Revisiting the “Enlightenment Project,” Inspired by Anthony Pagden and Armed with Some Ngrams

I turned in the last of my grades for the semester at the start of the week and was reminded, once again, that if April is the cruelest month, May — at least for academics — must be the kindest: a vast prospect for research, reading, and writing opens. September, for the moment anyway, remains little more than a distant threat. Conveniently enough, one of the books that I’m looking forward to reading turned up in my mailbox at the end of last week: Anthony Pagden’s The Enlightenment and Why it Still Matters.

A passing comment near the start of the book deals with one of my hobby-horses:

The now much-quoted, and much-abused phrase ‘the Enlightenment project’ was probably coined some thirty years ago by the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (about whom I will have more to say later). It was not meant to be complimentary.¹

Back in 2000, I ranted a bit in an article in Political Theory entitled “What Enlightenment Project?” (the title was supposed to be snarky, but that doesn’t always come off in print and “Enlightenment Project? WTF?” hadn’t occurred to me). Drawing on Albert O. Hirschman’s typology of reactionary forms of rhetoric (Jeremy Adelman’s recent biography of the great man is high up on my summer reading list), I examined some of the mischief associated with the term. Yet, when the time came to figure out what to put in the field that WordPress provides for briefly describing the focus of a blog, I found myself employing a variant of the phrase. My alibi was that I figured I could discuss treatments of the Enlightenment as a “continuing project” without actually committing myself to the view that this way of talking makes much sense. Pagden’s brief discussion of this “much-quoted, and much-abused phrase” provides a chance to revisit the phrase and see what sense I can make of it.

This post will focus on Pagden’s account of the genesis of the phrase (other posts, on related issues, will likely follow — after all, it’s summer and time to ruminate). Pagden makes three claims, which I’d like to a bit more closely: the first has to do with the novelty of the phrase “the Enlightenment project,” the second has to do with its alleged originator, and the third with the evaluation that the term implies. In what follows, I’ll be lending support to the first of these claims but questioning the other two.

The Ascent of the “Enlightenment Project”

The suggestion that the phrase “the Enlightenment project” was coined “some thirty years ago” is one of those claims that cries out for an Ngram:

What we have here would seem to confirm Pagden’s account: around 1980, the phrase “Enlightenment project” began its ascent, with “Enlightenment Project” following in its wake. The latter may be capturing an emerging practice of treating both parts of the bigram as proper nouns, but may also be tracking the appearance of the phrase in the titles of book sections and articles. Either way, it would seem to capture the extent to which the phrase is turning into a term of art.

The results look a bit messier if smoothing is turned off, but the same general picture emerges. There is, however, one intriguing difference:

While smoothed version makes it appear as if the ascent of “Enlightenment project” began in 1980, what we see in the unsmoothed version is a small hiccup in 1980, with the steady rise commencing in 1982, the year after the appearance of MacIntyre’s book. This fits better with Pagden’s claim about MacIntyre’s role, but it opens the question of how the phrase was the being used prior to the publication of After Virtue. A search for occurrences of the phrase limited to 1980 turns up five examples:

1. “The development of a universal, mathematically formulated science and its emergence as the model for all science and knowledge represents a culmination of the Enlightenment’s project.” David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: From Horkheimer to Habermas (1980) p. 161.
2. “John Wilkins, another Enlightenment project-director, who sought to fly to the moon, and who commissioned wings to be made for that purpose …” John L. Mahoney, The Enlightenment and English literature: Prose and Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, with Selected Modern Critical Essays(1980), p. 110
3. “Yet this loss of substance does not justify Goudzwaard’s outright negation of the entire Enlightenment project — toward human rights, toward democracy and toward science and technology” and “I argue against Goudzwaard that Christians must not stand against the Enlightenment project.” Gregory Brown, “Faith in Progress or Christian Faith,”The Ecumenist: A Journal for Promoting Christian Unity 19:3 (March-April 1981) 43-48 p. 45 & 48.
4. “Despite Maurice’s sympathy with the Enlightenment project of self-appropriation and self-possession, nevertheless he contended that the exaltation of the autonomous self-defining subject in the critical tradition was an abstraction as distorting and alienating as the older metaphysics had been.” Charles Davis, Community and Critique in Nineteenth-Century Theology (1980) p. 59
5. (No text snippet provided), Koun Yamada, Gateless Gate: The Classic Book of Zen Koans (1980)

Small though this list may be, it remind us of at least two things. First, some of these examples take some pains to specify just which Enlightenment project the author has in mind. For Held, the “Enlightenment project” involves the “development of a universal, mathematically formulated science,” in the first of the examples from Brown, Goudzwaard (a Dutch theologian)² is said to reject an “Enlightenment project” that was directed “toward human rights, toward democracy and toward science and technology,” and, according to Davis, Maurice (about whom, I have been able to learn nothing) is sympathetic towards an Enlightenment project that has to do with “self-appropriation and self-possession.”

As a crude way of tracking what, if any, differences there might be in usages of an “Enlightenment project” that is not further specified and one that is specified in the ways that our examples suggest, we can compare two NGrams: one for “Enlightenment project” and the other for “Enlightenment project of.” Here are the results (the smoothing is turned off):

Were all the instances of “Enlightenment project” simply the start of a phrase that continued “Enlightenment project of,” the two lines would overlap. Obviously they don’t. But caution is advised in interpreting what we are seeing here:

1. As always appears to be the case with the things I want to investigate, these are really puny numbers (I guess I should be doing what Google wants and constructing an Ngram that compares Albert Einstein, Sherlock Holmes, and Frankenstein). This might be reason enough to not to put much stock in any of these results.
2. Not all instances of what we might call the “specified Enlightenment project” take the form of “Enlightenment project of” (e.g., only example #4 above would be captured by the Ngram for “Enlightenment project of.” As a result, it is likely that there are more invocations of “specified Enlightenment projects” than our Ngram is showing.
3. Further, as example #3 illustrates, an author may initially specify what specific “Enlightenment project” is being discussed but then go on, for the remainder of the text, to employ the phrase “Enlightenment project” without a modifier. This, like the undersampling of “specified Enlightenment projects” noted in #2 would tend to reduce distance between the two lines.

Nevertheless, we may be on to something here. I can’t think of a good reason why the undercounting of “specified” uses of “Enlightenment project” should vary over time, but what we are seeing on the Ngram is a trend towards using “Enlightenment project” without spelling out just what it involves (though, once again, reservation #1 may still trump all other considerations). If this holds up, it would mean though invocations of the “Enlightenment project” increase, a specification of what it might involves are failing to keep pace.

The second thing that our five examples (four examples, if we leave Yamada out of the discussion) from 1981 suggests is that the phrase “Enlightenment project” is being used in at least three different disciplinary contexts: the first comes from a book on the Frankfurt School, the second is an editor’s note to one of the poems included in an anthology of literary texts from the eighteenth century,³ the third and fourth come from discussions in theology. While MacIntyre’s subsequent discussion of the “Enlightenment project” would be quite important for the context inhabited by the third and fourth examples, his work would appear to be rather alien to the tradition invoked in David Held’s study (true, MacIntyre wrote a book on Marcuse, but he made it clear that he didn’t think much of him). All of this is enough to wonder whether Pagden may have overlooked another possible candidate for “originator” of the term.

The Project of Enlightenment as the Project of Modernity

In 1997, the Swedish historian Sven-Eric Liedman offered the following account of the origins of the phrase “Enlightenment project.” It differs markedly from Pagden’s.

it was the German philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habermas who, in 1980, first talked about ‘the Enlightenment Project’ and maintained that it had not lost its vitality and value.⁴

Liedman was alluding to the speech given by Habermas in September 1980 when he was awarded the Adorno Prize by the city of Frankfurt. The section of the speech that carried the title Die Projekt der Aufklärung began as follows:

The project of modernity as it was formulated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century consists in the relentless development of the objectivating sciences, of the universalistic foundations of morality and law, and of autonomous art, all in accord with their own immanent logic. But at the same time it also results in releasing the cognitive potentials accumulated in the process from their esoteric high forms and attempting to apply them in the sphere of praxis, that is, to encourage the rational organization of social relations⁠.⁵

So here we have another account of the “Enlightenment project” and Habermas’s use of the phrase, unlike MacIntyre’s, could hardly be read as “not meant to be complimentary.”

There are two peculiarities that should be noted at the outset:

1. While the section carries the title Projekt der Aufklärung, the “project” that concerns Habermas in the speech itself is the one that the philosophes allegedly initiated: namely, “the project of modernity.”
2. The German Projekt der Aufklärung presents its translators with the dilemma of whether or not to employ the definite article: the two existing translations opt for “Project of Enlightenment,” but they could also, with equal justification, have used “Project of the Enlightenment.” Or they could have reproduced the ambiguity by going with “The Enlightenment Project.”

So, it’s time for another Ngram, this one comparing the German and English terms:

What’s clear from the Ngram is that the German literature is discussing the “Projekt der Aufklärung” slightly earlier than Anglophone publications are invoking the “Enlightenment project” and the German discussions go on to invoke it much more frequently, peaking around 1997 (which, lest we forget, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment). I suspect the falling off of instances of “Projekt der Aufklärung” after that date tells us more about purchasing patterns in American libraries than it does about German usage.

What this doesn’t prove, however, is that all of those German discussions of the “Projekt der Aufklärung” are devoted to Habermas’s enlightenment project: since German academics are more likely to read English books than Anglophone academics are likely to read German ones, it stands to reason that a fair number of those discussions of the “Projekt der Aufklärung” will be dealing with MacIntyre. Nevertheless, as the example from David Held’s 1981 study suggests, readers interested in Habermas were already picking up the habit of invoking something called “the Enlightenment project” before the publication of After Virtue. (I should be able to provide first-hand testimony on this since David and I were both in the PhD program in Political Science at MIT in the 1970s, but I have no recollection of when I first heard the words “Enlightenment project.” I do, however, recall when I first heard the word “deconstruction,” but that’s a story for another day.)

This suggests that we might want to modify Pagden’s account of the origins of the phrase “Enlightenment project” and suggest that, while it did indeed come into fashion right about the time when he claimed it did,

1. The credit (or blame) for the invention and popularization of the term would seem to belong to both Alasdair MacIntyre and Jürgen Habermas.
2. While, for MacIntyre, it may appear as if the term “was not meant to be complimentary” (there may be more I want to say about this, though), for Habermas it clearly was.

What this suggests is that sometime around 1981 we begin to see the beginning of a dispute over what “the Enlightenment project” involved and whether or not it was a good thing. This alternative account has its appeal: among other things, it makes 1981 look rather like 1784, when any number of people were arguing about what “enlightenment” was and wondering whether it was always a good thing. Perhaps this explains why, around this time, I thought it might make sense to start looking at the German debate on the question “What is Enlightenment?”

1. Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment and Why it Still Matters, (New York, Random House, 2013) 16. ↩
2. There is a bibliography of his works in English here. ↩
3. A copy of the book is making its way to me through interlibrary borrowing. ↩
4. Sven-Eric Liedman, “The Crucial Role of Ethics in Different Types of Enlightenment (Condorcet and Kant),” in The Postmodernist Critique of the Project of Enlightenment, ed. Sven-Eric Liedman, Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and Humanities 58 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 45-58, p. 45. ↩
5. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, ed. Maurizio Passerin d’Entreves and Seyla Benhabib, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge [England]: Polity Press, 1996), 44-46. For an earlier translation, see Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” trans. Seyla Ben-Habib, New German Critique, no. 22 (January 1, 1981): 8-9 ↩

How Isaiah Berlin Revised the “Two Concepts” (A Concluding Philological Postscript)

Having finished my three posts on the exchange of letters between Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin, I’m ready to reward myself by rolling around in the some of the nGram catnip that I’ve been accumulating. But there’s one bit of unfinished business: a discussion of the differences between the 1958 edition of Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” and the version that was reprinted, eleven years later, as the third of his Four Essays on Liberty. While, at first glance, this would seem to be a rather tedious topic, it wound up being a good deal more interesting than I’d initially suspected. It has implications both for appreciating some of the challenges that “Two Concepts of Liberty” appears to have posed to its first readers and for understanding how Berlin understood what he was doing in this influential, if sometimes perplexing, essay.

