DAVID SIDORSKY
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tive 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 capital–
ist 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 egalitar–
ian society. Despite this formulation of the "withering away" of the
need or use for negative liberties, when Josef Stalin decided to promul–
gate 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 Marx–
ist theory. Yet the grounds for this abstention were not the classic Marx–
ist 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 nec–
essary 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 pre–
pared 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.
