Isaiah Berlin
Being left alone and being master of oneself are two different kinds of freedom, and the second can be twisted into forcing people to be free; good values can truly clash.
Placement
Riga-born Oxford historian of ideas: negative liberty (freedom from interference) must be kept apart from positive liberty (self-mastery), which can be turned into a licence for coercion; human values are many and can genuinely conflict.
Key ideas
- Two concepts of liberty
- Value pluralism
- The hedgehog and the fox
- Counter-Enlightenment
Students: Charles Taylor
Influence
Influenced by 4
Giambattista Vico
influenced by
Berlin read Vico as the discoverer of a distinct kind of historical understanding: knowing from within what humans themselves have made (Vico and Herder, 1976). I. Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (1976); G. Vico, Scienza nuova (1725; 1744)
Evidence: AI draft
Giambattista Vico › 1668–1744
Johann Gottfried Herder
influenced by
Berlin read Herder as a founder of cultural pluralism and expressionism, for whom each culture has its own centre of gravity (Vico and Herder, 1976). I. Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (1976); Three Critics of the Enlightenment (2000)
Evidence: AI draft
Johann Gottfried Herder › 1744–1803
John Stuart Mill
influenced by
Berlin read Mill as a defender of negative liberty and human diversity whose liberalism went beyond his utilitarianism (‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’, 1959). I. Berlin, “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life” (1959), in Four Essays on Liberty (1969)
Evidence: also in InPhO · InPhO
John Stuart Mill › 1806–1873
Alexander Herzen
influenced by
Berlin presented Herzen as a forerunner of pluralism who refused to sacrifice living people to historical abstractions (‘Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty’, 1955; Russian Thinkers, 1978). I. Berlin, “Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty” (1955); “Alexander Herzen” (1956); Russian Thinkers (1978)
Evidence: AI draft
Alexander Herzen › 1812–1870
Influenced 1
John Rawls
influenced
Rawls attended Berlin’s seminars in Oxford (1952–53) and later adopted his view that no social world can realise all values without loss (Political Liberalism, 1993). J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993); I. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958); T. Pogge, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice (2007)
Evidence: also in InPhO · InPhO
John Rawls › 1921–2002
Criticism
Criticized by 1
Charles Taylor taught
taught
Taylor wrote his Oxford DPhil (1961) under Isaiah Berlin’s supervision; it became The Explanation of Behaviour (1964). He later contributed ‘What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty’ (1979) to Berlin’s Festschrift. R. Abbey, Charles Taylor (2000); C. Taylor, The Explanation of Behaviour (1964)
Evidence: also in InPhO · InPhO
criticised by
Taylor argued against Berlin that freedom is not an ‘opportunity concept’ but an ‘exercise concept’ requiring us to discriminate among our motivations (‘What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty’, 1979). C. Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty”, in A. Ryan (ed.), The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin (1979)
Evidence: AI draft
Charles Taylor › b. 1931
Criticizes 4
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
criticised
Berlin saw in Rousseau’s general will, which can ‘force’ a citizen ‘to be free’, a source of positive liberty turned into coercion (Freedom and Its Betrayal, 1952). I. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal (BBC lectures 1952; publ. 2002); J.-J. Rousseau, Du contrat social (1762), I.7
Evidence: AI draft
Jean-Jacques Rousseau › 1712–1778
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
criticised
Berlin counted Fichte among the ‘enemies of human liberty’: his true self, merged with the nation, made positive liberty a licence for coercion (Freedom and Its Betrayal, 1952). I. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (BBC lectures 1952; publ. 2002); “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958)
Evidence: AI draft
Johann Gottlieb Fichte › 1762–1814
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
criticised
Berlin held that Hegel’s identification of freedom with understanding rational necessity, embodied in the state, turned positive liberty into a justification of coercion (‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, 1958). I. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958); Freedom and Its Betrayal (BBC lectures 1952; publ. 2002)
Evidence: AI draft
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel › 1770–1831
Karl Marx
criticised
Berlin rejected the historical determinism he found in Marx, which dissolves individual choice and responsibility into impersonal historical forces (‘Historical Inevitability’, 1954). I. Berlin, Historical Inevitability (Auguste Comte Memorial Lecture, 1954); Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (1939)
Evidence: AI draft
Karl Marx › 1818–1883
Works
Essay on Tolstoy’s view of history: the fox knows many things, the hedgehog one big thing – Tolstoy was a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog.
Oxford inaugural lecture: negative liberty as freedom from interference, positive liberty as self-mastery – and how the second can justify coercion.
Position
Berlin began among the Oxford philosophers of language and turned to the history of ideas. His biography of Karl Marx (1939) was followed by essays on Russian thinkers, on the Enlightenment and on its critics – Vico, Herder, Hamann and de Maistre, whom he called the Counter-Enlightenment. “Historical Inevitability” (1954) attacked theories of history that excuse individuals from responsibility. His Oxford inaugural lecture, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), distinguished negative liberty, the area within which a person is left alone by others, from positive liberty, being one’s own master. He argued that the second idea, through talk of a “true” or “higher” self, has repeatedly been used to justify coercing people for their own good, and he traced this in Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel and Marx. Behind this stood his value pluralism: human values such as liberty, equality, justice and mercy are many, are not reducible to one another and can genuinely conflict, so that no political order can realise them all. Charles Taylor, whom he supervised, criticised his defence of negative liberty, and others questioned whether value pluralism supports liberalism at all. The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), an essay on Tolstoy, made his distinction between thinkers with one system and thinkers of many things widely known.
Life & context
Isaiah Berlin was born in 1909 in Riga into a Russian-Jewish family of timber merchants. As a child he saw the revolutions of 1917 in Petrograd; the family left in 1920 and settled in Britain in 1921. He studied at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and in 1932 was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls. During the war he worked for British Information Services in New York and at the embassy in Washington, whose weekly political reports he drafted, and in 1945 he met the poet Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad. From 1957 to 1967 he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, and he was the founding president of Wolfson College, Oxford. He was knighted in 1957, received the Order of Merit in 1971 and died in Oxford in 1997.
Further main works
- Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (1939)
- Historical Inevitability (1954)
- Vico and Herder (1976)
- Russian Thinkers (1978)
- The Crooked Timber of Humanity (1990)
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