The Latvian-born Oxford philosopher and historian of ideas whose essay Two Concepts of Liberty (1958) defined the postwar liberal vocabulary of negative and positive freedom, whose essays on the Russian intelligentsia and the Counter-Enlightenment shaped Anglophone intellectual history, and whose value pluralism gave moral philosophy a sustained alternative to monistic ethical systems.
isaiah-berlin
Latvian-born British philosopher and historian of ideas (1909–1997), Oxford professor and founding president of Wolfson College, whose essay Two Concepts of Liberty (1958) shaped postwar liberal political theory and whose essays on Russian thought, the Counter-Enlightenment, and value pluralism made him one of the most influential public philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century.
Life
Isaiah Berlin was born on 6 June 1909 in Riga, then in the Russian Empire, into a Russian-speaking Jewish family. His father Mendel Berlin was a timber merchant of comfortable means; the family was secular but maintained the cultural identification with the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia. The childhood was disrupted by the upheavals of the First World War and the Russian Revolution: the family moved to Petrograd in 1916, witnessed both the February and October revolutions of 1917 from the family apartment (Berlin watched a policeman being dragged off to be killed; the image stayed with him), and emigrated to Britain in 1921 when Berlin was eleven.
The family settled in London. Berlin attended St Paul's School and from 1928 read Classics, then Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was awarded his B.A. with a first in 1932 and immediately elected a fellow of All Souls — the first Jew elected to a fellowship there, a distinction noted in the Oxford political-intellectual gossip of the period. The All Souls election brought him into the company of A. J. Ayer, Stuart Hampshire, J. L. Austin, and the broader interwar Oxford philosophical scene; the close friendship with Austin in particular shaped Berlin's early philosophical work.
The philosophical career in the 1930s was conducted within the prevailing Oxford analytic style. Berlin contributed to the meetings of the Austin-led group that practiced the new careful linguistic-philosophical method, and his 1939 Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (Home University Library) — his first book, written for a general audience — was the major exception to the period's predominantly technical analytic focus. The Marx book is, by Berlin's own later admission, a young man's work, but it has stayed in print continuously since publication and remains in many estimations the best one-volume introduction to its subject.
The war redirected Berlin's career permanently. From 1940 he served in the British government's New York and Washington offices, principally as a political analyst writing weekly dispatches for the Foreign Office on American political opinion (the dispatches, declassified after his death, have been published in three volumes by Yale University Press). The Washington years produced lasting friendships across the American political and intellectual class — with Felix Frankfurter, Joseph and Stewart Alsop, Charles E. Bohlen, Averell Harriman, the broader New Deal intellectual establishment.
In 1945–46 Berlin spent a sabbatical posting at the British Embassy in Moscow, the experience that would shape much of his subsequent writing on Russia. The encounters in Moscow and Leningrad — particularly the November 1945 nocturnal conversation with the poet Anna Akhmatova at the Fountain House in Leningrad, lasting from late evening into the next morning, an encounter both later treated as a defining event — produced the deep engagement with twentieth-century Russian intellectual life that runs through Berlin's later essays. Akhmatova's later cycle Cinque, dedicated to Berlin, and her Sweetbriar in Blossom both draw on the encounter.
Berlin returned to Oxford in 1946 and moved progressively away from technical analytic philosophy toward the history of ideas. He was elected Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory in 1957; the 31 October 1958 inaugural lecture became, in the printed version, Two Concepts of Liberty — the most-cited single Berlin essay and one of the most cited essays in postwar political theory.
The last forty years of his career were occupied by the steady stream of essays on Russian thought (Herzen, Bakunin, Belinsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, the Slavophile-Westernizer debate); on the Counter-Enlightenment (Vico, Hamann, Herder, Maistre); on the conceptual structure of political theory; on the major topics of postwar liberal political reflection. Berlin published relatively few books in conventional form; the major essays were collected, often by Henry Hardy (who became Berlin's literary executor and the principal editor of the posthumous publishing), into volumes that have continued to appear since Berlin's death.
In 1966 Berlin became the founding president of Wolfson College, Oxford — a new graduate college created with Ford Foundation funding to provide Oxford with the kind of graduate-focused institution that other major universities had developed. He held the presidency until 1975. He died on 5 November 1997 in Oxford, of complications from coronary artery disease, aged 88.
Two Concepts of Liberty
The 1958 lecture, in the printed and revised version that appeared in Four Essays on Liberty (1969) and then in Liberty (2002), distinguishes two senses of political freedom that liberal political thought has used.
Negative liberty is freedom from interference — the absence of obstacles imposed by other agents to the agent's doing what he wishes to do. The classical English liberal tradition (Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Constant) is principally a tradition of negative liberty: the demand that the state leave the individual alone within certain protected spheres.
Positive liberty is freedom to do something — the realized capacity to be one's own master, to act according to one's higher or rational self rather than one's lower or impulsive self. The continental political tradition (Rousseau's general will, Kantian moral autonomy, Hegel's account of freedom realized in the ethical state, Marx's emancipation) is principally a tradition of positive liberty.
Berlin's argument: both concepts have legitimate uses, but positive liberty is vulnerable to a characteristic perversion. Once we distinguish a higher and lower self in the individual, we can claim that constraining the lower in the name of the higher is a form of liberation; the individual can be coerced into doing what his higher self really wants, can be “forced to be free” in Rousseau's phrase. This perversion has been the conceptual vehicle of much twentieth-century totalitarianism, in which the state claims to liberate citizens by constraining them in the name of the rational, the historical, the truly human, the genuinely working-class.
