This study offers a fresh reappraisal of the philosopher, political thinker, and historian of ideas Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) from childhood to the height of his intellectual career. It provides the first historically contextualized study of Berlin's formative years and identifies different stages in his intellectual development, allowing a reappraisal of his theory of liberalism. Applying a 'double perspective' that examines Berlin both as an East European Jewish émigré; as well as a British Liberal intellectual, author Arie (...) Dubnov stresses the very ambivalent relation between Berlin's liberal philosophy and his pro-Zionist sentiments. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin was recognized as Britain's most distinguished historian of ideas. Berlin is particularly associated with the concept of the 'Counter-Enlightenment', comprising those thinkers who in Berlin's view reacted against the Enlightenment's naïve rationalism, scientism and progressivism. Berlin's 'Counter-Enlightenment' has received critical attention, but no-one has yet analysed the understanding of the Enlightenment on which it rests. Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment explores the development of Berlin's conception of the Enlightenment, noting its curious narrowness, (...) its ambivalence, and its indebtedness to a specific German intellectual tradition. Contributors to the book examine his comments on individual writers, showing how they were inflected by his questionable assumptions, and arguing that some of the writers he assigned to the 'Counter-Enlightenment' have closer affinities to the Enlightenment than he recognized. By locating Berlin in the history of Enlightenment studies, this book also makes a contribution to defining the historical place of his work and to evaluating his intellectual legacy. (shrink)

Since his death in 1997, Isaiah Berlin's writings have generated continual interest among scholars and educated readers, especially in regard to his ideas about liberalism, value pluralism, and "positive" and "negative" liberty. Most books on Berlin have examined his general political theory, but this volume uses a contemporary perspective to focus specifically on his ideas about freedom and liberty. Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom brings together an integrated collection of essays by noted and emerging political (...) theorists that commemorate in a critical spirit the recent 50th anniversary of Isaiah Berlin's famous lecture and essay, "Two Concepts of Liberty." The contributors use Berlin's essay as an occasion to rethink the larger politics of freedom from a twenty-first century standpoint, bringing Berlin's ideas into conversation with current political problems and perspectives rooted in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, democratic theory, and critical social theory. The editors begin by surveying the influence of Berlin's essay and the range of debates about freedom that it has inspired. Contributors' chapters then offer various analyses such as competing ways to contextualize Berlin's essay, how to reconsider Berlin's ideas in light of struggles over national self-determination, European colonialism, and racism, and how to view Berlin's controversial distinction between so-called "negative liberty" and "positive liberty." By relating Berlin's thinking about freedom to competing contemporary views of the politics of freedom, this book will be significant for both scholars of Berlin as well as people who are interested in larger debates about the meaning and conditions of freedom. (shrink)

This book argues that the Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin should primarily be understood through British idealism. Though he adopted Kantian methodology and a view of people as purposive beings, he rejected the Idealists' monism and theories of positive liberty. Robert A. Kocis demonstrates how, like Michael Oakeshott and R. G. Collingwood, Berlin can be seen as a 'post-Idealist' thinker, invested in the implications of that rich tradition.

Isaiah Berlin was the greatest intellectual historian of the twentieth century. But his work also made an original and important contribution to moral and political philosophy and to liberal theory. In 1921, at the age of eleven, Isaiah Berlin arrived in England from Riga, Latvia. By the time he was thirty he was at the heart of British intellectual life. He has remained its commanding presence ever since, and few would dispute that he was one of Britain's greatest (...) thinkers. His reputation extends worldwide--as a great conversationalist, intellectual historian, and man of letters. He has been called the century's most inspired reader. Yet Berlin's contributions to thought--in particular to moral and political philosophy, and to liberal theory--are little understood, and surprisingly neglected by the academic world. In this book, they are shown to be animated by a single, powerful, subversive idea: value-pluralism which affirms the reality of a deep conflict between ultimate human values that reason cannot resolve. Though bracingly clear-headed, humane and realist, Berlin's value-pluralism runs against the dominant Western traditions, secular and religious, which avow an ultimate harmony of values. It supports a highly distinctive restatement of liberalism in Berlin's work--an agnostic liberalism, which is founded not on rational choice but on the radical choices we make when faced with intractable dilemmas. It is this new statement of liberalism, the central subject of John Gray's lively and lucid book, which gives the liberal intellectual tradition a new lease on life, a new source of life, and which comprises Berlin's central and enduring legacy. In a new introduction, Gray argues that, in a world in which human freedom has spread more slowly than democracy, Berlin's account of liberty and basic decency is more instructive and useful than ever. (shrink)

In Isaiah Berlin: Liberty, Pluralism and Liberalism, George Crowder provides both an accessible introduction to Berlin's ideas and an original contribution to ...

