Liberty: Incorporating "Four Essays on Liberty"

The Sophists are relativists, egalitarians, pragmatists, atheists, but for the most part, at any rate towards the end of the fifth century, they are not individualists. They want to alter society, not concentrate attention upon the individual and his character and needs. They differ about what kind of society is the most rational. They wish to eliminate mere traditional survivals. They criticise institutions for which they see no good reason, but not institu­tional life as such. Some appear to be democrats, some are not. It is one of the great paradoxes of history that the democracy that is Athens' greatest political glory was defended by so few that almost every writer who has survived is in some degree an enemy or a critic of it. The ideal is isonomia, equality before the laws - 'the most beautiful of all names', as Herodotus makes Otanes call it[120] - or eunomia, good order, a conservative slogan. Equality is defended against tyranny and arbitrary rule. Aristotle thinks that a State is satisfactory in which men rule and are ruled in turn/ while the cynical Antiphon wonders whether any man would not prefer to rule unjustly rather than be ruled justly by others.

There is no trace here of genuine individualism, the doctrine that there are personal values - pleasure, or knowledge, or friendship, or virtue, or self-expression in art or life - to which political and social arrangements should be subordinated: for which they create a pedestal, a means however indispensable, but still only a means. The assumption is, on the contrary, that all these values can be realised only within and as part of the life of the Greek polis. To ignore social arrangements, to profit by them, is not a normal frame of mind. Even Thrasymachus, who thinks that justice is the interest of the stronger, does not imply that life outside the intimate association of masters and slaves is conceivable. Callicles in Plato's Gorgias speaks for the bold, unscrupulous, self-seeking, gifted egoist who sweeps aside the institutions of the city like cobwebs and tramples on them and does as he likes - that is, might is right: nature demands despotism, not individualism. Lactantius is right in thinking Socrates does not win the argument against Thrasymachus and his like; the common opinion which he mar- shalls against him is not enough against violent individualism of this type. But Plato evidently thought that he had refuted the claims of these egomaniacs, with their distorted view of the facts, which would cost them dear in the end.

At this point it may be asked whether I have forgotten the greatest of all professions of political faith, the funeral speech of Pericles as reported by Thucydides, incomparably the greatest statement of its kind in the whole of our history. Certainly, Pericles says, Athens differs from Sparta in that 'we live as free citizens, both in our public life and in our attitude to one another in the affairs of daily life; we are not angry with our neighbour if he behaves as he pleases, we do not cast sour looks at him, which if they can do no harm nevertheless can cause pain'.[121] There is a similar remark, less nobly expressed, in the speech of Nikias to the dispirited, defeated Athenian troops in Sicily in 416 bc.[122] Euripides also speaks up for freedom of speech/ and Demosthenes says: 'In Sparta you are not allowed to praise the laws of Athens, or of this State or that; far from it, you have to praise what agrees with their constitution';[123] whereas in Athens free criticism of constitutions is evidently permitted.

What does this come to? Pericles says that some States are more liberal than others: not, as he has all too often been interpreted, that in Athens individuals have rights, natural or State-conferred, to speak as they please or act as they please within certain limits, with which the State has no right to interfere. This is the view advanced by Gomme, but he seems to be mistaken. No doubt the individual did 'have ample freedom in private life'/ no doubt there were protests from the conservatives, such as Aristotle's disapproval of men 'who live as they please' - as Euripides says, 'each according to his fancy" - or Plato's disgust with the city that has so much variety, so many foreigners, women and slaves who get above themselves and presume to behave almost like citizens. The pseudo-Xenophontic Constitution of Athens launches a diatribe against resident foreigners and slaves. Isocrates complains that there is not enough moral control over private lives, that the Areopagus should reassert its ancient authority in these matters. All this implies that life in Athens was a good deal freer, that there was more variety, perhaps more chaos than in totalitarian Sparta or perhaps other more tightly organised, more militarised States. But what Pericles is saying, in effect, is what any headmaster proud of the spirit of his school, any commander proud of the spirit of his army, might well say: We do not need compulsion. What other States have to force their citizens to do, ours perform because they are truly devoted to their city, because they are spontaneously loyal, because their lives are bound up with their city, in which they all have faith and pride.

It is a far cry from this to the assertion of the rights of the individual. Schoolboys, however lightly ruled, have no rights against the masters. The school may take pride in the fact that it does not need to threaten or bully, punish or intimidate, but it is the collective spirit of the school, the solidarity of its members, that is being praised: the Athenian State was the object of its own worship and upon its altar men were, if Pericles is to be believed, ready to sacrifice themselves. But to sacrifice oneself freely is still to sacrifice oneself, uncoerced surrender is still surrender; and vice and error are still defined in terms of each man pulling in his own direction, satisfying his own individual nature. Thucydides likes Pericles and does not like Cleon. Demosthenes believes in political freedom, freedom from rule by other States - say, Macedon - and so does Pericles, and all the great Athenians. Some believe in a loose texture, some in a tight one, but there is no note of individualism here, of the value of the State consisting in what it contributes to the individual satisfactions of its individual mem­bers. They are to lay down their lives for it; it has no duties, only claims; they have no claims against it, only duties. But in a well- organised, harmonious State, such as Pericles tries to represent Athens as being, claims are not pressed; they are satisfied spontane­ously, and no one scowls at his neighbour for being different from himself. Variety versus uniformity, spontaneity versus coercion, loyalty versus tyranny, love instead of fear: these are the Periclean ideals. However attractive they may be found, they are not identical either with individualism or (a much later stage of human development) with the notion of the right of the individual against encroachment by the State - the staking out of a claim to the sacrosanct area within which he literally can do as he pleases, however foolish, eccentric, outrageous his conduct.

That is the testimony of the major authors. There are some dissident voices; they are few and far between, and I shall have occasion to mention them later. Aristotle may have been an old- fashioned conservative towards the end of his life, but it is his view of the nature of society - the harmonious social whole, pursuing goals implanted in it by nature herself, to which every element must be subordinated, so that ethics and politics are wholly social and educational, as explained in his treatises on what the relation­ships are between the natural purposes of the various constituents of society, and how they may be made to perform their functions, their natural functions, as effectively and richly as possible - it is that vision that has bound its spell on the ancient world, the middle ages, and on a good many modern societies since his day.

At this point there is a most surprising development. Aristotle died in 322 bc. Some sixteen years or so later, Epicurus began to teach in Athens, and after him Zeno, a Phoenician from Kition in Cyprus. Within a few years theirs are the dominant philosophical schools in Athens. It is as if political philosophy had suddenly vanished away. There is nothing about the city, the education of citizens to perform their tasks within it, bad and good constitu­tions - nothing at all about this.¹ Nothing about the need for hierarchies or their dangers; nothing about the value of small organised communities, of extrovert social life as the mark and criterion of human nature; nothing about how to train specialists in governing men, or about the organisation of life so that unequal gifts are appropriately rewarded, with the explanation that different constitutions place different emphasis on different types of gift and character. Personal ethics are no longer deduced from social morality, ethics are no longer a branch of politics, the whole no longer precedes the parts, the notion of fulfilment as necessarily social and public disappears without a trace. Within twenty years or less we find, in place of hierarchy, equality; in place of emphasis on the superiority of specialists, the doctrine that any man can

' It is possible that Berlin might have wished to qualify this to some degree to take account of Zeno's Republic, a response (of which only fragments survive) to Plato's work of the same title. See Malcolm Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City (Cambridge etc., 1991). Ed.

discover the truth for himself and live the good life as well as any other man, at least in principle; in place of emphasis on intellectual gifts, ability, skill, there is now stress upon the will, moral qualities, character; in place of loyalty, which holds small groups together, groups moulded by tradition and memories, and the organic fitting-in of all their parts and functions, there is a world without national or city frontiers; in place of the outer life, the inner life; in place of political commitment, taken for granted by all the major thinkers of the previous age, sermons recommending total detach­ment. In place of the pursuit of grandeur, glory, immortal fame, nobility, public spirit, self-realisation in harmonious social action, gentlemanly ideals, we now have a notion of individual self- sufficiency, praise of austerity, a puritanical emphasis on duty, above all constant stress on the fact that the highest of all values is peace of soul, individual salvation, obtained not by knowledge of an accumulating kind, not by the gradual increase of scientific information (as Aristotle taught), nor by the use of sensible judgement in practical affairs, but by sudden conversion - a shining of the inner light. Men are distinguished into the converted and the unconverted. There are to be no intermediate types - they are either saved or not saved, either wise or stupid. One either knows how to save one's soul or one does not. One can be drowned as easily in a foot of water as in many fathoms, said the Stoics. One is either in Canopus or outside it: to be an inch outside and many miles outside are equally not to be in Canopus - all or nothing. It is something like the sudden puritanism following the Elizabethan Age.

For the older of the two teachers, Epicurus, the State hardly exists. The problem is how to avoid being hurt, how to escape misery. Reality - nature - is governed by iron laws which men cannot possibly alter. You cannot destroy or avoid nature, but you can avoid colliding with it unnecessarily. What makes men unhappy? Fear of the gods, superstition, fear of death, fear of pain - whence all the elaborate ritual, propitiation, obedience to the infernal powers that is called religion. But what if the gods, even if they do exist, take no interest in men, but live blissfully in their own remote world, unconcerned with affairs on earth? If fear of the gods goes, the burden is much lightened. As for pain, skilful management will diminish that too, both for me and for my neighbours. If the pain is intolerably intense it will not last long and death will release me; if it lasts it cannot be intense, and by living carefully, following the prescriptions of nature, one can avoid pain and disease. What remains of life? Happiness, peace, inner harmony. How may it be obtained? Not by seeking wealth, power, recognition, for these expose you to competition and all the sweat and toil of the arena. Public life brings more pains than pleasures; its rewards are not worth having, for they merely multiply your anxieties. Avoid situations in which you become liable to pain. All men are vulnerable: they must contract the vulnerable surface that may be wounded by other men or by things and events. This must be done by avoiding all forms of commit­ment. Epicurus preaches passionately, as a man who wishes to suppress all passions as sources of pain and trouble, against what today is called an engage attitude to politics. Lathe biosas:^[ get through life as obscurely as you can. Seek to avoid notice and you will not be hurt. Public life holds out rewards that are only a painful delusion. Be like an actor.2 Play the part that has been set up for you, but do not identify yourself with it. Above all, no enthusiasm, pas trop de zele. Pay taxes, vote, obey orders, but withdraw into yourself. 'Man is not by nature adapted for living in civic communities.'³ 'Confront every desire with the question: What do I gain by gratifying it, and what shall I lose by crushing it ? '⁴

Should one be just? Yes, because if you cheat - break rules - you may be discovered, and others may, because they are not dispas­sionate sages like you, punish you or at least hate you; and if you are haunted by the fear of being exposed, this will ruin your pleasures. There is no value in justice as such; justice is only a means of avoiding too much friction with others, of getting along. The reason for it is utility: all society is founded upon a social contract whereby arrangements are made which make it possible for human beings not to get in each other's way too much.

