Since then, reading Isaiah Berlin had taught him to think in terms of “positive and negative freedom.” He had little reverence for “positive” freedom, of the sort promised by a “centralised state”; he minded much more about “negative” freedom, by which Berlin meant “the freedom to think for oneself…to name things for what they are and not for what they purport to be, to apply common sense, and common humanity.” The horror of the Soviet Union was “the loss of autonomy, of the freedom to move freely.” By contrast to that, Stoppard had always had a sense of “comfortable national superiority.” But
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