Isaiah Berlin

Sir Isaiah Berlin, OM (June 6 1909 – November 5 1997) was a political philosopher and historian of ideas, regarded as one of the leading liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. He excelled as an essayist, lecturer and conversationalist; a brilliant performer who made rapid and spontaneous delivery of richly referenced material, coherently structured, whether for a lecture series at Oxford University or as a broadcaster on the BBC Third Programme, usually without notes. Many of his lectures were collected later in book form.

Born in Riga, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, he was the first person of Jewish descent to be elected to a prize fellowship at the elite All Souls College, Oxford. From 1957 to 1967, he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. In 1966, he helped to found Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its first President. He was knighted in 1957, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his writings on individual freedom.

Berlin's work on liberal theory has had a lasting influence. His 1958 inaugural lecture, "Two Concepts of Liberty", famous for its distinction between positive and negative liberty, has informed much of the debate since then on the relationship between liberty and other values.

Life

Berlin was born into a comfortably-off Jewish family, the son of Mendel Berlin, a timber merchant, and his wife Marie, née Volshonok. He spent his childhood in Riga (now Latvia), and later lived in Andreapol´ and Petrograd, witnessing both episodes of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The family moved to Britain in 1921, when Berlin was ten. In London, he lived in South Kensington and later Hampstead. He was educated at London's prestigious St. Paul's school, then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he studied Greats (Classics) and PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics). As an undergraduate, he notably befriended A. J. Ayer (with whom he was to share a friendly rivalry for the rest of his life), Stuart Hampshire, Maurice Bowra and J. L. Austin. He was to remain at Oxford for the rest of his life, apart from a period working for British Information Services in New York from 1940 to 1942, and the British embassies in Washington, DC, and Moscow from then until 1946. In 1956, he married Aline Halban, née de Gunzbourg.

Berlin died in Oxford in 1997, aged 88.^[1] He is buried there in Wolvercote Cemetery.

His work

"Two Concepts of Liberty"

Further information: Positive and negative rights

Berlin is best known for his essay "Two Concepts of Liberty", delivered in 1958 as his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. He defined negative liberty as the absence of constraints on, or interference with, agents' possible action. Greater "negative freedom" meant fewer restrictions on possible action. Berlin associated positive liberty with the idea of self-mastery, or the capacity to determine oneself, to be in control of one's destiny. While Berlin granted that both concepts of liberty represent valid human ideals, as a matter of history the positive concept of liberty has proven particularly susceptible to political abuse.

Berlin contended that under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel (all committed to the positive concept of liberty), European political thinkers often equated liberty with forms of political discipline or constraint. This became politically dangerous when notions of positive liberty were, in the nineteenth century, used to defend nationalism, self-determination and the Communist idea of collective rational control over human destiny. Berlin argued that, following this line of thought, demands for freedom paradoxically become demands for forms of collective control and discipline – those deemed necessary for the "self-mastery" or self-determination of nations, classes, democratic communities, and even humanity as a whole. There is thus an elective affinity, for Berlin, between positive liberty and political totalitarianism.^{[citation needed]}

Conversely, negative liberty represents a different, perhaps safer, understanding of the concept of liberty. Its proponents (such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) insisted that constraint and discipline were the antithesis of liberty and so were (and are) less prone to confusing liberty and constraint in the manner of the philosophical harbingers of modern totalitarianism.^{[citation needed]} It is this concept of Negative Liberty that Isaiah Berlin was a proponent of. It dominated heavily his early chapters in his third lecture.

This negative liberty is central to the claim for toleration due to incommensurability. This concept is mirrored in the work of Joseph Raz.

Other work

Berlin's essay "Historical Inevitability" (1954) focused on a controversy in the philosophy of history. In Berlin's words, the choice is whether one believes that "the lives of entire peoples and societies have been decisively influenced by exceptional individuals" or, rather, that whatever happens occurs as a result of impersonal forces oblivious to human intentions. Berlin is also well known for his writings on Russian intellectual history, most of which are collected in Russian Thinkers (1978; 2nd ed., 2008), edited, like most of Berlin's work, by Henry Hardy (in the case of this volume, jointly with Aileen Kelly).

