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PARTISAN REVIEW
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 eco–
nomic 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 exploita-
