British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
ISAIAH BERLIN LECTURE
The Third Concept of Liberty
Professor Quentin Skinner FBA, University of Cambridge
21 November 2001
The Lecture will offer an appreciation and a critique of Isaiah Berlin's celebrated distinction between positive and negative liberty. Berlin's account of positive freedom has often been criticised, but one of the aims of the lecture will be to defend and amplify that aspect of his argument.
The most influential aspect of Berlin's analysis has been his account of negative liberty, but here it will be suggested that his argument needs to be reconsidered and supplemented. Two different concepts of negative liberty need to be discriminated, one of which might be labelled the Gothic and the other the Neo-Roman understanding of what it means to be free. A preliminary attempt will be made to trace the rise and fall of the Neo-Roman conceptionin British political theory and its eventual supersession by the Gothic model. The lecture will end by appraising the rival merits of these two different visions of negative liberty.