Berlin, Isaiah(1909–1997)
Latvian born, English educated, and a cosmopolitan in the world of ideas, Isaiah Berlin was both a prolific public intellectual and a distinguished academic, concluding his career as Oxford University's Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory. After publishing some early essays in analytical philosophy, Berlin soon turned to more historical studies. While favoring the essay form, he published an important book-length study of Marx (1939) that was critical of Marx's historical determinism in ways that anticipated his later critiques of theories of historical inevitability. During the Second World War, Berlin worked for the British government in the United States, after which he returned to teaching at Oxford University, with occasional sojourns in London and the United States. His practical political involvements lent a spirit of engagement to his writings, whatever the subject.
Berlin championed political theory at a time when it was distinctly unfashionable in professional philosophy. To dismiss political reflection because of its rough-hewn character, he maintained, is to misconstrue the nature of the subject and leave oneself at the mercy of uncriticized political prejudices. But Berlin's major importance as a political thinker rests in the vision of liberalism that he articulated in the post–World War II decades. In his seminal essay "Two Concepts of Liberty," he developed an influential distinction between negative freedom (to act without interference) and positive freedom (to be one's own master), and expressed special concern about the totalitarian dangers lurking in the latter.
While Berlin clearly privileged negative freedom over positive freedom, his distinction is more nuanced than is often acknowledged. He made no fetish of liberty, and reminded readers that communities in conditions of dire poverty cannot give much thought to formal freedoms. What he most bemoaned in positive freedom was the ideal of self mastery projected onto classes, peoples, or the whole of mankind. His championing the liberal commitment to rights, as demarcating individual spheres of autonomy, has had a deep impact on all subsequent liberal theory, including John Rawls's political liberalism and Richard Rorty's pragmatic liberalism. He wrote, "There are frontiers, not artificially drawn, within which men should be inviolable," frontiers so secure that their observance "enters into the very conception of what it means to be a human being" (1969, 165).
Berlin also argued for identifying liberalism with an ethic of pluralism, for which ultimate good as postulated by determinist views of historical development, does not exist. "To assume that all values can be graded on one scale … seems to me to falsify our knowledge that men are free agents" (1969, p. 171). Liberal society is one in which values are always in conflict, and such conflicts cannot be resolved by metaphysical fiat but must instead be addressed by the arduous patient work of practical negotiation. Thus conceived, the liberal outlook is intrinsically opposed to the totalitarian impulse in all its forms. It rests on the acceptance of moral uncertainty as our epistemological fate, and tolerance as our political imperative.
Of his many contributions to the history of ideas, Berlin's studies of Giambattista Vico, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Georg Hamann, and Romanticism were of special importance to philosophy. His discussions of Romantic "expressivism" were instrumental to the English-language revival of studies in the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, starting in the 1970s. They helped shape the understanding of the Romantic background that Hegel both appropriated and criticized. Berlin's writings on Romanticism intertwined with his long interest in modern nationalism, which he regarded more sympathetically than many other post–World War II liberals. Berlin also wrote widely on Russian novelists and thinking, translating Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) and other classic writers into English.
Berlin wrote for popular as well as academic audiences and received much acclaim throughout his long life. He was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, the Erasmus Prize, the Angelli Prize, and the Lippincott Prize, among others. He was knighted in 1957 and received the Order of Merit in 1971. He died in Oxford, U.K., at the age of 88, having once remarked, "I don't mind death. … but I find dying a nuisance" (New York Times, November 7, 1997).
Determinism in History; Hamann, Johann Georg; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Herder, Johann Gottfried; Ideas; Liberalism; Marx, Karl; Pluralism; Rawls, John; Rights; Romanticism; Rorty, Richard; Vico, Giambattista.
Bibliography
Works by Berlin
Marx: His Life and Environment. London: T. Butterworth, 1939.
Four Essays on Liberty. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.
The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.
Russian Thinkers. New York: Viking Press, 1978.
Against the Current. New York: Viking Press, 1980.
The Crooked Timber of Humanity. London: John Murray, 1990.
The Proper Study of Mankind. London: Chatto and Windus, 1997.
The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Works on Berlin
Gray, John. Isaiah Berlin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Ignatieff, Michael. Isaiah Berlin: A Life. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998.
Ryan, Alan, ed. The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1979.
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