Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin (1909–97) UK historian of ideas and philosopher. Born in Riga, Latvia, and brought up in St Petersburg, Berlin came to the UK in 1921. In the 1930s he became a member of a group of Oxford philosophers, which included A.J. Ayer, Stuart Hampshire and John Austin, who were distinguished by their staunch support for empiricism.

Berlin developed a form of liberal pluralism that was influenced by counter-Enlightenment thinkers such as Vico (1668–1744), Herder (1744–1803) and Herzen (1812–70). The central flaw of Enlightenment thought, for Berlin, was its monism, a defect that he traced back to Plato. In Berlin’s view, since moral beliefs are not susceptible to rational analysis, the world must contain an indeterminate number of values, and these values are often incommensurate and irreconcilable. People, in short, will always disagree about the ultimate ends of life. This encouraged him to warn against the dangers of ‘positive liberty’ understood as self-mastery or self-realization. Whereas positive liberty can be used to map out the potentially totalitarian idea of a rationally ordained human future, ‘negative liberty’, understood as non-interference, is the best guarantee of freedom of choice and personal independence. Berlin’s best known works include Karl Marx (1939), Four Essays on Freedom (1969) and Against the Current (1979).