Chapter 3. The Power of Positive Thinking, or, Positive Thinking of Power

Anarchism is a philosophy of freedom. Other philosophies which are older, like liberalism, or better funded, like libertarianism, make the same claim, but they shrink from the logical, unqualified assertion of liberty against its antithesis: the state. To that extent, anarchists easily have a better understanding of freedom than its other, deeply conflicted proponents. But better is not necessarily good enough. The meaning of freedom is something anarchists more often take for granted than articulate, much less analyze. We should think more about this.

Bookchin often tries to impress his readers with forays into other fields, including philosophy. And indeed his philosophic dabbling is revealing. Since writing on this topic, the Director Emeritus has finally agreed with my conclusion that he is not an anarchist.[57] For once we can take him at his word, and he is a man of many, many words, many, many of which he does not understand. One of these words is freedom.

Some of the ex-Director’s readers must be puzzled by his terms negative and positive freedom, especially if they know what they mean. Negative freedom is said to be “freedom from,” whereas positive freedom is “a fleshed-out concept of freedom for.” Bookchin does not define these opaque expressions, he simply assigns them as gang colors. Lifestyle Anarchists “celebrate” negative freedom — also known, in his argot, as autonomy — in keeping with their bourgeois individualist liberal heritage. (What he calls) Social Anarchism, in contrast, “espouses a substantive ‘freedom to.’” It “seeks to create a free society, in which humanity as a whole — and hence the individual as well — enjoys the advantages of free political and economic institutions.”[58] He blithely ignores the fact that liberal philosophers espousing negative freedom — such as the utilitarians, the ultimate social engineers — have always assigned the highest importance to designing what they considered free political and economic institutions.[59]

The Director Emeritus says the Greek word autonomia means independence (of other people) — but this is one of his many etymological bumbles. The word means self-government, “having its own laws, f. AUTO + nomos law.” Another dictionary renders the word as “political freedom,” with a different Greek word, eleutheria, for “freedom.” It is something collective. Yet for the ex-Director, despite its etymology and dictionary meaning, autonomy is the object only of negative freedom. However, autonomy is a better word for positive than for negative freedom. My reading is also supported by the fact that the ancient Greeks, who coined the word, highly valued collective self-government but lacked the very concept of individual rights.[60]

The Director Emeritus has made a category mistake, representing facts as belonging to one type when they belong to another.[61] What a concept of freedom means and what kind of society would realize it are questions of a different order. And Bookchin’s particular formulations are also empirically false in obvious ways. The celebration of individual freedom is not the definition of Lifestyle Anarchism, for liberals and laissez-faire libertarians also celebrate individual freedom, but they are not anarchists.[62] The quest for a free society cannot define Social Anarchism, for, as Bookchin says, “many lifestyle anarchists eagerly plunge into direct actions that are ostensibly [sic] intended to achieve socialistic goals.”[63] Social Anarchists may be right and Lifestyle Anarchists may be wrong, but not by definition, especially in the absence of definitions.

Although he never explains what these phrases mean, the Director Emeritus finally says where he got them: Sir Isaiah Berlin’s well-known essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Although the distinction was at one time much discussed by philosophers, “it has been much criticized,” and the two concepts are really “not clearly differentiated.” Bernard Williams calls the distinction misleading in several respects, “especially if it is identified, as it is sometimes by Berlin [and always by Bookchin], with a distinction between ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to.’”[64] Generally, negative freedom means freedom from prevention of action, from interference, or as John P. Clark says, “freedom from coercion.”[65]

Positive freedom is the freedom — I think “capability” or “power” is the better word — to accomplish one’s purposes. The reader who finds this confusing or hairsplitting has my sympathy. How real is freedom of choice with nothing worth choosing? How is the power to act possible without some protection from interference? Negative freedom, freedom from interference, is more important than positive freedom if only because it is the latter’s precondition.[66] I find useful Gerald C. MacCallum’s popular proposal “to regard freedom as always one and the same triadic relation, but recognize that various contending parties disagree with each other in what they understand to be the ranges of the term variables.” Freedom is a triadic relationship among an agent, “‘preventing conditions’ [such] as constraints, restrictions, interferences, and barriers,” and “actions or conditions of character or circumstance.”[67]

