 For Berlin, this transformation became more sinister still in the hands of Kant’s German disciples. Kant himself had identified ‘positive’ freedom with autonomy, or self-determination, by the rational personality – the self freed from all that renders it ‘heteronymous’ and irrational. Later German philosophers influenced by Kant went further in identifying the ‘self’ whose self-determination constitutes freedom with entities other than the individual. Freedom becomes a matter of overcoming the poor, flawed, false, empirical self – what one appears to be and want – in order to realise one’s ‘true’, ‘real’, ‘noumenal’ self. This ‘true’ self may be identified with one’s best or true interests, either as an individual or as a member of a larger group or institution. Thus Fichte (who began as a radically individualist liberal, only to become, later, an ardent, even hysterical, nationalist – an intellectual forefather of Fascism and even Nazism) came to equate freedom with the rule of the ‘true’ self understood as the nation, or Volk. On this view, the individual achieves freedom only through renunciation of his or her desires and beliefs as an individual and submersion in a larger group. The ‘true’ self might also be identified with a cause, an idea, or the dictates of rationality, as in the case of Hegel’s definition of liberty, which equated it with recognition of, and obedience to, the laws of history as revealed by reason. Such theoretical shifts set the stage, for Berlin, for the ideologies of the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, both Communist and Fascist–Nazi, which claimed to liberate people by subjecting – and often sacrificing – them to larger groups or principles. To do this was the greatest of political evils; and to do it in the name of freedom, a political principle that Berlin, as a genuine liberal, especially cherished, struck him as a ‘strange […] reversal’ or ‘monstrous impersonation’ (2002b, 198, 180). Against this, Berlin championed, as ‘truer and more humane’, negative liberty and an empirical view of the self.