... lectures.1
My thanks are due to the institutions at whose invitations the lectures were delivered and to the respective publishers of the essays for granting permission for their republication. 
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... them.2
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. I am most grateful to Professors S.N. Hampshire, H. L. A. Hart, and Thomas Nagel and Mr. Patrick Gardiner for drawing my attention to errors and obscurities. I have done my best to remedy these, without, I feel sure, fully satisfying these distinguished and helpful critics. 
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... proposition3
It has the appearance of a universal statement about the nature of things. But it can scarcely be straightforwardly empirical, for what item of experience would count as evidence against it? 
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... true;4
What kind of incompatibility this is, logical, conceptual, psychological, or of some other kind, is a question `to which I do not volunteer an answer. The relations of factual beliefs to moral attitudes (or beliefs)-- both the logic and psychology of this-- seem to me to need further philosophical investigation. The thesis that no relevant logical relationship exists, e.g. the division between fact and value often attributed to Hume, seems to me to be implausible, and to point to a problem, not to its solution. 
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... fatalism.5
See A. K. Sen, `Determinism and Historical Predictions', Inquiry, no. 2, New Delhi, 1959, pp. 99-115. Also Gordon Leff in The Tyranny of Concepts , pp. 146-9. 
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... argument,6
The Structure of Science, New York, 1961, pp. 599-604. Also, by the same author, `Determinism in History',Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. xx, no. 3, March 1960, pp. 311-17. 
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... time';7
Op. cit. 
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... blame.8
The Structure of Science, pp. 603-4. 
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... true.9
See also a similar but equally unconvincing argument in the inaugural lecture by Professor Sydney Pollard at Sheffield University (Past and Present, no. 30, April 1965, pp. 3-22). Much of what Professor Pollard says seems to me valid and worth saying, but his view, supported by an appeal to history, that men's professions must be consistent with their practice is to say the least oddly surprising in a historian. Professor Nagel (opt cit., p. 602) suggests that belief in free will may relate to determinism much as the conviction that a table has a hard surface relates to the hypothesis that it consists of whirling electrons; the two descriptions answer questions at different levels, and therefore do not clash; This does not seem to me an apt parallel. To believe that the table is hard,solid, at rest, etc., entails no beliefs about electrons; and is, in principle, compatible with any doctrine about them: the levels do not touch. But if I supposed a man to have acted freely, and am later told that he acted as he did because he was `made that way', and could not have acted differently, I certainly suppose that something that I believed is being denied. 
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... personality.'10
What is History? London, 1964, p. 95. 
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... Passmore11
Philosophical Review, vol. 68, 1959, pp. 93-102. 
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... angle.12
Foundations of Historical Knowledge, New York, 1965, pp. 276 ff. I cannot pretend to be able to do justice here to the complex and interesting thesis which Professor White's luminous book expounds. I hope to do so elsewhere and ask him to forgive me for the summary character of this brief rejoinder. 
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... indeterminism.13
The Listener, 7 September 1967, p. 291. 
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... one.14
Hampshire replies: `The injunction not to treat men as merely natural objects defines the moral point of view precisely because, being studied from the scientific point of view, men can be so treated. Sir Isaiah Berlin disagrees with me (and with Kant) in regarding the question ``Are men only natural objects?'' as an empirical issue,' while I hold that, since no one can treat himself as merely a natural object, no one ought to treat another as merely a natural object. 
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... materialists.15
The Listener, 7 September l967, p. 291. 
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... views,16
I hope to do this on another occasion. 
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... himself.17
Op. cit., p. 131 
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... wills;18
A view attributed to me by Mr. Christopher Dawson in the Harvard Law Review, vol. 70, 1957, pp. 584-8. 
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... effective19
My evident failure to state my view sufficiently clearly is brought home to me by the fact that the opposite of this position--a crude and absurd anti-rationalism--is attributed to me by Mr. Gordon Leff (in The Tyranny of Concepts, pp. 146-9), by Prof. J. A. Passmore (in The Philosophical Review, loc. cit.), by Mr. Christopher Dawson, op cit.; and by half a dozen Marxist writers: some of these in evident good faith. 
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... breeds;20
Though not in all situations: see my article `From Hope and Fear Set Free', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1959-60. 
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... believe;21
I state this explicitly on pp.[*], [*]-[*], [*]-[*], [*]. 
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... not;22
See H. P. Rickman's review in The Hibbert Journal, January 1958, pp. 169-70. 
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... mistaken.23
The generous and acute anonymous reviewer of my lecture in the Times Literary Supplement was the first writer to point out this error; he also made other penetrating and suggestive criticisms by which I have greatly profited 
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... destroys.24
There is an admirable discussion of this topic in `Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism' inPsychoanalysis and Culture, by Dr. Robert R.Waelder (New York, n.d., International Universities Press, pp. 185-95). He speaks of the remoulding of the super-ego into `internalizing' external pressures, and draws an illuminating distinction between authoritarianism, which entails obedience to authority without acceptance of its orders and claims, and totalitarianism, which entails in addition inner conformity to the system imposed by the dictator; hence totalitarian insistence on education and indoctrination as opposed to mere outward obedience, a sinister process with which we have become all too familiar. There is, of course, all the difference in the world between assimilating the rules of reason, as advocated by Stoicism, and those of an irrational movement or arbitrary dictatorship. But the psychological machinery is similar. 
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... flowers.25
This point is well made by one of my critics, Mr. L. J. McFarlane, in `On Two Concepts of Liberty' (Political Studies, vol 14, February 1966, pp. 77-81). In the course of a very critical but fair and valuable discussion Mr. McFarlane observes that to know one's chains is often the first step to freedom, which may never come about if one either ignores or loves them. 
