Berlin Isaiah (1909–97), British philosopher and historian of ideas. He is widely acclaimed for his doctrine of radical objective pluralism; his writings on liberty; his modification, refinement, and defense of traditional liberalism against the totalitarian doctrines of the twentieth century (not least Marxism-Leninism); and his brilliant and illuminating studies in the history of ideas from Machiavelli and Vico to Marx and Sorel. A founding father with Austin, Ayer, and others of Oxford philosophy in the 1930s, he published several influential papers in its general spirit, but, without abandoning its empirical approach, he came increasingly to dissent from what seemed to him its unduly barren, doctrinaire, and truthdenying tendencies. From the 1950s onward he broke away to devote himself principally to social and political philosophy and to the study of general ideas.
His two most important contributions in social and political theory, brought together with two other valuable essays in Four Essays on Liberty (1969), are ‘Historical Inevitability’ (1954) and his 1958 inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty.’ The first is a bold and decisive attack on historical determinism and moral relativism and subjectivism and a ringing endorsement of the role of free will and responsibility in human history. The second contains Berlin’s enormously influential attempt to distinguish clearly between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ liberty. Negative liberty, foreshadowed by such thinkers as J. S. Mill, Constant, and above all Herzen, consists in making minimal assumptions about the ultimate nature and needs of the subject, in ensuring a minimum of external interference by authority of any provenance, and in leaving open as large a field for free individual choice as is consonant with a minimum of social organization and order. Positive liberty, associated with monist and voluntarist thinkers of all kinds, not least Hegel, the German Idealists, and their historical progeny, begins with the notion of self-mastery and proceeds to make dogmatic and far-reaching metaphysical assumptions about the essence of the subject. It then deduces from these the proper paths to freedom, and, finally, seeks to drive flesh-and-blood individuals down these preordained paths, whether they wish it or not, within the framework of a tight-knit centralized state under the irrefragable rule of rational experts, thus perverting what begins as a legitimate human ideal, i.e. positive self-direction and self-mastery, into a tyranny. ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ also sets out to disentangle liberty in either of these senses from other ends, such as the craving for recognition, the need to belong, or human solidarity, fraternity, or equality. Berlin’s work in the history of ideas is of a piece with his other writings. Vico and Herder (1976) presents the emergence of that historicism and pluralism which shook the two-thousand-yearold monist rationalist faith in a unified body of truth regarding all questions of fact and principle in all fields of human knowledge. From this profound intellectual overturn Berlin traces in subsequent volumes of essays, such as Against the Current (1979), The Crooked Timber of Humanity (1990), and The Sense of Reality (1996), the growth of some of the principal intellectual movements that mark our era, among them nationalism, fascism, relativism, subjectivism, nihilism, voluntarism, and existentialism. He also presents with persuasiveness and clarity that peculiar objective pluralism which he identified and made his own. There is an irreducible plurality of objective human values, many of which are incompatible with one another; hence the ineluctable need for absolute choices by individuals and groups, a need that confers supreme value upon, and forms one of the major justifications of, his conception of negative liberty; hence, too, his insistence that utopia, namely a world where all valid human ends and objective values are simultaneously realized in an ultimate synthesis, is a conceptual impossibility.
While not himself founder of any definable school or movement, Berlin’s influence as a philosopher and as a human being has been immense, not least on a variety of distinguished thinkers such as Stuart Hampshire, Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams, Richard Wollheim, Gerry Cohen, Steven Lukes, David Pears, and many others. His general intellectual and moral impact on the life of the twentieth century as writer, diplomat, patron of music and the arts, international academic elder statesman, loved and trusted friend to the great and the humble, and dazzling lecturer, conversationalist, and animateur des idées, will furnish inexhaustible material to future historians.
See also FREE WILL PROBLEM , LIBERALISM , POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, POSITIVE AND NEGA — TIVE FREEDO. R.Hau.