Isaiah Berlin

His work

Berlin is best known for his essay "Two Concepts of Liberty", which was delivered in 1958 as his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. He defined negative liberty as the absence of constraints on, or interference with, agents' possible action. I am more "negatively free" to the extent that fewer opportunities for possible action are foreclosed or interfered with. Positive liberty he associated with the idea of self-mastery, or the capacity to determine oneself, to be in control of one's destiny. While Berlin granted that both concepts of liberty represent valid human ideals, he believed that as a matter of history, the positive concept of liberty has proven more susceptible to political abuse. He argued that under the influence of Rousseau, Kant and Hegel (all committed to the positive concept of liberty), European political thinkers were frequently tempted to equate liberty with forms of political discipline or constraint. This became politically dangerous when the relevant ideals of positive liberty were, in the course of the 19th century, used to defend ideals of national self-determination, imperatives of democratic self-government, and the communist notion of humanity collectively asserting rational control over its own destiny. In this way of thinking, Berlin contended, demands for freedom paradoxically become demands for forms of collective control and discipline - those deemed necessary for the "self-mastery" or self-determination of nations, classes, democratic communities, and perhaps of humanity as a whole. There is thus an elective affinity, for Berlin, between positive liberty and political totalitarianism. Conversely, negative liberty represents a safer, more liberal, understanding of freedom on Berlin's account. Its proponents (like Bentham and Mill) insisted that constraint and discipline were the antithesis of liberty and so were (and are) less prone to confusing liberty and constraint in the manner of the philosophical harbingers of modern totalitarianism.

Related Topics:
Two Concepts of Liberty - 1958

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His essay "Historical Inevitability" (1953) focused on a controversy in the philosophy of history. In Berlin's words, the choice is whether one believes that "the lives of entire peoples and societies have been decisively influenced by exceptional individuals" or, rather, that whatever happens occurs as a result of impersonal forces oblivious to human intentions. Berlin is also well known for his writings on Russian intellectual history, most of which are collected in Russian Thinkers (1978), edited, like most of Berlin's work, by Henry Hardy.

Related Topics:
1953 - Philosophy of history - Societies - 1978 - Henry Hardy

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Berlin's writings on the Enlightenment and its critics — for whom Berlin coined the term the "Counter-Enlightenment" — and particularly Romanticism, contributed to his advocacy of an ethical theory he termed value-pluralism. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/#4 For Berlin, values are creations of mankind, rather than products of nature waiting to be discovered, though he also argued that the nature of mankind is such that certain values — for example, the importance of individual liberty — will hold true across cultures, which is what he meant when he called his position "objective pluralism." With his account of value pluralism, he proposed the view that moral values may be equally valid and yet incompatible, and may therefore come into conflict with one another in a way that is irresolvable. When values clash, it does not mean 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 part of human life ... These collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are," (Berlin, 2002).

Related Topics:
The Enlightenment - Counter-Enlightenment - Romanticism - Value-pluralism - Social justice

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