And knowledge? Is that desirable? Certainly, for only in this way will you know what to do and what to avoid if you are to attain to peace and contentment. 'Vain is the word of the philo­sopher which heals not the suffering of man.'5 This might well be the motto of the Rockefeller Foundation today. Knowledge is not an end in itself; nothing is an end in itself except individual happiness, and this is to be obtained by reliable goods - the love of friends, which is a positive source of pleasure, the joys of private life.

Should wealth be sought? Not as such, for that leads to fears, conflicts, but if it comes your way it is unreasonable to reject it. The wise man should be able to do with bread and water, but if luxuries come his way, why should he not accept them too? Public life is a snare and a delusion, and you should participate in it only if you need to - to avoid pain - or if you happen to have a restless temperament, or enjoy it: that is, if it offers some kind of opiate to you which other things do not. You cannot obtain all that you want: to want and not to get is to be a slave to desires, to be tossed about by forces stronger than yourself. Since you cannot get what you want, you must try to want only what you can get - you cannot manipulate the universe, but you can manipulate your own psychological states, within limits. Try not to want something that may easily be taken away from you. 'There is but one way to freedom: to despise what is not in our power." What you cannot get is not worth striving for.

There are two ways of being happy - by satisfying desires and by eliminating them. The first can be achieved only on a modest scale, since we are neither omniscient nor omnipotent, and facts are as they are and cannot be changed much; the second way is the only way to peace and independence. Independence is everything: the two great Epicurean words are autarkeia and ataraxia - self- sufficiency and imperturbability. And social life? And the glory of the city? And great dangers bravely faced? And Alexander in his plumed helmet mowing down the slaves of the King of Persia? These are not roads to permanent happiness. They merely excite the desires and make you seek for more and more, and enslave you more and more hopelessly to vast unfulfillable ambitions, and expose you to hopes and fears which do not let you rest. The greatest achievement of a man is to teach himself not to mind. That is the lesson to be drawn from the life of Socrates, not social arrangements or the value of mathematics as a path to metaphysical truth. You have not long to live and might as well arrange yourself as comfortably as possible in your own corner of the world. If you

' Encheiridion 19. 2.

do not interfere with others, or envy or hate them, or seek to alter their lives against their wishes, or try for power, you will get by.

This combination of belief in rationalism, which liberates one from fanaticism and anxiety, and belief in utilitarianism and personal relationships as the supreme good in life is a doctrine familiar whenever the stresses of life become too much for distinguished and sensitive persons. It is a form of retreat in depth, retreat into the inner citadel of the inviolable individual soul, so protected by fortitude and reason that nothing can upset it, or wound it, or throw it off its balance. Godwin believed something of the kind and imparted it to Shelley, in whose Platonism it plays a part. In our own day it constituted the morality of a good many English and, perhaps, some French and American intellectuals before and after 1914 - rationalist, anti-clerical, pacifist, contemp­tuous of the pursuit of reputation or wealth - who believed above all in personal relationships and aesthetic enjoyment, friendship and the production and enjoyment of beauty, and the pursuit of the unvarnished truth as alone worthy of human beings. Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, the philosopher G. E. Moore, in his earlier years Maynard Keynes believed something of this kind. When E. M. Forster declared shortly before the last war, 'if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country',[124] this was a militant expression of the Epicurean creed - a total reversal of previous Greek beliefs. 'A study of the laws of nature creates men of haughty independence of mind [sobroi and autarkeis] who pride themselves on the goods proper to man [idioi agathoi], not to circumstances.'[125] Public life is part of circumstances, not of the individual. The State is an instrument and not an end. Personal salvation is all that matters. The doctrine is one of liberation through self-sufficiency. This is indeed a transvaluation of values.

The Stoics were, of course, more influential than the Epicureans. Zeno, who established himself in Athens at the turn of the fourth century, was a foreigner, a Phoenician from Cyprus who taught that wisdom consisted of inner freedom, which could be obtained only by eliminating the passions from one's constitution. The world was a rational pattern and order, and since man by nature was a rational creature, to understand this order was to recognise its beauty and its necessity - the laws of reason were graven in deathless letters upon our deathless reason.[126] If only you could rid yourself of the influences that ruined you - errors about the world, induced by stupidity or ignorance or a bad and corrupt condition - you would become invulnerable to that which made other men vicious and unhappy. To understand the world truly is to under­stand that everything in it is necessary, and what you call evil is an indispensable element in a larger harmony. To achieve this under­standing is to cease to feel the common desires, fears, hopes of mankind, and dedicate yourself to a life led in accordance with reason or nature - which to Zeno are the same, for nature is the embodiment of the laws of universal reason. The Stoic sage observes that reason governs the world. If pain is part of the design, it must be embraced; your will must be adjusted to it. 'Do your worst, pain,' exclaimed the Stoic Posidonius when racked by mortal disease; 'no matter what you do, you cannot make me hate you.'2

Since any man can grasp the rational necessity of whatever occurs, there is no need to achieve harmony, stability, peace of mind for that minimum of material health and wealth that Aristotle admitted to be necessary for happiness. King Priam, however brave and good, could not achieve happiness, according to Aristotle, because his misfortunes were too great; according to the Stoics, he could. The only thing that is real is the basic reason that goes through nature and men. Why collect details of 257 constitutions in order to find out what suits what kinds of men, where, in what climates, with what traditions - when all men are fundamentally the same, and we can discover a priori, by training the reason within us to grasp the eternal laws of the world, what we must do to be at harmony with ourselves and the external world, rather than learn this by the uncertain inductive path chosen by the Peripatetics? How do we know what is certain? Because sometimes something 'almost takes hold of us by the hair . . . and drags us to assent'.³ Some truths are incorrigible and irresistible. It is easier to be harmonious and at peace in some circumstances than in others: if gold had not been dug up or luxuries brought by ships from abroad, there would be more simplicity and peace, but even in the

' Stoicorum veterum fragmenta (hereafter SVF) iii 360.

' loc. cit. (p. 3 i above, note i) = Edelstein-Kidd T3 8.

' Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos 7 (Adversus lagicos i). 2 57.

sophisticated and corrupt Athens of the beginning of the third century, discipline over emotion can be obtained, and one can make oneself impervious to the evil will of men or the blows of fortune. The ship must be wholly sealed from leaking - allow the faintest crack through which feelings might seep and you are sunk.

The ideal is apathia - passionlessness. The Stoic sage is impass­ive, dry, detached, invulnerable; he alone is king, priest, master, god. Like the Pharisees to whom Josephus compares them, the Stoic sages were accused of coldness, hypocrisy, pride, disdain, pretentiousness. The movement had its martyrs: since misery resulted only from deviation from reason, from over-attachment to persons or things, if circumstances became too evil or the tyrant too brutal and menacing, you could always escape the con­sequences by freely taking your own life. The Stoics did not advocate suicide, but neither did they preach against it. A rational man dies when life according to reason becomes impossible, because his faculties have decayed too far or life can be bought at too irrational a price. Man is a dog tied to a cart; if he is wise he will run with it. (That is called following nature - being rational and wise. If he is unwise it will drag him and he will run with it willy- nilly.)

What are the political doctrines of the early Stoics? Only the wise can live in peace and concord. They can live in any city; it doesn't matter where, for being passionless they will feel no special attachment to any body of men. The ideal dwelling-place will have no temples to the gods, no statues of them, no law courts, no gymnasia, no armies or warships or money, for the wise do not need these things; if you live in the light of reason, the conflicts, the fears and hopes that lead to the erection of these institutions will melt away. Zeno advocates total sexual freedom: all children shall be children of all the inhabitants. In the proper human life, according to Zeno, 'We should not live by cities or demes, severally divided according to our own idea of what is just, but should consider that all men are demesmen and fellow citizens; there should be one life and one world, just as of a herd feeding together, nurtured by a common pasture." This is the world of good men; only they can enjoy love, friendship, inner and outer harmony.

This is what Zeno preached; and, Plutarch exclaimed enthusiasti­cally, Alexander of Macedon achieved it. Tarn complains that, just as Aristotle divided men into those who are free and those who are slaves by nature, so Zeno divided them into the good and wicked, the saved and the sinners. But this is not just. Any man can be saved, but not any man can transform his Aristotelian, fixed nature from that of a slave to that of a free man. What is plain is that while Plato and Aristotle desired to organise, to create and preserve an order, Plato's communism is, principally, a means of breeding suitable citizens. Zeno wishes to abolish this; both Zeno and his disciples Cleanthes and Chrysippus advocated social freedom of the most extreme kind: sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, incest, the eating of human flesh, permission to do anything that is not forbidden by physis - nature - for all contrary rules and traditions and habits, when examined, will be found to be artificial and irrational. When you look into yourself, and only into yourself - for there is nowhere else to look (you should certainly not look at social institutions, which are a mere external, adventitious aid to living) - then you will find that some rules are graven upon your heart by nature herself, while others are mere human inventions, ephemeral and directed to irrational ends, nothing to the wise man.