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... fashion.26
See footnote 9 ,Two Concepts of Liberty 
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... liberty.27
Professor A. W. Gommne and others have provided a good deal of evidence for the hypothesis that they did. 
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... them.28
In his inaugural lecture to the University of Sheffield in 1966. 
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... omnipotent.29
It has been suggested that liberty is always a triadic relation: one can only seek to be free from X to do or be Y; hence `all liberty' is at once negative and positive or, better still, neither (see G. C. McCallum, Jr.,Philosophical Review, vol 76, no.3, 1967, pp.312-. 312- 34). This seems to me an error. 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; he just wants to remove the yoke. So do classes and nations. 
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... voices.30
Not that such open violence has been lacking in our own country, practised at times under the noble banner of the suppression of arbitrary rule and the enemies of liberty and the emancipation of hitherto enslaved populations and classes. On this I agree with a great deal of what has been said on this subject by Professor A. S. Kaufman (`Professor Berlin on Negative Freedom', Mind, April 1962, pp. 241-4). Some of his points may be found in an earlier attack by Professor Marshall Cohen (`Berlin and the Liberal Tradition ',Philosophical Quarterly, pp. 216-28). Some of Mr. Kaufman's objections have, I hope, been answered already. There is one point, however, on which I must take further issue with him. He appears to regard constraint or obstruction not brought about by human means as being forms of deprivation of social or political freedom. I do not think that this is compatible with what is normally meant by political freedom-- the only sense of it with which I am concerned. Mr. Kaufman speaks (op. cit., p. 241) of `obstructions to the human will, which have nothing to do with a community's pattern of power relations' as obstacles to (political or social) liberty. Unless, however, such obstructions do, in the end, spring from power-relations, they do not seem to be relevant to the existence of social or political liberty. I cannot see how one can speak of `basic human rights' (to use Mr. Kaufman's phrase) as violated by what he calls `non-human interference'. If I stumble and fall, and so find my freedom of movement frustrated, I cannot, surely, be said to have suffered any loss of basic human rights. Failure to discriminate between human and non-human obstacles to freedom seems to me to mark the beginning of the great confusion of types of freedom, and of the no less fatal identification freedom itself, which is at the root of some of the fallacies with which I am concerned. 
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... rule.31
Mr. David Nicholls in in admirable survey, `Positive Liberty, 1880-1904';American Political Science Review, March 1962, thinks that I contradict myself in quoting with approval Bentham's `Every law is an infraction of liberty, since some laws increase the total amount of liberty in a society'. I do not see the force of this objection. Every law seems to me to curtail some liberty, although it may be a means to increasing another. Whether it increases the total sum of attainable liberty will of course depend on the particular situation. Even a law which enacts that no one shall coerce anyone in a given sphere, while it obviously increases the freedom of the majority, is an `infraction' of the freedom of potential bullies and policemen Infraction may, as in this case, be highly desirable, but it remains 'infraction'. There is no reason for thinking that Bentham, who favoured laws, meant to say more than this.

In his article Mr. Nicholls quotes T. H. Green's statement (in `Liberal Legislation and the Freedom of Contract'): `The mere removal of compulsion, the mere enabling a man to do as he likes; is in itself no contribution to true freedom... the ideal of true freedom is the maximum of power for all members of human society alike to make the best of themselves.' (T. H. Green, Works, iii,p. 371-2). This is a classical statement of positive liberty, and the crucial terms are, of course, `true freedom' and `the best of themselves'. Perhaps I need not enlarge again upon the fatal ambiguity of these words. As a plea for justice, and a denunciation of the monstrous assumption that workmen were (in any sense that mattered to them) free agents in negotiating with employers in his time, Green's essay can scarcely be improved upon The workers, in theory, probably enjoyed wide negative freedom. But since they lacked the means of its realization, it was a hollow gain. Hence I find nothing to disagree with Mr. Green's recommendations; only with the metaphysical doctrine of the two selves-- the individual streams versus the social river in which they should be merged, a dualistic fallacy used too often to support a variety of despotisms. Nor, of course, do I wish to deity that Green's views were exceptionally enlightened, and this holds of many of the critics of liberalism in Europe and America in the last hundred years or so. Nevertheless, words are important, and a writer's opinions and purposes are not sufficient to render the use of a misleading terminology harmless either in theory or in practice. The record of liberalism is no better in this respect than that of most other schools of political thought. 

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... knowledge;32
As was done by Condorcet and his disciples. 
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... Spitz33
`The Nature and Limits of Freedom', Dissent, vol. viii, Winter 1962, pp. 78-86.. 
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... Spitz,34
Op. cit. 
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... practice.35
The classical--and still, it seems to me, the best--exposition of this state of mind is to be found in Max Weber's distinction between the ethics of conscience and the ethics of responsibility in `Politics as a Vocation' (Max Weber, Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills). 
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... matter.36
This, indeed, was the point of the penultimate paragraph of p.[*], which was widely taken as an unqualified defence of `negative' against `positive' liberty. This was not my intention. This much criticized passage was meant as a defence, indeed, but of a pluralism, based on the perception of incompatibility between the claims of equally ultimate ends, against any ruthless monism which solves such problems by eliminating all but one of the rival claimants. I have therefore revised the text to make it clear that I am not offering a blank endorsement of the `negative' concept as opposed to its `positive' twin brother, since this would itself constitute precisely the kind of intolerant monism against which the entire argument is directed. 
