Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin was born in 1909 in Riga, the present-day capital of Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, into a Jewish family. As a child, he witnessed the events of the Russian Revolution, and in 1921 he moved with his family to England. Berlin studied classics, history, and philosophy at the University of Oxford and later became one of the university’s most distinguished academic figures and the first President of Wolfson College. During the Second World War, he also served in the British Foreign Office, preparing valuable political reports from New York, Washington, and Moscow.

Berlin’s principal philosophical fame rests on his theory of liberty, presented in his famous 1958 lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty.” He distinguished between “negative liberty,” understood as the absence of obstacles and interference by others in an individual’s affairs, and “positive liberty,” understood as the capacity for self-government and control over one’s own destiny. Berlin warned that the concept of positive liberty, if misused by governments or totalitarian ideologies, could become a means of imposing a supposed “supreme good” and suppressing individual freedoms.

Another foundation of Berlin’s thought was “value pluralism.” Contrary to the monist tradition in Western philosophy, which held that all genuine values are ultimately compatible with one another, he argued that human goals and values, such as liberty, justice, equality, and honesty, are multiple and genuine, and that they can sometimes be unavoidably in conflict with one another. Thus, no single formula or utopian ideal can bring absolute happiness to all human beings, and politics should be based on tolerance, compromise, and difficult choices between competing goods. His other famous work, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” examines two different approaches found among thinkers and writers. Berlin died in Oxford in 1997.