ABSTRACT

The post-WWII philosophical history of liberal freedom can be summed up as a theoretical development from two, to one, and finally three concepts (or conceptions) of liberty, or freedom. The debate begins with Isaiah Berlin’s 1959 publication of “Two Concepts of Liberty,” comes to rest temporarily in Gerald MacCallum’s analysis of freedom as a “triadic concept” (MacCallum 1967), and has more recently erupted into a dispute among descriptivists and republicans over the nature of negative freedom. This history is not old, nor is it especially original so far as contested substantive meanings go. One could read “Two Concepts” as offering little more than an (ideologically tainted) historical narrative of what we have come to mean by liberty given what first “the ancients” and then “the moderns” meant by it. However, the abiding appeal of “Two Concepts” lies less in its wealth of historical reference points and more in its philosophical thesis, which is a version of the more general thesis that concepts denote objects, or, yet more generally, that (all) concepts have determinate content. On this view it is possible to distinguish between correct and incorrect applications of the concept of liberty: in Berlin’s words, “everything is what it is; liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture” (Berlin 2002: 172).