The Two Versions of the Two Concepts

When I began the series of posts on Popper and Berlin I wasn’t at all concerned with the differences between the 1958 and the 1969 versions. Indeed, it didn’t occur to me that there were any. I worked from the 1958 text because — as I explained in my the first post — it’s the one I’ve owned for as long as I’ve been interested in political theory and it was the version Popper cited — by page number — in his letter (the fact that it is smaller and lighter than the Four Essays also had its appeal). But when I teach the essay, I use the 1969 version and several years ago I scanned that version so I could keep it on my iPad and refer to it in class. When I started to work on these posts, it occurred to me that, rather than transcribe the material that I wanted to quote, it would be easier to extract the text from my scan of the 1969 version and then paste it into the word processor I use when writing these posts. But I quickly began to notice that there were differences between what I’d copied and what I was seeing on the page in front of me.

I explain this in order to make it clear that I have not made an exhaustive investigation of the differences between the two versions. Some of the changes that I noticed are simply alternative ways of making the same point. For example, on p. 23 of the 1958 text, Berlin writes,

Cephalus, whom Plato reports as saying that old age alone has liberated him from the passion of love — the yoke of a cruel master — is reporting an experience as real as that of liberation from a human tyrant or slave owner.

In the 1969 version (p. 138) “Cephalus” is replaced by “Sophocles,” a distinction without a difference since Cephalus — that tedious blowhard and, on this occasion, name-dropper — is recounting something that Sophocles allegedly told him. But a few of the others had implications for the discussion between Berlin and Popper, which was what led me to them in the first place.

Since the “Two Concepts” lecture is generally regarded as Berlin’s most important work, it might be useful for someone to draw up a list of the differences between the two editions (perhaps the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library might be interested in making such a thing available). But that is not even close to what I am offering here.

I will limit myself to noting three changes.

Conceptual Change: Historical, not Logical

The first change involves the insertion of a few words into a passage that appears at the second paragraph of the Section II of the lecture, the section in which Berlin begins his discussion of the concept of “positive freedom.” The paragraph in question (p. 16 of the 1958 version, pp. 131-132 of the 1969 version) prepares for the long preview of Berlin’s argument that follows in the next paragraph. The paragraph goes as follows (I’ve set the new material in boldface):

The freedom which consists in being one’s own master, and the freedom which consists in not being prevented from choosing as I do by other men, may, on the face of it, seem concepts at no great logical distance from each other — no more than negative and positive ways of saying much the something. Yet the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ notions of freedom historically developed in divergent directions not always by logically reputable steps until in the end, they came into direct conflict with each other

These alterations are small, but by no means trivial. The passage, as originally formulated, began by granting that the “logical distance” between two concepts and closed by observing that the “development” of these two concepts pushes them in diverging directions. Berlin’s later additions clarify what kind of “development” he is proposing to trace — a historical development — and stress that the process driving these concepts apart is governed by something other than logic.

Berlin made a similar modification at the close of the third paragraph from the end of Section V (“The Temple of Sarasto”). Again, the new material is in boldface:

In this way the rationalist argument, with its assumption of the single true solution, has led by steps which, if not logically valid, are historically and psychologically intelligible, from an ethical doctrine of individual responsibility and individual self-perfection to an authoritarian state obedient to the directives of an élite of Platonic guardians. (p. 37, 1959; p. 152).

Again, the change drives home the point that the transformation Berlin is attempting to trace represents something quite different from the working out of the logical implications of a proposition.

In the introduction to Four Essays on Liberty Berlin explained,

While I have not altered the text in any radical fashion, I have made a number of changes intended to clarify some of the central points which have been misunderstood by critics and reviewers.¹

The particular misunderstanding that Berlin would seem to be remedying with these changes is clear enough: they remind the reader that the transformation Berlin is tracing is historical, rather than a logical. What is somewhat less clear is why Berlin would have thought that this point needed emphasizing or which of his “critics and reviewers” might have misunderstood him in this way.

It may be relevant that, within five months of the delivery of the lecture, Berlin found it necessary to remind at least one critic of this point. The critic was Karl Popper. In his letter to Popper of March 16, 1959 explained,

The whole of my lecture, in a sense, is an attempt at a brief study or prolegomenon to the study — of the way in which innocent or virtuous or truly liberating ideas (’know thyself’ or sapere aude or the man who is free although he is a slave, in prison etc.) tend (not inevitably!) to become authoritarian & despotic and lead to enslavement and slaughter when they are isolated & driven ahead by themselves.²

The parenthetical interjection “not inevitably!” — like his additions to the 1969 version of “Two Concepts” — emphasizes that the transformation of the concept of “positive liberty” into something monstrous was neither logical nor inevitable.

Popper’s suggestion that it was possible to conceive of “a very different and very simple idea of positive freedom which may be complementary to negative freedom, and which does not need to clash with it” might have been motivation enough for Berlin to insist on this point in his response to Popper. The force of Popper’s critique was that it was (logically) possible to conceive a way of framing a concept of positive liberty that did not have the authoritarian implications that Berlin associated with the notion. Berlin’s response would seem to be aimed at reminding Popper that “Two Concepts” is not concerned with logical possibilities but rather with the “associations” that concepts have “accumulated” over the course of their historical development.

By the time that Berlin came to write the introduction to Four Essays on Liberty it would have been obvious to him that Popper was not the only reader who had read “Two Concepts” was an analysis of the differing implications of the concept of liberty, as opposed to an attempt to trace the diverging historical trajectory of two ways of talking about liberty. Two years before the publication of the Four Essays, the American political theorist Gerald MacCallum challenged Berlin’s notion that “we may usefully distinguish between two kinds or concepts of political and social freedom” and argued that

Whenever the freedom of some agent or agents is in question, it is always freedom from some constraint or restriction on, interference with, or barrier to doing, not doing, becoming, or not becoming something. Such freedom is thus always of something (an agent or agents), from something, to do, not do, become, or not become something; it is a triadic relation. Taking the format “x is (is not) free from (to do, not do, become, not become) z,” x ranges over agents, y ranges over such “preventing conditions” as constraints, restrictions, interferences, and barriers, and z ranges over actions or conditions of character or circumstance.³

MacCallum was aware that “disputes about the nature of freedom are certainly historically best understood as a series of attempts by parties opposing each other on very many issues to capture for their own side the favorable attitudes attaching to the notion of freedom.” But the point of his “triadic” conception of liberty was to clarify the ways in which the contestants in these historical struggles were engaged in modifying the content of the variables in a concept of liberty that remained, when properly analyzed, the same.

Berlin limited his response to MacCallum to a footnote that dissented from MacCallum’s suggestion and insisted,

A man struggling against his chains or a people against enslavement need not consciously aim at any definite further state. A man need not know how he will use his freedom; the just wants to remove the yoke. So do classes and nations.⁴

Berlin’s rejoinder is not without its shortcomings. It is easy enough to conceive of an individual who simply wants to be free from some burden, but does not go on to specify what he or she wants to do as an alternative (this is the strategy adopted by Melville’s Bartleby). It is, however, more difficult to conceive of political movements that simply want to be freed from some form of oppression but do not specify what they want to do or to be (e.g., they might explain that they wish to become “a self-governing people”). But the question, at least for Berlin, is an historical one, rather than a conceptual one and the possibility that, somewhere in the past, we can find movements that, like Bartleby, simply refuse to do something without specifying what it is that alternatives they would prefer, cannot be ruled out. We can analyze political statements using MacCallum’s triadic concept to our heart’s content, but what is ultimately at stake is the question of whether actual political and social movements have articulated their positions in the way that MacCallum’s matrix would suggest or whether they have tended “(not inevitably!)” to move to one of the two diverging conceptions of liberty whose history Berlin purports to be tracing.

The weakness that plagues Berlin’s account lies in the absence of anything resembling the historical account that the modifications made in the text of the “Two Concepts” suggests is needed. As I suggested in my previous post, we now know that he had attempted such a conceptual history in the Flexner lectures. But, he was unable to shape it into a form that he found satisfactory. And since very little of the historical narrative that he was trying to work out in the Flexner lectures made it into the “Two Concepts,” readers and critics might have been forgiven for thinking that Berlin was presenting a conceptual analysis, rather than a history of concepts: hence the need to set them straight.

Monists, All the Way Down

There is one last revision that I want to note before ending this postscript. It comes at the end of the final paragraph of Section V, which summarizes how a commitment to the idea that (1) “all men have one purpose, and one only, that of rational self-direction, (2) “that the ends of all ration beings most of necessity fit into a single universal harmonious pattern, (3), “that all conflict, and consequently all tragedy, is due solely to the clash of reason with the irrational or the insufficiently rational,” and (4) “finally, that when all men have been made rational, they will obey the rational laws of their own natures, which are one and the same in them all, and so be at once wholly law-abiding and wholly free” tends to lead “to despotism, albeit by the best or the wisest — to Sarastro’s temple in the Magic Flute — but still despotism, which turns out to be identical with freedom ….” In the version in Four Essays, the final sentence is modified with a deletion and an addition:

Can it be that Hume is right and Socrates and the creators of the central Western tradition in ethics and politics who followed him have been mistaken, for more than two millennia, that virtue is not knowledge, nor freedom identical with either? that despite the fact that it rules the lives of more men than ever before in its long history, not one of the basic assumptions of this famous view is demonstrable, or, perhaps, even true?

Popper’s letter had begun with a critique of this passage, noting that he considered himself a “rationalist” but had never accepted any of these principles and that he was “far from convinced that Socrates would have accepted your four basic assumptions, although I agree that Hume would have rejected them.” It would seem (at least as I read these changes) that Berlin’s modifications close the door on Popper’s attempt to persuade Berlin that there might be a way of salvaging both an alternative conception of positive liberty and a version of rationalism that was immune to the slide into despotism that Berlin sought to trace. Berlin eliminated the one point on which he and Popper (momentarily) agreed (namely, that Hume would reject these principles) and reinforced the notion that the entire tradition, beginning with Socrates, was wedded to what Berlin would come to call “monism.”

And, with this, my discussion of these exchanges between Berlin and Popper comes to a close.

Into the (nGram) Catnip

1. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, pp. ix-x. ↩
2. Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1946-1960 Edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes with the assistance of Serena Moore (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009) p. 681 ↩
3. Gerald C. MacCallum, “Negative and Positive Freedom,” The Philosophical Review 76, no. 3 (July 1967): 312-313. ↩
4. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty p. xliii. ↩

Berlin & Popper on Liberty & Enlightenment (Part III – Berlin’s Response)

I’ve devoted two previous posts to Karl Popper’s comments on Isaiah Berlin’s 1958 inaugural lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty,” as laid out in his letter to Berlin of February 17, 1959. This post will focus on Berlin’s response in his letter to Popper of March 16, 1959.¹

Berlin’s response lines up neatly with Popper’s comments: one paragraph addresses Popper’s reservations about Berlin’s account of “rationalism” (which I discussed in my initial post on this topic), while a second responds to Popper’s request for an explanation of Berlin’s claim that Horace’s dictum sapere aude has served as a justification for totalitarian forms of rule (a discussion of this section of Popper’s letter was the focus of my second post). What I would like to do here, then, is to wind up my discussion of the exchange by examining Berlin’s response to Popper’s two objections (a subsequent postscript will deal with a few textual alterations in the Two Concepts lecture).

Reservations About “Rationalism”

In his letter to Berlin, Popper dissented from the characterization of “rationalism” Berlin offered in at the close of Section V of the Two Concepts lecture. What Berlin offers there looms large in Berlin’s account of the central philosophical commitments on which he saw the Enlightenment as resting. Here is how Berlin summarized these principles:

first, that all men have one true purpose, and one only, that of rational self-direction; second, that the ends of all rational beings must of necessity fit into a single universal, harmonious pattern, which some men may be able to discern more clearly than others; third, that all conflict, and consequently all tragedy, is due solely to the clash of reason with the irrational or the insufficiently rational — immature and undeveloped elements in life – whether individual or communal, and that such clashes are, in principle, avoidable, and for wholly rational beings impossible; finally, that when all men have been made rational, they will obey the rational laws of their own natures, which are one and the same in them all, and so be at once wholly law-abiding and wholly free.

Popper’s objection to this description of rationalism was simple enough: he saw himself as a rationalist but vehemently rejected these principles. So, there was at least one rationalist in the world who did not believe what Berlin claimed rationalists believed.

Berlin’s discussion of “rationalism” continued,

Can it be that Hume is right and Socrates mistaken, that virtue is not knowledge, and freedom not identical with either? that despite the fact that it rules the lives of more men than ever before in its long history, not one of the basic assumptions of this famous view is demonstrable, or, perhaps, even true?

