Who was Isaiah Berlin?
Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, then in the Russian Empire, to a Jewish family. They lived through the 1917 revolution in Petrograd and came to Britain in 1921. He studied at Oxford and spent most of his working life there. During and after the Second World War he served as a British diplomat in Washington and Moscow. In 1958 he gave the lecture Two Concepts of Liberty, which made him famous well beyond universities. He was knighted in 1957, founded Wolfson College as its first president and later led the British Academy. He argued all his life for tolerance and against grand theories that promise a perfect society.
Political views
- Held that real human values are many, that they can clash and that they cannot always be put in one ranking.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Drew a line between negative liberty, being left alone, and positive liberty, the ideal of ruling oneself.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Warned that positive liberty can be twisted into a licence to force people to obey their supposed true selves.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Attacked ideas of historical inevitability, Marxist ones included, because they excuse people from responsibility for their acts.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Said the first duty of public life is to prevent the worst suffering and to hold a fragile balance between competing values.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Rejected communism, but also stressed that people need to belong to a community and a nation.Source: plato.stanford.edu
Legacy
Berlin's essay on two concepts of liberty is among the most quoted works in modern political thought. His value pluralism influenced later liberal writers and the debate about multiculturalism. During the Cold War many saw him as a champion of liberal tolerance, and some admirers even called him a liberal saint. Critics from the right, like Roger Scruton, and from the left, like Christopher Hitchens, said he was too comfortable or too evasive about the politics of his day. Leo Strauss and others claimed that his pluralism slides into relativism. Charles Taylor and other philosophers challenged his preference for negative liberty. His writing also brought new attention to the Counter-Enlightenment thinkers.
In their own words
“We are faced with choices between ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute, the realisation of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others.”