This book sets out to identify the nature and implications of a proper understanding of pluralism in a original and illuminating way. Isaiah Berlin believed that a recognition of pluralism is vital to a free, decent and civilised society. By looking below at the often neglected foundations of Berlin’s celebrated account of moral pluralism, Lyons reveals the more philosophically profound aspects of his undogmatic and humanistic liberal vision. He achieves this by comparing Berlin’s core ideas with those (...) of several of his most distinguished philosophical contemporaries, an exercise which yields not only a deeper grasp of Berlin and several major twentieth-century thinkers, principally A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, Bernard Williams and Quentin Skinner, but, more broadly, a keener appreciation of the power of history and philosophy to help us make sense of our predicament. (shrink)

A study of the political philosophy of the Russian born thinker explains how Isaiah Berlin came to reject ideological frameworks in favor of a pluralism that acknowledges the inevitable diversity of human values.

Isaiah Berlin is a classic name in political theory, but does he have anything to teach us about international relations? In the Cold War he was a realist disciple of the containment doctrine, indeed a more hawkish container than his friend George Kennan, at least until he saw what was happening in Vietnam. In the aftermath of the Cold War, confronted with an outburst of resurgent nationalism, he seemed more like a utopian idealist, dreaming with Herder of a world (...) of cultural harmony. But that dream is undermined by his own value pluralism, which points towards something more rigorous and interesting, a case for liberal internationalism in tension with its realist rival. From a value-pluralist point of view, realism tends towards moral monism, and liberal internationalism is normatively the more balanced view. However, liberals should still take seriously the central realist insight that security is an especially important value in the anarchic international context. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin is one of the foremost liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. Most notably in his classic “Two Concepts of Liberty”, he locates the intellectual roots of that century’s totalitarian politics in fundamental ideas about the nature of freedom and morality.

One of the most pressing dilemmas of the moment concerns pluralism and the issue of justification: how does one defend a commitment to any particular position? The fear is that pluralism undercuts our ability to justify our moral and political views, and thereby leads to relativism. As I argue here, Isaiah Berlin provides an exemplary argument concerning the ties between pluralism and liberalism. Although Berlin admits there is no logical link between pluralism and liberalism, he nevertheless highlights plausible (...) ties between pluralism and the fields of philosophy, history and politics, all of which provide good reasons for him to endorse liberalism. Moreover, these arguments indicate how pluralism differs from relativism, so that pluralists such as Berlin are not guilty of the charge of moral subjectivism. A reconsideration of Berlin's position thus provides insight into the problem of justification in a pluralist condition, one that illuminates certain features of pluralism, as well as exemplifies its compatibility with liberalism. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin is known for articulating two competing notions of freedom operative within the modern Western political philosophy, negative and positive. He provides a powerful defense of modern liberal tradition that elevates negative freedom in its attempt to preserve personal space for one's actions and choices while regarding positive freedom as suppressive due to its potentially collective orientation. This article uses Berlin as an interlocutor to challenge Zhuangzi, known for his portrayal of spiritual freedom in the Chinese tradition, (...) prodding modern Zhuangzians to bring the Zhuangzian spiritual freedom into the sociopolitical arena by reimagining new possibilities about politics. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin is known for articulating two competing notions of freedom operative within the modern Western political philosophy, negative and positive. He provides a powerful defense of modern liberal tradition that elevates negative freedom in its attempt to preserve personal space for one’s actions and choices while regarding positive freedom as suppressive due to its potentially collective orientation. This article uses Berlin as an interlocutor to challenge Zhuangzi, known for his portrayal of spiritual freedom in the Chinese tradition, (...) prodding modern Zhuangzians to bring the Zhuangzian spiritual freedom into the sociopolitical arena by reimagining new possibilities about politics. (shrink)

(2000). Isaiah Berlin, William Morris, and the politics of Utopia. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 3, The Philosophy of Utopia, pp. 56-86.