Later Stoicism absorbed a much more Aristotelian doctrine into itself and adapted itself to the uses of the Roman Empire, abandoning its sharp anti-political tone and content - for in principle Stoicism is as anti-political as Epicureanism. True, Zeno impressed the Macedonian ruler of Athens, Antigonus Gonatas, as a teacher of civic virtue. He would not serve him himself, but supplied pupils who became court chaplains and personal advisers to Hellenistic kings, and sometimes generals and practical social reformers (as in Sparta). Nevertheless the king, for the Stoics, is not a divine creature as he is for the Pythagoreans and even for Aristotle; he is a human being, and since it is desirable that life should be as rational as possible, the Stoic sage can give him advice and influence him in the right direction, which, although not the most essential duty - which is to put oneself in the right frame of mind and nothing else - creates conditions in which men can more easily save themselves by Stoic introspection, self-examination of the tasks that reason lays upon them.

It is sometimes said that Zeno believed in a world State, but this is a misinterpretation of Plutarch's text: he has no interest in the State at all. In sharp contradiction to Plato and Aristotle, he believes that wisdom is to be learned and exercised not in the ideal polis, but in a world filled with wise men. Society is fundamentally a hindrance to self-sufficiency. It is evident that men cannot avoid society altogether, and must make the best of it, but so far from ethics being deducible from politics, the private from the public, the proper route is the other way about: to regulate public affairs in accordance with the rules of private morality. The virtuous or wise man must learn not to mind the storms of public life, to escape into himself, to ignore that which, being public, is ultimately of small importance. The distance between the Epicurean ataraxia - imper­turbability - and the Stoic apathia - passionlessness - is not great. Pleasure or duty, happiness or rational self-realisation, these were the opposed ideals of the Hellenistic world. Whatever their differences, they were as one against the public world of Plato and Aristotle and the major Sophists. The break is immense and its consequences great. For the first time the idea gains ground that politics is a squalid occupation, not worthy of the wise and the good. The division of ethics and politics is made absolute; men are defined in individual terms, and politics, at best, becomes the application of certain ethical principles to human groups, instead of the other way around. Not public order, but personal salvation is all that matters. To sacrifice salvation to public needs is the greatest, most fatal error a man can commit; the betrayal of all that makes him human, of the reason within him, that which alone confers dignity and value upon men. There is no need to speak of the influence of this conception in Christianity, particularly in its Augustinian and quietist traditions.

It is very odd. How could so sharp a break occur within two decades? At one moment all the major thinkers appear to be discussing social and political questions; less than twenty years later no one at all is doing so. The Aristotelians are collecting plants, accumulating information about planets, animals and geo­graphical formations; the Platonists are occupied with mathematics; no one speaks of social or political issues at all - it suddenly becomes a subject beneath the notice of serious men.

The official explanation which almost all historians adopt is, of course, the destruction of the city-state by Philip and Alexander of Macedon. The conventional view, adopted by almost all historians on the subject (there are some honorable exceptions), is that the writings of the major thinkers reflect political conditions directly and unambiguously. Sophocles, the Thucydidean Pericles, Aeschy­lus, Herodotus are spokesmen for Athens during the highest peak of her power and creative achievement. Plato, Isocrates, Thucyd- ides himself reflect the internal stress and strain of the beginning of decadence. Demosthenes is the last desperate stand of independent democracy. Then comes the battle of Chaeronea in 338 bc. The polis is destroyed by the Macedonian phalanx. Aristotle - like Hegel's owl of Minervai - speaks for the past, not the future, and is out of date by the time that he escapes from Athens in 323. The polis becomes insignificant. A great new world is opened by Alexander's armies, and the average Greek or Athenian (as the author chooses), deprived of the sense of intimacy and security provided by the walls of the small self-contained city, feels puny and insignificant in the vast new empire which stretches out to the East. There is no natural unit to which to give his loyalty, and in which he can huddle for security.

The bleak new atmosphere, with familiar landmarks gone, makes him feel frightened and solitary, and concerned with his own personal salvation. Public life decays. Public concerns seem irrelev­ant. Menander, the fellow citizen and contemporary of Epicurus, writes comedies about domestic personal issues. Naturalism suc­ceeds the idealised painting and sculpture which represented common ideals of the entire polis - noble objects of social worship and admiration and emulation. Superstition fills the vacuum left by the disappearance of State religion. Men retreat into themselves. The social fabric disintegrates. All men are equal before the remote despot in Pella or Alexandria or Antioch. The organic community has been pulverised into dissociated atoms. Stoicism and Epicur­eanism are natural forms of faith for men in this condition.

What is unplausible about this account is that the catastrophic change - for it is nothing less - occurs too rapidly. Athens was of small account before Chaeronea, and did not cease to be a city- state in 3 3 7 bc. It was defeated, but it had been defeated by the Spartans before, and yet it led a sufficiently intense life as a city- state in the fourth century, as the speeches of the orators, if nothing else, convey. There was a Macedonian garrison in the Acropolis; it was expelled. True, it returned to subdue the rebellious city. Still,

' Mentioned at the end of Hegel's foreword to Grundlinien der Philowphie des Rechts: see Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Samtliche Werke, ed. Hermann Glockner (Stuttgart, 1927-51), vol. 7, p. 37.

civic feeling continued; men continued to vote, to elect to public office, to bear liturgies. The poleis were not dissolved by Alexander or his successors: on the contrary, new ones were created. The inscriptions do not show a slackening of public spirit. There was no real collapse until Romans appear on the scene. No doubt the cities did lose their independent character, especially in the field of foreign policy. It would, of course, be absurd to deny that Alexander had transformed the Mediterranean world. Yet however firmly you may believe that the ideological superstructure faith­fully follows changes in the social or economic substructure - in this case, political organisation - there was certainly no break in the history of the polis so sharp, to judge from the subjective experiences of the citizens, as to explain so abrupt, swift and total a transformation of political outlook.

That Alexander's conquests were a pertinent factor in the development is, of course, true; but it is difficult to suppose that it is alone sufficient to explain what occurred. It is as if one were to say that Napoleon's conquest of Europe totally transformed social and political thought; it did not. It modified it deeply, but there is not that gap between the writings of, say, Hume and James Mill, or Kant and Hegel, which marks the break between Aristotle and Zeno. Men do not say to themselves: 'My old world is crumbling, I must turn my attention to other aspects of experience. The outer life has become dreary, frightening and flat - it is time to turn to the inner life.' (And if the unconscious is, at this point, called to our aid, it is only reasonable to say that it does not work quite so fast underground.) Men did not say this, especially in the ancient world, where changes seem to have taken less abrupt and cata­strophic turns than in our own time. It is only reasonable to assume, therefore, that Stoic and Epicurean individualism did not spring quite so fully armed from the head of this now defeated and humiliated Athena. And, indeed, the new thinkers had some predecessors, occasionally mentioned by the ancient historians of philosophy. Zeno was a pupil of Crates, who was a Cynic, and he, in his turn, belonged to the school of Diogenes, who flourished, if that is the proper term for his peculiar life, in the middle of the fourth century bc. We know that behind him stand the figures of Antisthenes and Aristippus. Antisthenes, who was a personal pupil of Socrates and was known not to have taken an interest in public life or the State, who believed in independence, whose hero was Herakles, performer of great labours for the benefit of men, followed the narrow path of principle. Aristippus, who proclaimed himself a stranger everywhere, said that he wished 'neither to rule nor to be ruled',1 and therefore went too far for Socrates. His device was ekho all' oukh ekhomai ('I possess but am not possessed'):² I enjoy pleasures and seek them but they cannot make me their slave; I can detach myself from them at will. Antisthenes agreed with Plato about one thing, at any rate, that victory over oneself was the most difficult and most important of all victories. Aristippus was a Cyrenaic who came to Athens from a very different climate; he may have believed that pleasure, provided one is not enslaved by it, is the natural end of man, whereas the Stoics believed that it was the enemy and clouded the passions and obscured the truth and so made men stumble and lose their way and become enslaved by forces they could not control; but the ideal of both was the same - independence, self-possession, individual self-assertion. So far as most men were blind, enslaved, prey to irrational feelings, the sage was likely to be unpopular and in some danger; hence his interest in swaying the rulers to his own way of thought.

Behind Antisthenes, behind Socrates even, stands the enigmatic figure of Antiphon, the Sophist of the end of the fifth century, of whom at least we possess independent evidence in a papyrus. He believed that you can cheat men, but not nature. If you eat a poisonous food, you die; but if you commit what is called an injustice, then, if no one has seen it, you will not suffer for it. It pays you to practise justice only if there are witnesses of your act - human beings upon whom you can make an impression, if need be a false one. Anarchy is a painful state of affairs, so there is a reason to teach children to obey, but if you can get away with something condemned by the human rules which particular human beings have established, then why not do so? He was against lawsuits because in claiming justice you made enemies of those against whom you witnessed, however truthfully, and this might prove a source of grave disadvantage to you later. From what we gather, Antiphon was a pessimistic quietist who preached the need for self- protection. The world was full of violent, dangerous men ready to make the innocent suffer. He gives advice to the victims on how to keep out of trouble. This is the first audible voice in ancient Greece which says - what Epicurus and his followers later echoed down the centuries - that the only satisfactory life is lived by keeping out of the sight of those who can do you damage, by creeping into a corner of your own choosing and constructing a private life which alone can satisfy the deepest needs of man. This is what Plato set himself to refute - the view that justice, participation in public life, does not pay but leads to wounds and misery and frustrated ambition. How well he accomplished his task is an issue that is still argued to this day.

Diogenes went further than this. He declared that he had to alter the currency - to destroy the old values and substitute new ones. He boasted that he belonged to no city - for that is what the claim to be cosmopolitan means - in the sense in which the Communist Manifesto of i 847 declared that 'The workers have no country' and 'The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.'[127] Only the independent man was free, and freedom alone makes happy, by making invulnerable. He inveighed against the arts, the sciences and all external graces with deliberate rudeness to Alexander. The rough jokes attributed to him create an image of a man who deliberately set out to shock public opinion in order to call attention to the gratuitous falsity and conventional hypocrisies of civilised life. He advocated, so we are told, total disregard of the proprieties: sexual intercourse and every intimate function may be performed in public. What deters one from it? The fact that people are shocked? What of it? Why should one respect the reactions of fools or hypocrites, slaves of convention, men who do not understand that men can attain to happiness and dignity only by following nature, that is by ignoring artificial arrangements when all their instincts urge them in the opposite direction? This is full­blown individualism, but represented by our authorities as eccent­ric and a little deranged.

