Wednesday 10 June 2009

Isaiah Berlin and Guido De Ruggiero



In his guide to Political Ideas in the Romantic Age - published in History of Political Thought vol. XXIX (2008) - Roby Wokler mentions Guido De Ruggiero among the possible influences on Isaiah Berlin’s thought on liberty. Having corrisponded with him on the matter while he was preparing this essay - sadly left unfinished - I would like to add something to what Roby himself wrote. I agree with Roby’s suggestion that De Ruggiero is indeed among the likely sources of Berlin’s idea of using the negative vs. positive polarity as a cornerstone of his clarification of the concept of liberty. However, I think that Berlin’s reconstruction of the several senses of ‘liberty’ is more sophisticated than De Ruggiero’s sketchy account and owes very much to his critical reflection on the method of Oxford linguistic analysis and its limits.


Guido De Ruggiero was an Italian philosopher and political theorist - a good friend to both Croce and Collingwood - whose name was familiar to the English-speaking public before the Second World War as a fairly regular contributor to Philosophy. His main political work is Storia del liberalismo europeo (Laterza, Bari: 1925) which was translated in English by Collingwood.

In this book De Ruggiero draws a distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ liberty (using these very words). The distinction is put forward in a chapter on English liberalism, discussing the liberalism of T.H. Green, and it is developed in a section of part II, chapter I, whose title is ‘negative and positive liberty’. Being an Hegelian, De Ruggiero is more keen on positive liberty, but he recognises the importance of negative liberty as well. The similarity between De Ruggiero’s and Berlin’s treatment of this two concepts of liberty is close enough to make one wonder if the former might be a remote source (possibly read as a student via Collingwood, and then half forgotten) of the latter’s thought on the matter?

Another - though less likely - source of De Ruggiero’s influence on Berlin might be his book Il Ritorno alla ragione (Laterza, Bari 1946), a collection of essays mainly written during the war. In this book there is a chapter on ‘Definizioni della libertà’ that is a discussion of the distinction between negative and positive liberty.

Here are two passages (in Italian):

Tutte le definizioni della libertà, che leggiamo nei trattati di pace, nelle dichiarazioni dei diritti, negli statuti costituzionali e nelle scritture che li commentano, sono negative, in quanto accentuano l'atto della liberazione da qualcosa che vincola e opprime (p. 246).
(...) io non nego che anche questa libertà (i.e. negative liberty) sia qualcosa di molto importante, meritevole della più grande considerazione; ma dico che essa non è tutta la libertà, e non è neppure lo scopo più alto che con la libertà l'uomo possa proporsi. La rimozione di ogni esterno impedimento è invece soltanto il mezzo, o la premessa, o la condizione, che consente a una forza interna dello spirito di esplicarsi e di tendere a un fine appropriato alla sua natura. In altri termini, la libertà da qualche cosa dev’essere intesa come avviamento o tramite alla libertà per qualche altra cosa. Libertà negativa e libertà positiva sono i due nomi che io dò a questi due momenti di un più comprensivo concetto (p. 248).Towards the end, negative liberty is characterised by De Ruggiero as ‘liberty from something’, whereas positive freedom is ‘liberty for something’. The translation of the last phrase is: ‘Negative and positive liberty are the two names I give to the two moments of such more comprehensive concept’.

At least one chapter of the book - which was prepared as the text for a lecture to be given in Oxford in 1940, but finally delivered only in May 1946 - was published in English (by OUP) as Myth and Ideals. The aforementioned chapter might have attracted Berlin’s attention also because it deals with Romanticism.