25 March, 2007

Adam Curtis concludes his series on the origins of our contemporary idea of freedom. He traces the rise of today's narrow and peculiar idea of freedom, looking at how America and Tony Blair set out to spread this idea around the world from Russia to Iraq. They believed a new form of democracy and order would spontaneously arise, but what in fact resulted was a chaotic world without meaning and purpose, leading to authoritarian nationalism and anti-democratic Islamism. The final program focussed on the concepts of positive and negative liberty introduced in the 1950s by Isaiah Berlin. Curtis briefly explained how negative liberty could be defined as freedom from coercion and positive liberty as the opportunity to strive to fulfill one's potential. Tony Blair had read Berlin's essays on the topic and wrote to him in the late 1990s, arguing that positive and negative liberty could be mutually compatible. He never received a reply, as Berlin was on his death bed.

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