Popper had problems with this as well:

when you say “Can it be that Hume is right, and Socrates mistaken”. I am far from convinced that Socrates would have accepted your for basic assumptions, although I agree that Hume would have rejected them.But much as I admire Hume, he was the founder of irrationalism, together with Rousseau. I hasten to add that he was infinitely better than Rousseau, and surely not a romantic. But his irrationalism was that of a disappointed rationalist; and a disappointed rationalist is a man who expected too much from rationality.

How, then, did Berlin respond to these objections? He began by assuring Popper that, “of course,” he had no intention of associating him with such beliefs. But he resisted Popper’s effort to distance Socrates from the broader “rationalist” tradition and questioned whether Hume was, in fact, the outlier Popper took him to be. Indeed, what Berlin would seem to be suggesting is that Popper turns out to be the outlier: as Berlin sees it, Hume was hardly alone in his excessive expectations about what rationality might accomplish. Here is the continuation of the passage quoted above:

Of course I do not suppose that you could ever have subscribed to any of the propositions listed on p. 39: but I do think that the classical rationalists from Plato & Aristotle to Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz etc. could scarcely have denied them. What would Socrates have had against them? could he really have denied that all genuine questions had one true answer & one only, & that all rational men must, pro tanto, be capable of reaching perfect agreement on these answers? I think that Hume may have asked too much of rationality: but did Descartes or Aristotle ask less? I think they were genuinely mistaken about what being rational was: if my text implied that the alternative is rejection of reason in favour of some kind of Rousseau-ish état d’âme I have failed to convey my meaning.

It is possible that Berlin’s characterization of the thinkers he was criticizing as “classical rationalists” might have provided an opening for Popper to distinguish his “critical rationalism” from the line of (uncritical) rationalist running from “Plato & Aristotle to Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz etc.” But much hangs on the question of who is included in Berlin’s “etc.”

The Two Lectures had explicitly linked Kant to this tradition, an interpretation that — for reasons discussed in the first of these posts — Popper clearly rejected. Further, Popper had already, in effect, answered Berlin’s question as to what objections Socrates could have had to the principles shared by Berlin’s rationalists: his letter to Berlin implied that the “Socratic way of life” was equivalent to the critical stance that Popper associated with Kant. As a result, it is difficult to see how Popper could have taken much comfort in Berlin’s insistence that he had no intention of implying that Popper would have subscribed to the premisses on which “rationalism” rested while, nevertheless, continuing to hold that Socrates (and, in all likelihood, Kant) embraced them. Whatever grounds Berlin might have had for distinguishing “classical” from “critical” rationalism remain, at best, elusive.

The remainder of Berlin’s response to Popper’s first objection does little to address the disagreement between them on the nature of “rationalism.” But it does help to clarify some of the ambiguities in the position that Berlin was staking out.

I feel at least as hostile to Rousseau as you do: I realise his vast influence, but dislike his very prose – or bad poetry – so deeply, that I feel I cannot do justice even to the original psychological aperçus which it occasionally contains. The last thing that I want to do is to hold open the door for romanticism and blind faith — what socialists in the nineteenth century used to can “fidéisme”. But unless the pretensions of “rationalistic” reason are seen in correct perspective, will the disappointment in which they end not always tend to bring grist to the irrationalist mill? will the effort to be “scientific” where this does not fit – by Russell, or Marxists, or various kinds of positivists – not inevitably drive the victims & their sympathisers into the arms of sceptics, cynics, Hegelians and other Charlatans? I think that you believe me liable to discredit too much – in my zeal to refute metaphysical rationalism, to cast suspicion on reason as such. Perhaps this is just. It is always more difficult to be positive & defend the good than negative & attack wickedness.

Berlin might be seen as making three moves here:

1. Having reiterated his disagreement with Popper on the issue as to whether Socrates (and, by implication, Kant) are part of the tradition of “rationalism” that leads to disastrous consequences, he shifts the focus to a cluster of thinkers whose positions he and Popper are at one in rejecting: Rousseau, Russell, Marx, Hegel and assorted unnamed “sceptics,” “cynics,” and “Charlatans.” The result of this move is that, while Berlin remains a critic of a certain form of “rationalism,” he is able to assure Popper that he has no sympathy for the “irrationalists.”
2. In developing this point Berlin makes use of what Albert O. Hirschman dubbed the “jeopardy” argument: a rhetorical move that maintains that the pursuit of an otherwise laudable end will, when pushed too far, undermine whatever progress has been obtained through the pursuit of such ends.² This move allow Berlin to imply that there might, after all, be grounds for an alliance with Popper: certain forms of rationalism, by raising (as Popper himself had argued) unrealistic expectations about the power of reason, run the risk of driving disillusioned rationalists into the camp of the very thinkers that Popper (like Berlin) finds so treacherous. What distinguishes Popper’s rationalism from the sort of rationalism that Berlin is criticizing is that Popper, unlike the “classical rationalists” has tempered his expectations about reason.
3. Having now indicated that, despite their apparent disagreement about rationalism he and Popper are actually allies, Berlin is able to conclude his response by apologizing for an excess of zeal in fighting their common enemies. This might serve as an excuse for Berlin’s treatment of Socrates and Kant: it is evidence of his excessive, albeit well-intentioned, zeal.

A Brief Note on Berlin and Negative Liberty

This last move may have broader applicability for the argument of the Two Lectures. In its zeal to point out the dangers associated with “positive liberty” it is too easy to assume that Berlin was staking out a sort of libertarian position in the “Two Concepts,” a position that defines “freedom” more or less along the lines laid out in the Mercantus Center’s reckoning of “Freedom in the 50 States” — a reckoning in which we residents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are seen as groaning under the yoke of oppression while our neighbors across the border in New Hampshire are happily pursuing the first of the two alternatives on their license plates. But, as John Holbo has recently noted in a comment on the Mecantus Index on Crooked Timber, the Index is engaged in precisely the sort of crude tallying up of negative liberties that Berlin himself had questioned in the long footnote from the “Two Concepts” that Holbo goes on to quote. In other words, Berlin’s critique of the excesses of “positive” liberty no more makes him an unapologetic defender of negative liberty, than his critique of the excesses of rationalism makes him an irrationalist. The same argument is sometimes made about his more general stance towards the Enlightenment: despite all his criticisms of the Enlightenment’s “monism” and despite his sympathetic readings of various “counter-enlighteners,” he was — at heart — a friend of the Enlightenment.³

“Of Course I Have Nothing Against Sapere Aude”

Popper’s second response to the Two Concepts lecture consisted of a counter-argument and a question. The counter-argument took the form an alternative conception of “positive liberty” that can be seen as cast in the terms of Kantian lines: adopt the maxim to think critically, i.e., “sapere aude.” Hence the simple question that he posed to Berlin: “what do you have against sapere aude?”

Berlin’s response was anything but simple. “Of course,” he began, “I have nothing against sapere aude.” Of course, any sentence that begins with “of course” (including this one) is bound to invite suspicion and the fact that Berlin began both of his responses to Popper this way (“Of course I do not suppose that you could ever have subscribed to any of the propositions listed on p. 39″) suggests a certain defensiveness. Berlin goes on to lavish praises on Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?”: “Kant’s essay on the notion of Enlightenment is moving and unforgettable.” But (of course?) the inevitable “but” arrives and we get back to business:

But in the days of Socrates sapere had not yet accumulated the association it acquired from being used as a weapon — the weapon — by every authoritarian and monopolistic doctrine that ever slaughtered people on its altars. By Kant’s time it was surely not enough to ask only for sapere — only for satisfaction of intellectual curiosity — or even knowledge in its widest sense. Kant himself has won immortal glory by stressing the very fact that a man might know & know & still be a villain. The whole of my lecture, in a sense, is an attempt at a brief study or prolegomenon to the study — of the way in which innocent or virtuous or truly liberating ideas (’know thyself’ or sapere aude or the man who is free although he is a slave, in prison etc.) tend (not inevitably!) to become authoritarian & despotic and lead to enslavement and slaughter when they are isolated & driven ahead by themselves.

Here, in a few complex sentences, we see Berlin’s stance towards the Enlightenment laid out in all its ambivalence. Admirers of Albert O. Hirschman have no doubt already noted that. once again, Berlin trots out the jeopardy trope: Horace’s advice turns out to be one of those ideas that, while “innocent or virtuous or truly liberating ideas” tends to produce disastrous results when “isolated & driven ahead by themselves.”

How exactly this is supposed to work could be summarized as follows:

1. There is nothing inherently wrong with Horace’s maxim “sapere aude” (i.e., “satisfy your intellectual curiosity”): the dangers stem from the subsequent “accumulated association” that has been attached to the term.
2. This subsequent “accumulated association” was acquired as a result of the concept’s having been used “as a weapon” in authoritarian politics.
3. The use of the concept for such purposes is but one example of the way in which certain ideas “tend (not inevitably!)” to yield nasty results when they are “isolated & driven ahead by themselves.”

There is much to discuss here, but — in the interest of wrapping things up so that I can turn from the arduous task of unpacking Berlin’s sentences to the less demanding past-time of rolling around in nGram catnip — I’ll confine myself to a few points.

First, it is perhaps worth noting that Berlin raises no objections to the way in which Popper has decided to translate Horace’s (or is it Kant’s?) “sapere“: he accepts Popper’s suggestion that the term denotes “intellectual curiosity.” As I argued in my very first post on this blog, this is hard to reconcile with is hard to reconcile with either the literal translation of the Latin (what is needed here is “wisdom,” which has a somewhat broader reach than “intellectual curiosity)” or with the context in which Horace used the phrase (he is exhorting his friend not to delay moral reform). The reason for reiterating this seemingly pedantic point about the translation of sapere is that there are two different types of jeopardy arguments that Berlin could make and which one he deploys depends on how he chooses to read the maxim that Kant took over from Horace.

Using Popper’s definition would appear to support a jeopardy argument of the following sort: “intellectual curiosity,” pushed beyond a certain point, threatens to undermine previous achievements. But it difficult to see how the pursuit of more knowledge threatens the knowledge we have already obtained (e.g., more knowledge about subatomic particles may raise difficulties for particular theories, but we don’t see this as undermining scientific knowledge). On the other hand, it is not so difficult to see how relentless and unchecked attempts to satisfy our intellectual curiosity might threaten other values (for an argument of this sort, see Roger Shattuck’s book Forbidden Knowledge⁴). Had Berlin read sapere as referring to a something (i.e., “wisdom”) that is concerned not simply with the pursuit of “intellectual curiosity,” but also with other concerns (e.g., moral judgment, aesthetic sensibility, etc.) then he could have offered a jeopardy argument of a different sort. His rejoinder to Popper would be that, while there is nothing wrong, per se, in satisfying one’s “intellectual curiosity,” this pursuit (1) is only a part of what is involved in fulfilling Horace’s imperative and (2) it needs to be tempered by an awareness that neglecting these other concerns turns out to be “unwise.”

It is possible to catch a hint this line of argument when Berlin reminds Popper that Kant had been well aware of the danger of assuming that “intellectual curiosity” alone was enough to prevent the degeneration of “sapere” into manipulation (“Kant himself has won immortal glory by stressing the very fact that a man might know & know & still be a villain”). Pursuing this argument might have led Berlin to reflect on the role that Rousseau played in teaching Kant that knowledge and virtue did not always go hand in hand. As Kant explained,

I am myself by inclination a seeker after truth. I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge and restless passion to advance in it, as well as satisfaction in every forward step. There was a time when I thought that this alone could constitute the honor of mankind, and I despised the rabble who knows nothing. Rousseau set me right. This blind preference vanishes; I learn to respect men, and I should find myself far more useless than the common laborer if I did not believe that this view could give worth to all others to establish the rights of man.⁵

But, unfortunately, Rousseau has one, and only one, role to play in the argument that Berlin develops: he is the representative of the conception of (positive) liberty that allows compulsion to be presented as freedom.

One of the more peculiar features of the discussion of the phrase sapere aude in the Two Concepts is that Berlin’s concern lies not with the loss of the broader connotations that the phrase might once have had, but rather with the what it has gained over time: i.e., the “accumulated association” that it has taken on as a consequence of the uses to which it has been put. Much in this argument turns on what it means for a phrase to “accumulate” an “association.”