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... claim?37
Josephde Maistre once observed that, when Rousseau asked why it was that men who were born free were nevertheless everywhere in chains, this was like asking why it was that sheep, who were born carnivorous, nevertheless everywhere nibbled grass. Similarly the Russian radical Alexander Herzen observed that we classify creatures by zoological types, according to the characteristics and habits that are most frequently found to be conjoined. Thus, one of the defining attributes of fish is their liability to live in water; hence, despite the existence of flying fish, we do not say of fish in general that their nature or essence--the `true' end for which they were created--is to fly, since most fish fail to achieve this and do not display the slightest tendency in this direction. Yet in the case of men, and men alone, we say that the nature of man is to seek freedom, even though only very few men in the long life of our race have in fact pursued it, while the vast majority at most times have showed little taste for it, and seem contented to be ruled by others, seeking to be well governed by those who provide them.with sufficient food, shelter, rules of life, but not to be self-governed. Why should man alone, Herzen asked; be classified in terms of what at most small minorities here or there have ever sought for its own sake, still less actively fought for? This sceptical reflection was uttered by a man whose entire life was dominated by a single-minded passion--the pursuit of liberty, personal and political, of his own and other nations, to which he sacrificed his public career and his private happiness. 
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... McFarlane38
Op. cit. 
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... maintain39
e.g. L. J. McFarlane, op. cit, and the majority of democratic theorists. 
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...
This article was written in 1949 at the request of the Editor of the American Journal Foreign Affairs, for its Mid-century Issue. Its tone was to some extent due to the policies of the Soviet régime during Stalin's last years. Since then a modification of the worst excesses of that dictatorship has fortunately taken place; but the general tendency with which the issue was concerned seems to me, if anything, to have gained, if not in intensity, then in extent some of the new national states of Asia and Africa seem to show no greater concern for civil liberties, even allowing for the exigencies of security and planning which, these states need for their development or survival, than the régimes they have replaced. 
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... attain.1.1
I do not, of course, attribute this view either to Hegel or to Marx, whose doctrines are both more complex and far more plausible; only to the terribles simplificareurs among their followers. 
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... frustrated1.2
According to some, for historically or metaphysically inevitable reasons or causes which, however, soon or late will lose their potency. 
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... society.1.3
Hence; perhaps, the very different quality of the tone and substance of social protest, however legitimate, . in the West in our time, as compared to that of Asian or African critics who speak for societies where large sections of the population are still crushed or submerged. 
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... another.1.4
The history and the logic of the transformation of liberalism in the nineteenth century into socialism in the twentieth is a complex and fascinating subject of cardinal importance; but cannot, for reasons of space and relevance, even be touched upon in this short essay. 
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... lexi1.5
But see Appendix. 
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... Lenin1.6
Like Posadovsky-himself. 
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... Communards,1.7
Or, as is quite likely, from Marx's own writings in 1847-51. 
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... oppose.'2.1
Bernard Berenson, Rumor and Reflection, p. 110 (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1952). 
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... known.2.2
I do not wish here to enter into the question of what such procedures are, e.g. of what is meant by speaking of history as a science--whether the methods of historical discovery are inductive, or `deductive-hypothetical', or analogical, or to what degree they are or should be similar to the methods of the natural sciences, and to which of these methods, and in which of the natural sciences; for there plainly exists a greater variety of methods and procedures than is usually provided for in textbooks on logic or scientific method. it may be that the methods of historical research are, in at least some respects, unique, and some of them are more unlike than like those of the natural sciences; while others resemble given scientific techniques, particularly when they approach such ancillary inquiries as archaeology or palaeography or physical anthropology or again they may depend upon the kind of historical research pursued--and may not be the same in demography as in history, in political history as in the history of art, in the history of technology as in the history of religion. The `logic' of various human studies has been insufficiently examined, and convincing accounts of its varieties with an adequate range of concrete examples drawn from actual practice are much to be desired. 
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... individuals2.3
Indeed, the very notion of great men, however carefully qualified, however sophisticated, embodies this belief; for this concept, even in its most attenuated form, would be empty unless it were thought that some men played a more decisive role in the course of history than others. The notion of greatness; unlike those of goodness or wickedness or talent or beauty, is not a mere characteristic of individuals in a more or less private context, but is, as we ordinarily use it, directly connected with social effectiveness, the capacity of individuals to alter things radically on a large scale. 
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... ourselves.2.4
We are further told that we belong to such wholes and are `organically' one with them, whether we know it or not; and that we have such significance as we do only to the degree to which we are sensitive to, and identify ourselves with, these unanalysable, imponderable, scarcely explicable relationships; for it is only in so far as we belong to an entity greater than ourselves, and are thereby carriers of `its' values, instruments of `its' purposes, living `its' life, suffering and dying for `its' richer self-realisation, than we are, or are worth, anything at all. This familiar line of thought should be distinguished from the no less familiar but less ethically charged supposition that men's outlooks and behaviour are largely conditioned by the habits of other past and present members of their society; that the hold of prejudice and tradition is very strong; that there may be inherited characteristics both mental and physical; and that any effort to influence human beings and to judge their conduct must take such non-rational factors into account. For whereas the former view is metaphysical and normative (what Karl Popper calls `essentialist'), the latter is empirical and descriptive; and while the former is largely found as an element in the kind of ethical or political anti-individualism held by romantic nationalists, Hegelians, and other transcendentalists, the latter is a sociological and psychological hypothesis which doubtless carries its own ethical and political implications, but rests its claim on observation of empirical facts, and can be confirmed or refuted or rendered less or more plausible by it. In their extreme forms these views contradict each other; in their softer and less consistent forms they tend to overlap, and even coalesce. 
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... Marx,2.5
Or, some prefer to say, Engels. 
