten in cultural terms as a reciprocal agreement embodying positive liberty for all groups in the society. On the one hand, there was a cultural requirement that minorities be co-opted into the common civic, popular, or national culture; on the other hand, minorities were to willingly seek assimilation and participation in the inherited traditions of the cultural majority.

In terms of positive liberty, it is consistent with the free development of the society that minority groups be educated in the historically dominant or traditionally accepted language and culture. The caveat is the recognition that the concept of positive liberty has often involved the possibility, in Rousseau’s phrase, of "forcing" persons "to be free." Thus, in the name of national self-realization, Aborigine children were coercively separated from their natural families in order to undergo education and self-identification as citizens of Australia. More characteristically, as a matter of historical practice, there has been a high degree of symbiosis between the ways in which the majority culture integrates the minority and the willingness of the minority to assimilate.

With the development of the third concept of liberty, a third pattern emerges under which individual and minority groups are free to choose their own public identities. Accordingly, they are not required to maintain their cultural identity as a private domain which does not infringe on the public sphere. Nor is the minority required to enter into a kind of implicit contract with the traditions, values, sancta, or classics of the historical majority culture. The ideal of the national culture, in accordance with the third concept of liberty, is the recognition and advancement of plural languages and cultures in the public sphere.

Accordingly, the issue of cultural politics in democratic societies has become contested in terms of two options for the evolution of a historic people or nation. One view argues for the legitimacy and need for cultural assimilation as part of political integration and social cohesion. The competing view argues for the pursuit of diversity and the value of the preservation of plural, minority cultural expressions.

Advocates of multiculturalism who have argued for the equal rights of any chosen culture have also claimed special rights for the status of the cultural expression of identified "victim groups" in contemporary society, including the culture of women as a gender and selected minorities. From the muticulturalist perspective, the champions of the historical cultural tradition, like T. S. Eliot or Ralph Ellison, are viewed as the defenders of elitism and cultural domination in the guise of the supposedly universal standards of "high" culture. The multiculturalist contends that the assertion of universal standards is a mask for cultural coercion against the right to the freedom of self-identification and provides a spurious basis for the legitimation of discrimination against minority cultures. In terms of education, the imposition of a national or classical cultural curriculum is judged to be the expression of such coercion and discrimination.

The issue has been joined in contemporary debate, with particular focus on cultural studies in the university. Those who assert historical or classical standards consider the multicultural program to be a form of nihilism and relativism which denies objective cultural values as well as an abdication of educational standards. The counterclaim, sanctioned by the third concept of liberty, is that only an educational system which allows groups to select their own cultural icons and determine their own internal and authentic standards can be adopted in a free society.

Among Western societies, the American cultural paradigm had been formulated in terms of both negative and positive liberty. Constitutionally, the plurality of religious, linguistic, and cultural groups were legitimized as the rights of the private individual to exercise freedom. On the other hand, American national self-realization was to be achieved through a gradual, uncoerced process of cultural assimilation of minorities into the culture of the majority. To a remarkable degree, both of these approaches succeeded, particularly as the historically dominant culture of colonial Protestant America integrated successive waves of European ethnic communities.

In recent times, the third concept of liberty has been used by the more numerous and diverse immigrant groups as well as by the historically segregated black community. It has contributed to the challenge confronting such groups in the patterns of cultural integration into American society.

One simple historical illustration of the operation of the third concept of liberty that involves the right of self-definition is available in the changing practice of the United States Census. Previously, the Census required the "objective" classification of the race of the enumerated resident to be carried out by a presumably impartial and informed Census official. Since 1960, however, the individual resident is free to exercise his own racial self-identification in the Census. As of 2000, this exercise of choice can be pluralistic and permits the listing of more than one self-definition by race.

In the more complex ethnic and cultural contexts, this interpretation of liberty legitimates the right of a group to seek to transform its identity. Most dramatically, in the United States, there has been an exercise of choice by a significant part of the community once identified as "Negro" to choose to be Black or African-American and, with greater historical discontinuity and political significance, to cease to consider its religious heritage as Christian. There has been a movement to adopt and adapt variants of historical African and Islamic religions and to reconstruct and pursue the linguistic and cultural traditions which are assumed to follow from such self-identification. It is not yet clear whether this example is sui generis or represents a harbinger, model, or trend for the transformation of other ethnic and religious groups.