It is easy enough to come up with examples of previously “innocent” phrases that were subsequently tainted as a result of their use by political movements. For example, Walter Kaufmann once argued that when Nietzsche used the phrase “blond beast” he had lions in mind.⁶ With the rise of National Socialism and the repeated use of the phrase as a way of designating a certain racial ideal, Nietzsche’s phrase “accumulated” very different connotations: when we read it today we think of Nazi thugs, rather than lions.

While it is easy to see how such an argument might work for “blond beast,” it is a good deal harder to see how it can account for what allegedly happened with “sapere aude.” Berlin does not — and, indeed, could not — provide instances of the use of this phrase as “a weapon — the weapon” employed by authoritarians (e.g., Hitler may have talked about “blond beasts,” but he didn’t quote Horace). But this does not seem to be what Berlin had in mind when he spoke of an “accumulated association.” So let us try a different tack.

It is significant that Berlin’s reservations are not confined to Horace’s “sapere aude.” His letter to Popper offers Socrates’s “know thyself” as yet another example of one of those “innocent or virtuous or truly liberating ideas” that “tend (not inevitably!) to become authoritarian & despotic and lead to enslavement and slaughter when they are isolated & driven ahead by themselves.” He also mentions a third example: the idea that it is possible for a man to be “free although he is a slave.”

Readers of the “Two Concepts” (a group that, of course, includes Karl Popper) will recall that all three of these “innocent ideas” had played a role in Berlin’s argument: St. Ambrose’s statement that “A wise man, though he be a slave, is at liberty …” is quoted in Section III and “knowing oneself” is a prerequisite for the project of “self-realization” that Berlin takes up in Section IV, which also contains his first invocation of the phrase sapere aude. In saying that sapere aude have taken on an “accumulated association” Berlin is not making a claim about the history of a particular phrase, but is instead trying to capture something about the implications of the broader idea that Berlin sees this phrase, along with the phrases from Socrates and Ambrose, invoke: namely, the possibility of separating off a “rational self” that has the capacity for self-legislation and self-realization. Berlin’s concern, in other words, lies not with what has happened to a few “innocent phrases,” but rather with the trajectory of a few “innocent ideas,” all of which seem to be implicated in the creation of the potentially dangerous notion of “positive liberty.”

A Post Factum Prolegomenon

As I suggested in my initial post in this series, what Berlin needs to provide — if not here, then at some point — is a history that would trace how these “innocent” ideas were transformed into a “weapon” that was used to compel obedience. His letter to Popper would appear to concede the need for a history of this sort when it characterized the “Two Concepts” as “a brief study or prolegomenon” to such an account. But, as we now know, Berlin’s alleged “prolegomenon” was written after an extended, but incomplete, attempt at constructing such a history: his Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College.

In these lectures the dangers that the “Two Concepts” lecture associates with Horace’s “sapere aude” had been associated with Rousseau’s insistence that compelling individuals to do what the general will dictates might, in fact, be seen not as compulsion but rather as liberation. This argument had been linked, at least in Berlin’s mind, with a commitment to those central principles of “classical rationalism” that Popper had seen as antithetical to his own understanding of “rationalism.” But just how all of this was supposed to fit together is not entirely clear — even to Berlin himself.

A letter from Berlin to Jacob Talmon dating from the December 30, 1952 helps clarify the problems Berlin faced in bringing the different threads of his argument together.⁷

Now I must sit down to the hideous task of writing a book. God knows, the awful shadow of Marx broods over the entire thing, and I do not know whether to put him in or keep him out, and I still feel terribly obscure and muddled about Rousseau. You and I think that he is the father of totalitarianism in a sense. Why do we think this? Because of the despotism of the general will What does he, in fact, say? He talks about (a) the necessity to keep out selfish and sectional interests, so that each man shall ask himself what is it right to do from the point of view of the community in general; this assumes that there is such a thing as a general interest or some courses of action which are better for entire societies than others, and this, although none too clear, obviously is in some sense valid; so far so good. One may raise questions about how one ever knows which course is best and then one may reasonably answer that Rousseau’s recommendations about eliminating selfish and sectional interests, as practical tips, have a certain value, at least in some situations, and that the difference between what is traditionally considered to be the right frame of mind for members of the English Parliament as against, say, American Senators, who quite openly represent territorial or economic interests, is a case in point. Again so far so good. Furthermore, everyone in the Assembly has the right to express his views as he pleases. Any suppression automatically breaks the social contract and destroys the general will, the Sovereign etc., so that liberty seems to be guaranteed. But once the decision has been reached the dissidence must form and this, I suppose, is the ordinary practice of all democratic assemblies, from Quaker meetings to Lenin’s Regional Central Committee and Politbureau.

Having reached this point in his elaboration of what Rousseau had said and, it would appear, having found it difficult to find much evidence to justify the picture of Rousseau as the “father of totalitarianism” (it is to Berlin’s credit that, though he finds Rousseau’s prose distasteful, his interpretation is rather charitable), he went on to ask,

What then do we complain of? Simply, (a) that Rousseau thinks that an absolutely objectively true answer can be reached about political questions; that there is a guaranteed method of doing so; that his method is the right one; and that to act against such a truth is to be wrong, at worst mad, and therefore properly to be ignored, and that all these propositions are false? (b) the mystique of the soi commun and the organic metaphor which runs away with him and leads to mythology, whether of the State, the Church, or whatever. Is this all? Or is there more to complain of? I don’t feel sure. The muddle is so great.

While both of these “complaints” will reappear in “Two Concepts,” it is not at all clear that Berlin actually needs both of them to explain why the “innocent” idea of autonomy became the weapon of choice for totalitarian regimes. The second complaint more than suffices: once the state is conceived as a collective subject, the idea of autonomy becomes a tool for domination. One of the advantages of such an explanation is that it eliminates the need to argue that every Enlightenment thinker was somehow committed to a rationalism of the sort that can be found in Leibniz and Wolff (or, alternatively, the need to restrict the corpus of “Enlightenment thinkers” to those who embrace these views and the reassignment of everyone else to something called the “counter-Enlightenment).

The explanation for why Berlin thinks he needs to insist that the Enlightenment was bound to a rationalism of this sort may have something to do with “the awful shadow” that Berlin found looming over the book that he would never write. In order to bring Marx into the picture, he was convinced that he needed to invoke his argument about “rationalism.” Indeed, as I noted in the first post in this discussion, the earliest appearance of Berlin’s 1939 study of Marx. Here’s what said there about the assumptions that Marx allegedly took over from the Enlightenment:

Reason is always right. To every question there is only one true answer which with sufficient assiduity can be infallibly discovered, and this applies no less to questions of ethics or politics, of personal and social life, than to the problems of physics or mathematics. Once found, the putting of the solution into practice is a matter of mere technical skill; but the traditional enemies of progress must first be removed, and men taught the importance of acting in all questions on the advice of disinterested scientific experts, whose knowledge is founded on reason and experience. Once this has been achieved, the path is clear to the millennium.⁸

It is difficult (at least for me) to read Marx as having thought that “every question” has “only one true answer”: there would seem to be any number of questions that Marx regarded as — at best — poorly posed (e.g., the value of commodities) or — at worst — utter nonsense (perhaps we could see “that’s nonsense” as counting as an answer to a question). It is even harder to see Rousseau signing onto this. However we understand the “general will,” it is clear that Rousseau does not see it as a single solution applicable to all political communities — different political communities have different common interests and, of course, the common interest of any individual community is not the same as the interest of all of its citizens: as Rousseau notes, were this not the case, politics would cease to be an art.

Final Solutions

In any case, Berlin seems to have had a deep and unshakeable conviction that much of the misery of the twentieth century can be traced to the belief that (to use the most concise of Berlin’s many different ways of putting it)

all genuine questions can be answered,that if a question cannot be answered it is not a question. … that all these answers are knowable … that all the answers must be compatible with one another … .⁹

The final section of the Two Concepts lecture (“The One and the Many”) opened with passage that leaned rather heavily on this point:

One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals — justice or progress or the happiness of future generations, or the sacred mission or emancipation of a nation or race or class, or even liberty itself, which demands the sacrifice of individuals for the freedom of society. This is the belief that somewhere, in the past, or in the future, in divine revelation, or in the minds of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heart of an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution.

The danger of spending looking too closely at passages like this is that it is all too easy (at least for me) to become unnecessarily concerned with rhetorical tricks like the positioning, at the very end of the second of these two sentences, of an “innocent term” that has now “accumulated” a truly monstrous “association.” Still, some resistance to what Berlin is doing here might be warranted.   The twentieth century was abundant enough in its slaughter that there is no need to be stingy in spreading the blame around: the rationale for the incineration of the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki appears to have rested on imperatives less lofty than the “great historical ideals” laid out in the opening sentence. There is little need for those of us who work in the area of intellectual history to try to corner the market on atrocities and no reason to think that big body counts are always the result of big ideas.

Popper may have had a better sense of where the problem lay.  In his letter to Berlin he suggested,

No doubt, the idea that anybody is wise, is dangerous and repugnant. But why should sapere aude be interpreted as authoritarian? It is, I feel, anti-authoritarian. When Socrates said, in the Apology, that the search for truth through critical discussion was a way of life (in fact, the best way of life he knew of) — was there anything objectionable in this?

He reiterated this point in his response to Berlin of March 21, 1959.

My main thesis can be summed up by saying: science has no authority; it can claim no authority. Those who claim authority for science, or in the name of science (the doctors, the engineers), misunderstand science. …All this is so important because without respect for science, for the search for truth, we cannot manage; and with too much respect (scientism) we cannot either ….¹⁰

To see problems as capable of solution is not the same thing as assuming that they will be solved, much less that they have now been solved. Nor does it mean, as Berlin sometimes seems to be saying, that we live in a world devoid of tragic collisions between opposing values. But adopting the stance that the world presents us with a myriad of problems does serve as a check on too early an exit from attempts to find solutions, achieve agreements, or find ways of living together. Not all disagreements are “tragic;” some of them are merely stupid and something stupidities are remediable.   There are times when enlightenment doesn’t  demand courage; sometimes it merely requires persistence.

1. The relevant portions of the letter are available in the second volume of Berlin’s correspondence, Enlightening: 1946-1960, Edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes with the assistance of Serena Moore (London: Chatto & Windus 2009) 680-682. ↩
2. Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) . ↩
3. For an example of this line of argument, see Roger Hausheer, “Enlightening the Enlightenment,” in Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler, Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003) 33-50. At some point it would be interesting to take a closer look at the assumptions that drive the “enlightening the Enlightenment” trope. ↩
4. Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge (New York : St. Martin’s Press ; 1996 ), I hope to say something about this book in a future post. ↩
5. Akademie XX:44 (I’ve used Manfred Kuehn’s translation from Kant: A Biography p. 131-2), ↩
6. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press , 1974) 225.↩
7. Berlin, Enlightening: Letters II 354-355. ↩
8. Berlin, Karl Marx; His Life and Environment (London: T. Butterworth ltd, 1939). 44. ↩
9. Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism 21. ↩
10. I am obliged to the staff at the Hoover Institution Archives providing me with a copy of this letter, which resides in Box 276, Folder 10. I quote it here with the permission of the Karl Popper Library, Klagenfurt, Austria. ↩

Fox News, the Enlightenment, and G. K. Chesterton

I’m about as familiar with the Fox News Channel as I am with golf: I know that people watch the former and I’m aware that people play the latter and when I go to the local YMCA I wind up in a locker room with people who do both. We all get along, because (1) we’re naked and (2) the Red Sox have stopped drinking beer and eating fried chicken in their locker room and are back to their usual trick of convincing us that This Might be the Year.

Given my limited contact with what goes on at Fox, it was with considerable trepidation that I clicked a link in an email from a fellow historian that took me to a “Fox & Friends” broadcast. The email read: “Thought you might be interested in this (rather bizarre) reinterpretation (???) of Dialectic of Enlightenment.”

Happily, Fox wasn’t doing cruel things to the book that everyone loves to hate. Unhappily, the link took me to a clip of Steve Doocy interviewing a woman named Penny Nance about the decision by Anthony Foxx, the mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, to issue proclamations making May 2 not only a “Day of Prayer” but also a “Day of Reason.” Doocy and Nance had no problems with the former proclamation, but were quite annoyed about the latter. Nance, it turns out, is “CEO and President” (there’s a difference?) of something called “Concerned Women of America,” an organization whose “Statement of Faith” goes a long way towards clarifying her reservations about the “Day of Reason”:

• We believe the Bible to be the verbally inspired, inerrant Word of God and the final authority on faith and practice.
• We believe Jesus Christ is the divine Son of God, was born of a virgin, lived a sinless life, died a sacrificial death, rose bodily from the dead on the third day and ascended into Heaven from where He will come again to receive all believers unto Himself.
• We believe all men are fallen creations of Adam’s race and in need of salvation by grace through personal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ
• We believe it is our duty to serve God to the best of our ability and to pray for a moral and spiritual revival that will return this nation to the traditional values upon which it was founded.

