there were differences in conception, there were disagreements but there was supposedly one subject matter there that was central and persistent. in the 80s i tried to write a book on that, and failed completely and moved away from that view.

berlin says that people project all the good features of human life positive freedom and it becomes an inflated, distended mess - i wish he would have realized the same is true about freedom as a whole. as i was analyzing the different concepts of freedom for my book, i found 12

(authenticity, self realization, self governance, development of one’s powers, self control, autonomy, unobstructed action, unobstructed wants, unobstructed rationality, unobstructed powers, not deliberately obstructed, etc.). if you lay these out, you don’t get a nice dualistic berlinian picture,

you get a whole array of things. why don’t i simplify my life and talk about these concepts in their own right rather than projecting them into the concept of freedom and pulling them out again? why don’t i save myself the step?

i also became increasingly impressed with something nietzsche says: that freedom is the goal of the slave. it’s a mistake to think that you can universalize from a particular case of desire for freedom from this to a global concept of freedom.

this is parallel to marx’s argument on equality, but he didn’t extend this to the concept of freedom - freedom understood as the development of human powers and capacities.”