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The true-self objection

If liberty is obedience to my "true" will, someone else can claim to know it better than I do, and coerce me in the name of my freedom.

Objects to Positive liberty

Berlin · "Two Concepts of Liberty" · 1958

1. Positive liberty, in the versions the objection targets, distinguishes two wills in each of us: the one we express, and a "true" (rational, higher) will that ought to rule.
2. Once these two wills can diverge, someone must say where the true one lies: and nothing prevents a third party, party, state, or majority, from declaring itself a better judge of it than I am.
3. Coercing my expressed will then no longer counts as oppression but as liberation: Rousseau's formula, he will be forced to be free, coined for obedience to the general will, stops being a paradox and becomes a program in other hands.
4. A definition of liberty that allows coercion to be described as liberation has lost what any conception of liberty must keep: that my actual will counts.

Therefore Liberty as the rule of the "true self" opens the door to a tyranny exercised in freedom's name: any definition of this type bears the burden of showing what blocks that slope, and until it does, it cannot serve as a definition, whatever the worth of the ideal of autonomy.