Volume 63, Issue 1, 2016
Igor Paulíček
Pages 85-94
Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty
Isaiah Berlin introduces two concepts of liberty and this distinction of liberty although is on the one side relevant and important but on the other problematic and questionable. Berlin’s distinction points out that these concepts of the positive and negative liberty are really antagonistic. There are two points of view; one is the point of a human nature or man as individual and the second is the point of a human society. The main purpose of our article is to answer the question which of these concepts is more suitable from the human nature or human society point of view. Berlin’s conclusion is that the negative liberty more reflects the human nature and is a truer human ideal than the positive concept of liberty with the goals of those who seek after a better society. But contrary to Berlin we want to prove that this result is not so evident because each one of these concepts implicitly contains some problematic difficulties which cannot be so simply overcome by Berlin’s dichotomy. For this reason the result of our analysis is a scale of liberty between its two poles.