What Sir Isaiah did make quite clear was his judgment as to the political implications of the two concepts. Writing during the Cold War, he was strongly committed to the West.[68] Negative freedom, he contended, implies limits on state action, but positive freedom is totalitarian in tendency.[69] At least since Rousseau, many theorists of positive freedom have, like Bookchin, equated freedom with identification with the general will. Real freedom consists, not in unconstrained individual indulgence, but in fulfilling one’s — that is, everyone’s — true nature. In the case of humans, rising above their animal origins, self-realization occurs in and through the social whole. As Bookchin has approvingly (but falsely) written, “Bakunin emphatically prioritized the social over the individual.”[70] It can happen that the individual, as Rousseau put it, can and should be forced to be free. I do not care for the prospect of society prioritizing me.

Anarchism is nothing if it does not transcend this dichotomy. Bookchin himself once said that his imaginal urban revolution expressed a demand for both, and he authorized John P. Clark, then his subaltern, to represent him that way.[71] Negative freedom is not necessarily anarchist — Berlin is no anarchist — but positive freedom, Berlin thinks, is necessarily authoritarian. This of course is diametrically opposed to Bookchin’s use of the distinction, which explains why the Director Emeritus keeps the specifics of Berlin’s argument out of his own. Bookchin himself admits that his is not the mainstream anarchist position: “Essentially, however, anarchism as a whole advanced what Isaiah Berlin has called ‘negative freedom,’ that is to say, a formal ‘freedom from,’ rather than a substantive freedom to.”[72] But Berlin does not equate negative freedom with formal freedom and positive freedom with substantive freedom. That’s transparently sleight of hand. Everybody wants substantive freedom. The question is how to get it.

Berlin’s own census of major philosophers of freedom shows that his distinction is no predictor of their politics. Adherents of negative freedom include Occam, Erasmus, Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Constant, J.S. Mill, de Tocqueville, Jefferson, Burke, and Paine. Hobbes and Locke? Burke and Paine? What use is a classification that puts Paine on the same side as Burke but the opposite side from Rousseau? Had Rousseau lived to see the French Revolution, he, not Paine, would have been its greatest defender against Burke, its greatest critic. There is hardly an adherent on the list who does not sometimes sound like he espouses positive freedom, including the archetypal philosopher of negative freedom, Locke: “So that, however it may be mistaken, the end of Law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge Freedom.”[73] Wilhelm von Humboldt thought the purpose of human life is self-development, and that “social union” is a means by which individuals realize themselves and one another. This sounds like the language of positive freedom with a German accent. But von Humboldt, like his admirer J.S. Mill, held that provision of security, the one condition of self-development which an individual cannot obtain by his own unaided efforts, is the only proper state function. And Charles Taylor, a philosopher of positive freedom, thinks that Mill may belong in that camp.[74] I think maybe de Tocqueville does too.

Adherents of positive freedom include Plato, Epictetus, St. Ambrose, Montesquieu, Spinoza, Kant, Herder, Rousseau, Hegel, Fichte, Marx, Bukharin, Comte, Carlyle, T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley, and Bosanquet. Plato, for example, is representative of the ancient Greek “‘positive’ conception of freedom as obedience to right authority.”[75] Here again, the attribution falters whenever looked into closely. As Locke is the ultimate negative freedomseeker, Kant is the ultimate positive freedomseeker, and Kant makes the negative/positive distinction explicitly. But John Rawls, who also recognizes the distinction and identifies his philosophy as in the Kantian tradition, subordinates positive freedom to negative freedom. Implicitly, so does the Kantian anarchist Robert Paul Wolff.[76]