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... hear2.6
No one has demonstrated this with more devastating lucidity than Professor Karl Popper. While he seems to me somewhat to underestimate the differences be tween the methods of natural science and those of history or common sense (Professor F. v. Hayek's The Counterrevolution of Science seems, despite some exaggerations, to be more convincing on this topic), he has, in his The Open Society and its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism, exposed some of the fallacies of metaphysical `historicism' with such force and precision, and made so clear its incompatibility with any kind of scientific empiricism, that there is no further excuse for confounding the two. 
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... metaphor.2.7
I do not, of course, wish to imply that metaphors and figures of speech can be dispensed with in ordinary utterance, still less in the sciences; only that the danger of illicit `reification'--the mistaking of words for things, metaphors for realities--is even greater in this sphere than is usually supposed. The most notorious cases are, of course, those of the State or the Nation, the quasi-personification of which has rightly made philosophers and even plain men uneasy or indignant for over a century. But many other words and usages offer similar dangers. Historical movements exist, and we must be allowed to call them so. Collective acts do occur; societies do rise, flourish, decay, die. Patterns, `atmospheres', complex interrelationships of men or culture are what they are, and cannot be analysed away into atomic constituents. Nevertheless, to take such expressions so literally that it becomes natural and normal to attribute to them causal properties, active powers, transcendent properties, demands for human sacrifice, is to be fatally deceived by myths. `Rhythms' in history occur, but it is a sinister symptom of one's condition to speak of them as `inexorable'. Cultures possess patterns, and ages spirits; but to explain human actions as their `inevitable' consequences or expressions is to be a victim of misuse of words. There is no formula which guarantees a successful escape from either the Scylla of populating the world with imaginary powers and dominions, or the Charybdis of reducing everything to the verifiable behaviour of identifiable men and women in precisely denotable places and times. One can do no more than point to the existence of these perils; one must navigate between them as best one can. 
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... Nature).2.8
Determinism is, of course, not identical with fatalism, which is only one, and not the most plausible, species of the vast determinist genus. The majority of determinists seem to maintain that such distinctions as those between voluntary and involuntary behaviour, or between acts and mechanical movements or states, or what a man is and what he is not accountable for, and therefore the very notion of a moral agent, depend on what is or could be affected by individual choice, effort, or decision. They hold that I normally praise or blame a man only if, and because, I think that, what occurred was (or might a1 any rate in part be) caused by his choice or the absence of it; and should not praise or blame him if his choices, efforts, etc:, were conspicuously unable to affect the result that I applaud or deplore; and that this is compatible with the most rigorous determinism, since choice, effort, etc., are themselves causally inevitable.consequences of identifiable spatio-temporal antecedents. This (in substance the classical 'dissolution' of the problem of free will by the British empiricists--Hobbes, Locke; Hume, and their modern followers Russell, Schlick, Ayer, Nowell-Smith, Hampshire, etc.) does not seem to me to solve the problem, but merely to push it a step further back. It may be that for legal or other purposes I may define responsibility, moral accountability, etc., on some such lines as these. But if I were convinced that although acts of choice, dispositional characteristics, etc., . did affect what occurred, yet were themselves wholly determined by factors not within the individual's control (including his own motives and springs of action), I should certainly not regard him as morally praiseworthy or blameworthy. In such circumstances the concept of worth and desert, as these terms are now used, would become empty for me.

The same kind of objection seems to me to apply to the connected doctrine that free will is tantamount to capacity for being (causally) affected by praise, blame, persuasion, education, etc. Whether the causes that are held completely to determine human action are physical or psychical or of some other kind, and in whatever pattern or proportion they are deemed to occur, if they are truly causes--if their outcomes are thought to.be as unalterable as, say, the effects of physical or physiological causes--this of itself seems to me to make the notion of a free choice between alternatives inapplicable. On this view `I could have acted otherwise' is made to mean I could have acted otherwise if I had closen', i.e. if there were no insuperable obstacle to hinder me (with the rider that my choice may well be affected by praise, social disapproval, etc.; but if my choice is itself the result of antecedent causes, I am, in the relevant sense, not free. Freedom to act depends not on absence of only this or that set of fatal obstacles to action--physical or biological, let us say--while other obstacles, e.g. psychological ones--character, habits, `compulsive' motives, etc.--are present; it requires a situation in which no sum total of such causal factors wholly determines the result--in which there remains some area however narrow, within which choice is not completely determined. This is the minimal sense of `can' in this context. Kant's argument that where there is no freedom there is no obligation, where there is no independence of causes there is no responsibility and therefore no desert, and consequently no occasion for praise or reproach, carries conviction. If I can correctly say `I cannot help choosing thus or thus', I am not free. To say that among the factors which determine the situation are my own character, habits, decisions, choices, etc.--which is, of course, conspicuously true--does not alter the case, or render me, in the only relevant sense, free. The feeling of those who have recognised free will as a genuine issue, and were not deceived by the latest efforts to interpret it away, turns out, as so often in the case of major problems which have plagued thoughtful men in every generation, to be sound as against philosophers armed with some all conquering simple method of sweeping troublesome questions out of sight. Dr. Johnson, as in other matters affecting commonsense notions, here, too, seems to have been guided by a sound linguistic sense. It does not, of course, follow that any of the analyses so far provided of the relevant senses of `can', `freedom', `uncaused', etc. is satisfactory. To cut the knot, as Dr. Johnson did, is not to untie it. 