Isaiah Berlin’s political thought consistently combines tragic value pluralism with moral priority for a minimum sphere of individual liberty which is defined and protected by a core set of basic human rights. His fundamental concept of a common moral minimum includes multiple components, including the idea that there is a common moral world of plural and conflicting incommensurable objective values and the idea that humans share a common nucleus of needs and interests centered on the overriding goal of human (...) survival. The basic human rights have priority over competing values because the rights are essential for human survival. They determine a common threshold of human decency: decent societies must respect the rights, which are in principle mutually harmonious under ordinary conditions, although emergencies can arise in which some of the rights must be sacrificed to respect others. Berlin’s focus is on decency, which he insists can be maintained without a commitment to political democracy. (shrink)

Against the standard reading of Isaiah Berlin's thought that drives a wedge between his early and subsequent work, this article suggests that his late normative anti-reductionism has roots in the early writings on meaning, semantics and truth. Berlin's anti-reductionist objection to logical positivists in the realm of semantics evince a sensitivity to reductionism, a recognition of the irreducibility of propositional meaning, a plea for the embededness of language in a temporal continuum, an anti-dualist call, and a celebration of (...) the plural and open-ended character of propositions, all of which keep broad affinity with his mature value pluralism in ethics and politics. The unity of concerns in Berlin's work brings about two implications. First, it sheds light on the fact that Berlin's ethical and political pluralism rests on views about semantics and ontology as well. Second, it offers a basis on which to deflect some current moral realist readings of his value pluralism, offering instead a history-laden understanding of his pluralism that provides more compelling grounds to understand the relationship between the latter and liberalism in Berlin's work. (shrink)

This essay offers a reinterpretation of Isaiah Berlin's value pluralism. It argues that pluralism is above all an ethical stance by means of which Berlin asserts the importance of empathy, imagination, and freedom in any good human life. Emphasizing these elements of Berlin's thought draws out his deeply cosmopolitan outlook, which his critics have often ignored. On this reading, Berlin is no defender of cultural particularism-rather, he prefers individuals who understand their choices and aspirations against a (...) broad background of incommensurable yet valuable alternatives. It is on this pluralist sensibility that he rests his hopes for a tolerant, humane politics. (shrink)

This essay offers a reinterpretation of Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism. It argues that pluralism is above all an ethical stance by means of which Berlin asserts the importance of empathy, imagination, and freedom in any good human life. Emphasizing these elements of Berlin’s thought draws out his deeply cosmopolitan outlook, which his critics have often ignored. On this reading, Berlin is no defender of cultural particularism—rather, he prefers individuals who understand their choices and aspirations against a (...) broad background of incommensurable yet valuable alternatives. It is on this pluralist sensibility that he rests his hopes for a tolerant, humane politics. (shrink)

A biography of the Soviet-born British philosopher describes how he was shaped by politics and culture of his time, and his contributions to contemporary liberal philosophy.

The essay provides a short outline of Berlin's career and an assessment of his contribution to pluralist and liberal thought. He was a British academic with a Russian cast of mind, and an inhabitant of the ivory tower who was very much at home in the diplomatic and political world. Similarly, he was neither a historian of ideas nor a political philosopher in the narrow sense usually understood in the modern academy. Rather, he engaged in a trans-historical conversation about (...) the human condition with such figures as Machiavelli, Herzen, Vico, and Herder. The Russian liberal understanding of the historical and cultural setting was, in his view, much superior to that of familiar figures such as John Stuart Mill, just as the nonliberal Machiavelli cast a particularly vivid light on the problems of a pluralist world view. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin was one of the leading political thinkers of the twentieth century, and his work continues to attract admiration and debate. In Isaiah Berlin: Liberty, Pluralism and Liberalism, George Crowder provides both an accessible introduction to Berlin's ideas and an original contribution to political theory. Berlin's range of interests and learning was vast but united by a single overarching project: the uncovering of the conceptual roots of twentieth-century totalitarianism. He traces these through three levels of (...) analysis: the distortion of the concept of freedom by thinkers such as Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel and Marx; the scientism of the Enlightenment and irrationalism of the Counter-Enlightenment and romanticism; and moral monism, the idea that all ethical questions can be answered by reference to a single moral law. Against monism, Berlin asserts the claims of value pluralism, which he aligns with a politics of liberal moderation. In this new assessment, Crowder argues that Berlin's critique of the modern enemies of liberty is exciting and powerful, but also that the coherence of his thought is threatened by a tension between its liberal and pluralist elements. Crowder goes on to suggest how that tension can be resolved by appeal to arguments that go beyond the case actually presented by Berlin but which remain within the spirit of his general outlook. (shrink)

