Since the French Revolution, they argued, the popular drive for equality had become the transforming force of history. They all believed that liberalism was aligned with the direction of history itself. This was a tradition forged by Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill. But he left much more, and to grasp what the achievement now looks like, more than a quarter of a century after his death, it’s necessary to see what he did to transform the grand liberal tradition he inherited from the 19th century. If all that Berlin left behind was the warm beer of liberal gradualism, it would not be much of a legacy. Berlin’s work never served, as Keynes’s, Crossman’s or Beveridge’s did, as an inspiration for party political platforms. His broadcasts on the BBC in the 1950s established him as a respected purveyor of a sceptical liberal gradualism, and if he had any actual political influence in his own times, it was his part in confirming sceptical gradualism as the default political setting for swathes of “the great and the good” in the London elite and the professionals in the broad English middle class. His liberalism sometimes aligned with one power source, sometimes another. In 1945 he voted Labour, in the election that chucked Churchill out in 1951 he voted Liberal, to remove Attlee and at other times he may even have voted Conservative, from sheer desire to teach the others a lesson. He leant his support, at elections, to all three currents of his time. Could he discuss his ideas with Berlin?īerlin’s liberalism is not easy to assign a future to, because it never had a stable home in the political past. Freedom from arbitrary constraint, he believed, was critical to any creed on the left, but it needed to be underpinned by freedom to, and that meant not more state tyranny but seeking “to devolve political power and to build a more egalitarian community.” This new synthesis, Blair conceded, didn’t have “a ready-made vehicle to take forward”, but that was the machine-New Labour-that Blair wanted to create. Western socialism had learned from the “depredations” of the Soviet model. In Stalin’s hands, freedom had degenerated into the hypocritical rationale of an all-powerful state imposing its way of life on a people “for their own good.” Berlin detested any political movement claiming to know what people wanted better than they did themselves, and he suspected that earnest, politically correct western socialists were also prey, if not to totalitarian fantasies, then at least to the hubristic delusion that ordinary people could be taught to want what socialists wanted. Positive liberty is the freedom to choose who rules you and, by that act, to choose the collective goods that create freedom and opportunity for all. It was time, Blair thought, to revive the left by rescuing freedom to, Berlin’s idea of positive liberty.
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