DAVID SIDORSKY
The Third Concept of Liberty and the Politics
of Identity
I
NTERPRETATIONS 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 aspira–
tions 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 coloniza–
tion was a dominating political fact, the question of freedom was for–
mulated in terms of national independence. The great force of the idea
of freedom in contemporary political controversy still reflects its funda–
mental priority derived from the struggle against the blight of slavery in
antiquity or from the confrontation with the ravages of imperial domi–
nation in the ancient world.
Since the I960s, the right and the ability to choose to create one's
own self, that is, to construct a preferred identity, whether of the indi–
vidual 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 I960s 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 formula–
tion in Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty." Berlin's interpretation
was formula ted near the end of the I 95 os and represented a rare