It turns out that point three is the important one for Ms Nance’s take on the Enlightenment (I have no idea which, if any, of these concerns matter to Mr. Doocy or, indeed, if Mr. Doocy has views on the Enlightenment’s relationship to the Holocaust).

Mayor Foxx’s rationale for proclaiming May 2 Charlotte’s “Day of Prayer” was that May 2 is the “National Day of Prayer” and, perhaps, he thought that the good citizens of Charlotte needed an additional reason for observing it. Among the reasons for the proclamation of a “Day of Reason” (which can be seen below) was the conviction that “The application of reason, more than any other means, has proven to offer hope for human survival on earth.” No one should be surprised that there is also a “National Day of Reason” that, even less surprisingly, also falls on May 2.

Fox’s interest in Foxx’s proclamation (stuff like this is enough to make me wonder whether theologians overlooked the most compelling proof for the existence of God: the universe is ruled by an all-powerful intelligence with a wicked sense of humor) might seem momentarily puzzling. Why are these Foxites so worked up over this particular Foxx when there so many other foxes trying to sneak into the great national hen-house? But everything became perfectly clear to me once Mr. Doocy kindly explained that Mayor Foxx is President Obama’s pick to become Secretary of Transportation. Fox News, of course, is interested in everything that President Obama does — indeed, so insatiable is their interest in his doings that they sometimes have to make them up.

Had Mr. Doocy or Ms Nance recalled John Locke’s distinction between ecclesiastical and civil interests (after all, Ms Nancy is a graduate of Liberty University and perhaps the Letter Concerning Toleration is part of the curriculum; I have no idea what Doocy has read), they might have looked more kindly on Mayor Foxx’s double proclamation: those concerned with the care of their souls can pray in the manner they judge most efficacious for their salvation while those concerned with “life, liberty, health, and indolency of body” can spend the day reasoning. But Ms Nance was concerned that a pursuit of civil ends without the leavening of faith ends in disaster. This is where the Enlightenment comes in. Thus spake Ms Nance:

You know, the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism. And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust… Dark periods of history is what we arrive at when we leave God out of the equation.

I suspect that friends of the Enlightenment can take a little comfort in Ms Nance’s use of the phrase “gave way” rather than “gave rise.” But I’m afraid that what she really meant was “gave rise” (but was kind enough not to say it).

Either way, Ms Nance’s argument isn’t quite the same as Horkheimer and Adorno’s. For them, the problem was that enlightenment kept collapsing back into mythology. For her, what’s bad about the Enlightenment was that it greased the slippery slope that culminates in “moral relativism.” During her three minutes on Fox Ms Nance didn’t have time to explain whether she believed that Voltaire, Hume, Kant, Smith, and the rest were moral relativists or whether the problem is that their moral philosophies were so deeply flawed that they provided no viable alternative to it — perhaps she’ll clear this up by giving a talk at the next conference of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Nance’s point has more in common with the position staked out in 1940 by the historian Carlton J. H. Hayes than it does with Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.  Hayes argued:

For two centuries some of the classes, especially intellectuals, have been repudiating our common religious heritage, but indifference or hostility of the masses towards it, of the rural as well as the urban masses, is a strictly contemporary phenomenon. How this has come about, I shall not here attempt to suggest. I merely remark the fact, which seems to me self-evident, and pass on to an important consequence. No man, whether he be Western or Eastern, lives by bread alone. Everybody must have faith, a faith in some mysterious power outside of one’s self, a faith attested by feelings of reverence and expressed in external acts and ceremonials. When a man loses faith in one religion, he naturally attaches himself consciously or unconsciously to another object of worship. It may be worship of Christ; it may be worship of totem or fetish; it may likewise be worship of science or humanity – provided these concepts are written in his mind with capital letters.¹

Among the possible objects to which men turn, especially in an age of disruption, are authoritarian movements. Unfortunately, Hayes failed to spell the relationship between these “self-evident” facts and what was regarded by some as his cozy relationship with the Franco regime during his stint as FDR’s ambassador to Spain (as the moral philosopher Bob Dylan once observed, in what might serve as a fair summary of Professor Hayes’ argument: “you gotta serve somebody.”)

There was a rage for these sorts of explanations of fascism during the late 1930s and early 194s, presumably because the idea that the Enlightenment might, somehow or other, have paved the path that led to National Socialism is less obvious — and hence — more noteworthy than arguments that attributed fascism to German nationalism, the imperatives of monopoly capitalism, or anti-semitism, a.k.a. “the socialism of idiots.” In intellectual history as in competitive figure skating, the degree of difficulty counts for something.

In those days, what Ms Nance calls “moral relativism” was characterized as “nihilism” and Leo Strauss, recently arrived in America but not yet schooled in the subtle art of concealing his punch lines, gave a lecture that he probably wished he hadn’t given that explained at some length how the Enlightenment led to a nihilism that was so pervasive that even intelligent young Germans came to view National Socialism as a plausible remedy.² I suspect that Ms Nance is probably not a Straussian (though it does seem that Strauss was, if only temporarily, some sort of fascist).

Having explained the relationship between the Enlightenment and the Holocaust, Ms Nance went to show that she was not someone to be underestimated by quoting a bit of G. K. Chesterton (was this, perhaps, the first G. K. Chesterton shout out in the history of Fox News?):

You know, G. K. Chesterton said that the Doctrine of Original Sin is the only one which we have 3,000 years of empirical evidence to back up. Clearly, we need faith as a component and it’s just silly for us to say otherwise.

As I was listening to Ms Nance explain this to me, I was struck by two things:

1. She says “you know” a lot — perhaps she’s trying to be kind to those of us who are utterly clueless about the sorts of things she claims to be true.
2. She probably doesn’t want to go around quoting Chesterton: he’s not a reliable friend — he’s more like a frenemy.

For example, a careless reader might think that the following passage from Chesterton’s What I Saw in America provides some support the last of the four concerns on the Concerned Women of America’s statement of faith:

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things.

I can imagine that when Ms Nance read this (for, of course, we can be sure that she has her Chesterton down cold) she was nodding along right up to the part about the condemnation of atheism and the clear naming of “the Creator” and go so excited with this that she overlooked those last two sentences where Chesterton starts making things complicated again.

And I suspect that perhaps she was so taken with the idea that Chesterton saw original sin as an empirical fact that she missed this tough little nut from his Orthodoxy, which is not very gentle with those people that Fox & Friends like to call “job creators.”

If we wish to pull down the prosperous oppressor we cannot do it with the new doctrine of human perfectibility; we can do it with the old doctrine of Original Sin. If we want to uproot inherent cruelties or lift up lost populations we cannot do it with the scientific theory that matter precedes mind; we can do it with the supernatural theory that mind precedes matter. If we wish specially to awaken people to social vigilance and tireless pursuit of practise, we cannot help it much by insisting on the Immanent God and the Inner Light: for these are at best reasons for contentment; we can help it much by insisting on the transcendent God and the flying and escaping gleam; for that means divine discontent. If we wish particularly to assert the idea of a generous balance against that of a dreadful autocracy we shall instinctively be Trinitarian rather than Unitarian. If we desire European civilization to be a raid and a rescue, we shall insist rather that souls are in real peril than that their peril is ultimately unreal. And if we wish to exalt the outcast and the crucified, we shall rather wish to think that a veritable God was crucified, rather than a mere sage or hero. Above all, if we wish to protect the poor we shall be in favour of fixed rules and clear dogmas. The rules of a club are occasionally in favour of the poor member. The drift of a club is always in favour of the rich one.

Chesterton is just too complicated to be Fox’s kind of Christian. Which explains why we are treated to the spectacle of Ms Nance explaining the finer points of the doctrine of original sin to a less-than interested Mr. Doocy.

It’s not surprising that she simplifies the passage about original sin  that she pretends to have read. Here’s what Chesterton actually said in Orthodoxy:

Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact.The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin — a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or not could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. … The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. …In this remarkable situation it is plainly not now possible (with any hope of a universal appeal) to start, as our fathers did, with the fact of sin. This very fact which was to them (and is to me) as plain as a pikestaff, is the very fact that has been specially diluted or denied. But though moderns deny the existence of sin, I do not think that they have yet denied the existence of a lunatic asylum. We all agree still that there is a collapse of the intellect as unmistakable as a falling house. … For the purpose of our primary argument the one may very well stand where the other stood. I mean that as all thoughts and theories were once judged by whether they tended to make a man lose his soul, so for our present purpose all modern thoughts and theories may be judged by whether they tend to make a man lose his wits.

J. G. A. Pocock argued that there was a “magisterial enlightenment” as well as a radical one. Passages like the one I just quoted from Chesterton make me think that this was a good thing: beginning with a shared conviction that, as Voltaire insisted, there was evil in the world, these two enlightenments could keep each other honest.

The National Day of Reason is every bit as idiotic as the National Day of Prayer and the republic would be much happier if its trustees would spend their time trying to remedy actual wrongs rather than telling the faithful to pray and the rational to reason and acting as if these are two separate interest groups with no overlap in membership. I hope that Mayor Foxx will soon be freed from the need to engage in nonsense of this sort and — once the now-obligatory hearings, holds, filibusters, and faux outrage on the Fox News Channel are over and done with — he can get to work on dealing with the legitimate “civil interest” of moving citizens from point A to point B without their killing each other or burning up the planet.

As for Fox, of course, there is no hope. Looking at Mr. Doocy and Ms Nance as they chatter at each other I am glad to follow Chesterton’s advice and refrain from speculating on the state of their souls. But, you know, they’re both nitwits.

1. Carlton J. H. Hayes, “The Novelty of Totalitarianism in the History of Western Civilization,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 82, no. 1 (February 23, 1940) 95. ↩
2. Leo Strauss, “German Nihilism,” ed. David Janssens and Daniel Tanguay, Interpretation 26, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 353-378 ↩

Why It Wouldn’t Have Mattered if Isaiah Berlin used nGrams

I’d been planning on posting the final part of my discussion of the exchange of letters between Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper on liberty and enlightenment, but various commitments have conspired to delay my posting of that discussion until later in the week. But I’d been planning to say a few things about what we can — and mostly can’t — learn about the distinctions Berlin sought to draw by looking at the frequency of usage of the terms he was discussing. So now seems as good (or, as it turns out, as bad) a time as any to say it. Hence, here is a sort of “pre-postscript” to my posts on Berlin and Popper.

Earlier this term I discussed Berlin’s Two Concepts essay in my introductory political thought course and I thought it might be interesting to show the class (most of whom hadn’t heard about nGrams) how patterns in the use of “liberty” and “freedom” have changed over time. The results were more or less what I’d expected: “liberty” crests around 1790 and then begins a slow descent, “freedom” plays the tortoise to liberty’s hare and pulls ahead around 1905.

After constructing the nGram it struck to me that I ought to push the end date up from Google’s default of 2000 to something closer to the present in order to see if there had been any uptick in uses of “freedom” in the wake of the September 2001 attacks (it certainly seemed as if “freedom” was being invoked quite a bit between 2001-2004, particularly by the man who just got his very own Presidential Library). Surprisingly, nothing seems to happen.

What I hadn’t thought to do at the time was to see if there was any way of seeing whether the nGram could tell us anything about shifts in the invocation of the concepts of positive and negative conceptions of liberty. But an attempt along these lines rather quickly brings us up against the difficulties of trying to pick up changes in the use of concepts by looking at changes in the use of words. For starters, an nGram for uses of the phrases “positive liberty” and “negative liberty” tells us next to nothing. The reasons for this are easy enough to see: (1) these are technical terms that enjoy rather little usage outside of a specialized literature, so shifts in the frequency of their usage are small moves in a rather small sample and (2) they are terms that tend to be used together, as a way of drawing a distinction in philosophical discussions. As a result, all that such a search will pick up is how many articles are being published in any given year that are invoking the distinction that Isaiah Berlin made famous.