The papers published in this issue of the EJPT discuss facets of the work of Isaiah Berlin from different perspectives and making use of varying intellectual approaches. At the same time, they focus attention on a few, central themes of Berlin's work: his complex relationship to liberalism and nationalism, his theories of liberty and value pluralism, and his perception and uses of the history of ideas. Consideration of the differences and overlap between these articles presents an occasion to (...) take stock of Berlin's work as a whole; and a critical response to the interpretations and criticisms of Berlin presented here afford an opportunity to re-evaluate, criticize and defend central aspects of Berlin's intellectual position. This article goes beyond summary to present a critical, interpretive adjudication between the claims of Berlin's work, and the interpretations of that work presented in the other articles in this issue. Drawing on each of these, I present an interpretation of Berlin's contributions to thinking about the Enlightenment, nationalism and cultural pluralism, utopianism and political ethics, liberty, and value pluralism; I also consider the difficulties of interpreting Berlin's work, and applying his ideas today. (shrink)

One of the largest contemporary debates in political theory revolves around the question of how pluralists can justify their political commitments. Isaiah Berlin, one of the first to face this problem, was a self-proclaimed liberal, whose political writings have led to controversy. In this essay, I take up the issue of how Berlin's use of the essay genre contributes to his defense of liberalism given his pluralist beliefs. I argue that while his reliance upon the essay generates particular (...) interpretive problems, it need not undermine his commitment to liberalism. Rather, Berlin's defense of liberalism involves a rhetorical attempt to discredit alternatives to liberalism while drawing attention to suggestive ties between history, political judgment, and liberalism. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin famously attacked a view he called historical inevitability. He believed that a causal view of history entails the adoption of an extreme deterministic position – a kind of determinism which would rule out the possibility of free will, turning moral responsibility a notion void of meaning. His thesis was also based on the assumption that historians are not just chroniclers of the past but need to engage in moral judgments; therefore should determinism hold true of our world, (...) our moral language – and consequently much of our historical language – would need to undergo serious revision. In this brief article we look in some detail at the arguments offered by Berlin in support of his thesis and offer criticism. (shrink)

The essay is a ‘personal impression’ of Isaiah Berlin and his liberalism, beginning with some intellectual biography, and turning to the question of how the way Berlin wrote about political ideas illuminates the liberalism he espoused. The essay discounts Berlin’s self-description as a historian of ideas who had abandoned philosophy, and follows Bernard Williams in arguing that the historicity of our political values demands a dialogical approach to their analysis in which we engage with our forebears and (...) contemporaries in an essentially conversational mode. The claim is illustrated with Berlin’s engagement with Alexander Herzen and Romanticism. (shrink)

While both Isaiah Berlin and William James are widely seen as pluralists, this paper contends that neither is a pluralist tout court. Berlin certainly is a pluralist when it comes to morality and politics, but he is a monist when it comes to nature. And James is, paradoxically, both a pluralist and a monist as regards all of reality. These claims are advanced by showing how both thinkers’ approaches contrast with those of monists, not least Plato, Hegel, and (...) Nietzsche. They are also shown to be associated with different narrative genres: tragedy in Berlin’s case, and tragicomedy in James’. The paper then concludes with a brief discussion of an alternative approach, one that treads a path in between monism and pluralism and, because of this, favours a particular form of comedy. (shrink)

