DAVID SIDORSKY
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moment of balance in the contest over the priority of each of these con–
cepts that had marked modern European and American history.
The first concept of liberty, termed "negative liberty" by Berlin, iden–
tified 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 neg–
ative liberties of the individual had been eroded in the ideological and
political conflicts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These liber–
ties 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 nec–
essary 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 con–
ceptual 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 individ–
ual 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 indi–
vidual or group was to be considered free if it could realize its poten–
tialities, 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 uncon–
trolled passion, enslaving addictions, or the shackles of ignorance and
false belief. This tradition provides a basis for a conceptual reformula–
tion 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 sover–
eign 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.