Crates, a rich man, gave up his wealth and took a few posses­sions in a knapsack and became the missionary and the saint of life according to nature. He called on families made unhappy by fears or jealousies or hatreds, reconciled enemies, created harmony and happiness, and, pauper and hunchback that he was, won the love of a beautiful and aristocratic lady, who married him against all protestations and became his fellow missionary. Man must be free, his possessions must be few enough to be carried in a sack slung across his shoulders, the pera which became the symbol of itinerant preachers of the Cynic sect. Here are Crates' words:

There is a city, Knapsack is its name, in the midst of the wine-coloured sea of Typhos [illusion]. Fair and fruitful it is, exceedingly beggarly, owning nothing. Thither sails no fool nor parasite nor lecher delight­ing in harlots, but it bears thyme and garlic and figs and bread. For such men fight not one another, nor yet do they take up arms for petty gain, nor for glory . . . Free are they from lust, the enslaver of men, they are not twisted by it: rather do they take pleasures in freedom and immortal kinghood. i

And again:

I am a citizen of the lands Obscurity and Poverty, impregnable to fortune, a fellow citizen of Diogenes, who defied all the plots of envy.[128]

These are the true predecessors of the new individualism - not many; and represented by our major authorities as somewhat marginal figures in the development of Greek culture. But were they indeed marginal? We cannot tell, for the principal, the fatal difficulty of this entire account is that we simply do not know what doctrines and opinions were held either by ordinary Greeks or by the thinkers among them. The vast bulk of our information comes from the writings of Plato and Aristotle, and they do not trouble to conceal their bias. Aristotle is perhaps a little more detached, scholarly and objective than Plato, but his own views are very positive and he shows little charity to his opponents, neither more nor less than other philosophers have since the beginning of the activity. What we know about the Sophists of the fifth century, and the Cynics and Sceptics and other so-called minor sects, is about as accurate as it would be if all we knew about, say, the writings of Bertrand Russell and modern linguistic analysis came to us from Soviet histories of philosophy; or if our only source for medieval thought was Russell's own history of Western thought. It is difficult to represent one's opponents fairly, and Plato plainly did not even try, unless they were positively sympathetic to him, like Parmenides or, in part, Protagoras - while the thinkers of whom we speak were plainly bitter enemies, whose views were to be put down at all costs.

The only point I wish to stress is that it is intrinsically unlikely that Zeno and Epicurus, Carneades and the new academy sprang up fully fledged to take over ethics and politics from the failing hands of degenerate Aristotelians and Platonists. Other scholars have felt this and have made gallant efforts to derive Stoicism, at least, from oriental sources. They point out, quite accurately, that every Stoic teacher of any note came from Asia or Africa. Grant and Zeller, Pohlenz and Bevan and a host of others think it no accident that Zeno and Persaeus came from the Phoenician colony in Cyprus; Herillus came from Carthage; Athenodorus came from Tarsus; Cleanthes from the Troad; Chrysippus from Cilicia; Diogenes the Stoic from Babylon; Posidonius from Syria; Panaet- ius from Rhodes; others from Sidon and Seleucia, Ascalon and the Bosphorus - alas, not a single Stoic was born in old Greece. It is implied that these men brought oriental ideas for personal salva­tion, black-and-white conceptions of good and evil, duty and sin, the desirability of dissolution in the eternal fire, the attractiveness of suicide. And perhaps it is hinted that this is echoed, in however vague a form, in the Jewish Bible: in the notion of individual responsibility to God that is no longer communal in Jeremiah, in Ezekiel and in the Psalms.' Who knows? Perhaps Philo of Alexandria, who was always trying to persuade people that Plato was acquainted with the teachings of Moses, was saying something that had some substance in it.

These theories are more interesting as indications that there is something inexplicable in this situation than because they are intrinsically plausible. Epicurus, whose doctrines for these pur­poses come close to those of the Stoics, was of pure Athenian blood, even though he grew up in Samos. Diogenes had come from Sinope, but Crates came from Elis, and no one suspected Antiphon of foreign origin. There is nothing inherently un-Greek in Zeno's doctrines: the belief in universal reason, in nature, in peace and inner harmony, self-mastery and independence, liberty and a calm detachment are not Hebraic values. He did speak of duty in terms of absolute rules, but this sprang from his conception of reason as providing ends, as in Plato - as a rigorous category admitting of no degree. There are no voices that thunder at human beings, no sublime and mysterious and terrifying divine presence whose nature it is impious to enquire into: on the contrary, everything is nearly too rational, too systematic, too neat and cut-and-dried, too positivistic. There is no element of mysticism in either Zeno or Epicurus. Cleanthes' profoundly religious hymn is not the utter­ance of a mystic but of a rationalist, a believer in cosmic reason. If these men were, indeed, foreign in origin and habits and appear­ance, they assimilated, if anything, too eagerly to the Greek model, like many a colonial in Imperial Rome or natives of the Levant or India in France or England in the nineteenth century. The movements are Greek through and through. Indeed Dodds com­plains that they were too rationalistic, so that the irrational impulses of the Greeks forced a return to superstition.

Yet the revolution is very great, and if it is not sudden - because the names of the thinkers who preceded it or the opposition to the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle has simply been suppressed or forgotten - that is no more than a conjecture, and rests on considerations of general plausibility, not on any hard evidence that we possess.

What did the revolution come to? Let me attempt to summarise

it.

Politics and ethics are divorced. The natural unit is now no longer the group, in terms of which men are defined as natural members of it, even if not limbs of an organism, but the individual. His needs, his purposes, his solutions, his fate are what matter. Social institutions may be natural ways of satisfying the indivi­dual's needs; however, they are not ends in themselves, but means. And politics, the discipline that deals with the nature and purpose of such institutions, is not a philosophical enquiry that asks about ends and the nature of reality, but a technological discipline that tells men how to obtain what they need or deserve, or should have or make or be - questions answered by ethical or psychological enquiry, not by treatises about the State or about kingship. There are many of these latter, but they are handbooks for Hellenistic rulers or loyal tributes and justifications of their conduct by tame court philosophers.

The only genuine life is the inner life; what is outer is expendable. A man is not a man unless his acts are dictated by himself and not forced upon him by a despot from without or by circumstances which he cannot control. The only portion of himself that is within his control is his inner consciousness. If he trains that consciousness to ignore and reject what it cannot control, he acquires independence from the external world. Only the independent are free, and only the free can satisfy their desires, that is, attain to peace and happiness. Such independence can be obtained only by understanding the nature of reality. But whereas for Plato and Aristotle this reality contains public life - the State - as intrinsic parts of it, for the Hellenistic philosophers it does not; hence the decay of political philosophy until Roman needs and Roman practice cause a specious revival in it.

(c) The ethics are the ethics of the individual, but this is not the same - and this point is of some importance - as the notion of individual rights or the sacredness of private life. Diogenes did not mind whether you were disgusted by his mode of living, his rags, his filth, his obscenity, his insulting behaviour, but he did not seek privacy as such. He merely ignored social conventions because he believed that those who knew the truth would not be horrified, but would live as he did. There is more inclination to privacy in Epicurus, but even there there is no individual to keep others out of his particular corner - a right to a room of one's own. This is a much later idea, and those writers who, like Sabine and, indeed, Pohlenz, who is a far more genuine scholar, speak of the emergence of the new value of privacy, and in the case of Sabine go so far as to talk about the rights of man, misunderstand the ancient world profoundly. Not until a force that in principle resisted the encroachments of the civil establishment - the Christian Church in its early struggles against Rome, and, perhaps, before it, Orthodox Jews who fought the secularising policies of Antiochus Epiphanes - created a conflict of authority did the idea arise that frontiers must be drawn beyond which the State is not entitled to venture. Even then it took many centuries for the notion of individual rights to emerge, the notion defended so passionately by Benjamin Constant, that men need an area, however small, within which they can do as they please, no matter how foolish or disapproved of by others. The notion of freedom from State control which his contemporary Humboldt defended, and which found its most eloquent champion in John Stuart Mill - that notion is wholly alien to the ancient world. Neither Plato nor Xenophon nor Aristotle nor Aristophanes, who deplore the selfishness, rapacity, lawless­ness, lack of civic sense, irresponsibility of Athenian democracy; nor Pericles, who defends the 'open' society over which he presides; nor the Stoics and Sceptics and their successors, who thought of nothing but the self-preservation and self-gratification of individuals - none of these had any notion of the rights of man, the right to be left alone, the right not to be impinged upon within identifiable frontiers. That comes much later, and it is a gross anachronism to find it in the ancient world, whether Greek or Hebraic.

(d) But what happened was dramatic enough. One of the legs of the tripod upon which Western political philosophy rests was, if not broken, cracked. Individual salvation, individual happiness, individual taste, individual character emerge as the central goal, the centre of interest and value. The State is no longer what it was for Aristotle - a self-sufficient group of human beings united by natural pursuit of the good (that is, satisfying) life - but 'a mass of people living together, governed by law' (so Chrysippus at the beginning of the third century defined it).[129] A man may serve the State 'if nothing stops him'/ but it is not the central function of his life.

This is the moment that marks the birth of the idea that politics is unworthy of a truly gifted man, and painful and degrading to a truly good one. Of this attitude to politics there is scarcely any earlier trace, although perhaps the life of Socrates, as perhaps of original and interesting thinkers of earlier times of whom we know too little, bears witness to this too. At any rate, from now on this new scale of values haunts the European consciousness. Public and individual values, which had not been discriminated before, now go in different directions and, at times, clash violently. There is an attempt to patch up the situation by the Stoics of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. Panaetius regrets Zeno's viol­ently anti-political attitude and tries to say that all this was written on the 'dog's tail'/ that is, when Zeno was still under the influence of the Cynic Crates. But once the seamless whole of the city-state in which the public and the private were not distin­guished is torn, nothing can ever make it entirely whole again. In the Renaissance, in modern times, the notion of the separateness of moral and political values, the ethics of resistance, of withdrawal, of personal relationships, versus those of the service of mankind, is one of the deepest and most agonising issues. This is the hour of its birth.

