The idea seems to have got around that there is something seriously and obviously wrong with negative liberty. Negative liberty means freedom to act without hindrance; those who love it demand a state whose citizens are able to pursue their various ends without government interference or direction.

I have heard it asserted that it promotes selfishness; that it tends towards anarchy; even that it was invented during the cold war by thinkers who denied that humans ever have altruistic or idealistic ends. And many politicians reject a minimalist conception of state activity. Government ministers describe “happiness” as a legitimate political end; even Conservatives say that the state should care less about measurable prosperity and more about “wellbeing”. But the philosophical roots of negative liberty are deeper and older than its modern critics think. 

There are two opposing philosophical theories of freedom. One view— Kant’s—is that when you act freely you are not like an animal: you step back from your own desires or inclinations and are motivated instead by “reason”. The idea has some psychological resonance: on occasions when you overcome intermittent impulses to smoke, we naturally say that your “better” or rational part—and not just another desire—is what moves you. On other occasions we say you are “overcome” by desire. It is tempting to think that that isn’t just a metaphor.

On this “positive” conception freedom is not doing what you want: it is following the counsel of reason. And if, as Kant thought, reason speaks the same to all men, it follows that all free men will agree on what to do when faced with a given choice. It is therefore compatible with this “positive” liberty that men are forced to act against their own inclinations in favour of social aims, for instance forced not to smoke. Such coercion actually liberates them from the passions that would otherwise enslave them. As Berlin says, this idea animated Jacobins and Communists alike; to see what love of positive liberty can actually justify we therefore need look no further than Soviet Russia or Revolutionary France.

 But there is another (I think better) view of freedom. It says that we are really just intelligent animals. Reason alone is impotent; all actions are driven by desires, ultimately irrational biological drives. It is not that abstention from smoking is free because it especially involves exercise of rationality. Abstention and indulgence are both free: in one case the drive for the drug wins out and in the other case the desire (as it might be) for physical health. This picture owes something to Hume; also to certain philosophers of the French Enlightenment. 

But is this really freedom? If drives or appetites produce behaviour, and if these in turn are determined by chemical processes beyond your control, how is behaviour ever more free than when it is instinctive? It is irrelevant that modern quantum theory denies the strict determinacy of physical processes (if it does): if externally determined desires could not generate free actions then neither could they do this if they were random.

Empiricist philosophers—Russell, Ayer, Hume, Locke, and above all Hobbes—have said more than enough to answer this objection, which confuses freedom of the will with freedom of action. It may be true—if it means anything—to say that the will is unfree; it hardly follows that actions are. To act freely is to do what you want because you want to do it. And a free man, as Hobbes says, “is he that is not hindered to do what he hath the will to do.” Hence freedom is the freedom to act on your drives, whatever they may be. Since every man has different drives it is therefore inevitable that men in a free society will not normally act on any single common purpose. That is the truth in Mrs Thatcher’s remark that there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families.

We are really just intelligent animals. Reason alone is just impotent.

Now liberty in this sense cannot be untrammelled without, so to speak, frustrating itself. If I am stronger than you, and if my interests demand the use of your unwilling labour, then complete freedom to pursue my aims will deprive you of yours. The state is there to prevent this: it has a coercive power whose use or threat prevents citizens from compromising one another’s liberty. Thus the universality of freedom places an upper limit on its individual exercise that the state and its agents have the power to enforce. Far from tending towards anarchy, negative liberty demands the existence of strict rules and of a state with power to enforce them.

But it also demands that those powers be limited. For the state has the power to override our ends for its, for instance to direct industrial output in pursuit of a social or economic plan. As well as the guarantor of liberty, the state is the greatest threat to it. The solution is the Rule of Law. It is in Dicey’s words the absolute supremacy of regular law as opposed to the existence of arbitrary power; it excludes the existence of arbitrariness, or prerogative, or even of wide discretionary authority on the part of the government.

In effect this means that laws are, or ought to be, a formal and impersonal framework by which government can regulate means but never dictate ends. As Hayek says: “While every law restricts individual freedom to some extent by altering the means which people may use in the pursuit of their aims, under the Rule of Law the government is prevented from stultifying individual efforts by ad hoc action.” As a safeguard of liberty the principle predates and supersedes democracy; and like those of democracy, Hayek sees its roots in Athens, to whose citizens Solon gave “not so much control of public policy as the certainty of being governed legally in accordance with known rules”.

So much for what negative liberty is; why is it a good thing? A society of atomic individuals pursuing various ends might seem like an army without a general. You would have thought that directed and cooperative effort towards a single end is more likely to advance social welfare than free and competitive efforts towards many. Certainly the rationalist philosophers did, e.g. Descartes, who said (in the Discourse on Method): “There is seldom so much perfection in works composed of many separate parts, upon which different hands have been employed, as in those completed by a single master… The pre-eminence of Sparta was due… to the circumstance that, originated by a single individual, [its laws] all tended to a single end.”

But that is wrong. The great discovery that Mandeville presented with such force (in the Fable of the Bees), and then Adam Smith with such detail and clarity (in The Wealth of Nations), was that society’s needs are in fact best served by individuals pursuing their own interests in a context of economic liberty and not the perceived needs of society at the state’s behest. This is certainly surprising. But what philosophical thesis has history confirmed so well? Western economic growth in the last four hundred years, and the associated rise in living standards—greater by far than what had hitherto occurred in the entirety of history—is owed not to any single social plan or guiding political mind but to economic atoms freely pursuing their interests. It is facile to object that economic growth does not seem to make people any happier. Economic growth makes the difference between being unhappy because famine has wiped out your family and being unhappy because you can’t afford a new television.

It is a common misconception that a free society so conceived must be selfish. If each person pursues his own aims and not—except by accident—those of “society”, is he not selfish? It is true that eighteenth century writers used phrases like “self-love” or “selfish interests” as catch-all terms for the drives that on the present picture motivate all actions. But that is irrelevant: as far as his negative liberty is concerned it does not matter whether a man’s “self-interest” includes, as it normally will, desires for the welfare of others eg his family. What matters is that he can act on these desires to the best of his knowledge and ability. To treat negative liberty as an excuse for egotism is to confuse the truism that your desires always belong to you with the absurdity that they only ever concern you.

Negative liberty expresses a metaphysical theory of freedom. What commends it is the theory that society’s ends are best met, not consciously through state planning and intervention, but spontaneously through self-directed individual efforts. Whether these theories are true is an interesting question; certainly I think them closer to the truth than their rationalist competitors. But the current reaction against negative liberty and an atomistic society seems to recognize none of this. It owes more to misunderstanding and emotion than to either reason or experience.

Dr Arif Ahmed is a lecturer in the department of philosophy.