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... such.2.9
What can and what cannot be done by particular agents in specific circumstances is an empirical question, properly settled, like all such questions, by an appeal to experience If all acts were causally determined by antecedent conditions which were themselves similarly determined, and so on ad infinitum, such investigations would rest on an illusion. As rational beings we should, in that case, snake an effort to disillusion ourselves--to cast off the spell of appearances; but we should surely fail. The delusion, if it is one, belongs to the order of what Kant called `empirically real' and `transcendentally ideal'. To try to place ourselves outside the categories which govern our empirical (`real') experience is what he regarded as an unintelligible plan of action. This thesis is surely valid, and can be stated without the paraphernalia of the Kantian system. 
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... deluded;2.10
This desperate effort to remain at once within and without the engulfing dream, to say the unsayable, is irresistible to German metaphysicians of a certain type: e.g. Schopenhauer and Vaihinger. 
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... others.2.11
See pp.[*] and [*]-[*]. 
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... are2.12
At least in principle. 
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... former2.13
See, for example, the impressive and influential writings of Professor E. H. Carr on the history of our time. 
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... nations.2.14
I do not, of course, mean to imp1y that the great Western moralists, e.g. the philosophers of the medieval Church (and in particular Thomas Aquinas) or those of the Enlightenment, denied moral responsibility; nor that Tolstoy was not agonized by problems raised by it. My thesis is that their determinism committed these thinkers to a dilemma which some among them did nor face, and none escaped. 
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... thesis2.15
Held, unless I have gravely misunderstood his writings, by Professor Herbert Butterfield. 
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... school.2.16
The paradox arising out of general scepticism about historical objectivity may perhaps be put in another fashion. One of the principal reasons for complaining about the moralistic attitude of this or that historian is that his scale of values is thought to distort his judgments, to cause him to pervert the truth. But if we start from the assumption that historians, like other human beings, are wholly conditioned to think as they do by specific material (or immaterial) factors, however incalculable or impalpable, then their so called bias is, like everything else about their thought, the inevitable consequence of their `predicament', and so equally are our objections to it--our own ideals of impartiality, our own standards of objective truth in terms of which we condemn, say, nationalistic or woodenly Marxist historians, or other forms of animus or parti pris. For what is sauce for the subjective goose must be sauce for the objective gander; if we look at the matter from the vantage point of a communist or a chauvinist, our `objective' attitude is an equal offence against their standards, which is in their own eyes no less self-evident, absolute, valid, &c. In this relativistic view the very notion of an absolute standard, presupposing as it does the rejection of all specific vantage points as such, must, of course, be an absurdity. All complaints about partiality and bias, about moral (or political) propaganda, seem, on this view; beside the point. Whatever does not agree with our views we call misleading, but if this fault is to be called subjectivism, so must the condemnation of it; it ought to follow that no point of view is superior to any other, save in so far as it proceeds from wider knowledge (given that there is a commonly agreed standard for measuring such width). We are what we are, and when and where we are ; and when we are historians, we select and emphasize, interpret and evaluate, reconstruct and present facts, as we do, each in his own way. Each nation and culture and class does this in its own way--and on this view all that we are doing when we reject this or that historian as a conscious or unconscious propagandist is solely to indicate our own moral or intellectual or historical distance from him; nothing more: we are merely underlining our personal position. And this seems to be a fatal internal contradiction in the views of those who believe in the historical conditioning of historians and yet protest against moralizing by them, whether they do so contemptuously like Mr. Carr, or sorrowfully like Professor Butterfield. 
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... history2.17
As opposed to making profitable use of other disciplines, e.g. sociology or economics or psychology. 
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... science.2.18
That history is in this sense different from physical description is a truth discovered long ago by Vico, and most imaginatively and vividly presented by Herder and his followers, and, despite the exaggerations and extravagances to which it led some nineteenth century philosophers of history, still remains the greatest contribution of the Romantic movement to our knowledge. What was then shown; albeit often in a very misleading and confused fashion, was that to reduce history to a natural science was deliberately to leave out of account what we know to be true, to suppress great portions of our most familiar introspective knowledge on the altar of a false analogy with the sciences and their mathematical and scientific disciplines. This exhortation to the students of humanity to practise austerities, and commit deliberate acts of self-laceration, that, like Origen, they might escape all temptation to sin (involved in any lapse from `neutral' protocols of the data of observation), is to render the writing of history (and, it may be added, of sociology) gratuitously sterile. 
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... others.2.19
Such `stability' is a matter of degree. All our categories are, in theory, subject to change. The physical categories--e.g. the three dimensions and infinite extent of ordinary perceptual space, the irreversibility of temporal processes, the multiplicity and countability of material objects--are perhaps the most fixed. Yet even a shift in these most general characteristics is in principle conceivable; After these come orders and relations of sensible qualities--colours, shapes, tastes, etc. ; then the uniformities on which the sciences are based--these can be quite easily thought away in fairy tales or scientific romances. The categories of value are more fluid than these; and within them tastes fluctuate more than rules of etiquette, and these more than moral standards. Within each category some concepts seem more liable to change than ethers. When such differences of degree become so marked as to constitute what are called differences of kind, we tend to speak of the wider and more stable distinctions as `objective', of the narrower and less stable as the opposite. Nevertheless there is no sharp break, no frontier. The concepts form a continuous series from the `permanent' standards to fleeting momentary reactions, from `objective' truths and rules to `subjective' attitudes, and they criss-cross each other in many dimensions, sometimes at unexpected angles, to perceive, discriminate, and describe which can be a mark of genius. 
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... us.2.20
Unless indeed we embark on the extravagant path of formulating and testing the reliability of such methods by methods of methods (at times called the study of methodology), and these by methods of methods of methods; but we shall have to stop somewhere before we lose count of what we are do and accept that stage, willy-nilly, as absolute, the home of `permanent standards'. 
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... work.2.21
Criteria of what is a fact or what constitutes empirical evidence are seldom in grave dispute within a given culture or profession. 