It seems to have come to maturity, and to have begun to possess the minds of the intellectually most influential city that ever existed, somewhere between the death of Aristotle and the rise of the Stoics and the Epicureans. We know little about this intermedi­ate period. Theophrastus reigned in the Lyceum in the place of Aristotle, and he believed in oikeiosis - kinship of all life - that there was a natural bond that united men to one another, a great solidarity, not service in a common cause, or the march towards a common purpose, or perception of the same truths, or union by some reciprocally accepted convention, or the claims of utility, but the sense of the unity of life, of the value of men as men, of humanity as a single family with world-wide frontiers. This is not a political idea, but a biological and moral one. Where does it come from? Not from Aristotle, who thought that neither barbarians nor slaves were even remote cousins to free men. But it is echoed by Zeno and by Epicurus. Where does it come from? That is a question to which we may never be able to discover the answer. Antiphon? Pythagoras? We do not know. Plato and Aristotle, if they knew, chose not to tell us.

(e) The new age of individualism is usually deplored as an age of decadence. Cornford says that after Aristotle 'nothing remains but the philosophy of old age, the resignation of a twilight that deepens alike over the garden of Pleasure and the hermitage of Virtue'. Sabine observes that the result of the decline of the city-state was 'a defeatist attitude, a mood of disillusionment, a disposition to withdraw and to create a private life in which public interests had a small or even a negative part' .² Then follows a passage in which it is suggested that 'the unfortunate and dispossessed' made them­selves even more violently vocal against the city-state and its values and laid 'stress upon the seamy side of the existing social orderV 'To Plato and Aristotle', the same author goes on, 'the values offered by citizenship still seemed fundamentally satisfying, or at least capable of being made so; to a few of their contemporaries and increasingly to their successors this appeared to be false.'[130] How does he know that there were few? If Greek literature does not reflect the prevalent democracy, but, on the contrary, criticism of it, why should it record a perhaps widespread desire for private values and private salvation? Why should we consider Plato and Aristotle better witnesses to the general thought of their time than Prodicus or Antiphon? Are Burke and Hegel, because they possess more genius, more reliable witnesses of the thought of their own time than Paine or Bentham? If Goethe and Comte were the only authors that survived from their age, how accurately should we be able to deduce its political and moral outlook? As for the pessimistic note struck by Cornford or Sabine, why should we assume that the decline of the 'organic' community was an unmixed disaster? Might it not have had a liberating effect? Perhaps the individuals who lived in greater and more centralised units felt a greater degree of independence, less interference. Rostovtzeff speaks of 'buoyant optimism' in the cities of the Greek diaspora/ The great leap forward in the sciences, and the arts as well, coincides with Cornford's theory of twilight and the disillu­sionment and defeatism of which Sabine and Barker speak. To every age its values: the individualism of the Hellenistic age is attributed by these thinkers to men's loneliness in the new mass society. Yet perhaps what they felt was not loneliness, but a sense of suffocation in the polis? First aristocrats like Heraclitus com­plained of it, then others. So far from being a sad, slow decline, it meant expanding horizons. The third century marks the beginning of new values, and a new conception of life; the condemnation of it by Aristotle and his modern disciples rests on assumptions which, to say the least, do not seem self-evidently valid.

FINAL RETROSPECT

Excerpts from 'My Intellectual Path' Determinism

Political freedom is a topic to which I devoted two lectures during the 1950s. The first of these was entitled 'Historical Inevitability'.[131] Here I stated that determinism was a doctrine very widely accepted among philosophers for many hundreds of years. Determinism declares that every event has a cause, from which it unavoidably follows. This is the foundation of the natural sciences: the laws of nature and all their applications - the entire body of natural science - rest upon the notion of an eternal order which the sciences investigate. But if the rest of nature is subject to these laws, can it be that man alone is not? When a man supposes, as most ordinary people do (though not most scientists and philosophers), that when he rises from the chair he need not have done so, that he did so because he chose to do so, but he need not have chosen - when he supposes this, he is told that this is an illusion, that even though the necessary work by psychologists has not yet been accomplished, one day it will be (or at any rate in principle can be), and then he will know that what he is and does is necessarily as it is, and could not be otherwise. I believe this doctrine to be false, but I do not in this essay seek to demonstrate this, or to refute determinism - indeed, I am not sure if such a demonstration or refutation is possible. My only concern is to ask myself two questions. Why do philosophers and others think that human beings are fully determined? And, if they are, is this compatible with normal moral sentiments and behaviour, as commonly under­stood?

My thesis is that there are two main reasons for supporting the doctrine of human determinism. The first is that, since the natural sciences are perhaps the greatest success story in the whole history of mankind, it seems absurd to suppose that man alone is not subject to the natural laws discovered by the scientists. (That, indeed, is what the eighteenth-century philosophes maintained.) The question is not, of course, whether man is wholly free of such laws - no one but a madman could maintain that man does not depend on his biological or psychological structure or environ­ment, or on the laws of nature. The only question is: Is his liberty totally exhausted thereby? Is there not some corner in which he can act as he chooses, and not be determined to choose by antecedent causes? This may be a tiny corner of the realm of nature, but unless it is there, his consciousness of being free, which is undoubtedly all but universal - the fact that most people believe that, while some of their actions are mechanical, some obey their free will - is an enormous illusion, from the beginnings of mankind, ever since Adam ate the apple, although told not to do so, and did not reply, 'I could not help it, I did not do it freely, Eve forced me to do it.'

The second reason for belief in determinism is that it does devolve the responsibility for a great many things that people do on to impersonal causes, and therefore leaves them in a sense unblameworthy for what they do. When I make a mistake, or commit a wrong or a crime, or do anything else which I recognise, or which others recognise, as bad or unfortunate, I can say, 'How could I avoid it? - that was the way I was brought up' or 'That is my nature, something for which natural laws are responsible' or 'I belong to a society, a class, a Church, a nation, in which everyone does it, and nobody seems to condemn it' or 'I am psychologically conditioned by the way in which my parents behaved to each other and to me, and by the economic and social circumstances in which I was placed, or was forced into, not to be able to choose to act otherwise' or, finally, 'I was under orders.'

Against this, most people believe that everyone has at least two choices that he can make, two possibilities that he can realise. When Eichmann says 'I killed Jews because I was ordered to; if I had not done it I would have been killed myself' one can say 'I see that it is improbable that you would have chosen to be killed, but in principle you could have done it if you had decided to do it - there was no literal compulsion, as there is in nature, which caused you to act as you did.' You may say it is unreasonable to expect people to behave like that when facing great dangers: so it is, but however unlikely it may be that they should decide to do so, in the literal sense of the word they cow/d have chosen to do so. Martyrdom cannot be expected, but can be accepted, against whatever odds - indeed, that is why it is so greatly admired.

So much for the reasons for which men choose to embrace determinism in history. But if they do, there is a difficult logical consequence, to say the least. It means that we cannot say to anyone, 'Did you have to do that? Why need you have done that?' - the assumption behind which is that he could have refrained, or done something else. The whole of our common morality, in which we speak of obligation and duty, right and wrong, moral praise and blame - the way in which people are praised or condemned, rewarded or punished, for behaving in a way in which they were not forced to behave, when they could have behaved otherwise - this network of beliefs and practices, on which all current morality seems to me to depend, presupposes the notion of responsibility, and responsibility entails the ability to choose between black and white, right and wrong, pleasure and duty; as well as, in a wider sense, between forms of life, forms of government, and the whole constellations of moral values in terms of which most people, however much they may or may not be aware of it, do in fact live.

If determinism were accepted, our vocabulary would have to be very, very radically changed. I do not say that this is impossible in principle, but it goes further than what most people are prepared to face. At best, aesthetics would have to replace morality. You can admire or praise people for being handsome, or generous or musical - but that is not a matter of their choice, that is 'how they are made'. Moral praise would have to take the same form: if I praise you for saving my life at your own risk, I mean that it is wonderful that you are so made that you could not avoid doing this, and I am glad that I encountered someone literally determined to save my life, as opposed to someone else who was determined to look the other way. Honourable or dishonourable conduct, pleasure-seeking and heroic martyrdom, courage and cowardice, deceitfulness and truthfulness, doing right against temptation - these would become like being good-looking or ugly, tall or short, old or young, black or white, born of English or Italian parents: something that we cannot alter, for everything is determined. We can hope that things will go as we should like, but we cannot do anything towards this - we are so made that we cannot help but act in a particular fashion. Indeed, the very notion of an act denotes choice; but if choice is itself determined, what is the difference between action and mere behaviour?

It seems to me paradoxical that some political movements demand sacrifices and yet are determinist in belief. Marxism, for example, which is founded on historical determinism - the inevit­able stages through which society must pass before it reaches perfection - enjoins painful and dangerous acts, coercion and killing, equally painful at times both to the perpetrators and to the victims; but if history will inevitably bring about the perfect society, why should one sacrifice one's life for a process which will, without one's help, reach its proper, happy destination? Yet there is a curious human feeling that if the stars in their courses are fighting for you, so that your cause will triumph, then you should sacrifice yourself in order to shorten the process, to bring the birth-pangs of the new order nearer, as Marx said. But can so many people be truly persuaded to face these dangers, just to shorten a process which will end in happiness whatever they may do or fail to do? This has always puzzled me, and puzzled others.

All this I discussed in the lecture in question, which has remained controversial, and has been much discussed and disputed, and is so still.

Freedom

My other lecture on freedom was entitled 'Two Concepts of Liberty' .1 This inaugurated my Oxford Professorship, and its gist was to distinguish between two notions of liberty, negative and positive. By negative liberty I meant the absence of obstacles which block human action. Quite apart from obstacles created by the external world, or by the biological, physiological, psychological laws which govern human beings, there is lack of political freedom - the central topic of my lecture - where the obstacles are man- made, whether deliberately or unintentionally. The extent of negative liberty depends on the degree to which such man-made obstacles are absent - on the degree to which I am free to go down this or that path without being prevented from doing so by man- made institutions or disciplines, or by the activities of specific human beings.

