As always, you can find the Dobbs v. Jackson decision here.

Paragraph 7 of 9

Sentence 4 of 4

The next sentence is a single claim:

“In a well-known essay, Isaiah Berlin reported that ‘[h]istorians of ideas’ had cataloged more than 200 different senses in which the term had been used.”

The essay in question is “Two Concepts of Liberty.” The Court has cited the book Four Essays on Liberty, but I read it in Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty. I’m assuming my version of the essay is the same as in the Court’s version. Here’s a PDF.

Here’s the relevant passage, which begins on page 168 of Liberty:

“To coerce a man is to deprive him of freedom—freedom from what? Almost every moralist in human history has praised freedom.”

There’s an echo of Lincoln from the previous sentence. Berlin continues:

“Like happiness and goodness, like nature and reality, it is a term whose meaning is so porous that there is little interpretation that it seems to resist. I do not propose to discuss either the history of this protean word or the more than two hundred senses of it recorded by historians of ideas. I propose to examine no more than two of these senses—but they are central ones, with a great deal of human history behind them, and, I dare say, still to come.”

Can we track down who those “historians” are? Does it even matter? Without citation, this Berlin quote is useless in support. It’s less than an anecdote. It’s a factoid. Maybe not a factoid, because it might be true, but we’ll never know if it’s true due to Berlin’s work.

For what it’s worth, Merriam-Webster lists four main definitions of “liberty,” with several variants within a few of those.

Not all “senses” of the word are equal, though. I don’t think SCOTUS is going to get confused as to whether the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees “a short authorized absence from naval duty usually for less than 48 hours.”

The Oxford English Dictionary—the most thorough record of the uses of English words—has an entry for “liberty” that runs less than four columns (I consulted the 1970 reprint, of which the nearby county library had a copy). There are ten separate entries within the listing for the noun “liberty,” and a few variations within those, but nothing like the 200 variations Berlin mentions in 1959.

So the bottom line is that this claim is true. Berlin did write what the Dobbs Court claims. It doesn’t really matter, though, since there’s nothing to the quote other than it was written. It offers no support for the argument at hand.

Berlin’s number 200—maybe a casual, offhand remark in his essay—is deployed in Dobbs to lend weight to the idea that the concept of “liberty” is confusing. Pinning down a specific use of “liberty” seems less intimidating if that number is nine. Or thirty. Not all possible definitions are equally likely, and we can decide for ourselves which ones make sense.

In the end, the two possibilities are these: either Berlin’s 200 definitions are borne out somehow outside of his quote, or the Berlin citation is misleading and inappropriate. At this point it’s not looking good.

Though Berlin’s report might be nonsense, and therefore the Court’s use of it a waste of rhetorical space at the very least, this claim is true:

• “In a well-known essay, Isaiah Berlin reported that ‘[h]istorians of ideas’ had cataloged more than 200 different senses in which the term had been used.”