Berlin does not reject positive liberty as such but warns against the political consequences of its absolutization. The argument is one of the foundational statements of postwar liberalism in its Cold War mode; the essay has been continuously debated, with major contributions from Charles Taylor (“What's Wrong with Negative Liberty?,” 1979), Quentin Skinner (the rival neo-republican third concept of liberty as non-domination), Philip Pettit, Gerald MacCallum (the famous triadic analysis of all liberty as a single triadic relation), and many others.
Value Pluralism
The positive doctrine for which Berlin is best known is value pluralism: the claim that the genuinely valuable goods human beings can pursue are plural, incommensurable, sometimes incompatible, and not reducible to any single overriding value. Justice and mercy can conflict; liberty and equality can conflict; the demands of artistic excellence and political engagement can conflict; the loyalty owed to family can conflict with the loyalty owed to friend or to nation.
These conflicts are not the product of confusion or of inadequate moral knowledge but are inherent in the structure of human value. There is no master value (the good, the rational, utility, happiness) to which the plural goods can be reduced for arbitration. The choice between conflicting goods is genuinely tragic in those cases where both goods are real and both cannot be honored.
The value-pluralist position is anti-monistic and anti-utopian. The political mistakes of the twentieth century, Berlin argued in many essays, were largely the work of political programs operating on the monistic premise that all genuine values must be compatible in some final harmony, so that the apparently tragic conflicts of ordinary life would dissolve in the realized ideal. The value-pluralist diagnosis: no such harmony is available; the conflicts are real; the political task is to manage conflict among real and incompatible goods rather than to escape it through the realization of an ideal.
Gray's Isaiah Berlin (HarperCollins, 1995), George Crowder's Liberalism and Value Pluralism (Continuum, 2002), and William Galston's Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge University Press, 2002) develop the position in different directions. The value-pluralist tradition that has descended from Berlin runs through Joseph Raz, Bernard Williams (whose position is close but distinct), and the contemporary moral-philosophical literature on incommensurability.
The Counter-Enlightenment Essays
Berlin's essays on Vico, Hamann, Herder, Maistre, and the broader Counter-Enlightenment — collected in Vico and Herder (1976), The Magus of the North (1993, on Hamann), The Roots of Romanticism (1999, the Mellon lectures of 1965), The Crooked Timber of Humanity (1990) — reconstructed an intellectual tradition that had been neglected by mainstream Anglophone intellectual history. The thinkers Berlin recovered were not the standard Enlightenment heroes; they were the eighteenth-century opponents and critics of the Enlightenment program, often deeply hostile to it, who had nonetheless contributed concepts (the historical specificity of cultures, the role of language in constituting thought, the irrationality of much human motivation) that the subsequent intellectual tradition could not do without.
The essays are the principal source of what many subsequent readers know about these figures. Berlin's pluralism was partly a product of this engagement: the Counter-Enlightenment writers had argued that the universalist values of the Enlightenment were neither universal nor compatible with the actual variety of human cultures and the values realized in them.
The Russian Essays
The Russian essays — collected in Russian Thinkers (1978), the splendid posthumous The Soviet Mind (2004), and elsewhere — treat Herzen, Bakunin, Belinsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, the Slavophile-Westernizer debate, and the broader Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century. The most-cited single essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), uses a fragment of Archilochus (“the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”) as the frame for an extended interpretation of Tolstoy as a fox by temperament who tortured himself trying to be a hedgehog.
The essays were written in elegant, sometimes baroque English prose — the long Berlinian sentence with its accumulated subordinate clauses became one of the recognizable styles of postwar English intellectual writing. The Russian and Counter-Enlightenment essays together constituted Berlin's principal contribution to the history of ideas as a discipline.
Reception
Berlin's reception was complicated by his unconventional academic career. The major work was not the systematic treatise but the essay; the institutional commitments were extensive (Oxford college and university administration, Wolfson, the British Academy presidency from 1974); the public visibility was (radio broadcasts, lectures, the wide circle of intellectual and political connections). The judgment of professional analytic philosophers on Berlin's strict philosophical contribution has been mixed; the judgment of intellectual historians and political theorists has been considerably more favorable.
The steady editorial work of Henry Hardy, who has assembled and edited approximately twenty volumes of Berlin's essays since 1978 (continuing after Berlin's death from the manuscripts and letters), has made the full body of Berlin's writing available in a way it would not otherwise have been. The Wolfson College Berlin archives and the website isaiah-berlin.wolfson.ox.ac.uk maintain extensive scholarly resources.
Michael Ignatieff's Isaiah Berlin: A Life (Henry Holt, 1998), the authorized biography Berlin himself collaborated on at length in his last years, is the standard biographical source.
Significance
Berlin's importance has three dimensions. As political theorist, the Two Concepts of Liberty and the broader value-pluralist position supplied the conceptual vocabulary within which postwar liberal political philosophy has continuously operated. As historian of ideas, the Russian and Counter-Enlightenment essays recovered traditions that mainstream Anglophone intellectual history had neglected and made them part of the cultivated reader's standard repertoire. As public philosopher, the career embodied a model of philosophical engagement with politics, history, and culture that was rare in the twentieth century and that the broader intellectual world has continued to look to as a model.