However, Berlin did employ, in passing, the circumlocution “liberty from” as a way of denoting “negative liberty,” a usage that echoes a distinction that Franklin Roosevelt had drawn in his list of the “Four Freedoms” between “freedom from” want and fear and “freedom of” speech and worship. And, much more emphatically, Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941) had framed the distinction between “positive” and “negative” freedoms as the distinction between “freedom to” and “freedom from.” I’ve always found this way of explaining Berlin’s distinction more of a hindrance than a help: typically (and, I suspect, rightly) it tends to confuse students. They ask “Isn’t freedom from regulations that forbid something the same thing as freedom to do it?” and I say “Don’t pay attention to that” and point them to the way in which Berlin framed the distinction: negative liberty “is involved in the answer to the question ‘What is the area within which the subject — a person or group of persons — is or should be left to do or be what he wants to do or be, without interference by other persons?’” In contrast, positive liberty, “is involved in the answer to the question ‘What, or who, is the source of control or interference, that can determine someone to do, or be, one thing rather than another?’” But while the conceptual distinction between positive and negative liberty might better be grasped by focusing on the questions that Berlin posed, it is possible that tracking the use of the colloquial distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom to” might pick up something worthwhile.

Let’s start with “freedom from,” “freedom to,” and, for the sake of completeness, “liberty from” and “liberty to” (it turns out that there is no need to worry about the capitalized form of the terms):

At first glance, what we have here seem quite peculiar: the most notable feature is the long decline of “liberty to.” But a moment’s reflection should be enough to remind us that this decline probably tells us more about the fading of the once-prevalent idiom “at liberty to do x” than it does about the distinction between “positive” and “negative” forms of freedom or liberty. The nGram may also be reminding us of two other things: (1) there is no equivalent idiom “at liberty from x” and (2) there are different idioms in play for talking about “freedom”: namely, “free to” and “free from.”

On one of the more influential early critique of the Two Concepts lecture, the American political theorist Gerold MacCallum argued that instead of seeing disputes over the concept of liberty as involving a struggle between Berlin’s “liberal” notion of “negative liberty” and the “romantic” (and potentially totalitarian) concept of “positive liberty,” we would do better “to regard freedom as always one and the same triadic relation, but recognize that various contending parties disagree with each other in what they understand to be the ranges of the term variables.” [“Negative and Positive Freedom,” The Philosophical Review 76, no. 3 (July 1967): 312]. He proposed that

Whenever the freedom of some agent or agents is in question, it is always freedom from some constraint or restriction on, interference with, or barrier to doing, not doing, becoming, or not becoming something. Such freedom is thus always of something (an agent or agents), from something, to do, not do, become, or not become something; it is a triadic relation. Taking the format “x is (is not) free from (to do, not do, become, not become) z,” x ranges over agents, y ranges over such “preventing conditions” as constraints, restrictions, interferences, and barriers, and z ranges over actions or conditions of character or circumstance. [313]

MacCallum, it should be stressed, was proposing a conceptual distinction, but he argued that we could use the distinction could clarify how disputes involving freedom might be seen as:

a series of attempts by parties opposing each other on very many issues to capture for their own side the favorable attitudes attaching to the notion of freedom. [313]

If MacCallum’s conceptual distinction remotely corresponds to the way in which contesting parties talk about freedom, what we would expect to find, at any given moment, is a rough equivalence in uses of “free from,” “free to,” “freedom of” and the corresponding forms of liberty. But (and here I am tempted to add “of course”), we don’t:

This is a really ugly nGram (and not just because it would profit from a better contrast between its colors), but it may have something to tell us about the folly of trying to use an nGram to frame a history of this sort of concept (I’d like to think that there are other concepts whose history might be tracked more effectively by nGrams — for instance, “enlightenment”). Here’s what I think I’ve learned from this (I’ll be interested in seeing what others make of it):

1. What we’re seeing here is not what a straightforward translation of MacCallum’s conceptual distinction into word usage would have suggested. We do see movement in the different aspects of his “unitary” concept of freedom. While there may well be variation in the ways in which different parties fill out the different parts of his “unitary” notion, what we seem to see here is that, over time, there is a shift in the usage of “freedom of,” “free from,” “free to.”
2. I suspect, however, that some of what we are seeing here can best be explained in the migration of certain circumlocutions from various specialized discourses into common usage (and, perhaps, the reverse). For example: “freedom of” sounds, at least to me, like a term that had been at home in legal discourse, but began to spread into other domains during the 1930s (this is the sort of change that Bookworm is tailor-made to pick up).
3. Other changes (e.g., the decaying of “freedom of” and the rise of “free of”) might reflect nothing more significant than a preference for the shorter term “free” over the more technical sounding “freedom.”
4. Finally, to give MacCallum his due, perhaps we can understand the convergence of “freedom of,” “free to,” “free of,” and “free from” as we near 2000 as evidence that those who are engaged in disputes about “freedom” are busily involved in defining the “freedom of” agents “from” certain impediments “to” do or be something or other.

But, in the end, I’m inclined to think that the exercise in which I’ve been engaged here really doesn’t have much to recommend it.

Isaiah Berlin & Karl Popper on Liberty & Enlightenment (Part II)

Last Sunday (which, for those of us who live in the Boston area, seems like the distant past), I began an examination of Karl Popper’s comments on Isaiah Berlin’s 1958 lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty” in his letter to Berlin of February 17, 1959.[1] Popper’s letter struck me as worth discussing for two reasons. First, Berlin’s Two Concepts is interesting in its own right: it is an influential — though at times quite puzzling — discussion of a central political concept and Popper’s letter allows us to see how one of Berlin’s contemporaries tried to make sense of its arguments. Second, the discussion between Berlin and Popper sheds some light on the diverging ways in which two self-described liberals, at the height of the Cold War, thought about the Enlightenment and its implications. In this post, I’ll finish the discussion of Popper’s letter by considering the second of the two points he raised. Next week, I’ll finish off the discussion by examining Berlin’s response.

A Kantian Case for Positive Liberty

Popper’s second point consists of a proposal and a question. The proposal takes the form of an alternative way of thinking about “positive” liberty. The question has to do with what strikes Popper as Berlin’s antipathy towards Horace’s phrase “sapere aude.” Our first task will be to figure out how the proposal (which is, I think, straightforward enough) is related to the question (which is, at first glance, a bit obscure).

Here is the relevant section of Popper’s letter (which consistently renders “sapere aude” as “sapere ande” — an error I have not transcribed here — and includes a minor typo that I’ve crossed out):

My second point is your picture of positive freedom. It is a marvelous elaboration of the idea of being one’s own master. But is there not a very different and very simple idea of positive freedom which may be complementary to negative freedom, and which does not need to clash with it? I mean, very simply, the idea to spend one’s own life as well as one can; experimenting, trying to realize in one’s own way, and with full respect to others (and their different valuations) what one values most? And may not be the search for truth — sapere aude — be part of a positive idea of self-liberation? What have you against sapere aude? No doubt, the idea that anybody is wise, is dangerous and repugnant. But why should sapere aude be interpreted as authoritarian? It is, I feel, anti-authoritarian. When Socrates said, in the Apology, that the search for truth through critical discussion was a way of life (in fact, the best way of life he knew of) — was there anything objectionable in this?

The connection that Popper seeks to draw here between the “very different and very simple” example of “positive freedom” that he offers and his defense of the “anti-authoritarian” implications of Horace’s sapere aude becomes somewhat clearer if we look at the lecture Popper had given (five years before Berlin delivered his inaugural lecture) on the BBC to mark the sesquicentennial of Immanuel Kant’s death.[2]

Popper began his homage to Kant by recalling the unexpectedly large crowds that gathered for the great philosopher’s funeral:

They came to show their gratitude to a teacher of the Rights of Man, of equality before the law, of world citizenship, of peace on earth, and, perhaps most important, of emancipation through knowledge (175).

Popper’s invocation of the idea of “emancipation through knowledge” sets the stage for a brief discussion of Kant’s response to the question “What is Enlightenment?” and a consideration of Kant’s role as the “last great defender” of the Enlightenment.[3] After quoting the opening paragraph of Kant’s answer, which culminates in Horace’s sapere aude, Popper provided the follow explanation:

Kant is saying something very personal here. It is part of his own history. Brought up in near poverty, in the narrow outlook of Pietism … his own life is a story of emancipation through knowledge. In later years he used to look back with horror to what he called “the slavery of childhood,” his period of tutelage. One might well say that the dominant theme of his whole life was the struggle for spiritual freedom.

With those last four words we arrive at the nub of Popper’s second comment on the Two Concepts. How can we to situate Kant’s “struggle for spiritual freedom” within Berlin’s distinction between “positive” and “negative” forms of liberty?

What is at stake in this struggle is not a question of the extent of the space in which an individual “is or should be left to do or be what he wants to do or be, without interference by other persons” (i.e., “negative” liberty). I can be “negatively” free to engage in any number of activities that I am “spiritually unfree” (e.g., because of fear or ignorance) to undertake. Kant characterizes enlightenment in terms of an escape from a state of “self-incurred tutelage [Unmündigkeit]” — a condition for which I am myself responsible. So the question of whether I am free or not turns on whether I am or am not exercising “mature autonomy” (one of a variety of terms that translators have used to try to capture the implications of the German Mündigkeit). What is involved, then, in the pursuit of enlightenment turns on considerations that were nicely captured by Berlin in his initial definition of “positive” liberty: “What, or who, is the source of control or interference, that can determine someone to do, or be, one thing rather than another?” Kant’s subsequent account of the differences between “public” and “private” uses of reason can, without too much difficulty, be understood as involving questions about the extent to which subjects are free, or not free, to articulate certain positions — i.e., with what Berlin characterizes as the “negative” concept of liberty. But Popper is not concerned with that discussion. What interests him, instead, are the broader implications of the motto that Kant took from Horace, a motto that Popper sees as summarizing the story of Kant’s life: “a story of emancipation through knowledge.” And this, of course, is a question about “positive,” rather than “negative,” liberty.

Berlin’s Case Against Positive Liberty

It would have been hard for Popper to overlook the degree to which Berlin’s critique of the concept of “positive” liberty represents a critique of the very idea that he had praised in his own discussion of Kant. Section IV of the Two Concepts lecture closed with a full-throated attack on what Berlin characterized as “the positive doctrine of liberation by reason,” which argued that,

Socialized forms of it, widely disparate and opposed to each other as they are, are at the heart of many of the nationalist, communist, authoritarian, and totalitarian creeds of our day. It may, in the course of its evolution, have wandered far from its rationalist moorings. Nevertheless, it is this freedom that, in democracies and in dictatorships, is argued about, and fought for, in many parts of the earth today.

Several pages later, in the sprawling second paragraph of Section V, he resumed his attack on the idea of “liberation through reason” by noting how it had figured in the work of such otherwise different thinkers as Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu, Kant, and Burke and then went on to conclude,

The common assumption of these thinkers (and of many a schoolman before them and Jacobin and Communist after them) is that the rational ends of our ‘true’ natures must coincide, or be made to coincide, however violently our poor, ignorant, desire-ridden, passionate, empirical selves may cry out against this process. Freedom is not freedom to do what is irrational, or stupid, or wrong. To force empirical selves into the right pattern is no tyranny, but liberation.

But the passage in Berlin’s lecture that appears to have most concerned Popper was the opening paragraph of Section IV, where Berlin states that, when “free self-development” becomes the standard for determining whether one is truly free, individuals tend to view the various “obstacles which present themselves as so many lumps of external stuff” blocking the achievement of this goal. He continues,

That is the programme of enlightened rationalism from Spinoza to the latest (at times unconscious) disciples of Hegel. Sapere aude. What you know, that of which you understand the necessity — the rational necessity — you cannot, while remaining rational, want to he otherwise. For to want something to be other than what it must be is, given the premisses — the necessities that govern the world — to be pro tanto either ignorant or irrational. Passions, prejudices, fears, neuroses, spring from ignorance, and take the form of myths and illusions. To be ruled by myths, whether they spring from the vivid imaginations of unscrupulous charlatans who deceive us in order to exploit us, or from psychological or sociological causes, is a form of heteronomy, of being dominated by outside factors in a direction not necessarily willed by the agent. The scientific determinists of the eighteenth century supposed that the study of the sciences of nature, and the creation of sciences of society upon the same model, would make the operation of such causes transparently clear, and thus enable individuals to recognize their own part in the working of a rational world, frustrating only when misunderstood. Knowledge liberates by automatically eliminating irrational fears and desires.

There is more to say about what Berlin seems to be doing in this paragraph, but for now it may be enough to suggest that his use of the motto from Horace that had served as the touchstone for Popper’s encomium to Kant clarifies the context for the question that Popper posed to Berlin in his “second point”: “What have you against sapere aude”?

