COMM 2273 Lecture Notes - Lecture 37: The Slippery Slope, Strake Jesuit College Preparatory, Totalitarianism
10 Feb 2020
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At positive liberty: positive liberty leads to contradiction because it justifies authoritarianism. Many liberals, including berlin, have suggested that the positive concept of liberty carries with it a danger of authoritarianism. Consider the fate of a permanent and oppressed minority. Because the members of this minority participate in a democratic process characterized by majority rule, they might be said to be free on the grounds that they are members of a society exercising self-control over its own affairs. But they are oppressed, and so are surely unfree. In this case, even the majority might be oppressed in the name of liberty. Such justifications of oppression in the name of liberty are no mere products of the liberal imagination, for there are notorious historical examples of their endorsement by authoritarian political leaders. The slippery slope towards this paradoxical conclusion begins, according to berlin, with the idea of a divided self.
