Two Concepts of Liberty

Introduction

Isaiah Berlin delivered the lecture on 31 October 1958 on taking up the Chichele Professorship of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. Writing during the Cold War, he argues that the positive idea of liberty, being one’s own master, tends to divide the self into a higher, rational self and a lower, empirical one, so that people can be coerced in the name of what they would want if they were rational; he finds this development in thinkers from Rousseau and Fichte to Hegel and Marx. Berlin defends negative liberty, an area free from interference, together with value pluralism: human goods are many and cannot always be reconciled. The lecture is among the most discussed texts of 20th-century political philosophy.

Connections

Builds on

• On Liberty1859 · John Stuart Mill

Criticizes

• The Social Contract1762 · Jean-Jacques Rousseau

More works by Isaiah Berlin

• 1953The Hedgehog and the Fox