Histories, Individual and Collective

Popper had good reason to be puzzled by the link Berlin sought to establish between the “positive” conception of liberty and totalitarian forms of domination: the Two Concepts lecture was not entirely clear as to how this relationship was to be understood.

At the beginning of the discussion of “The Notion of Positive Liberty” (Section II of the lecture), Berlin explained that his intent was to show how the two concepts of liberty, which might initially seem to have been nothing more than two perspectives on the basic idea, had “diverged” over time. Here’s how he presents this in second paragraph of Section II:

The freedom which consists in being one’s own master, and the freedom which consists in not being prevented from choosing as I do by other men, may, on the face of it, seem concepts at no great logical distance from each other — no more than negative and positive ways of saying much the same thing. Yet the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ notions of freedom historically developed in divergent directions until in the end, they came into direct conflict with each other.[4]

This suggestion that, while the “logical distance” between positive and negative conceptions of liberty may not be that great, their historical development proved to be quite different, would seem to be setting the stage for an historical account of how this divergence came about. But the lecture never quite provides one.

What Berlin offers, instead, is a condensed (albeit quite evocative) sketch of “the independent momentum which the metaphor of self-mastery acquired.” This sketch is notable for what it doesn’t contain: anything approaching an account of an historical transformation of a concept. Berlin starts with a passing reference to T. H. Green and then goes on to trace the “momentum” of the concept of self-mastery. Let’s look at the passage in question and then try to make sense of what is going on:

Have not men had the experience of liberating themselves from spiritual slavery, or slavery to nature, and do they not in the course of it become aware, on the one hand, of a self which dominates, and, on the other, of something in them which is brought to heel? This dominant self is then variously identified with reason, with my ‘higher nature’, with the self which calculates and aims at what will satisfy it in the long run, with my ‘real’, or ‘ideal’, or ‘autonomous’ self or with my self ‘at its best’; which is then contrasted with irrational impulse, uncontrolled desires, my ‘lower’ nature, the pursuit of immediate pleasures, my ’empirical’ or ‘heteronomous’ self, swept by every gust of desire and passion, needing to be rigidly disciplined if it is ever to rise to the full height of its ‘real’ nature. Presently the two selves may be represented as divided by an even larger gap: the real self may be conceived as something wider than the individual (as the term is normally understood), as a social ‘whole’ of which the individual is an element or aspect: a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn. This entity is then identified as being the ‘true’ self which, by imposing its collective, or ‘organic’, single will upon its recalcitrant ‘members’, achieves its own, and therefore their, ‘higher’ freedom. The perils of using organic metaphors to justify the coercion of some men by others in order to raise them to a ‘higher’ level of freedom have often been pointed out. But what gives such plausibility as it has to this kind of language is that we recognize that it is possible, and at times justifiable, to coerce men in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or public health) which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue, but do not, because they are blind or ignorant or corrupt. This renders it easy for me to conceive of myself as coercing others for their own sake, in their, not my, true interest.

What we seem to have here is a discussion of the dangers associated with the use of a metaphor: the metaphor of “self-mastery.” These dangers are illustrated by tracing a path that leads from an experience of liberation to a new form of slavery. To simplify (without, I hope, distorting Berlin’s argument ), the steps in the path might be summarized as follows:

1. An experience of liberation from some form of “slavery”
2. A subsequent interpretation of this experience in terms of a contrast between between two different “selves”
3. The identification of one of these selves with a larger collectivity
4. The exercising of coercion over the self that is not identified with the collectivity.

These steps are sufficiently abstract to allow them to be interpreted in a variety of ways. We might, for example, think of them as stages in the development of an individual. For example:

1. After a youth spent in various pursuits, a young man experiences, for the first time, a sense of purpose and coherence in his life
2. He identifies this new sense of coherence and purpose with the “new” (“truer” and “purer”) person he has become, a person that has overcome the temptations that dogged the “old” person that he was
3. He finds a larger community (religious or political) that offers him a language in which he can articulate this experience, a language that carries on the interpretation that he has begun at step 2 by linking it to this larger community (e.g., as the distinction between those who have been “enlightened” vs those who remain in the “darkness”).
4. As a member of this community the young man engages in aggressive efforts at recruitment and “conversion” (perhaps at the behest of his superiors) of others, in order to bring others (who remain in the darkness from which he has escaped) into “the light.”

While a narrative of this sort may have a certain plausibility — especially for those of us who spent Friday “sheltering in place” and watching more television than anyone should — we can, just as easily, imagine more benign versions. For example:

1. a recent college graduate, having double majored in Economics and English, weighs the decision of whether to accept a promotion in the financial firm at which she is employed, but recognizes that accepting this position will mean increased demands on her time that will require her to abandon the writing she has been doing in her spare time. She concludes that the time has come to quit her job (which she finds rather tedious) and instead to pursue a career as a writer.
2. Upon making this decision, she experiences a certain relief — indeed a “liberation” — in the realization that, all along, she had “really” been “a writer”, rather than an aspiring investment banker (this recognition may also help her to understand why she found work at the firm so tedious).
3. She joins a group of writers in her city who get together from time to time to discuss their work and provide support to each other.
4. The group she has joined also includes individuals who have yet to quit their day jobs and are, indeed, wrestling with the sort of decision that our recent college graduate has already made. She discusses the challenges and rewards of the path she has taken with those who are still trying to figure out what they should be doing.

Both of these narratives — and any number of other stories of this sort that we might want to construct — consist of a sequence of moves that, for all their apparent logic, are beset by any number of contingencies. The transition from step 1 to 2 may perhaps seem slightly less contingent than the other steps because we are familiar with the set of metaphors that both individuals are using to interpret their experience. But the interpretation of the experiences undergone at step 1 in terms of the metaphor employed in step 2 rests on the fact that the individuals in these stories being members of communities in which these sorts of metaphors have some currency. And, pushing on through the remainder of the steps, it is less than obvious that metaphors of this sort possess any sort of “independent momentum” that requires the individual who, at step 2, takes up the metaphor of “self-mastery,” to march onward through steps 3 and 4. Obviously, not all individuals who experience religious conversions wind up packing shrapnel into pressure cookers and not all accountants turned writers become members of writer support groups.

But while it may be appealing to read Berlin’s steps as describing a sort of personal history of the sort that I have constructed (at least it appeals to me, since it makes some sense of the process that he seems to be tracing), Berlin had something else in mind. He was attempting to trace the trajectory of an idea, not a life, which means that movement from step 1 through step 4 has to be reformulated as a sort of “biography of an idea” — i.e., as a history of the concept of “freedom,” cast in the form of a “history of ideas” written in the Great Books style: ideas are passed from thinker to thinker and reformulated along the way. But, while this sort of history lies at the heart of the transition that Berlin sketched at the start of Section II, this isn’t what he proceeds to offer in the remainder of the Two Concepts lecture. What we find instead is something that looks, at best, like an account of the implications of a metaphor and, at worst, like the “movement of the Concept.”

Berlin’s “Phenomenology of Freedom”: Self-Mastery, Self-Abnegation, and Self-Realization

So, let’s try again, this time talking about the history of a concept rather than the biography of an individual. Berlin’s account of the vicissitudes of the concept of “positive liberty” goes as follows.

1. He begins with a brief discussion, in Section II, of the “desire to be self-directed” and then proceeds, in the next two sections, to explore the two directions that efforts to achieve such self-direction have taken.
2. Section III (“The Retreat to the Inner Citadel”) considers the project of “self-abnegation,” i.e., the attempt to “strive for nothing that I cannot be sure to obtain.”
3. Section IV (“Self-Realization”) focuses on a strategy of liberation that he sees as central to the project of “enlightened rationalism”: this project involves understanding what “rational necessity” demands and making this necessity into one’s own project.
4. Finally, Section V (“The Temple of Sarasto”) examines how adepts at the project outlined in Section IV impose such projects on others in order to lead them (or, more bluntly, to force them) to “true” freedom.

These sections can, without too much difficulty, be mapped onto steps 2 through 4 of the sequence that I constructed above. Section III of the lecture generates a division between “rational” and “irrational” selves of the sort that can be found at step 2 of my earlier reconstruction. Section IV — with some difficulty (which can be clarified in a moment) — can be seen as a sort of merging of the “rational self” into a larger collectivity (e.g., one of Berlin’s favorite examples for this is a musician learning to play a composition and, in doing so, becoming “free” by subjecting himself or herself to the score). And Sarastro’s “enlightened despotism” in Section V is, quite transparently, an example of what Berlin sees at work in step 4.

As we make our way through these three sections we encounter many proper names (Kant, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Burke, Hegel etc.), but it is hard to get a grasp on how these names are supposed to be arranged into anything like a history of ideas (even in the Great Books style). While Berlin (like Popper) disliked Hegel intensely, the experience of reading these sections is not unlike the confusion that begins to settle over a reader of Hegel’s Phenomenology: concepts are on the move, changing their implications as they make their progress; glimpses of the development of these concepts can be seen in this or that thinker (though Hegel, unlike Berlin, is sparing in his use of proper names), but it is not always obvious how the discussion is supposed to line up with anything that resembles an actual history.

Kant’s name turns up quite a bit in Section III, where he serves as an illustration of how the breach between the “two selves” comes about. In Berlin’s account, the “retreat to the inner citadel” rests on the separating off of a “‘noumenal’ self” that remains free, even though the phenomenal self may be subject to external forces.

From this doctrine, as it applies to individuals, it is no very great distance to the conceptions of those who, like Kant, identify freedom not indeed with the elimination of desires, but with resistance to them, and control over them. I identify myself with the controller and escape the slavery of the controlled. I am free because, and in so far as, I am autonomous. I obey laws, but I have imposed them on, or found them in, my own uncoerced self. Freedom is obedience, but ‘obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves’ and no man can enslave himself.

From time to time, we find discussions in the Two Concepts lecture that provide something approximating an account of the development of metaphors and their appropriation by historical actors. For example, four paragraphs from the end of Section III, Berlin observes:

Kant’s free individual is a transcendent being, beyond the realm of natural causality. But in its empirical forms — in which the notion of man is that of ordinary life — this doctrine was the heart of liberal humanism, both moral and political, that was deeply influenced both by Kant and by Rousseau in the eighteenth century. In its a priori version, it is a form of secularized Protestant individualism, in which the place of God is taken by the conception of the rational life, and the place of the individual soul which strives towards union with Him is replaced by the conception of an individual, endowed with reason, straining to be governed by reason and reason alone and to depend upon nothing that might deflect or delude him by engaging his irrational nature. Autonomy, not heteronomy: act and not to be acted upon. The notion of slavery to the passions is — for those who think in these terms — more than a metaphor.

What Berlin might be suggesting here is that Kant provides a secularized form of Protestant theology and that — perhaps because his discussion of autonomy and heteronomy shared much with a more culturally pervasive appropriation of religious accounts of divisions within the soul — his particular way of framing these discussions went on to have a broad appeal to “liberal humanists” (e.g., liberals who were looking for non-religious ways of reframing the religious traditions from which they were coming?). An account of this sort might help clarify why the metaphor of self-mastery could take on a “momentum” that would allow it to complete the passage from step 1 to step 4. But it is hard to see how Berlin can characterize this “momentum” as in any sense “independent.” There is no logical explanation for the transition from step 1 to step 4 nor is it clear that the metaphor of “self-mastery” has any inherent relationship to the later discussions of “self-realization” or self-enslavement. If there is a connection here, it is an historical or cultural one. At the close of Section IV, Berlin is content to note that, in the account he has been offering, the idea of positive liberty has, “wandered far from its rationalist moorings.” Explaining that it is not his intent “to trace the historical evolution [emphasis mine] of this idea,” he proposes instead “to comment on some of its vicissitudes.” And, with that, we move on to the discussion of Sarastro’s Temple.

A Brief Consideration of the Flexner Lectures

Berlin had, however, attempted an account of the “historical evolution” of the idea of positive liberty some six years earlier as part of his Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College. An adequate discussion of these lectures would drag this already lengthy set of posts out to an intolerable length. And, in any case, it would be folly for me to attempt such an account without having had the chance to read Joshua Cherniss’s recently published discussion of the development of Berlin’s thought, which draws on archival materials that I have not examined.[5] But, at the risk of having Cherniss’ book prove me wrong (and I’m enough of a Popperian not to get worked up about being proven wrong), here is my take on what is going on in the Flexner Lectures.