The educational implications of the third concept of liberty reach beyond the issue of cultural pluralism and cultural integration. In terms of a general approach to education, both the "traditional" school, which aimed at transferring the heritage of a historical culture to the next generation, and the "progressive" school, which aimed at fostering an environment in which the self develops its own given potentialities, represent constraints on freedom of choice. The third concept of liberty promotes a more variable sense of the options for individual lifestyles. The possibility of "dropping out" rather than striving to realize potential and the option of moving beyond reasoned criticism of the inherited social institutions in favor of an adversarial stance toward one’s own culture are legitimated. The legitimation of alternative lifestyles seems to have been taking place at a greater pace in Western society and education since the 1960s.

The case for diversity, whether of cultural identification or of lifestyle, is supported as a requirement of human freedom. Consequently, the constraints which are derived from a historical tradition, social unity, and cultural standards are judged to be secondary to the priority of freedom.

According to this analysis, the third concept of liberty serves as a kind of trumping suit against the alternative views in current disputes on issues of gender, nationalism, and culture. In light of the significant role played by the third concept of liberty in contemporary political and cultural life, the adequacy of this concept merits critical examination. The perennial challenges to any concept of liberty which are implicit in the constraints of nature, the irreversibility of history, and the inevitable need for balance in choosing among competing values merit restatement and review.

In many societies, the idea of freedom, often in association with a "dream of Reason," has been an instrument that projects a vision of human liberation from the bonds of nature or the constraints of history. In general terms, the vision of human liberation has included the claim that there can be an infinite extension of the natural resources available to human society and that there can be unlimited progression toward human perfectibility. Without evaluating such a general thesis of the scope of human freedom, the more particular thesis of the third concept of liberty has stressed the possibility of the transformation of human identity, both of the individual and of the group, despite the seeming limits of nature or the apparent givens of history. Yet any vision of liberation must confront the recognition of the "eternal verities" and platitudes about the ineradicable facts of nature and the burdens of history. The recognition of the truths that are embedded in platitudinous expressions about the ways in which nature and history circumscribe human transformation challenges the application of the third concept of liberty in any society.

The analysis of the third concept of liberty in relationship to the nature of human nature is continuous with the contemporary critique of the excesses of the utopian imagination in modern history. Again, without entering into the general question of the limits of human progress, we can ask whether specific programs of human transformation involve changes that would go beyond the limits of nature.

A significant illustration is the way in which one of the most prominent issues in the politics of identity—gender equality in military service—provides a reformulation of one of the earliest exercises of the utopian imagination. In Plato’s apparently utopian projection of an ideal political society in the Republic, he envisages women as front-line troops in defense of the city-state. Plato advances this conception in the context of the possibilities of education in transforming the human nature of the soldiers or guardians of the city. He assumes that gender differences are superficial, so that if women were to cut their hair short and men were to wear their hair long, they would become indistinguishable in the cadres of combat infantry. Plato’s hyperbolic language indicates his ironically skeptical attitude toward this transformation, yet his argument has provided a test case throughout historical speculation on natural constraints in planning ideal societies.

The current affirmative acceptance of Plato’s ironical perspective of the place of women in combat infantry may rest upon the belief that contemporary technology has changed the conditions of battlefield warfare from those of Plato’s era. The recognition that the change in the combat status of women reflects a change in the conditions of warfare may actually serve to reinforce the relevance of gender for military service. In those contemporaneous battlefield conditions which do not exhibit a technological revolution but which are continuous with those of previous eras, as in Chechnya, Sierra Leone, or Kosovo, the constraints of gender have not been rendered irrelevant.

Whether in the ancient and commonplace example derived from Plato’s utopian fable or in the sophisticated projections of genetic modifications of human beings, there remains the enduring possibility of natural limits. The fact that some or many of the ascriptions of gender differences as having a basis in nature represented a societal imposition of discriminatory prejudice does not render all such ascriptions illusory. Free choice must recognize the existence of the constraints of nature, even if the boundaries of such constraints are not fixed for eternity. The constraints embodying an understanding of the nature of things and the permanent characteristics of human nature remain a challenge to the third concept of liberty.

The third concept of liberty has served to revitalize and reinforce the aspirations of particular historical communities. The success of such transformation involves the recognition of the possibilities that are latent in the third concept of liberty. Yet the very success indicates a potential flaw in the application of this concept in contemporary politics of identity. For any such transformation has been achieved through great efforts over a significant historical span and cannot be easily reversed or readily changed by another application of the concept of the transformative freedom of the group to create its own identity.

