There is no traffic to speak of and there are no diversions or police roadblocks. You turn right, but no one was preventing you from going left or straight on. You turn left, but no one was forcing you to go one way or the other.

Imagine you are driving a car through town, and you come to a fork in the road. Philosophers have long differentiated between two types of freedom, which Isaiah Berlin coined “negative liberty” and “positive liberty.” Negative liberty, defined by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is: This is a funny kind of freedom: not a freedom to do something but a freedom not to do something. What else has (fortuitously) taken the word “Freedom” as its title recently? A Web-based computer application that “locks you away from the Internet … for up to eight hours at a time.” The New Yorker is already all over this program: James Surowiecki wrote about it in his piece on procrastination in this week’s issue, and last week, at the “ Your Brain on the Internet” panel during our festival, Daniel Zalewski, our features editor, confirmed that at least one of our staff writers uses the program. Of course, we’re not reading “Freedom” in Tolstoy’s era we’re reading it now. The second part of “Freedom,” Patty’s autobiography, certainly raises this issue: she’s always guessing at her own youthful motivations, wondering if she might have acted differently. The line follows a disquisition on the nature of freewill and of philosophy’s efforts to reconcile it with the “dependence” of our personality on external factors.

Isaiah berlin tolstoy