No Vax, No Tax. COVID-19 and Negative or Positive Liberty

The efforts to legitimize or to oppose the policies responses to COVID-19 have placed the concept of freedom at the center of the contemporary political arena. The article intends to contribute to the debate, by reconsidering a minor classic in modern political theory: Isaiah Berlin’s lecture “Two concepts of Liberty”. This Inaugural Lecture, delivered before the University of Oxford in 1958, as well as the subsequent pamphlet published eleven years afterwards, discuss the notion of Liberty by examining two conceptualizations: Negative Liberty and Positive Liberty. Berlin’s reasoning is inspiring because it refers to a series of actual topics: the role of the state; the differentiation between right and left; the totalitarian and totalizing ideologies; neoliberalist anti-political culture; the state of exception and of absolute sovereignty: the calls to social responsibility. Berlin himself declared the aims of his reflections on liberty by stressing the importance of the comprehension of the emergence of the despotic regimes of the twentieth century. I will then present Berlin’s discussion by reproposing an old article I wrote in 1979 when, as a young student at McGill University, I was eager to clarify the relationship between political narratives and experience.