Volume 48, Number 8 · May 17, 2001
Live and Let Live
By Alan Ryan
Two Faces of Liberalism
John Gray
New Press, 161 pp., $25.00
Philosophers enjoy simple oppositions. Locked in metaphysical combat, monism battles pluralism, and idealism struggles against materialism: the world is one or the world is many; the world is mental or the mind is material. Political philosophers share this liking, pitting order against liberty, conservatism against progressivism. Reality is complicated, but the philosopher simplifies it, or more usually oversimplifies it. Isaiah Berlin took the title of his famous essay 'The Hedgehog and the Fox' from Archilochus—'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing'—to warn his readers against the hedgehog's passion for oversimplifications, but Berlin himself went on to write Two Concepts of Liberty. He subverted the tidy conclusions suggested by the title by writing about many more and much more various topics than that. Nonetheless, most of his readers thought he was saying that the one big thing about freedom was that negative liberty, the right not to be interfered with, was good, and positive liberty—the right, for example, to benefit from state-sponsored programs for self-improvement—could be bad.
Review, 4980 words
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