It is not enough to say that negative freedom simply means freedom to do what I like, for in that case I can liberate myself from obstacles to the fulfilment of desire simply by following the ancient Stoics and killing desire. But that path, the gradual elimination of the desires to which obstacles can occur, leads in the end to humans being gradually deprived of their natural, living activities: in other words, the most perfectly free human beings will be those who are dead, since then there is no desire and therefore no obstacles. What I had in mind, rather, was simply the number of paths down which a man can walk, whether or not he chooses to do so. That is the first of the two basic senses of political freedom.

Some have maintained, against me, that freedom must be a triadic relationship: I can overcome or remove or be free from obstacles only in order to do something, to be free to perform a given act or acts. But I do not accept that. The basic sense of unfreedom is that in which we ascribe it to the man in gaol, or the man tied to a tree; all that such a man seeks is the breaking of his chains, escape from the cell, without necessarily aiming at a particular activity once he is liberated. In the larger sense, of course, freedom means freedom from the rules of a society or its institutions, from the deployment against one of excessive moral or physical force, or from whatever shuts off possibilities of action which otherwise would be open. This I call 'freedom from'.

The other central sense of freedom is freedom to: if my negative freedom is specified by answering the question 'How far am I controlled?', the question for the second sense of freedom is 'Who controls me?' Since we are talking about man-made obstacles, I can ask myself 'Who determines my actions, my life? Do I do so, freely, in whatever way I choose? Or am I under orders from some other source of control? Is my activity determined by parents, schoolmasters, priests, policemen? Am I under the discipline of a legal system, the capitalist order, a slave-owner, the government (monarchical, oligarchic, democratic)? In what sense am I master of my fate ? My possibilities of action may be limited, but how are they limited? Who are those who stand in my way, how much power can they wield?'

These are the two central senses of 'liberty' which I set myself to investigate. I realised that they differed, that they were answers to two different questions; but, although cognate, they did not in my view clash - the answer to one did not necessarily determine the answer to the other. Both freedoms were ultimate human ends, both were necessarily limited, and both concepts could be per­verted in the course of human history. Negative liberty could be interpreted as economic laissez-faire, whereby in the name of freedom owners are allowed to destroy the lives of children in mines, or factory-owners to destroy the health and character of workers in industry. But that was a perversion, not what the concept basically means to human beings, in my view. Equally it was said that it is a mockery to inform a poor man that he is perfectly free to occupy a room in an expensive hotel, although he may not be able to pay for it. But that, too, is a confusion. He is indeed free to rent a room there, but has not the means of using this freedom. He has not the means, perhaps, because he has been prevented from earning more than he does by a man-made economic system - but that is a deprivation of freedom to earn money, not of freedom to rent the room. This may sound a pedantic distinction, but it is central to discussions of economic versus political freedom.

The notion of positive freedom has led, historically, to even more frightful perversions. Who orders my life? I do. I? Ignorant, confused, driven hither and thither by uncontrolled passions and drives - is that all there is to me? Is there not within me a higher, more rational, freer self, able to understand and dominate passions, ignorance and other defects, which I can attain to only by a process of education or understanding, a process which can be managed only by those who are wiser than myself, who make me aware of my true, 'real', deepest self, of what I am at my best? This is a well- known metaphysical view, according to which I can be truly free and self-controlled only if I am truly rational - a belief which goes back to Plato - and since I am not perhaps sufficiently rational myself, I must obey those who are indeed rational, and who therefore know what is best not only for themselves but also for me, and who can guide me along lines which will ultimately awaken my true rational self and put it in charge, where it truly belongs. I may feel hemmed in - indeed, crushed - by these authorities, but that is an illusion: when I have grown up and have attained to a fully mature, 'real' self, I shall understand that I would have done for myself what has been done for me if I had been as wise, when I was in an inferior condition, as they are now.

In short, they are acting on my behalf, in the interests of my higher self, in controlling my lower self; so that true liberty for the lower self consists in total obedience to them, the wise, those who know the truth, the elite of sages; or perhaps my obedience must be to those who understand how human destiny is made - for if Marx is right, then it is a Party (which alone grasps the demands of the rational goals of history) which must shape and guide me, which­ever way my poor empirical self may wish to go; and the Party itself must be guided by its far-seeing leaders, and in the end by the greatest and wisest leader of all.

There is no despot in the world who cannot use this method of argument for the vilest oppression, in the name of an ideal self which he is seeking to bring to fruition by his own, perhaps somewhat brutal and prima facie morally odious means (prima facie only for the lower empirical self). The 'engineer of human souls', to use Stalin's phrase,[132] knows best; he does what he does not simply in order to do his best for his nation, but in the name of the nation itself, in the name of what the nation would be doing itself if only it had attained to this level of historical understanding. That is the great perversion which the positive notion of liberty has been liable to: whether the tyranny issues from a Marxist leader, a king, a Fascist dictator, the masters of an authoritarian Church or class or State, it seeks for the imprisoned, 'real' self within men, and 'liberates' it, so that this self can attain to the level of those who give the orders.

This goes back to the naive notion that there is only one true answer to every question: if I know the true answer and you do not, and you disagree with me, it is because you are ignorant; if you knew the truth, you would necessarily believe what I believe; if you seek to disobey me, this can be so only because you are wrong, because the truth has not been revealed to you as it has been to me. This justifies some of the most frightful forms of oppression and enslavement in human history, and it is truly the most dangerous, and, in our century in particular, the most violent, interpretation of the notion of positive liberty.

This notion of two kinds of liberty and their distortions then formed the centre of much discussion and dispute in Western and other universities, and does so to this day.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPENDICES

Berlin aged twelve, Arundel House School, July 1921

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244 'La repuUcion de Vico', trans. by Enrique BocardoCrespo of review of Peter Burke, Vico, in Pablo Badillo O'F^rell and Enrique Bocardo Cre (eds), Isaiah Berlin: la mirada despierta de Ia historia (Madrid. 1999: Tecnos); original English version, 'The Repuwion of Vico', published in New Vico Studies 17 (1999), 1-5

200

245 The Power of Ideas, ed. Hency Hardy (London, 200: Chatto and Windus; Princeton, 200: Princeton University Press) (reprints of 21,43, 52, 54a, 55,62, 63, 65,18,85, 102, 103, 1ll, 113, 115, 121, 221,240, together with 248); trans German, Italian, Spanish

246 Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hai^m, Herder, ed. Henry Hardy (London, 2^Ю: Pimlico; Princeton, 2000: Princeton University Press) (reprints of 148, with revisions to the Vico material, and 212, with the English original of the Foreword to the German edition); trans. Chinese, Greek

247 'Herzen • A Preacher of the Truth', in Gionavva Calebich C^^ra, Aleksandr Jvanovic Henen: prnfezia e tradizione (Naples, 200: C^^, 39-40

248 'The Scarch for Status' (lalk on part of71). in POI, 195-9

249 Letter to Anand Chandavarlc.ar on Keynes and anti-Semitism, in Anand Chandavarkar, 'Was Keynes anti-Semitic?'. Economic and Political Weekly, 6 May 200, 1619-24, at 1623

2001

250 'A Visit to Leningrad' (1945), Times Literary Supplement. 23 March 2001, 13-15

250)a 'A Sense of Impending Doom' (1935; original title 'Literature and the Crisis'), Times literary Supplement, 21 July 2001, 11-12

250b 'The State of Psychology in 1936' (1936), History and Philosophy of Psychology 3 No I (2001), 16-83

250e 'Notes on Prejudice' (1981), Ne w York Review of Books, 18 October 2001, 12; repr. in L and, as 'Notes on Prejudice and Fanaticism', Australian Financial Review, 12 October 200 I, Review section, 4; trans. Swedish

202

251 Freedom land its Betrayal: Six Eru!mies ofHi^w liberty (1952), ed. Hency Hardy (London, forthcoming 2002: Chano & Windus; Princeton, fonhcoming 2002: Princeton University Press)

252 libery, ed. Henry Hardy, with a critical bibliography by Ian Harris (Oxford and New York, fonhcoming 2002: Oxford University Press) (253, with other writings on liberty: repnnts of 221, 24\a, excerptS from 240, and 241, together with 254 and 255)

253 'Five Essays on Liberty',cd Henry Hardy (second edition of \ \2, with reprint of 93 added). in L

254 A Letter to George Kennan 1951), in L

The end of the bibliography from the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library, http://berlin.wolf.ox.acMk/, October 2001

Postscript

'Of making many books there is no end.' Since this essay was written, Berlin and his themes have continued to claim attention. Positive freedom has been considered by Adam Swift, who unpicks several of the strands woven together in 'Two Concepts', and finds more to say for some of these than Berlin.¹ Jonathan Riley, who is writing a book entitled Pluralistic Liberalisms: Berlin, Rawls and Mill, has reworked 'Crooked Timber and Liberal Culture'² by way of 'Interpreting Berlin's Liberalism', and has addressed George Kateb's question4 in 'Defending Cultural Pluralism within Liberal Limits'.⁵

' Political Philosophy: A Beginner's Guide for Students and Politicians (Oxford etc., 200 i: Polity and Blackwell), part 2, 'Liberty'.

See p. 360 above.

American Political Science Review 95 (2001), 283-95.

See p. 360 above.

; Political Theory 30 No i (February 2002), forthcoming.

CONCORDANCE TO FOUR ESSAYS ON LIBERTY

In this concordance, whose aim is to enable readers to find references to the original page-numbering of Four Essays on Liberty easily in the present volume, the first column lists the pages of Four Essays on Liberty, the second column specifies on which page of Liberty the opening words of the original page (excluding subheadings) are to be found, and the third column gives those opening words as they appear in Liberty.