Almost any anarchist can be quoted as straddling this unbridgeable chasm. The anarchist philosophy, in fact, shows up the inadequacy of the distinction. Bookchin has accused Lifestyle Anarchists of perpetuating the pernicious German philosophical tradition which led from Fichte and Kant through Stirner to Heidegger and Hitler.[77] (Stirner is maliciously misplaced in this Bloc of Rights and Trotskyists, since he was influenced by Hegel, not Kant, and influenced neither Heidegger nor Hitler.) For blatantly self-serving reasons the Director Emeritus omits Hegel, Marx, Engels, Lassalle, Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao. Nor does Bookchin remind the reader of his own earlier admiration for “Fichte’s stirring prose,”[78] much less his current claim that Fichte “essentially wrote that human beings are nature rendered self-conscious,” as Bookchin also contends.[79] All these gentlemen adhered to the positive concept of freedom. Although, as is obvious from the lists, adherents of each view are all over the political map, there is some perceptible tendency for adherents of positive freedom not to be adherents of freedom at all.[80] Thus the Director Emeritus has found his place.

For Bookchin, of all the malignant influences on Lifestyle Anarchism, Max Stirner seems to be the worst. Sputtering with horror, he cannot more vehemently express the degeneracy of Hakim “The Bey” than by ejaculating that “Hakim Bey even invokes Max Stirner, who believed that the concerns of the ego — the ‘I’ — should be the guide of all human action.” (Although the ex-Director formerly wrote that, “in principle [sic], Stirner created a utopistic [sic] vision of individuality that marked a new point of departure for the affirmation of personality in an increasingly impersonal world.)”[81] Stirner with his individualist, surrational, amoral egoism epitomizes more of what Bookchin loathes than any other classical anarchist thinker. In 1976, the Director’s disciple John P. Clark devoted an entire book, perhaps on his orders, to refuting Stirner’s heresies, which had not received so much hostile attention since Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology 130 years before. Stirner, then, should be an exponent, maybe the ultimate exponent, of negative freedom.

Instead, he is the ultimate exponent of positive freedom: “Who is it that is to become free? You, I, we. I, therefore, am the kernel that is to be delivered from all wrappings and — freed from all cramping shells. What is left when I have been freed from everything that is not I? Only I; nothing but I. But freedom has nothing further to offer to this I himself. As to what is now to happen further after I have become free, freedom is silent — as our governments, when the prisoner’s time is up, merely let him go, thrusting him out into abandonment.”[82] For Stirner as for Bookchin, negative freedom is insufficient at best, a formalistic mockery at worst.[83] What Bookchin calls positive freedom, Stirner calls “ownness” (die Eigenheit): “I have no objection to [negative] freedom, but I wish more than freedom for you: you should not merely be rid of what you do not want; you should not only be a ‘freeman,’ you should be an ‘owner [Eigner]’ too.”[84]

Even if it has some utility in other contexts, the distinction between positive and negative freedom does nothing to differentiate Social Anarchism from Lifestyle Anarchism, or even to characterize anarchism as such. On the contrary, as Clark says, “anarchism is the one major political theory which has attempted to synthesize the values of negative and positive freedom into a single, more comprehensive view of human liberty.”[85] Bakunin did not prioritize society over the individual: “Man is not only the most individual being on earth,” he wrote, “but also the most social.” In fact, Bakunin nearly anticipated Berlin’s two concepts of liberty and even his terminology. “We see that liberty as conceived by the materialists [as he then defined himself] is very positive, complex and, above all, an eminently social matter, which can only be realized by means of society and through the strictest equality and solidarity of each and everybody... The second aspect of liberty is negative. It consists in the rebellion of the human individual against all authority, whether divine or human, collective or individual.”[86] Bookchin has never demonstrated that any Lifestyle Anarchist espouses negative freedom to the exclusion of positive freedom. In fact, he has never demonstrated that any Lifestyle Anarchist espouses negative freedom. He misappropriates the distinction to try to infuse some content into his own incoherent dichotomy between Social Anarchism and Lifestyle Anarchism, but the infusion does not relieve the confusion. The semi-literate Director Emeritus is, as so often, showing off by pretending to be smarter than he really is.