Banning the Muslim Veil in the Name of Liberty – But Liberty of What Kind?

This paper argues that the recent bans against various versions of the Muslim veil throughout Europe exemplify Isaiah Berlin’s fear that positive liberty invites the specific kind of coercion that parades as liberation, and that it does so by a psychologically predictable pattern. Its main aim, however, is to answer the question of which type of positive liberty, more precisely, is involved in this heated political issue. Previous research typically assumes that veil bans should be understood as attempts to safeguard the positive liberty of autonomy, a conception of the good rooted in what is typically called “Enlightenment liberalism”. This paper, by contrast, argues that what is rather at stake in for example the French debate on the “burqa ban” is not so much autonomy, but a different version of positive liberty, namely individuality, a Romantic ideal that J.S. Mill adopted from both Schleiermacher and Humboldt.