FEL

L

FEL page begins

FEL

L

FEL page begins

ix

³

The first of these

xxViii

2 I

myself to have

four essays

refuted it

X

4

The main issues

xxix

22

but be conveyed

between

xxx

23

But this is so because

xi

5

and conduct

xxxi

24

enter imaginatively

xii

5

philosophers when

xxxii

25

extreme eccentricity

xiii

6

of the basic terms

xxxiii

26

more than this seems

xiv

7

'self-determinism'

xxxiv

26

unalterable patterns

XV

8

which we are then

xxxV

²7

and extend our

xvi

9

Spinoza, most men

liberty

xvii

10

subscribe to

xxxVi

28

I recognize the fact

determinism

xxxVii

29

no way out

xviii

i i

different 'levels'

xxxViii

30

(b) whether the term

xix

12

inspire Professor

'liberty'

Passmore's

xxxix

3I

'Nature', which

xx

¹ 3

necessarily, to each

xl

32

this in any

other

quantitative

xxi

I4

would not think it

xli

33

by 'team spirit'

reasonable

xlii

34

eighteenth century

xxii

I5

if we took

xliii

35

to deserve to be

determinism

called

xxiii

i6

particular nexus

xliv

36

others, if I do

between

xlv

37

have taken this

xxiv

I 7

passage that I have

'negative'

quoted

xlvi

38

thought this too

XXV

i 8

can only escape

obvious

xxvi

19

altogether plausible

xlvii

39

form, is in far

xxvii

20

the truth

xlviii

40

strong - a situation

FEL

L

FEL page begins

xlix

41

hard-and-fast rule

I

4²

expense of efficiency

li

43

there exists such a

thing

Iii

44

everything is still

liii

45

relativity largely

derives

liv

46

give the kind of

reasons

lv

46

virtually useless

Ivi

47

vision, a principle

Ivii

48

exploit or dismiss

lviii

49

enthusiasm for

common

lix

5⁰

and finally to forget

lx

P

shown by

philosophical

Ixi

52

so critical that

lxii

53

certain evils

lxiii

54

political problems

i

55

Historians of ideas

2

56

The notion of 'laws'

³

57

of time - was not

⁴

57

economic and

political

⁵

58

Lytton Strachey

6

59

realization of that

free

⁷

60

common to all

8

61

And yet to a casual

⁹

62

even legislation

10

63

a considerable degree

11

64

Marx with much

12

65

unbridled private

i3

66

were the deepest

14

67

analysis of the

character

'5

68

essentially romantic

i6

68

a doctrine which

'7

70

a splendid disregard

i8

7¹

Diderot or Saint-

Simon

!9

72

that which divided

20

73

slaves by nature

21

74

the flow of life

22

75

made by such great

23

76

they - even Sextus

24

77

psychological

possibility

25

78

Orwell and Aldous

Huxley

26

78

adjusted as to

involve

FEL

L

FEL page begins

27

79

old symbols

28

80

forms the obverse

29

81

continue to say

30

82

human souls'

3¹

83

In the United States

3²

84

flourished, for

instance

33

85

In this sinister

fashion

34

86

scientific enquiry

35

87

of diagnosticians

36

88

this kind - the

artificial

37

89

alignment of forces

38

90

eagerly today

39

9i

economic

organisation

40

92

more frequent ad

hoc

41

94

Writing some ten

years

42

95

affected the

categories

43

95

so confidently

prophesied

44

96

But whatever value

45

97

such as environment

46

98

civilisations or races

47

99

limited extent

48

100

There are many

versions

49

101

theory, stated in

50

102

knowledge permit

51

103

the Life-Force

52

104

which puts obstacles

53

¹⁰5

-fore no historical

account

54

106

metaphor. To those

55

¹⁰7

play their parts

56

108

ultimate 'structure of

reality'

57

109

shall have laws

58

109

laws' which make

59

110

necessarily empty

6o

111

demand justice from

61

112

irresistible - which

truly

62

113

element; they enter

63

114

direction truly

'scientific'

64

¹¹5

'responsible'. I live at

6s

47

To assess degrees

L

FEL page begins

FEL

L

^I17

used, whereby

105

154

history

106

!55

118

known, to us

119

historians and

^I07

155

sociologists

120

The proposition that

108

156

121

the sense of history

109

¹57

122

-evitable' depends on

!23

to convince ourselves

1 10

158

124

models, pure and

unapp ied

I I I

159

125

to be reminded

126

boundary between

112

160

126

everything, explain

"3

161

¹²7

compulsion of this

type

114

162

128

relief from moral

115

163

burdens

116

164

¹²9

see why this or that

^{1 !}7

165

130

moment, as Taine

131

illusion, and with it

i iS

166

Ч²

claims masquerading

»33

seek to save

119

167

134

is responsible for

120

168

much

12!

168

135

or the complexities

136

For to treat what

122

169

!37

cannot by definition

¹²3

i7⁰

138

Pasteur as a

124

171

benefactor

125

172

139

beliefs about the

126

¹73

world

140

inaccuracy, or stupidity

¹²7

¹73

140

-torians to suppress

I28

175

142

historians differ from

129

i76

142

are as creditable

^!3^O

i77

^r43

as a rule,

quantitatively

131

178

144

our historical

132

i78

language

43

i79

145

and avoidable intrusion

44

180

146

be based on

!35

181

ignorance

136

182

147

grasp these rules

^I37

I83

148

of the propositions

149

with nothing to contrast

138

184

150

merited perhaps, but

139

i85

151

martyrs and the

I40

186

minorities

141

I87

i5²

desirable to have

I42

188

¹5J

we can never know

I43

189

FEL

66

67

68

69

7°

7¹

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

9°

9¹

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

100

101

102

I°3

104

FEL page begins

prevent it will only Two powerful

doctrines 'the unity of the

knower in one field than invalid; and the

desire contemporary

collapse material factors -

physical there is no anxiety effective younger sister

metaphysico-theological our task to describe to me to spring little regard for

experience If men never

disagreed some cases violently It may be that ideas or spiritual

forces able to do or be freedom. It is only the interests of other is not some species ' economic ' - is

increased interference is to be

drawn would say of Occam In the second place connected with

democracy is a good deal more and positive ways if they were more theories of self-

realisation I am the possessor independent, on its creatures at the

mercy tampering with

human men and things losing their original who, even while all other obstacles fallacious corollary

37°

LIBERTY

FEL

L

FEL page begtns

FEL

L

144

190

plan my life

178

222

145

191

Those who believed

146

19²

order must in

179

223

principle

147

!93

of themselves'

180

224

148

194

the predisposed order

181

225

149

195

follow. In the ideal

182

226

case

183

227

150

196

understand your true

184

228

goals

185

229

Ч¹

197

aesthetic, justification

Ч²

198

that only thus will

186

²3i

¹53

199

automatically be

187

232

¹54

200

to Sarastro's temple

155

201

society, everything

188

233

156

202

taken to be

189

234

157

203

human, and therefore

190

235

q8

204

or nation, than

191

236

¹59

204

'organic' view

19²

237

160

205

Mill called 'Pagan

!93

238

161

206

can be substituted

162

207

at any rate to believe

194

239

163

208

of the fully qualified

164

209

as mercilessly as

'95

239

165

210

rights, or the word

196

240

166

211

of what I mean

167

212

One belief, more than

'97

242

168

²4

of some of our ideals

198

242

169

214

perversity. Indeed

17°

²¹5

cannot be satisfied

199

243

17¹

216

-counter some

unforeseen

200

245

17²

²¹7

and sense of their

201

246

own

202

247

173

218

[I must begin by]

174

²¹9

the centenary of the

203

248

birth

204

249

175

²¹9

Everyone knows the

205

250

story

206

²P

176

220

went through his first

207

69

¹77

221

spontaneity and

uniqueness

FEL page begins

conditioning human

beings whose religion

breathes in Jamaica as a criterion of unrealized; among Mill had scarcely any variety of human life the essay after her

death amiable of rulers always alter our

views great? Mill goes on foundations for just of opinion for its will, is to prevent damaging to them Kant once remarked that

means Utilitarians and

the mere refusal authority and the

inevitable revolt against this Guardians. He

thought the ancient

prescription that. A quarter formidable, they are contemporary. On

Liberty ashamed, of this fact of God was possible He was the teacher over nature, but [This is not an entirely]

INDEX

Compiled by Douglas Matthews

References in italic are to 'Berlin and his Critics' (pages 349-66)

Aarsleff, Hans, 363

Abramsky, Chimen, 69n

activity: and liberty, 34-5

Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Ist

Baron, 2 3-4, 33, I p, 249 Aeschylus, 3 io Africa: social protest in, 64n Against the Current (IB), xxvii, 362, 364 Age of Enlightenment, The (IB), 350 Agnelli Prize, xxvi Alcibiades, 296 Alcidamas, 298

Alembert, Jean Le Rond d', 109 Alexander the Great (of Macedon), i i 5,

'44. 309-I0, 312, 314 Ambrose, St, i 8 2n anarchistic nihilism, 8 8 Anarchists, 195 Anderson, Perry, 363-4 animism, i9, i 58 Annan, Noel, 354, 364 anthropomorphism, 19 Antigone, 298 Antigonus Gonatas, 309 Antiochus Epiphanes, 3 18 Antiphon, 33, 298-9, 3 ij, J2o-i Antisthenes, 312-13 Aquinas, St Thomas, 135П, 261, 287 Arblaster, Anthony, 356 Archelaus, 298 Aristippus, 312-1 3 Aristophanes, 298, 319 Aristotelian Society: IB's Presidential

Address to, xix Aristotle: and determinism, 16; and civic liberty, 33; leaves Athens, 49; on obstacles to self-fulfilment, 253; on knowledge as liberating, 257; on causation and moral responsibility, 260; moral and political ideas, 287, 289, 291,

^ ^ 3⁰²-3, 309, 3 4-2, 3 I 5, 317-21; on social life, 294-5; exalts contemplative life, 295; on King Priam, 307; and Stoic doctrines, 310; escapes from Athens, 311 Armstrong, Hamilton Fish, 55n Asia: social protest in, 64n Assassins, 88

Associated Television company, xxvi Athenodorus, 3 i 6

Athens, 294, 308, 311, 319; see also

Greece (ancient) Attila the Hun, 115 Augustine, St, 287

authority: and liberty, 35-7, 39, 194-5, 206; and obedience, 75, 198, 284; and disagreement, 88^, 90, 92; area of, 206, 209-12; in ancient world, 283-4; see also sovereignty autonomy, 185, 277 Ayer, Alfred Jules, u6n, iji, 261, j58 Aztecs, 102