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... replace.2.22
I need hardly add that responsibility (if I may still venture to use this term) for this cannot be placed at the door of the great thinkers who founded modern sociology-- Marx, Durkheim, Weber, nor of the rational and scrupulous followers and critics whose work they have inspired. 
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... power2.23
And a collection of isolated insights and aperçus, like the dubious `all power either corrupts or intoxicates', or `man is a political animal', or `Der Mensch ist was er i$\beta$t'. 
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... come.2.24
I do not mean to imply that other `sciences' -- e.g.`political science' or social anthropology -- have fared much better in establishing laws; but their claims are more modest. 
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... dimension;2.25
As well as new methods for testing the validity of old conclusions. 
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... difficulty.2.26
See Introduction, p.[*]. 
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... history,2.27
`History has seized us by the throat', Mussolini is reported to have cried on learning of the Allied landing in Sicily. Men could be fought; but once `History' herself took up arms against one, resistance was vain. 
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... structure,2.28
`The irresistible', Mr. Justice Brandeis is said to have remarked, `is often only that which is not resisted.' 
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... beings.3.1
I do not, of course, mean to imply the truth of the converse. 
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... freedom.3.2
Helvétius made this point very clearly: `The free man is the man who is not in irons, nor imprisoned in a gaol, nor terrorized like a slave by the fear of punishment ...it is not lack of freedom not to fly like an eagle or swim like a whale.' 
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... theory.3.3
The Marxist conception of social laws is, of course, the best known version of this theory, but it forms a large element in some Christian and utilitarian, and all socialist, doctrines. 
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... word.3.4
`A free man', said Hobbes, `is he that ...is not hindered to do what he hath the will to do.' Law is always a `fetter', even if it protects you from being bound in chains that are heavier than those of the law, say, some more repressive law or custom, or arbitrary despotism or chaos. Bentham says much the same. 
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... it.3.5
This is but another illustration of the natural tendency of all but a very few thinkers to believe that all the things they hold good must be intimately connected, or at least compatible, with one another. The history of thought, like the history of nations, is strewn with examples of inconsistent, or at least disparate, elements artificially yoked together in a despotic system, or held together by the danger of some common enemy. In due course the danger passes, and conflicts between the allies arise, which often disrupt the system, sometimes to the great benefit of mankind. 
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... light.3.6
See the valuable discussion of this in Michel Villey, Leçons d'histoire de la philosophie du droit , who traces the embryo of the notion of subjective rights to Occam. 
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... Reformation.3.7
Christian (and Jewish or Moslem) belief in the absolute authority of divine or natural laws, or in the equality of all men the sight of God, is very different from belief in freedom to live as one prefers. 
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... specification.3.8
Indeed, it is arguable that in the Prussia of Frederick the Great or in the Austria of Josef II men of imagination, originality, and creative genius, and, indeed, minorities of all kinds, were less persecuted and felt the pressure, both of institutions and custom, less heavy upon them than in many an earlier or later democracy. 
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... consists.3.9
`Negative liberty' is something the extent of which, in a given case, it is difficult to estimate; it might, prima facie, seem to depend simply on the power to choose between at any rate two alternatives. Nevertheless, not all choices are equally free, or free at all. if in a totalitarian state I betray my friend under threat of torture, perhaps even if I act from fear of losing my job, I can reasonably say that I did not act freely. Nevertheless; I did, of course, make a choice, and could, at any rate in theory, have chosen to be killed or tortured or imprisoned. The mere existence of alternatives is not, therefore, enough to make my action free (although it may be voluntary) in the normal sense of the word. The extent of my freedom seems to depend on (a) how many possibilities are open to me (although the method of counting these can never be more than impressionistic. Possibilities of action are not discrete entities like apples, which can be exhaustively enumerated); (b) how easy or difficult each of these possibilities is to actualize; (c)how important in my plan of life, given my character and circumstances, these possibilities are when compared with each other; (d) how far they are closed and opened by deliberate human acts; (e) what value not merely the agent, but the general sentiment of the society in which. he lives, puts on the various possibilities. All these magnitudes must be `integrated', and a conclusion, necessarily never precise, or indisputable, drawn from this process. It may well be that there are many incommensurable kinds and degrees of freedom, and that they cannot be drawn up on any single scale of magnitude. Moreover, in the case of societies, we are faced by such (logically absurd) questions as `Would arrangement X increase the liberty of Mr. A more than it would that of Messrs. B, C, and D between them added together?' The same difficulties arise in applying utilitarian criteria. Nevertheless, provided we do not demand precise measurement, we can give valid reasons for saying that the average subject of the King of Sweden is, on the whole, a good deal freer today than the average citizen of Spain or Albania. Total patterns of life must be compared directly as wholes, although the method by which we make the comparison, and the truth of the conclusions, are difficult or impossible to demonstrate. But the vagueness of the concepts, and the multiplicity of the criteria involved, is an attribute of the subject matter itself, not of out imperfect methods of measurement, or incapacity for precise thought. 
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... account.3.10
The ideal of true freedom is the maximum of power for all the members of human society alike to make the best of themselves', said T. H. Green in 1881. Apart from the confusion of freedom with equality, this entails that if a man chose some immediate pleasure--which (in whose view?) would not enable him to make the best of himself (what self?)--what he was exercising was not `true' freedom:and if deprived of it, would not lose anything that mattered. Green was a genuine liberal: but many a tyrant could use this formula to justify his worst acts of oppression. 
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... weapons.3.11
`A wiseman, though he be a slave, is at liberty, and from this it follows that though a fool rule, he is in slavery', said St. Ambrose. It might equally well have been said by Epicterus or Kant. 