The history of ideas that Berlin offered at Bryn Mawr began by tracing the way in various Enlightenment thinkers (among them, Helvetius) advanced a concept of liberty that is grounded on the accumulation of natural scientific knowledge of the functioning of the world. This knowledge was seen as potentially liberating in two ways. In the case of the various illusions and prejudices that held sway over the human mind, a demonstration of their falsity was sufficient to break their hold. Further, human liberty could also be enhanced by an understanding of the actual constraints that nature places on human actions. In this case, emancipation took the form of the development of strategies that echoed Bacon’s idea that, in order to command nature, we must first learn how to obey her. It is important, I think, that there is no talk at this point about a division between “true” and “false” selves nor any suggestion that knowing how nature operates necessarily requires the leap that Berlin makes at the start of Section IV of the Two Concepts lecture when sapere aude is identified with a process in which individuals achieve liberty by subjecting their own ends to those of nature. Pangloss may do this, but Candide winds up learning that work (or, as Habermas would have it, “purposive-rational action”) is a reasonable alternative. And Voltaire, as we know, didn’t try to convince himself that torturing Huguenots was part of the “rational necessity” of the world.

In the Flexner Lectures, the discussion of these (“Enlightenment”) strategies for advancing human liberty is followed by an analysis of what he terms the “romantic conception” of liberty. As would be the case in the Two Concepts lecture, Kant’s role in this story lies in his distinction between two different “selves” (noumenal and phenomenal) (see pp. 147–148 and 173), which serves as the premise for Berlin’s discussion of the notion of “positive freedom” (166). The narrative that Berlin offered at Bryn Mawr associates “positive freedom” with what he terms the “romantic” rather than the “liberal” conception of liberty, and much of his discussion of it is accomplished in an extended account of Fichte (177–198). In Fichte, Berlin found a thinker who might be seen as tailor-made for demonstrating the dangerous “momentum” of the concept of “self-mastery”: the Wissenschaftslehre corresponds to the distinction between the “free” self and the “subject” one (step 2 in the sketch above), while The Addresses to the German Nation show how such a distinction might be transferred to a collectivity (step 3 above). But since Fichte is, in Berlin’s eyes, a “romantic” not an Aufklärer, a considerable reshuffling of labels is necessary in order to produce the account offered in the Two Concepts.

The label “romantic liberty” was jettisoned and the roots of “positive liberty” were seen as reaching back to (at least) the Enlightenment. This shift allowed Berlin, in the lectures, articles, and drafts that would follow in the wake of the Two Concepts, to bring the Romantics, along with that odd assortment of thinkers who make up the Counter-Enlightenment, onto the field as the opponents of what, in the Flexner lectures, had been characterized as the “Romantic conception” of liberty. It is possible that this may, in part, have provided a reason for avoiding an historical account of the transformation of the concept in the Two Lectures. Not only would it have been difficult to work such a discussion into the limited space permitted in his inaugural lecture, but it is also possible that Berlin was not, at least at this point, entirely settled on how such a history might be presented.

Popper on Positive Liberty as Self-Legislation

Had Popper been familiar with how Berlin’s argument had been developed in the Flexner Lectures, it would have done little to remove his reservations about Berlin’s attitude towards Horace’s “sapere aude.” Though Fichte might have shown how a thinker could run through the steps that culminated in subjection to the authority of the ”enlightened“ that had been previewed in the third paragraph of Section II and ultimately cashed out in the discussion of Saratro’s Temple in Section V, Popper would have had considerable difficulties in seeing Fichte as a legitimate heir of Kant. He had emphatically rejected that line of interpretation in his BBC lecture:

Kant believed in the Enlightenment. He was its last great defender. I realize that this is not the usual view. While I see Kant as the defender of the Enlightenment, he is more often taken as the founder of the school which destroyed it — of the Romantic School of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. I contend that these two interpretations are incompatible.[6]

What separates Berlin and Popper, then, are two rather different accounts of the relationship between “the Enlightenment” and “the Romantics.” These interpretations, to be sure, are creatures of a period in which the lines between enlightenment, idealism, and romanticism tended to be drawn more starkly than we might be inclined to draw them today. This difference in how Berlin and Popper situate Kant leaves us with two self-described liberals — both wary of the threat posed by a totalitarian enemy — who offer markedly diverging accounts as to how to trace the history of the ideas that laid the foundations for the enemy they both oppose.

But since the Two Concepts offered rather little of this history of ideas, their disagreement may not have been quite as significant for Popper as it might appear to those of us who can work our way through the Flexner Lectures and fill out the intellectual history that the Two Concepts lacked. Popper had the luxury of simply being puzzled by what Berlin was saying and could go on to read what Berlin was offering as an exercise in political philosophy that sought to distinguish two different concepts of liberty. What struck him as questionable in the lecture was its implication that positive liberty and negative liberty were ultimately incommensurable: a conjecture about the implications of a concept, rather than a history. And Popper, of all people, knew what to do with conjectures: try to come up with a refutation.

Popper’s second point, then, can be viewed as an attempt to refute Berlin’s claim that there is an inherent contradiction between positive and negative concepts of liberty by providing a “very simple idea of positive freedom which may be complementary to negative freedom, and which does not need to clash with it.” The example that he provides is — appropriately enough for a friend of Kant — cast in the form of a maxim:

search for truth — sapere aude

Popper prefaces this familiar quotation with the following maxim:

spend one’s own life as well as one can; experimenting, trying to realize in one’s own way, and with full respect to others (and their different valuations) what one values most …

However we understand what Kant was doing with the “motto” he took from Horace, Popper has captured something important about the form in which it is cast: it can only be interpreted as an example of “positive freedom.” In Berlin’s account, the adopting of a maxim (i.e., “search for the truth” or “think for oneself” rather than follow instructions that are given by others) is, and can only be classified as an example of positive, rather than negative, liberty since what is at issue here is a question of who is the source that is determining what I can be or do. Since “sapere aude” is a rule that I give to myself (as opposed to a command from a superior), it counts as an instance of “positive” freedom: it represents an act of self-legislation.

As I have suggested in an earlier post, this way of thinking about the phrase from Horace is not unique to Popper. When read in context, what Horace is advising his young friend Lollius Maximus to do is to adopt a rule for living properly. As my friend Manfred Kuehn has explained in a discussion of Kant’s lectures on anthropology, Kant held that

As free and rational beings, we can and must adopt principles according to which we live, and it is for that reason that character may “be defined also as the determination of the freedom (Willkür) of human beings by lasting and firmly established maxims.” Insofar as character is indeed the characteristic mark of human beings as free and rational beings, living by maxims makes us what we should be. … It is for this reason that he identifies character with our “way of thinking” (Denkungsart), which is opposed to the “way of sensing” (Sinnesart).[7]

This seems to have been the way in which Horace’s motto was understood by the “Society of the Friends of Truth,” that strange group of Epicurean champions of Leibniz and Wolff who were responsible for coining the medal that graces the right side of this page. They thought that the Horatian imperative could be reconciled with Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, hence the rule that they adopted for themselves: “Hold nothing as true, hold nothing as false, so long as you have been convinced of it by no sufficient reason.” Perhaps, a discussion of the difference between their use of Horace’s dictum and Kant’s might introduce some needed complexity into Berlin’s account of the relationship between “the Enlightenment” and the vicissitudes of the concept of positive liberty.

In his letter to Berlin, Popper emphasized the difference between claiming to be in possession of the truth, a claim that looms large in Berlin’s discussion of the dangers that haunt the concept of positive liberty, and the demand to seek the truth through a process of criticism (which Popper saw as the project pursued by Socrates). To quote the crucial passage once again,

No doubt, the idea that anybody is wise, is dangerous and repugnant. But why should sapere aude be interpreted as authoritarian? It is, I feel, anti-authoritarian. When Socrates said, in the Apology, that the search for truth through critical discussion was a way of life (in fact, the best way of life he knew of) — was there anything objectionable in this?

Popper, of course, could find nothing objectionable here. Next week we can see how Berlin responded.

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1. The letter can be found in Box 276, Folder 10 of the Karl Popper Papers at the Hoover Institution Archives and I quote from it here with the permission of the Karl Popper Library, Klagenfurt, Austria. ↩
2. Popper, “Immanuel Kant: Philosopher of the Enlightenment,” reprinted as “Kant’s Critique and Cosmoology” in Conjectures and Refutations (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963) 175–183. ↩
3. The discussion also features a footnote in which Popper takes aim at the OED’s infamous definition of “Enlightenment.” ↩
4. In the version of this passage in Four Essays on Liberty, the words “not always by logically reputable steps” are inserted immediately after the words “divergent directions.” I’ll have more to say about this, and other, changes in the text next week. ↩
5. Joshua Cherniss, A Mind and Its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The first chapter of the book is available as a free download from Oxford’s website. ↩
6. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations 176. ↩
7. Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 147. ↩

Edes and Gill, the “Patriot Printers” & Locke’s Second Treatise

I published this post about three hours before the bombing in Boston as the second of two posts marking the Patriots’ Day holiday.  In the wake of the attacks, I pulled both posts off the site.  I’ve replaced the first post with a very different one.  This one, I think, can stand more or less as it was.

As Richard Sher and Michael Warner have reminded us, any discussion of an “American Enlightenment” had better pay attention to printers. And what better printers are there to attend to on “Patriots’ Day”  than the “Patriot Printers” Benjamin Edes and John Gill? Among their many other achievements, Edes and Gill were the publishers of the Boston Gazette, the newspaper that played a leading role in the anti-British agitation that culminated with the confrontation in Concord that citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts celebrate today, among other ways, by gathering along the route of the Boston Marathon.

My interest in Edes and Gill is rather limited and focuses on their role in publishing the item on the right. Despite having lived in Boston, off and (mostly) on for almost four decades, my knowledge of eighteenth-century Boston is scandalous spotty. And, despite having taught John Locke’s Two Treatises more times than I would care to remember (it’s possible to teach introductory courses in political thought without teaching Locke, but why would anyone want to?), it was only recently that I became interested in when the practice of reading the Second and only the Second Treatise was established. Granted, there are good reasons why interest in the First Treatise was bound to fade once Sir Robert Filmer’s reputation began its decline (I’ve always savored the irony that Locke’s attack on Filmer in the First Treatise was so successful in driving Filmer from history that it also removed most of the reasons why anyone would want to read what Locke had to say about him — who wants to read an attack on a nobody?). But when did this shift in the sense of what mattered in Locke’s work begin to be reflected in editions of the Second Treatise that presented it as an independent text that could be read on its own?

The answer, it seems, is 1691, the date of the publication of a French translation by the Huguenot émigré David Mazzel (the title page says “a Londres,” but I assume this was produced in Holland for smuggling into France). Mazzel’s translation eliminated the First Treatise and the opening chapter of the Second (which made it clear that it was a continuation of the argument begun there), and retitled the volume Du Gouvernment Civil. The work that resulted sported a table of contents that looks exactly like the current Hackett edition of the Second Treatise, the version that most undergraduates wind up reading.

Along with a variety of editions of the Two Treatises that were published in England over the course of the eighteenth century, WorldCat notes the appearance in London in 1753 of a work by Locke entitled Of Civil Polity. It describes itself in its Preface as having been “extracted from Mr. Locke’s Essay on Civil Government, with some Alterations and Additions”. A quick look at the copy available on ECCO reveals a very peculiar book: it eliminates quite a bit of the Second Treatise, including the important (and incendiary) chapter on the dissolution of government that concludes the work (and which is, after all, the point of the entire exercise) and patches in a discussion of “the establishment of religion” (a quick scanning of the chapter suggests that it may have been pulled from the Letter Concerning Toleration, though I’ve done no more than glance at the text). In contrast to the Mazzel translation, here is a book that provides scant evidence that what Locke had produced was a powerful argument for deposing a monarch. What we are presented with is a treatise on the nature of civil government that is capped, not by a discussion of the legitimate grounds for dissolving a government, but instead by a sketch of the differences between the ends of civil and ecclesiastical society.

It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that editions began to appear in the United Kingdom that follow the model provided by Mazzel. As a result, the 1773 edition produced by the patriot printers Edes and Gill would appear to have been the first edition anywhere in the world to do, in English, what Mazzel had done in French. Theirs would be the only edition of either of the two treatises to appear on the North American continent. It should come as no surprise that Edes and Gill, like Mazzel before them, included the chapter on the dissolution of government.