Babeuf, Francois Noel ('Gracchus'), 71 Bacon, Francis, 111-12, 259 Baghramian, Maria, and Attracta Ingram, 36on

Bain, Alexander, 223П Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 1 13, 2 p n

Baldwin, Tom, 355

Barker, Ernest, 33, 321

Barres, Maurice, 130

Baudelaire, Charles, 66

Beaver, Harold, xiv-xv

behaviourism, 95, 124, 278

Belinsky, Vissarion Grigorievich, 172

Bellamy, Richard, 362

Belloc, Hilaire, 118, q8

Bentham, Jeremy: on law as infraction of

liberty, 4m, i 7on, 195; on social development, 62; on utilising man's slavery to passions, 184; on liberty to do evil, i94n; on individual interests, 2i7n; and J. S. Mill, 22o-2, 227, 234, 238-9, 244, 250; on happiness, 222-3, ²²jn, 226; Utilitarianism, 224; Mill's essay on, 225; influence and reputation, 321, 338; and moral goodness, 340; on reason and determinism, 361 Berenson, Bernard, 94 Bergson, Henri: anti-rationalism, 67, 74 Bevan, Edwyn Robert, 3 16 Bismarck, Prince Otto von, 1 59 blame see praise and blame Blanc, Louis, 228n Blanqui, Louis Auguste, 71 Blok, Alexander, xxi n Blokland, Hans, 3 55, 3 60 Bodin, Jean, 289

Bonald, Louis Gabriel Ambroise, vicomte de, 63

Booth, John Wilkes, 1 3 Bosanquet, Bernard, 196 Bossuet, Jacques Benigne, 10, 101, 156 bourgeoisie: achievements, 8 1 Bowra, Maurice, xxin Bowring, John, 223n Boy's Herald, The, xxviiin Bradley, Francis Herbert, 196, 271 Brandeis, Louis, i64n Brather, Hans-Stephan, 230n Brentano, Franz, 358n Brinton, Crane, i94n Brown, John, xiii-xv Buchner, Georg, 67, 96 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 77, 234, 247, 289 Buckroyd, Carol, xxiv Bukharin, Nikolay Ivanovich, i84n Burckhardt, Jacob, 2on, 64, 227, 242 Burke, Edmund: on composite society, 130, 203, 2o6n, 241; on individual liberties and interests, 173, 2i7n; on restraint, 194; on compromise, 215; and Mill, 244; on political structure, 289; reputation, 32 i Burnham, James, 344 Butler, Joseph, io2n Butler, Samuel: Erewhon, i 5 Butterfield, Herbert, 133, i35n, Ij8n, 229

Cabet, Etienne, 1 i 2 Caesar, Julius, i 1 5 Callicles, 299 Calvinism, 10, 175

Campanella, Tommaso, I i 2 Carlile, Richard, 223 n Carlyle, Alexander, 236 Carlyle, Thomas: historical view, 20, ioo, 244; irrationalism, 60, 66, i 97; cynicism, 78, 134; as prophet, 218; and Mill, 228, 247; on social control, 236; on Mill's relations with Harriet Taylor, 240; opposes Victorian claustrophobia, 243; influence, 247; defiance, 3 3 8 Carneades, 261, 316 Carr, Edward Hallett: criticises IB, xxi, 352-3; and IB's views on determinism, 7, io-1 1; historiographical views, 19-22, 26-7, 30, 1 32n; moral sermonising, 24, I38n; upholds victors over victims, 343; What is History?, i in Carritt, Edgar Frederick, 277 causality: in history, 5, 27-9; and self-

determination, 26o-i Chaeronea, battle of (338 bc), 3ii Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 100 Chang, Ruth, 3 59 Charlemagne, 20 Chasles, Philarete, 92n Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 244 children: obedience to orders, 193, 195 choice: and exercise of liberty, 44-9, 53, 271-2, 278, 340; as illusion, 1 1 o; constraints on, i 22-6; existentialism and, 162; and coercion, i 77n; and conflict of values, 214; Mill on supremacy of, 222, 237; of belief, 257-8; and self- determination, 26o-8; Kant on, 3 3 7; and deception, 33 9; see also determinism; free will

Chrysippus, 7, 26o-z, 309, 316, 3i9 Church, the: authoritarianism, 88, 90,

283-4; and values, 291-2 Cicero, 3i, 117, 261 civil liberties, 6 5 class (social), 68-70, 99-Ю0 Cleanthes, 309, 316-17 Cleon, 301 Cobden, Richard, 3 8 Cocks, Joan, 36/

coercion: and deprivation of freedom, i68-7i, 173-6, 184, 210; of the weak and ignorant, 179, i86n, i97-8; and rule by reason, 193 Cohen, Gerald Allan, 3 55 Cohen, Marshall, 40n, 3 54 Cole, George Douglas Howard, i66n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 36, 221, 238, 244, 248

Collini, Stefan, 364 Common Knowledge (ed. Perl), xxvi Communards (French), 71 Communism: rise of, 6o-1, 68, 352; totalitarianism of, 77, 198; fanaticism of, 88; on education, 342 compulsion, 196-7, 274, 284 Comte, Auguste: and impersonality of history, 19-20, 109, i 29; influence and reputation, 77, 94-5, 247, 321; on disagreement in ethics and social sciences, 8o-i; and scientific supremacy in politics, 86; Memorial Lectures, 94; character and qualities, 9;; Utopianism, I 12; and generalisations in history, 14 i, 158; belief in universal causation, 153; as founder of sociology, 161; and human benefactors, 1 6 3; on free thinking in politics, 197; Mill's attitude to, 227, 234, 242n, 247, 25 in; on harmony of theory and practice, 23on; and 'pedantocratie', 2pn; and self-determination, 278 Concepts and Categories (IB), xxv Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de: on unitary nature of values, 42, 2 I 2n, 289; liberalism, 62; on history as natural science, 95, 109, iii, 129; Utopianism, 112, 2i2n; on individual rights in ancient world, 176; Mill and, 244; Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progres de I'esprit humain, 111

conformism, 44, 239-42, 244 Conservatives, 59, 63, 66 Constant, Benjamin: quoted, 3; and State intervention, 38-9, 173; on 'sacred frontiers', p; on libeny, 171, 209-11, 283-4; and liberalism, 207; and J. S. Mill, 227; on individual rights, 318 Constitution of Athens, 301 Cornford, Francis Macdonald, po-i Cowling, Maurice, 362, 364 Craig, Edward, 364 Crates, 312, 314-16, 319 Creighton, Mandell, Bishop of London,

23-4, 138

Crick, Bernard, 35,3^5

crimes: and blame, 14-1 5

Critias, 296, 299

Cromwell, Oliver, i 15, 138

Crooked Timb'!r of Humanity, The (IB),

xxvin, jj7 Crowder, George, 359 Cumberledge, Geoffrey, xii

Cushman, John, xii Cynics, 3 i 2, 315

Darwin, Charles, 89, 142, 158, 287; The

Origin of Species, 219 Dasgupta, Panha, J 58 David and Goliath, 276 Davin, Dan, xiii Dawson, Christopher, 27n, 353 democracy: and individual liberty, 42, 176-8, 21 i; Mill mistrusts, 24o-i, 243, 25 m; in USA, 241, 284; in ancient Greece, 283, 295-6, 299, 32i; in France, 284

Demosthenes, 30D-1, 3 i 1

Denmark, 90

Descartes, Rene, 141, 287

desires: and freedom, 3 1-2, 326

despotism: and individual liberty, 49-50;

see also tyranny determinism: concept of, 4-i2, i6-i8, 29-30, n6n, i22, 124, 155; and blame, i4-i6, iii, i i6n; and historicism, 19-21, 28, 113-i4, 120, 124; and knowledge, I 39, 154, 264, 278; social, i6o-i; belief in, i6i, 257, 322-4; and search for causes, i88; and self- prediction, 265-70; and rationality, 277; Marxism and, 325; see also self- determination Dickens, Charles, 247 Dickman, Howard, 359n Diderot, Denis, 71, 243 Diogenes of Babylon (Stoic), 316 Diogenes Laertius, 23On Diogenes of Sinope (Cynic), 312, 314, 3^l8-19

Disraeli, Benjamin (Earl of Beaconsfield), 246

Dodds, Eric Robertson, 317 domination, 192

Dostoevsky, Fedor Mikhailovich, 47, 66, 79, 171, 247; The Brothers Karamazov, 86, 338 n; The Devils, 71; Dyadyushkin Son ('Uncle's Dream'), 340; Zapiski iz podpol'ya ('Notes from Underground'), 343n Durham, John George Lambton, 1st Earl

of, 224 Durkheim, Emile, q8n Dworkin, Ronald, 355, 358, 359

East India Company, 224 education: and political ideals, 61-2, 195; and obedience, 195-8, 2i4, 284, 342; Mill on effects of, 242-3; as moulding, 341^-2

Eichmann, Adolf, 323

Eichthal, Gustave d', 248

Einstein, Albert, 287

Eliot, Thomas Stearns: quoted, 94

empiricism: opposes impersonal forces, 27;

and the real, 123n; Mill's, 232, 238 Engels, Friedrich, 71, 85, iom, 130, 166, 230n

England: trade unions in, 84; self- confidence in, i 87n; see also Great Britain

Epictetus, 3 I, i 82n, I 86, 273-4 Epicureans, 253, 260, 306, 309-12, 320 Epicurus, 33, 189, 302-4, 311, 314, 316-18, 320

equality: and freedom, i 8on, 200

Erasmus, Desiderius, 175, 243

ethics: and determinism, 1 6; and attaining

truth, 75 Euripides, 298, 300 evil: freedom to perform, 194 n existentialism, 162 Eyre, Edward John, 224

Fabianism, 68, 227, 229n Faguet, Emile, pn fanaticism, 345-7 Farganis, Sandra, 358 Fascism: rise of, 6o, 352 ; totalitarianism, 77; rejects old values, 79; reliance on instinct, 83; ideology, 1 58; defiance, 338; on education, 342; Maistre and, 3 50 fatalism, 1 o, 1 1 6n Festugiere, Andre Jean, 252 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 87 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 5 in, 167, 191,