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The articles in this issue were written in response to my invitation to a group of authors to reflect on the concepts of negative and positive liberalism. As exemplars of negative liberalism, our authors were sent quotes from two articles that appeared in the March 27, 1998 issue of the Times Literary Supplement. The first quote was taken from a review by Mark Lilla of two reprinted books by Judith Shklar (Political Thought and Political Thinkers and Redeeming American Political Thought):
Shklar came to the conclusion that the only political position defensible in our time was what she called the "liberalism of fear." Such a liberalism would not depend on a theory of rights derived from a positive doctrine of theology, human nature, reason, justice, contract, or law. It would instead begin with the negative principle that the first aim of politics is to secure individuals from the worst injustices they can suffer. And the worst of all such injustices is cruelty. (Lilla, 1998, 7)
The second quote appeared in an essay by Stephen Lukes on Isaiah Berlin:
First, [Berlin] sought to draw a sharp distinction between pluralism and relativism. "Pluralism," he had written in "Two Concepts of Liberty" (Four Essays on Liberty, 1969), "with the measure of ‘negative' liberty that it entails, seems to me a truer and more human ideal than the goals of those who seek in the great, disciplined, authoritarian structures the ideal of ‘positive' self-mastery by classes, or peoples, or the whole of mankind." (Lukes, 1998, 8)
In the end, the focus of the issue was widened to include not only a discussion of the distinction between positive and negative liberalism, but the work of Isaiah Berlin more generally. Given his intellectual eminence, as evidenced by the large number of articles and seminars that followed his death, this broadened focus seemed more than appropriate. Consequently, the articles range from Honneth's "The Tensions between Negative and Positive Freedom in Isaiah Berlin's Political Theory" and Muthu's "Enlightenment Anti-Imperialism" to Cock's "Individuality, Nationality and the Jewish Question."Arien Mack
Joan Cocks is Professor of Politics and Chair of Critical Social Thought at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of The Oppositional Imagination: Feminism, Critique, and Political Theory (Routledge, 1989), and her recent publications include "A New Cosmopolitanism? V.S. Naipaul and Edward Said" in Constellations (forthcoming, 2000) and "From Politics to Paralysis: Critical Intellectuals Answer the national Question" in Political Theory (24:3, August 1996).
Richard Flathman is George Armstrong Kelly Memorial Professor of Political Science at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Reflections of a Would-Be Anarchist (U. Minnesota, 1998) as well as over a dozen other books and numerous articles. He is currently involved in studies concerning freedom, discipline, and resistance.
Robert Grant is a Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. His recent articles include "Heritage, Tradition and Modernity" in Town and Country (Barnett and Scruton, eds., Jonathan Cape, 1998), and "Values, Means and Ends" in Philosophy and Technology (Fellows, ed., Cambridge, 1995). His book The Politics of Sex and Other Essays is forthcoming (Macmillan/St. Martin's, 2000).
Amy Gutmann is Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is author, most recently, of a new edition of Democratic Education (Princeton, 1999); Democracy and Disagreement (Harvard, 1996), co-authored with Dennis Thompson; and Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton, 1996), co-authored with Anthony Appiah.
Axel Honneth is Professor at the Institut für Philosophie at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt-am-Main. He is the author of The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Conflicts (MIT, 1996) and Suffering from Indeterminacy: A Reactualization of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (forthcoming, 2000).
George Kateb is Professor of Politics at Princeton University. His publications include Utopia and its Enemies (1995); Emerson and Self-Reliance (Sage, 1995); and The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Cornell, 1994), and he is the editor of Utopia.
Ira Katznelson is Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University. He is the author of Liberalism's Crooked Circle: Letters to Adam Michnik (Princeton, 1996); Marxism and the City (Oxford, 1992); and Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after the Holocaust, Totalitarianism, and Total War (forthcoming, Columbia).
James Miller is Professor of Political Science and the Director of Liberal Studies at the New School University's Graduate Faculty. He is the author of Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977 (Simon & Schuster, 1999) and his book The Passion of Michel Foucault is being reissued by Harvard (2000).
Sankar Muthu is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Faculty of the New School University. His paper "Justice Beyond States: Kant's Cosmopolitan Right" is forthcoming in Constellations (2000) and he is currently working on the book Enlightenment and Empire: Humanity and Cultural Pluralism in Anti-Imperialist Political Thought.
Tracy B. Strong is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. His most recent publication, co-authored with Ted Miller, is "Meanings and Contexts: Mr. Skinner's Hobbes and the English Mode of Political Theory" (Inquiry, Fall 1997) and his paper "Love, Passion and Maturity: Nietzsche and Weber on Morality and Politics" appeared in Confronting Democracy and Technology: Essays in Twentieth Century German Political Social Theory (McCormick, ed., Duke, 1999)
Chin Liew Ten is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University in Australia. Most recently, he edited the volume Mill's Moral, Political and Legal Philosophy (Ashgate, 1999). He is the author of Mill on Liberty (Clarendon, 1980); Crime, Guilt and Punishment (Clarendon, 1987) and the editor of The Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 1994). He is currently working on a book on toleration in plural societies.
Bernard Yack is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of The Fetishism of Modernities: Epochal Self-Consciousness in Contemporary Social and Political Thought (Notre Dame, 1997); The Longing for Total Revolution (University of California, 1986); and The Problems of a Political Animal (University of California, 1993), and the editor of Liberalism Without Illusions (University of Chicago, 1996).
