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Two Concepts of Liberty was the inaugural lecture delivered by Isaiah Berlin before the University of Oxford on October 31, 1958. It was subsequently published as a 57 page volume by Oxford at the Clarendon Press. It also appears in the collection of Berlin's papers entitled Four Essays on Liberty (1969) and more recently reissued in a collection entitled simply Liberty.
Berlin distinguished between two forms or concepts of liberty - negative liberty and positive liberty - and argued the latter is politically dangerous because it tempts rulers to curtail people's negative liberties "for their own good."
External links
- The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library
- TLDOC: Berlin's two concepts of liberty
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Positive and Negative Liberty
"Two Concepts of Liberty"