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PARTISAN REVIEW
positive and negative liberty. The third concept of liberty has reemerged
in the politics of identity since the 1960s.
THE REDISCOVERY OF THE THIRD CONCEPT of liberty took place with the
change in political climate that characterized the dramatic and self–
declared revolutionary activities of the 1960s. The sanctioning of an
intellectual revolt against all forms of established authority makes pos–
sible the rejection of the two more traditional concepts of liberty with
their reliance on the givens of self and of history. In a philosophical and
literary context, the view that history is a "given" has been confronted
by the postmodernist thesis of Jacques Derrida that any historical nar–
rative can be "deconstructed" so that the record of the "given" is open
to contrary interpretation. Similarly, in the postmodernist investigations
of Michel Foucault, any norm which is sanctioned by authority can be
considered arbitrary because of its connection to a historical culture of
domination.
The political context for such a concept of freedom is no longer that
of the division between two power blocs that could be identified with
championing either negative liberty or positive liberty. Rather, it points
to the rejection of both camps in their ideological confrontation. With
the actual end of this confrontation, the fixed lines of cohesion lessened,
giving more scope to the possibilities of the new politics of identity.
An interpretation of liberty derived from the legitimacy of human
choice moved to the foreground. The legitimation of these new patterns
of identification has been the focus of political change in diverse areas,
including (1) new directions in sexual or gender politics,
(2)
new pat–
terns in nationalist movements, and (3) the advocacy of multicultural
educational curricula against the tradition of teaching the historical cul–
tural heritage.
(1)
New Directions in Sexual or Gender Politics
The traditional political agenda of the movement for women's eman–
cipation had stressed the continuity between the rights which the State
should grant to women and the natural rights ascribed to all human
beings in a free society. The right to women's suffrage or the right of
women to inherit and control property, for example, was viewed as a
rectification of the exclusion of women as bearers of rights accorded to
all other human beings or to fellow citizens. Within this agenda of for–
mal equality, there was also a demand for the recognition of the special
needs or welfare rights of women, as a group, in light of the history of