One of the important—yet often underestimated—dimensions of the intellectual legacy of Isaiah Berlin is his contribution to the demystification of the totalitarian temptation in the twentieth century. This paper starts with an apparent paradox: Berlin is described as a major figure of the anti‐totalitarian camp, yet his writings nowhere touch explicitly on the totalitarian regimes of his time. Nonetheless, it is argued that Berlin's notion of “monism,” and his unique insight into the totalitarian mind, are an indirect (...) yet valuable contribution to the understanding of the appeal exercised by totalitarianism within the modern political imagination. Despite Berlin's highly contestable account of the origins of monism—which he situates in the Enlightenment movement—it is asserted that Berlin's denunciation of utopias remains very much pertinent in light of the emergence of new fundamentalist utopias in a post 9/11 world. Consequently, there are grounds from which to dismiss those claims according to which Berlin's work belongs to an age—that of the Cold War—unfamiliar to the present. (shrink)

This essay responds to the argument that Jonathan Riley offers in the February 2013 issue of Political Theory for rendering Isaiah Berlin’s theory of pluralism consistent with his commitment to negative liberty. I show that the “standard of humanity” that Riley attributes to Berlin fails to take account of Berlin’s distinction between “political” liberty and what Berlin calls “basic” liberty. Consequently, Riley ends up conflating the conditions for living in a decent society with being a human (...) being. And this leads him to make the further, mistaken assumption that humans need to “exercise” their generic human capacities in order to remain human and not become, in Riley’s words, “robots or moral idiots.” While Riley’s essay is a valuable contribution to our understanding of what we might call Berlin’s ethic of human rights, it ultimately fails in its effort to show that the domain of human rights constitutes Berlin’s standard of humanity, and therefore it fails to show that normal human beings must assign overriding moral priority to a modicum of political liberty in order to secure their humanity. (shrink)

Reply to Steven Lestition's article, "Countering, Transposing, or Negating the Enlightenment? A Response to Robert Norton," published in the Journal of the History of Ideas(2007), pp. 659-81.

The volume contains Isaiah Berlin's letters to his Polish friend, Andrzej Walicki, and Walicki's detailed account of Berlin's role in his life. Berlin actively promoted Walicki's books on Russian intellectual history not only because of his own interest in the subject. Above all he wanted to promote Russian intellectual history as a separate, internationally recognized field of study and, therefore, warmly welcomed Walicki's firm intention to study it in a systematic way, with the aim of providing a (...) comprehensive synthesis of all important currents in pre-Revolutionary Russian thought. Already at their meeting Berlin discovered in Walicki a promising candidate to help him in laying foundations for Russian intellectual history as a legitimate part of the universal history of ideas; as a discipline rewarding in itself and particularly relevant for rediscovering the great traditions of the Russian intelligentsia and setting them against the stifling dogmas of Soviet totalitarianism. (shrink)

This essay is an explication and analysis of the work of Sergei Kotliarevskii, a major Russian liberal theorist, focusing on his 1915 treatise Vlast’ i pravo. Problema pravovogo gosudarstva (Power and Law: The Problem of the Lawful State). Although the “lawful state” has long been a subject of interest and controversy (even at the definitional level) among historians and political scientists, curiously Kotliarevskii has not received the attention he deserves. His study of the concept of the lawful state, which for (...) him was integrally related to the ideal of the rule of law, is an important Russian contribution to the history and philosophy of law and the state. This essay explores the philosophical sources and contexts of his work; his understanding of the relationship among power, law, and thestate; his thesis that religious ideas and institutions were most important in the historical development of legal consciousness; his consideration of the modern constitutional state; and his conviction that personhood—the absolute value and dignity of the human person—was the ultimate justification for the rule of law. (shrink)

7 What Ss Counter- Enlightenment? Mark Cilia i. The critique of the modern age is as old as the age itself. Ever since men began seeking distinction by ...

The aim of this article is to provide a critical examination of Berlin’s treatment of positive freedom by offering a review of his standard arguments against this concept. Throughout his essays and particularly in “Two Concepts of Liberty” Berlin connects the idea of positive freedom with such notions as monism, rationalism, and determinism. Each of these connections will be discussed separately. I will argue that most of Berlin’s arguments against positive liberty are somehow flawed. Although Berlin (...) valued positive freedom as one of the ultimate ends of life, his critical view of the concept should be tempered and contextualized since it was mostly based not on logical or conceptual grounds but on historical and interpretative considerations. (shrink)