Berlin's writings on the Enlightenment and its critics – for whom Berlin used the term "the Counter-Enlightenment" – and particularly Romanticism, contributed to his advocacy of an ethical theory now usually termed value pluralism.^[2] For Berlin, values are creations of mankind, rather than products of nature waiting to be discovered, though he also argued that the nature of mankind is such that certain values – for example, the importance of individual liberty – will hold true across cultures, which is part of what he meant when he called his position "objective pluralism". With his account of value pluralism, he proposed the view that moral values may be equally, or rather incommensurably, valid and yet incompatible, and may therefore come into conflict with one another in a way that admits of no resolution without reference to particular contexts of decision. When values clash, it may not be that one is more important than the other. Keeping a promise may conflict with the pursuit of truth; liberty may clash with social justice. Moral conflicts are "an intrinsic, irremovable element in human life". "These collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are." ^[3]

Bibliography

• More details of the books listed below

Major works:

All publications listed from 1978 onwards are compilations or transcripts of various lectures, essays, and letters, edited by Henry Hardy. Details given are of first and current UK editions. For US editions see link above.

• Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, Thornton Butterworth, 1939. 4th ed., 1978, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-510326-2.
• The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1953. Phoenix. ISBN 978-075380-867-2.
• Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford University Press, 1969. Superseded by Liberty.
• Russian Thinkers (co-edited with Aileen Kelly), Hogarth Press, 1978. 2nd ed., Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-144220-4
• Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, Hogarth Press, 1978. Pimlico. ISBN 0-670-23552-0.
• Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, Hogarth Press, 1979. Pimlico. ISBN 0–7126–6690–7.
• Personal Impressions, Hogarth Press, 1980. 2nd ed., 1998, Pimlico. ISBN 0–7126–6601–X.
• The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, John Murray, 1990. Pimlico. ISBN 0–7126–0616–5.
• The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History, Chatto & Windus, 1996. Pimlico. ISBN 0–7126–7367–9.
• The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (co-edited with Roger Hausheer), Chatto & Windus, 1997. Pimlico. ISBN 0–7126–7322–9.
• The Roots of Romanticism (recorded 1965), Chatto & Windus, 1999. ISBN 0–7126–6544–7.
• Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, Pimlico, 2000. ISBN 0–7126–6492–0.
• The Power of Ideas, Chatto & Windus, 2000. Pimlico. ISBN 0–7126–6554–4.
• Freedom and its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (recorded 1952), Chatto & Windus, 2002. Pimlico. ISBN 0–7126–6842–0.
• Liberty (revised and expanded edition of Four Essays On Liberty), Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-19-924989-X.
• The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism, Brookings Institution Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8157-0904-8.
• Flourishing: Selected Letters 1928–1946, Chatto & Windus, 2004. ISBN 0-7011-7420-X. (Published as Selected Letters 1928–1946 by Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-521-83368-X.)
• Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought, Chatto & Windus, 2006. ISBN 0-701-17909-0. Princeton University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-691-12687-6.0. Pimlico, ISBN 978–1–844–13926–2.

• (with Beata Polanowska-Sygulska) Unfinished Dialogue, Prometheus, 2006. ISBN 978-1-59102-376-0/1-59102-376-9.

References

See also

• Liberalism
• Contributions to liberal theory
• The Hedgehog and the Fox
• Counter-Enlightenment
• The Trap (television documentary series)

Further reading

• Isaiah Berlin and the history of ideas.
• The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library, Wolfson College, Oxford.
• A podcast interview with Henry Hardy on Berlin's Pluralism.
• A recording of the last of Berlin's Mellon Lectures, Wolfson College, Oxford.
• BBC obituary.
• Biographical information on Sir Isaiah Berlin
• Tribute from Chief Rabbi at his funeral.
• Anecdote from Wolfson College's tribute page.
• Entry on Berlin in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, including his "Master Idea".
• Letter to Berlin from Tony Blair, 23 October 1997.
• Obituary by Henry Hardy.
• John Gray. Isaiah Berlin, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-691-04824-X.
• Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life, New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1999. ISBN 0-8050-6300-5. Authorised biography.
• Charles Blattberg, From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-19-829688-6. A critique of Berlin's value pluralism.
• George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. ISBN 0-7456-2476-6.
• Joshua Cherniss, 'Isaiah Berlin: A Defence', The Oxonian Review of Books
• Claude Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. ISBN 0-19-827868-3.
• Ned O'Gorman, 'My dinners with Isaiah: the music of a philosopher's life - Sir Isaiah Berlin' - includes related article on Isaiah Berlin's commitment to ideals of genuine understanding over intellectual mastery, Commonweal, 14 August 1998
• Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, Ramin Jahanbegloo (1992)

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