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... happier.3.12
`Proletarian coercion, in all its forms, from executions to forced labour, is, paradoxical as it may sound, the method of moulding communist humanity out of the human material of the capitalist period.' These lines by the Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin, in a work which appeared in 1920, especially the term `human material', vividly convey this attitude. 
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... conditioning,3.13
Kant's psychology, and that of the Stoics and Christians too, assumed that some element in man--the `inner fastness of his mind'--could be made secure against conditioning. The development of the techniques of hypnosis, `brain washing', subliminal suggestion, and the like, has made this a priori assumption, at least as an empirical hypothesis, less plausible. 
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... Republic.3.14
It is not perhaps far-fetched to assume that the quietism of the Eastern sages was, similarly, a response to the despotism of the great autocracies, and flourished at periods when individuals were apt to be humiliated, or at any rate ignored or ruthlessly managed, by those possessed of the instruments of physical coercion. 
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... death.3.15
It is worth remarking that those who demanded--and fought for--liberty for the individual or for the nation in France during this period of German quietism did not fall into this attitude. Might this not be precisely because, despite the despotism of the French monarchy and the arrogance and arbitrary behaviour of privileged groups in the French state, France was a proud and powerful nation, where the reality of political power was nor beyond the grasp of men of talent, so that withdrawal from battle into some untroubled heaven above it, whence it could be surveyed dispassionately by the self-sufficient philosopher, was not the only way out? The same holds for England in the nineteenth century and well after it, and for the United States today. 
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... reason,3.16
Or, as some modern theorists maintain, because I have, or could have, invented them for myself, since the rules are man-made. 
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... misconceive,3.17
In practice even more than in theory. 
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... liberation.3.18
On this Bentham seems to me to have said the last word: `Is not liberty to do evil, liberty? If not, what is it? Do we not say that it is necessary to take liberty from idiots and bad men, because they abuse it?' Compare with this a typical statement made by a Jacobin club of the same period: `No man is free in doing evil. To prevent him is to set bim free.' This is echoed in almost identical terms by British Idealists at the end of the following century. 
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... be.3.19
`To compel men to adopt the right form of government, to impose Right on them by force, is not only the right, but the sacred duty of every man who has both the insight and the power to do so.' 
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... it.3.20
Kant came nearest to asserting the `negative' ideal of liberty when (in one of his political treatises), he declared that `the greatest problem of the human race, to the solution of which it is compelled by nature, is the establishment of a civil society universally administering right according to law. It is only in a society which possesses the greatest liberty ...the most exact determination and guarantee of the limits of [the] liberty [of each individual] in order that it may co-exist with the liberty of others--that the highest purpose of nature, which is the `development of all her capacities, can be attained in the case of mankind.' Apart from the teleological implications, this formulation does not at first appear very different from orthodox liberalism. The crucial point, however, is how to determine the criterion for `the exact determination and guarantee of the limits' of individual liberty. Most modern liberals, at their most consistent, want a situation in which as many individuals as possible can realize as many of their ends as possible, without assessment of the value of these ends as such, save in so far as they. may frustrate the purposes of others. They wish the frontiers between individuals or groups of men to be drawn solely with a view to preventing collisions between human purposes, all of which must be considered to be equally ultimate, uncriticizable ends in themselves. Kant and the rationalists of his type, do not regard all ends as of equal value. For them the limits of liberty are determined by applying the rules of `reason', which is much more than the mere generality of rules as such, and is a faculty that creates or reveals a purpose identical in, and for, all men. In the name of reason anything that is non-rational may be condemned, so that the various personal aims which their individual imagination and idiosyncrasies lead men to pursue--for example aesthetic and other non-rational kinds of self-fulfilment--may, at least in theory, be ruthlessly suppressed to make way for the demands of reason. The authority of reason and of the duties it lays upon men is identified with individual freedom, on the assumption that only rational ends can be the `true' `objects of a `free' man's `real' nature

I have never, I must own, understood what `reason' means in this context; and here merely wish to point out that the a priori assumptions of this philosophical psychology are not compatible with empiricism: that is to say, with any doctrine founded on knowledge derived from experience of what men are and seek. 

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... belong.3.21
This has an obvious affinity with Kant's doctrine of human freedom; but it is a socialized and empirical version of it, and therefore almost its opposite. Kant's free man needs no public recognition for inner freedom. If he is treated as a means to some external purpose, that is a wrong act on the part of his exploiters, but his own `noumenal' status is untouched, and he is fully free, and fully a man, however he may be treated. The need spoken of here is bound up wholly with the relation that I have with others; I am nothing if I am unrecognized. I cannot ignore the attitude of others with Byronic disdain, fully conscious of my own intrinsic worth and vocation, or escape into my inner life, for I am in my own eyes as others see me. I identify myself with the point of view of my milieu: I feel myself to be somebody or nobody in terms of my position and function in the social whole; this is the most `heteronomous' condition imaginable. 
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... meaningless.3.22
This argument should be distinguished from the traditional approach of some of the disciples of Burke or Hegel who say that, since I am made what I am by society or history, to escape from them is impossible and to attempt it irrational. No doubt I cannot leap out of my skin, or breathe outside my proper element; it is a mere tautology to say that I am what I am, and cannot want to be liberated from my essential characteristics, some of which are social. But it does not follow that all my attributes are intrinsic and inalienable, and that I cannot seek to alter my status within the `social network', or `cosmic web', which determines my nature; if this were the case, no meaning could be attached to such words as `choice' or `decision' or `activity'. If they are to mean anything, attempts to protect myself against authority, or even to escape from my station and its duties', cannot be excluded as automatically irrational or suicidal. 
