DAVID SIDORSKY
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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. Conser–
vative theorists may interpret the way in which genetic factors influ–
ence outcomes as a significant substantiation of the Burkean thesis of
the lack of realism about human nature in theories of political utopi–
anism 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 cho–
sen by the development of techniques of genetic modification may rein–
force 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 per–
son 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 signifi–
cant 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 Wag–
nerian version of an ancient Teutonic past. From a traditional point of
view, such inventions represent fictions which will not withstand ulti–
mate 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 exis–
tentialist 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
