Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom by Bruce Baum Robert Nichols

Author:Bruce Baum, Robert Nichols
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135132385
Publisher: Routledge

2. AGAINST “RULE BY EXPERTS”: THE DEMOCRATIC POTENTIAL OF BERLIN'S THOUGHT

When Berlin condemns intrusive rule by the state over individual lives, he directs his criticism largely at the paternalistic character of extensive state control. He argues, “All paternalistic governments, however benevolent, cautious, disinterested, and rational, have tended, in the end, to treat the majority of men as minors…. This is a policy which degrades men….” (IN, 54). He claims that the tendency to view “human needs in their entirety as those of the inmates of a prison or a reformatory or a hospital, however sincerely it may be held, is a gloomy, false, and ultimately degraded view, resting on denial of the rational and productive nature of all, or even the majority of, men.” In these passages and elsewhere Berlin attacks the “despotic” character of governments which treat citizens as children or inmates who require intensive supervision and guidance for their own good. He charges such approaches with misunderstanding and demeaning humans, who are “creative and self-directing beings.”27

Berlin focuses mostly on the paternalistic denial of individuals' negative liberty. Yet the larger point he makes about the degradation that is inherent in “rule by experts” who claim to “do for men … what they cannot do for themselves” has democratic implications (TC, 198, 197).28 It points to the possibility that expert rule also offends against the abilities of ordinary people to participate in self-governance. Berlin challenges an infantilizing view of citizenship that subjects the majority of people to intrusive governance by those who know better. This criticism resonates with democratic claims concerning the right of all citizens to participate in political decision making, not only by granting their consent or allocating their power to a representative elite, but by enjoying sufficient access to institutions that enable direct citizen action.

The democratic significance of Berlin's antipaternalism is most evident in the explicit contrast he draws between a “therapeutic” and a democratic conception of the citizen.29 In the case of the former, the individual member of a polity is likened to a “patient” who does not “understand his own condition” and therefore awaits treatment from a “psychiatrist” figure who does. The assumption here—“that all men are in some degree cripples”—is completely at odds, Berlin argues, with a democratic understanding of the self and its capacities. Democracy, at bottom, rests on the presupposition that “every man is in principle capable of giving answers to personal and social questions which are as worthy as any other man's” and that men are capable of communication, persuasion, and compromise.30 Plainly, “democracy, whether Christian … or agnostic or atheistic … is irreconcilable with the belief in the privileged status of the elect appointed … to guide and govern the rest.”31 Berlin's criticism of paternalism is inspired in part by a vision of the democratic citizen who is “treated as an equal” and entrusted with the task of navigating a world of plural values, together with others.32

Berlin's objection to political “rule by experts” refuses not only the image of citizens as minors or patients.

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