Modern Age - Winter 2016 - 77

REFLECTIONS ON ANCIENT AND MODERN FREEDOM

fear-underlined by the historical reality of modern totalitarianism-is that in the name of realizing a Good that will make human
beings "truly" free, coercion may be employed by those who feel
they have greater insight into the Good against those they regard
as ignorant. As Berlin frames the matter:
I may declare that they [the objects of coercion] are actually aiming at what they in their benighted state actually resist . . . their latest
rational will or their "true" purpose. . . . Once I take this view, I am in
a position to ignore the actual wishes of men and societies, to bully,
oppress, torture them, in the name, and on the behalf, of their "real"
selves in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of
man (happiness, performance of duty, wisdom, a just society, selffulfillment) must be identical with his freedom-the free choice of
his "true," albeit submerged and inarticulate, self.23

To avert this danger Berlin and other defenders of the liberal
tradition propose a rejection of the very concept of an overarching Good that human nature as such ought to realize. Berlin's
position is that belief in such an overarching Good contains the
implicit temptation to impose this concept on the unwilling-an
idea he associates with modern totalitarianism. Individuals must
be free not only to act without interference but also to seek
and define their own values. This is his famous concept of value
pluralism:
Pluralism, with the measure of "negative liberty" it entails, seems
to me a truer and more humane goal than the goals of those who
seek in the great, disciplined, authoritarian structures the ideal of
"positive" self-mastery. . . . To assume that all values can be graded
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Modern Age - Winter 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Winter 2016

Contents
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