Isaiah Berlin

Sir 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 20th
century. [1] Born in Riga, now Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, he was the first
Jew to be elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford; became the
founding president of Wolfson College, Oxford; and from 1957 to 1967, served as the
Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was
knighted in 1957, was awarded the Order of Merit in 1971, and was president of the
British Academy from 1974 to 1978.

Berlin's work on liberal theory has had a lasting influence. His 1958 essay "Two
Concepts of Liberty", in which he famously distinguished between positive and
negative liberty, has informed much of the debate since then on the relationship between
liberty and equality.

Contents
• 1 Life
• 2 His work
• 3 Quotes
• 4 Trivia
• 5 Bibliography
• 6 References
• 7 See also
• 8 Further reading

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Life
Berlin was born into a Jewish family, the son of Mendel Berlin, a timber merchant, and
his wife Marie, née Volshonok. He spent his childhood in Riga, Latvia and St
Petersburg (then called Petrograd), witnessing the Russian Revolutions of 1917, and
arriving with his family in Britain in 1921. In the UK, he was educated at St Paul's
School, London, a private school, then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he
studied Greats (Classics) and PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics). He was to
remain at Oxford for the rest of his life, apart from a period working for the British
Information Services in New York (1940-2), the British Embassy in Washington, D.C.
(1942-5), and Moscow (1945-6). In 1956, he married Aline Halban, née de Gunzbourg.

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His work

Berlin is best known for his essay "Two The Liberalism Series
Concepts of Liberty", which was delivered in Part of the Politics series
1958 as his inaugural lecture as Chichele
Professor of Social and Political Theory at Currents
Oxford. He defined negative liberty as the Classical liberalism
absence of constraints on, or interference with, American liberalism
agents' possible action. I am more "negatively
Economic liberalism
free" to the extent that fewer opportunities for
possible action are foreclosed or interfered with. Ordoliberalism
Positive liberty he associated with the idea of Radicalism
self-mastery, or the capacity to determine Social liberalism
oneself, to be in control of one's destiny. While Ideas
Berlin granted that both concepts of liberty
represent valid human ideals, he believed that as Contributions to liberal theory
a matter of history, the positive concept of Free market · Mixed economy
liberty has proven more susceptible to political Individual rights · Civil rights
abuse. He argued that under the influence of Negative liberty · Positive liberty
Rousseau, Kant and Hegel (all committed to the Liberal democracy
positive concept of liberty), European political
Open society
thinkers were frequently tempted to equate
liberty with forms of political discipline or Parties
constraint. This became politically dangerous Liberalism worldwide
when the relevant ideals of positive liberty were,
Liberal International
in the course of the 19th century, used to defend
ideals of national self-determination, ELDR/ALDE · CALD · ALN · Relial
imperatives of democratic self-government, and
Politics Portal · Edit this box
the communist notion of humanity collectively
asserting rational control over its own destiny.
In this way of thinking, Berlin contended, 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
perhaps of humanity as a whole. There is thus an elective affinity, for Berlin, between
positive liberty and political totalitarianism. Conversely, negative liberty represents a
safer, more liberal, understanding of freedom on Berlin's account. Its proponents (like
Bentham and 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.

His essay "Historical Inevitability" (1953) 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), edited, like most of Berlin's
work, by Henry Hardy.

Berlin's writings on the Enlightenment and its critics — for whom Berlin coined the
term the "Counter-Enlightenment" — and particularly Romanticism, contributed to his
advocacy of an ethical theory he 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 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 valid and yet
incompatible, and may therefore come into conflict with one another in a way that is
irresolvable. When values clash, it does not mean 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 part of human life ... These
collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are," (Berlin, 2002).

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Quotes
• "The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some
objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the
absolute values of our primitive past." - Isaiah Berlin

• "Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs." - Isaiah Berlin

• "Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions." - Isaiah

Berlin, quoted in The Listener, 1978.

• "If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle
compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict -- and of tragedy --
can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The
necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable
characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Acton
conceived of it -- as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out of
our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a
panacea could one day put right." - Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty"
(1958), part VIII.

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Trivia
• Isaiah Berlin was once confused with Irving Berlin by Winston Churchill who
invited the latter to lunch, thinking he was the former.

• Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox made it to number 65 in the National
Review's article on "The 100 Best Non-fiction Books of the Century. [3]

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Bibliography
Major works:

All publications listed from 1978 onwards are compilations of various lectures, essays,
and letters, brought together and edited by Henry Hardy.

• Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, Oxford University Press, 1939. ISBN
0195103262.
• The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History, Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, London, 1953.
• Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford University Press, 1969. ISBN 0192810340.
• Russian Thinkers, Penguin Books, 1978. ISBN 0140136258.
• Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, Viking Adult, 1978. ISBN
0670235520.
• Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, Viking Adult, 1980. ISBN
0670109444.
• Personal Impressions, Princeton University Press, 1980. ISBN 0691088586.
• The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, Princeton
University Press, 1990. ISBN 0691058385.
• The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1997. ISBN 0374527172.
• The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History, Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1998. ISBN 0374525692.
• Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, Princeton
University Press, 2000. ISBN 0691057273.
• The Roots of Romanticism, Bollingen, 2001. ISBN 0691086621.
• The Power of Ideas, Princeton University Press, 2001. ISBN 0691092761.
• Freedom and its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty, Princeton University
Press, 2002. ISBN 0691090998.
• Liberty, Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN 019924989X. (revised and
expanded edition of Four Essays On Liberty)
• The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture Under Communism, Brookings Institution
Press, 2004.. ISBN 0815709048.
• Selected Letters 1928 1946, Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN
052183368X.

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References
• Berlin, Isaiah. Freedom and its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty,
recorded 1952; ed. Henry Hardy, 2002. ISBN 0691114994.

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See also

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Isaiah Berlin

• Liberalism
• Contributions to liberal theory

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Further reading
• Isaiah Berlin & the history of ideas.
• The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library, Wolfson College, Oxford.
• A recording of the last of Berlin's Mellon Lectures, Wolfson College, Oxford.
• BBC obituary.
• Tribute from Chief Rabbi at his funeral.
• Anecdote from Wolfson College's tribute page.
• Entry on Berlin in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Letter to Berlin from Tony Blair, October 23, 1997.
• John Gray. Isaiah Berlin, 1996.
• Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life, 1999. Authorized biography.
• George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism, 2004.