Isaiah Berlin

11 Key excerpts on "Isaiah Berlin"

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  eBook - ePub

  Freedom and Culture in Western Society

  • Hans Blokland(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 Isaiah Berlin on positive and negative freedom      

  INTRODUCTION

  Isaiah Berlin was born on 6 June 1909, the son of a Jewish timber merchant in Riga, capital of Latvia. In 1915, he left with his parents for St Petersburg, where he was to witness both Russian revolutions. From there, the family, characterized by Berlin as ‘bourgeois liberal’ emigrated to England in 1919. His father was an anglophile, which explains his choice of destination. In England, he attended St Paul’s School in London and Corpus Christi College in Oxford. He was to spend the greater part of his academic career attached to the University of Oxford, as professor of social and political theory (1957–67), chairman of Wolfson College (1966–75) and Fellow of All Souls College (1932–8 and 1960 to the present). Berlin, who was knighted in 1957, was also chairman of the British Academy (1974–8). He is mainly known for his work in the history of ideas and political theory, but has also been active in the fields of theory of knowledge and science, literature (especially Russian) and musicology.1

  A thread running through Berlin’s work is his crusade against the widespread monistic conviction that there is only one correct answer to every question and that all correct answers can be arranged in a harmonious manner into a single knowable rational system. Opposed to this belief, which according to Berlin has led to inertia, intolerance and cruelty, he suggests that there are many values, each of which is worth emulating in itself yet which are conflicting, so that inevitably they must be weighed up against each other. In his history of ideas, which can be characterized as a sort of phenomenology of Western consciousness, he studies in particular how this idea of pluralism has developed since the end of the eighteenth century. The philosophers Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), and above all the Russian writer Alexander Herzen (1812–70) are his heroes in this history.

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  Pluralism

  • Peter Lassman(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  In the world of modern Anglo-American political theory, the discovery of the problem of pluralism is generally attributed to the work of Isaiah Berlin. In particular, the publication of his Inaugural Lecture, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, delivered on occupying the Chichele Chair of Political and Social Theory at the University of Oxford in 1958, is taken as the textual origin of the ‘pluralist movement’ in political theory. This essay was, at first, noticed primarily for the famous distinction between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ liberty that Berlin did so much to popularize. It subsequently became clear that this conceptual distinction itself rested upon the more interesting and controversial thesis of value pluralism.

  It is now generally agreed that the idea of the existence of plural and conflicting values is, or has become in the eyes of many contemporary political theorists, the central theme in the political thought of Isaiah Berlin. This is a relatively recent development insofar as Berlin, prior to the emergence of the problem of pluralism as a central topic in political thought, was generally thought of as primarily a historian of political ideas rather than a political philosopher. It might be that Berlin’s own self-description, as someone who had abandoned philosophy for the history of ideas, contributed to the general disregard of his account of pluralism by philosophers and political theorists. Charles Taylor has pointed out that Berlin’s thesis of pluralism was ‘deeply unsettling to the moral theories dominant in his own milieu. It is one of the paradoxes of our intellectual world, which will be increasingly discussed in the future, why this latter point was not realized. The bomb was planted in the academy but somehow failed to go off.’26 It is also worth noting that these claims made for the significance and originality of Berlin’s contribution to political thought have also been challenged, and have encountered considerable scepticism. For example, Ernest Gellner argued forcefully that Berlin’s idea of pluralism is both unoriginal and obscure. In particular, Gellner pointed out that Berlin himself refers to some intellectual precursors for this idea of pluralism. Machiavelli, Vico, Herder and Tolstoy are all mentioned in Berlin’s essays. However, the problem here is that, in so doing, Berlin seems to undermine his own claims, or, at least, those made on his behalf, for the originality of his idea of pluralism. We can point both to the centrality of tragic conflicts of value in ancient Greek drama and, in more recent times, to such figures (of whom Berlin was clearly more than just aware) as Max Weber and Raymond Aron, for whom the idea of the pluralism of values was a central concern. Clearly, it is of particular interest here to reflect upon Berlin’s avoidance of a discussion of Weber’s ideas on the problem of plural and conflicting values. As Gellner exclaims, Weber ‘didn’t merely talk about warring gods, he explored them with unequalled depth. All this is highly relevant, in as far as one of the crucial criticisms which can be made of Berlin’s formulation of the rival-gods problem is precisely its sociological thinness, its abstract philosophical formulation.’27

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  Isaiah Berlin

  • Jeffrey Friedman(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Ignatieff, Michael. 1998 .

  Isaiah Berlin: A Life

  . New York: Henry Holt.
• Jahanbegloo, Ramin. 1991 .
  Conversations with Isaiah Berlin
  . New York: Macmillan.
• Laslett, Peter. 1956 . “Introduction.”
  Philosophy, Politics and Society
  , First Series. New York: Macmillan.
• Merelman, Richard. 2003 .
  Pluralism at Yale: The Culture of Political Science in America
  . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
• Ricci, David. 1984 .
  The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy
  . New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Ryle, Gilbert. [1949 ] 2000.
  The Concept of Mind
  . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Schoeck, Helmut, and James W. Wiggins, eds. 1961.
  Relativism and the Study of Man
  . Princeton: Van Nostrand.
• Smith, Steven B. 2006 . “Leo Strauss’s Platonic Liberalism.” In
  Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism
  . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Smith, Steven B. 2018 . “Isaiah Berlin on the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment.” In
  The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin
  , ed. Joshua L. Cherniss and Steven B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Storing, Herbert, ed. 1962.
  Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics
  . New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
• Strauss, Leo. [1936 ] 1966.
  The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis
  , trans. Elsa M. Sinclair. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Strauss, Leo. [1946 ] 2008. “Letter to Karl Löwith, August 20, 1946.” In
  Leo Strauss Gesammelte Schriften Band 3: Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften – Briefe
  , ed. Heinrich and Wiebke Meier. Stuttgart: Metzler.
• Strauss, Leo. [1948 ] 2013.
  On Tyranny. Including the Strauss-Kojève Correspondence
  , ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michal S. Roth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Strauss, Leo. [1953 ] 1971.
  Natural Right and History
  . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Strauss, Leo. [1956] 1989. “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism.” In idem,
  The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism