Isaiah Berlin

Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy
Full name	Isaiah Berlin
Born	6 June 1909 Riga, Latvia
Died	5 November 1997 (aged 88) Oxford, England
School/tradition	Liberal
Main interests	Political philosophy History of ideas Philosophy of history Liberalism · Ethics · Zionism · Marxism · Literature · Romanticism
Notable ideas	Positive and Negative liberty Counter-Enlightenment Value pluralism
Influenced by Vico · Herder · Herzen · Constant  · Montesquieu  · Tolstoy · Bentham · Mill · Marx  · Ludwig Wittgenstein
Influenced Many contemporary liberal and other thinkers

Sir Isaiah Berlin, OM (6 June 1909 – 5 November 1997) was a Russian-British philosopher, historian of ideas and liberal, regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century, and as the dominant liberal scholar of his generation.^[1] He excelled as an essayist, lecturer and conversationalist; and as a brilliant speaker who delivered, rapidly and spontaneously, richly allusive and coherently structured material.^[1] He translated works by Turgenev from Russian into English and, during the war, worked for the British Diplomatic Service. The Independent stated that "Isaiah Berlin was often described, especially in his old age, by means of superlatives: the world's greatest talker, the century's most inspired reader, one of the finest minds of our time... there is no doubt that he showed in more than one direction the unexpectedly large possibilities open to us at the top end of the range of human potential".^[2]

In 1932 he was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. From 1957 to 1967, he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. In 1966, he helped to found Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its first President. He was knighted in 1957, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his writings on individual freedom. Berlin's work on liberal theory has had a lasting influence.

[edit] Life

Sign marking what was once Berlin's childhood house in Riga

Berlin was born as an only child into a wealthy Jewish family, the son of Mendel Berlin, a timber industrialist and lineal descendant of Israel ben Eliezer, and his wife Marie, née Volshonok. He spent his childhood in Riga (now capital of Latvia), and later lived in Andreapol´ (a small timber town near Pskov, effectively owned by the family business^[3]) and Saint Petersburg, witnessing both the February and October Revolutions of 1917.

Feeling increasingly oppressed by life under Bolshevik rule, the family left Saint Petersburg on October 5, 1920, for Riga, but encounters with anti-Semitism and difficulties with the Latvian authorities convinced them to leave, and they moved to Britain in early 1921 (Mendel in January, Isaiah and Marie at the beginning of February), when Berlin was eleven.^[4] In London, he lived in Surbiton, South Kensington, and later Hampstead. His English was virtually nonexistent at first, but he became fluent within a year.^[5] He was educated at St Paul's School (London), then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he studied Greats (Classics) and PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics). While still a student, he notably befriended A. J. Ayer (with whom he was to share a friendly rivalry for the rest of his life), Stuart Hampshire, Maurice Bowra, Stephen Spender, J. L. Austin and Nicolas Nabokov. Upon graduation, he presented a philosophical paper on the philosophy of language to Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge University. Wittgenstein rejected his paper in discussion, but praised Berlin for his intellectual honesty and integrity. Berlin was, indeed, to remain at Oxford for the rest of his life, apart from a period working for British Information Services in New York from 1940 to 1942, and the British embassies in Washington, DC, and Moscow from then until 1946. Meetings with Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad in autumn 1945 and January 1946 had a powerful effect on both of them, and serious repercussions for Akhmatova (who memorialized the meetings in her poetry). He befriended Boris Pasternak, and was responsible for smuggling the first copies of Doctor Zhivago out of Russia. In 1956, he married Aline Halban, née de Gunzbourg, who was from an exiled Russian aristocratic family based in Paris.

Berlin died in Oxford in 1997, aged 88.^[1] He is buried there in Wolvercote Cemetery. On his death, the front page spread of The Independent wrote: "he was a man of formidable intellectual power with a rare gift for understanding a wide range of human motives, hopes and fears, and a prodigiously energetic capacity for enjoyment - of life, of people in all their variety, of their ideas and idiosyncrasies, of literature, of music, of art."^[2] The front page of The New York Times concluded: "His was an exuberant life crowded with joys -- the joy of thought, the joy of music, the joy of good friends... The theme that runs throughout his work is his concern with liberty and the dignity of human beings... Sir Isaiah radiated well-being."^[6]

[edit] His work

[edit] "Two Concepts of Liberty"

Berlin is popularly known for his essay "Two Concepts of Liberty", delivered in 1958 as his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. The essay, with its analytical approach to the definition of political concepts, re-introduced the study of political philosophy to the methods of analytic philosophy.

[edit] Counter-Enlightenment

Berlin's writings on the Enlightenment and its critics (especially Giambattista Vico, Johann Gottfried Herder, Joseph de Maistre and Johann Georg Hamann) – for whom Berlin created the concept of the "the Counter-Enlightenment" – contributed to his advocacy of an irreducibly pluralist ethical ontology.^[7]

[edit] Value Pluralism

For Berlin, values are creations of mankind, rather than products of nature waiting to be discovered. He argued, on the basis of the epistemic and empathetic access we have to them, that the nature of mankind is such that certain values – for example, the importance of individual liberty – will hold true across cultures, and this is what he meant when he called his position "objective pluralism". Berlin's argument was partly grounded in Wittgenstein's later theory of language. With his account of value pluralism, he proposed the view that moral values may be equally, or rather incommensurably, valid and yet incompatible, and may therefore come into conflict with one another in a way that admits of no resolution without reference to particular contexts of decision. When values clash, it may not be that one is more important than the other. Keeping a promise may conflict with the pursuit of truth; liberty may clash with social justice. Moral conflicts are "an intrinsic, irremovable element in human life". "These collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are."^[8] For Berlin, this incommensurate clashing of values within, no less than between, individuals, constitutes the tragedy of human life.

[edit] "The Hedgehog and the Fox"

"The Hedgehog and the Fox", a title referring to a fragment attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, was one of Berlin's most popular essays with the general-public, reprinted in numerous editions.

[edit] Other work

The Isaiah Berlin Quad, at Wolfston College, Oxford University

Berlin's essay "Historical Inevitability" (1954) focused on a controversy in the philosophy of history. Of the choice, whether one believes that "the lives of entire peoples and societies have been decisively influenced by exceptional individuals" or, conversely, that whatever happens occurs as a result of impersonal forces oblivious to human intentions - Berlin rejected both options and the choice itself. Berlin is also well known for his writings on Russian intellectual history, most of which are collected in Russian Thinkers (1978; 2nd ed., 2008), edited, like most of Berlin's work, by Henry Hardy (in the case of this volume, jointly with Aileen Kelly).

[edit] Wolfson College

Isaiah Berlin was instrumental in the founding, in 1965, of a new college at Oxford University. Berlin founded Wolfson College to be a centre of academic excellence which, unlike many other colleges at Oxford, would also be based on a strong egalitarian and democratic ethos.^[9] In Berlin's words, the college would be 'new, untrammelled and unpyramided'.^[9]

[edit] Bibliography

• More details of the books listed below

Major works:

All publications listed from 1978 onwards are compilations or transcripts of various lectures, essays, and letters, edited by Henry Hardy. Details given are of first and current UK editions. For US editions see link above.

• Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, Thornton Butterworth, 1939. 4th ed., 1978, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-510326-2.
• Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas, Chatto and Windus, 1976. Redwood Burn Ltd.. ISBN 0-7011-2512-8.
• The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1953. Phoenix. ISBN 978-075380-867-2.
• Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford University Press, 1969. Superseded by Liberty.
• Russian Thinkers (co-edited with Aileen Kelly), Hogarth Press, 1978. 2nd ed., Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-144220-4
• Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, Hogarth Press, 1978. Pimlico. ISBN 0-670-23552-0.
• Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, Hogarth Press, 1979. Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-6690-7.
• Personal Impressions, Hogarth Press, 1980. 2nd ed., 1998, Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-6601-X.
• The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, John Murray, 1990. Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-0616-5.
• The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History, Chatto & Windus, 1996. Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-7367-9.
• The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (co-edited with Roger Hausheer), Chatto & Windus, 1997. Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-7322-9.
• The Roots of Romanticism (recorded 1965), Chatto & Windus, 1999. ISBN 0-7126-6544-7.
• Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, Pimlico, 2000. ISBN 0-7126-6492-0.
• The Power of Ideas, Chatto & Windus, 2000. Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-6554-4.
• Freedom and its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (recorded 1952), Chatto & Windus, 2002. Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-6842-0.
• Liberty (revised and expanded edition of Four Essays On Liberty), Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-19-924989-X.
• The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism, Brookings Institution Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8157-0904-8.
• Flourishing: Selected Letters 1928–1946, Chatto & Windus, 2004. ISBN 0-7011-7420-X. (Published as Selected Letters 1928–1946 by Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-521-83368-X.)
• Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought, Chatto & Windus, 2006. ISBN 0-701-17909-0. Princeton University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-691-12687-6.0. Pimlico, ISBN 978-1-844-13926-2.
• (with Beata Polanowska-Sygulska) Unfinished Dialogue, Prometheus, 2006. ISBN 978-1-59102-376-0/1-59102-376-9.

[edit] Notes

[edit] See also

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Isaiah Berlin

• Liberalism
• Contributions to liberal theory
• The Hedgehog and the Fox
• Counter-Enlightenment

[edit] Further reading

• A tribute to Isaiah Berlin&A conversation with Isaiah Berlinon The Philosopher's Zone, ABC, June 6 & 13, 2009.
• The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin edited by Henry Hardy, The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2009
• Isaiah Berlin and the history of ideas.
• The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library, Wolfson College, Oxford.
• A podcast interview with Henry Hardy on Berlin's Pluralism.
• A recording of the last of Berlin's Mellon Lectures, Wolfson College, Oxford.
• BBC obituary.
• Biographical information on Sir Isaiah Berlin
• Tribute from Chief Rabbi at his funeral.
• Anecdote from Wolfson College's tribute page.
• Hywel Williams: An English liberal stooge
• "Isaiah Berlin" article by Joshua Cherniss and Henry Hardy in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Letter to Berlin from Tony Blair, 23 October 1997.
• Obituary by Henry Hardy.
• Adam Curtis: The Trap, broadcast in 2007 questioning Berlin's differentiation between negative and positive rights
• John Gray. Isaiah Berlin, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-691-04824-X.
• Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life, New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1999. ISBN 0-8050-6300-5. Authorised biography.
• Charles Blattberg, From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-19-829688-6. A critique of Berlin's value pluralism.
• George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. ISBN 0-7456-2476-6.
• Joshua Cherniss, 'Isaiah Berlin: A Defence', The Oxonian Review of Books
• Claude Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. ISBN 0-19-827868-3.
• Ned O'Gorman, 'My dinners with Isaiah: the music of a philosopher's life - Sir Isaiah Berlin' - includes related article on Isaiah Berlin's commitment to ideals of genuine understanding over intellectual mastery, Commonweal, 14 August 1998
• Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, Ramin Jahanbegloo (1992)
• Isaiah Berlin, Beyond the Wit, Evan R. Goldstein