Axel Honneth, “Three, Not Two, Concepts of Liberty”

Even for those among us who are not altogether convinced by Isaiah Berlin's famous essay "Two Concepts of Liberty," it has by now become commonplace to adopt a distinction between "negative" and "positive" liberties that largely coincides with the one he offered. In my lecture I defend the thesis that this bifurcation of the concept of freedom is incomplete in a significant respect, because it omits a third type, which I will call "social freedom." I proceed first by illustrating with some well-known examples how we must understand this third form of freedom, which cannot be performed by one subject alone, but rather requires the cooperation of others. In the second step I want to recall briefly the philosophical tradition in which this idea of "social freedom" has always had a central place. Finally, I delve into the systematic question of whether the suggested model of freedom in fact designates a third concept, which does not conform to the traditional bifurcated understanding.
Axel Honneth is a professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt and Columbia University, and the director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt.
This talk, the Dewey Lecture in Law and Philosophy, was recorded on November 12, 2014.

[@ElPsicoProfeta0993]

Berlin does note that negative freedom is not necessarily democratic: "Liberty in this sense is principally concerned with the area of control, not with its source. Just as a democracy may, in fact, deprive the individual citizen of a great many liberties which he might have in some other sort of society, so it is perfectly conceivable that a liberal-minded despot would allow his subjects a large area of personal freedom. [Such despot] may be unjust, or encourage the wildest inequalities, care little for order, or virtue, or knowledge, but provided he does not curb their liberty [...], he meets with [this] specification". (Liberty, 176).
Honneth's third concept should not be understood as a critique of Berlin's categories, but rather as an illuminating complement to them. Social freedom would thus guarantee democratic participation in a society that already respects negative, individual liberty. A truly free and open society should ensure and defend liberty in each of these three aspects, as a whole.

[@gerryrodgers]

Thank you for this

[@S.Lowell.Soderman]

I love Berlin's essay, "Two Concepts of Liberty", and I know he was very clear that he was not saying there are only two concepts of liberty, but that he was only distinguishing two in particular. To say that Berlin said there were only two concepts of liberty is either to misunderstand him, or to strawman.

[@yuezhenli]

Berlin wrote, ”I do not propose to discuss eitlier the history or
the more than two hundred senses of this protean word [freedom] recorded by historians of ideas. I propose to examine no more than two of the senses - but those central ones, with a great deal of human history behind thern, and, I dare say, still to come." (Berlin 1958) The fact that Berlin acknowledged that there are more than two sense of freedom is perfectly consistent with his belief that positive and negative liberties are the "central" senses in which freedom can be conceptualized. That is in turn consistent with Honneth's point that such a bifurcation fails to appreciate that the "idea of 'social freedom' has always had a central place" in the Western philosophical tradition.

[@S.Lowell.Soderman]

Thank you. I wrote that three years ago. Reading your comment, and in retrospect, I agree that you're right, and I was wrong. While Berlin did qualify that the concept of freedom had different forms, he was indeed focusing on two of its most salient forms in particular. However, since I wrote that comment, there's a piece I've read that I feel makes a great critique of the distinction between positive/negative freedom. I wouldn't say that the criticism negates the distinction, but argues that it's not much of a distinction at all, but more a matter of degree of two variables within the one holistic concept of freedom. It's Gerald C. MacCallum, Jr., "Negative and Positive Freedom", in The Philosophical Review 76, no. 3 (July, 1967). He argues that, in what philosophers are making out to be two kinds of freedom, there are actually three inseparable aspects of freedom, not irreconcilable kinds, and that these aspects can always be at least implicitly appreciated according to the context in which the concept of freedom is being used. MacCallum defines freedom like this: "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". In this definition you will notice that the positive and negative distinctions have been subsumed. And then he advises that it is best "to regard freedom as always one and the same triadic relation [i.e. freedom is always of, from, and to (do or access) something], but recognize that various contending parties disagree with each other in what they understand to be ranges of the term variables" (p. 312). With this criticism, I've come to think of the positive/negative distinction as qualities always there *within* the larger concept of freedom, and that it is better not to think of there as being two distinct conceptions of freedom, but rather one conception, but with varying emphases on one quality over another. I basically think of freedom as being *of* someone, *from* something, *towards* something. The negative/positive distinction lies in the *from* and *towards* something, respectively.

[@damianbylightning6823]

May be a language problem - but what the hell is he talking about?
I am sure Berlin had read Aristotle and reflected on those readings when constructing his practical view. He saw, I am sure, negative and positive liberty as two sides of the same coin. However, positive liberty has the danger that it is easily hijacked by cranks, kooks and nutters. Such theft, when not challenged or overthrown, may ramble anywhere, just like Honneth.
I believe Berlin once opined that he hated being treated like a child. - this perfectly sums up his fears.
Perhaps Honneth should go back and look at Berlin in a more rounded way?

[@mariovaldivia340]

mudpuddlestruck bylightning

[@andu__]

just as the title mentions it, he's proposing a third model of freedom, which is largely based on Hegels concepts of recognition, and with it, Sittlichkeit.
Opposed to the positive and negative concepts of freedom, where the I is the bearer of freedom, social freedom states that society is the bearer of freedom. Through the development of society as a whole, the end result will be the development of an autonomous individual. And tha'ts supposed to happen through what he's referring to as mutual recognition, or the struggle for recognition. This presupposes the assumption that we as individuals can't be separated from our social interactions, because without them, we are nothing but an unfulfilled individual.
Hegel and Honneth thus expand the notion of the individual by claiming that one must think of the individual as an autonomuos extension of the other.