The black community in the United States, for example, has succeeded in changing the stereotypical caricatures of the group’s identity, which had received a high degree of popularization and even a marginal degree of internal acceptance. These caricatures of black identity were replaced as part of a process of the transformation of the civic condition of the black community as well as of its self-identification. The further direction of this effort to transform black self-identification, whether along the lines of African nationhood or of Islamic religion, or along the lines of an ethnic group which parallels the career of other American ethnic groups in becoming co-opted into the civic culture of American society, remains an undetermined aspect of the current politics of identity. Any such transformation is not readily reversible, but becomes fixed by historical achievement. Accordingly, even with the successful realization of a historical transformation of group identity, the constraints that history imposes upon the freedom of self-transformation remain a challenge to any application of the third concept of liberty.

A similar illustration is the way in which the Zionist movement succeeded in transforming, at least in part, the religious status of the Jewish community into the condition of modern nationhood. Such a change of seemingly rooted characteristics of group identity can be represented as a demonstration of the way in which an option to create an alternative form of self-identification can be realized despite historical adversity. Yet the significant conceptual point is that after such a transformation has been achieved, the constraints of history have not been overcome. For the new condition must accept or come to terms with a new sense of the continuing burdens of history. In the case of the Zionists, the transformation to nationhood has placed upon successive generations the subsequent burdens of defense of a sovereign state, the establishment of a solvent economy, and the challenge of realizing treaties of peace with neighboring states. The third concept of liberty is challenged since after any transformation of the identity of the group, there is no release from the burdens imposed by history.

The admonition that one must beware of what one wishes for because the wish may be granted provides a cautionary tale for any application of the third concept of liberty to concrete historical circumstances. The interpretation of liberty as the freedom to create the identity of the self suggests an illusion that such a creation is a liberation from history. While it may mark a liberation from a particular set of historical circumstances, it can never provide a liberation from the limits which the new configuration of historical circumstances sets upon the possibilities of individual or group transformation.

Any concept of liberty functions in a context of plural values. The choice for the priority of liberty involves a balance with other values. Indeed, one justification of the priority of liberty is that only in a free society can there be an open and critical examination of competing values so that an optimal balance can be reached. The justification of freedom presupposes some value that can be assigned to the ends for which freedom is a means.

In the effort to realize a balance among plural values, there is always the possibility that liberty, like competing values such as civic order or economic equality, will be subject to compromise for the achievement of an optimal societal outcome. The person who would strive for freedom in the sense of personal independence has weighed this achievement against the values of the condition of dependence, often security of status and paternalistic guidance. Similarly, the community that insists on freedom of speech recognizes that there are some values connected with the boundaries of free speech, whether these are drawn in terms of the protection of privacy, the defense of standards of morality, or even the recognition of the necessities of national security. A society which adopted a conception of liberty under which liberty could never be constrained would probably so undermine its own social cohesion that it would not be able to realize the practice of liberty. The exercise of liberty always involves some calculation of the benefits to be realized weighed against the costs.

The creation of any new group identity in the context of identity politics involves some weighing or balancing of the advantages and disadvantages of any particular choice. Accordingly, those who champion liberty as the exercise of free choice in the creation of a group’s identity must evaluate the consequences and prices of every particular choice as set against alternative paths for the realization of the ends and interests of the members of the group. The application of the third concept of liberty in practice necessarily requires the recognition that all human ideals are limited because human society can never be a monolithic expression of a single value, but embodies plural values.

Like the recognition of the inevitability of the facts of nature and the constraints of history, the realization that a choice among alternative ends is unavoidable in the exercise of human freedom is a truism. Yet truisms or platitudes demand affirmation in those contexts where they are being denied. For in the contemporaneous politics of identity, there have been various ideologies of liberation that assert claims which contradict the platitudes of nature, history, and plural ends. Yet it is relevant to note that truistic statements have taken on the character of platitudes because they embody enduring truths about the human condition.

The third concept of liberty represents a formulation of the perennial ideal of freedom that has special bearing in the peculiar circumstances of our own age. In the new international context, after the rigidities of the long struggle between two antagonistic power blocs, there has been increased room for change in the formerly fixed boundaries of national and ethnic self-identification. In a period of global economic transformation with rapid advances in information technology, there has been greater space for individual self-definition. Yet whether that torch of liberty will function as a guiding light or as a burning sun will depend upon the ways in which its application is carried out with an awareness of the bonds of nature, the burdens of history, and the plurality of values that are implicit in the achievement of a free society.