Q. After having completed an extensive program of reading great conservative works, how can you still be a liberal?The negative liberty/positive liberty contrast is as neat a brief definition as one can find. He is also correct that few of us are purists in that, but sit along a continuum.
A. As Isaiah Berlin pointed out, what separates us at the most fundamental level may be our different conceptions of liberty. Conservatives value above all else what Berlin called the negative vision of liberty, namely, freedom from coercion. Liberals are more willing to balance that against the positive vision of liberty — that is, having a reasonable opportunity to realize one’s potential. The negative vision focuses conservatives on restricting the government’s ability to interfere in people’s lives. The positive vision leads liberals to believe that government has a role in guaranteeing baseline minimums in education, medical care, and healthy communities. Most of us probably accept both visions to some extent, but how we balance the two may be built into our DNA...
Monday, July 18, 2011
A Liberal Reads Right
National Review Online has an interview with a liberal, a New England professor even, who wrote a biography of William F Buckley Jr, and in the course of that, read conservative writers extensively. His comments seem just, and it is nice in any event to have a different set of eyes on the same material.
That is a summary that should be widely disseminated. It actually gives credit to both sides for good intentions and intelligent reasoning, rather than demeaning and name-calling.
ReplyDeleteFor that reason, it will not be accepted by virtually anyone in the current climate. Such talk cannot improve either broadcast ratings or search engine results.
Yes, and he doesn't call us evil. Nice.
ReplyDeleteThat was exactly my reaction: he's found a way of describing the divide that doesn't demean either extreme -- other than the apparently irresistible urge to call one negative and the other positive.
ReplyDeleteAnother thought -- he sees that conservatives view coercion from government as the evil most likely to restrict liberty in our lives. I have to wonder what force he thinks it is that restricts the "opportunity to reach our potential"? His examples concern education, personal health, and public health. Granted, the path to personal fulfillment may depend heavily on finding the means to address ignorance and illness, but that doesn't address the proper role of government in the effort.
ReplyDeleteI first encountered the discussion of these two different conceptions of liberty in something I read or heard in graduate school while reading a book by some sociologists that a classmate had lent me. Of course, being that it was graduate school (and that the book in question was written by a sociologist) the leftist conception of "positive" liberty was presented as being more "mature" than the "negative" vision of liberty. It sounds like, in this presentation at least, he's managed to sidestep some of that judgementalism, but I think it's still implicit in the distinction. (Upon further reflection, I remembered that the book, in question was Habits of the Heart by Robert Bella et al, and it was originally published in 1985. I also seem to recall having seen or heard about the distinction again in a discussion of Frances Moore Lappe's book called Rediscovering America's Values.)
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