What's Wrong with "Negative Liberty": [Commentary

Abstract

course of the interview Marx clarified the platform of the International Society as it had been established at Gotha in 1875. The platform was a litany of liberal reforms: universal male suffrage in all elections, popular referenda on issues of war and peace, the abolition of a standing army matched by universal military duty, the abolition of all laws regulating the press and public assemblies, free legal counsel and jury trials, universal public education, freedom of science and religion, a progressive income tax, legal restrictions on the length of the working day, the abolition of child labor, sanitary laws guaranteeing the safety of the living and working conditions of labor, and restrictions on prison labor. The fact that much of Marx's program has been implemented in the United States raises interesting questions about David Abraham's extraordinary critique of liberalism.2 By reformulating C. B. Macpherson's critique of possessive individualism, Abraham rejects-implicitly and sometimes explicitly-the more recent efforts to locate a republican or alternative to liberal individualism in the American past. To be sure, Abraham borrows from the communitarian critique of rights rhetoric, but only to show that the right of property has always trumped every serious effort to mitigate the rule of capital. The essay is in many ways a dazzling performance. It ranges broadly over two centuries, two continents, and several different bodies of scholarly literature. Yet far from collapsing into pointless erudition, the author sails through the material with a clear, al-