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... another.3.23
But see Introduction, p.[*]. 
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... them.3.24
In Great Britain such legal power is, of course, constitutionally vested in the absolute sovereign--the King in Parliament. What makes this county comparatively free, therefore, is the fact that this theoretically omnipotent entity is restrained by custom or opinion from behaving as such. it is clear that what matters is not the form of these restraints on power--whether they are legal, or moral, or constitutional--but their effectiveness. 
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... justice.3.25
Condorcet, from whoseEsquisse these words are quoted, declares that the task of social science is to show `by what bonds Nature has united the progress of enlightenment with that of liberty, virtue, and respect for the natural rights of man; how these ideals, which alone are truly good, yet so often separated from each other that they are even believed to be incompatible, should, on the contrary, become inseparable, as soon as enlightenment has reached a certain level simultaneously among a large number of nations.' He goes on to say that: `Men still preserve the errors of their childhood, of their country, and of their age long after having recognized all the truths needed for destroying them.' Ironically enough, his belief in the need and possibility of uniting all good things may well be precisely the kind of error he himself so well described. 
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... beings.3.26
On this also Bentham seems to me to have spoken well: `individual interests are the only real interests ..., can it be conceived that there are men so absurd as to ...prefer the man who is not to him who is; to torment the living, under pretence of promoting the happiness of them who are not born, and who may never be born?' This is one of the infrequent occasions when Burke agrees with Bentham; for this passage is at the heart of the empirical, as against the metaphysical view of politics. 
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... monstrous.'4.1
From a tribute to John Stuart Mill by James Bain, quoted in the full and interesting Life of John Stuart Mill by Michael St. John Packe, p. 54. 
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... uniformity.4.2
He did not seem to look on socialism, which under the influence of Mrs. Taylor he advocated in the Political Economy and later, as a danger to individual liberty in the way in which democracy, for example, might be so. This is not; the place to examine the very peculiar relationship of Mill's socialist to his individualist convictions. Despite his socialist professions; none of the socialist leaders of his time--neither Louis Blanc nor Proudhon nor Lassalle nor Herzen--not to speak of Marx--appears to have regarded him even as a fellow traveller, He was to them the very embodiment of a mild reformist liberal or bourgeois radical. Only the Fabians labeled him as an ancestor. 
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... declared4.3
Autobiography, pp. 42- 43(Wodd's Classics edition). 
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... refutation.'4.4
On Liberty, p. 37 (World's Classics edition). 
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... opinion'.4.5
Liberty, p. 53. 
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... truth'4.6
Liberty, p. 50. 
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... opinions.'4.7
Liberty, p. 63. 
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... wrong?'4.8
Liberty, p. 106. 
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... himself',4.9
Liberty, p. 115. 
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... right.'4.10
Liberty, p. 15 
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... Himmel!'4.11
New Letters of Thomas Carlyle (ed. A. Carlyle), vol. ii, p. 196. 
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... both.4.12
And in the essays on Coleridge andBentham. 
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... individuals'4.13
Liberty, p. 13. 
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... rest'4.14
Liberty, p. 18. 
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... humanity.'4.15
Liberty, p. 86. 
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... decline.'4.16
Liberty, p. 86. 
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... individuality4.17
Liberty, pp. 90-91. 
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... service.'4.18
Liberty p. 83 
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... display'4.19
Liberty, p. 40. 
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... police'4.20
Liberty, p. 108. 
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... business'.4.21
Liberty, p. 107. 
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... democracy,4.22
`Which in any case he regarded as inevitable and, perhaps, to a vision wider than his own time-bound one, ultimately more just and more generous. 
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... opinion',4.23
Packe, op. cit. , p. 203 
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... freedom'.4.24
Liberty, p. 101 
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... mankind.'4.25
Liberty, p. 23. 
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... not4.26
This is the line which divides him from Saint-Simon and Comte, and from H. G. Wells and the technocrats. 
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... coiner.'4.27
Packe, op. cit. , pp. 294-5. 
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... ought',4.28
Liberty, p. 110 
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... unmolested'.4.29
Liberty, p. 112. 
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... succumb.4.30
Liberty, p. 118. 
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... slaves'.4.31
Liberty, p. 141. 
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... works'4.32
Packe, op. cit. , p. 222. 
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... not';4.33
He goes on: `Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers.' Essay on Bentham. 
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... fame.4.34
It will be seen from the general tenor of this essay that I am not in agreement with those who wish to represent Mill as favouring some kind of hegemony of right-minded intellectuals. I do not see how this can be regarded as Mill's considered conclusion not merely in view of the considerations that I have urged, but of his own warnings against Comtian despotism, which contemplated precisely such a hierarchy. At the same time, he was, in common with a good many other liberals in the nineteenth century both in England and elsewhere, not merely hostile to the influence of uncriticized traditionalism, or the sheer power of inertia, but apprehensive of the rule of the uneducated democratic majority, consequently he tried to insert into his system some guarantees against the vices of uncontrolled democracy, plainly hoping that, at any rate while ignorance and irrationality were still widespread (he was not over optimistic about the rate of the growth of education), authority would tend to be exercised by the more rational, lust, and well informed persons in the community. It is, however, one thing to say that Mill was nervous of majorities as such, and another to accuse him of authoritarian tendencies, of favouring 'the rule of a rational elite, whatever the Fabians may or may not have derived from him. He was not responsible for the views of his disciples, particularly of those whom he himself had not chosen and never knew. Mill was the last man to be guilty of advocating what Bakunin, in the course of an attack on Marx, described as la pédantocratie, the government by professors, which he regarded as one of the most oppressive of all forms of despotism. 
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