Isaiah Berlin Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Michael Ignatieff

Critical Essay by Michael Ignatieff

SOURCE: “On Isaiah Berlin,” in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLIV, No. 20, December 18, 1997, p. 10.

In the following tribute, his biographer sketches a portrait of Berlin as an intellectual.

He was born in the twilight of imperial Russia and he was buried on a grey Friday morning at the end of the century in the Jewish section of Oxford's Wolvercote cemetery. At the age of seven, he watched the banners of the Russian Revolution waving below the balcony of his parent's apartment in Petrograd; he lived long enough to witness the collapse of Soviet tyranny. The Russian Revolution framed both his life and work: as an intellectual historian he uncovered its totalitarian impulses, and as a political theorist he defended the liberal civilization it sought to destroy.

He was the last representative of the passionate, comic, voluble, and morally serious intelligentsia of old Russia. When...
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