Isaiah Berlin

For more information on Sir Isaiah Berlin, visit Britannica.com.

British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin (born 1909), wrote widely on topics involving the history of ideas, political philosophy, and the relationship of the individual to society. He skillfully explored the history of ideas to find ways in which society can use large philosophical principles to secure individual conformity to social values.

Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, Latvia, on June 9, 1909. The family moved often and eventually ended up in St. Petersburg. Even as a young child he witnessed some of the most profound events of the 20th century, when at the age of six he watched the Russian Revolution unfold in the streets below the family's apartment window. The family emigrated to Great Britain in March, 1920 when Berlin was eleven. By July of that same year, Berlin had won first prize for an essay in English. He was educated at St. Paul's School, London, and then attended Corpus Christi College, Oxford (B.A. in 1932, M.A. in 1935). He later was awarded many honorary degrees.

His early career was devoted to diplomatic work, and he served in the British embassies in Washington (1942-1945) and Moscow (1945-1946). At the British embassy in Washington, he was responsible for reporting on American public opinion during the war. He so impressed Prime Minister Winston Churchill with his reports that Churchill asked to meet "this man Berlin". Shortly thereafter, Churchill found himself entertaining the American composer Irving Berlin. This type of mix-up between the two happened often, including a time in 1932 when Berlin was elected the first Jewish Fellow at All Souls College in Oxford and the Chief Rabbi of England congratulated Irving Berlin for the honor in the Jewish Chronicle.

Isaiah Berlin was a lecturer at various colleges at Oxford after 1933 and was a visiting professor at scores of American colleges - most notably Harvard, Princeton, and The City College of New York. He was president of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978 and a member of the board of governors of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He was knighted in 1957 and received The Order of Merit in 1971. Berlin married Aline Elizabeth Yvonne de Gunzburg in 1956.

As a young man Berlin became an avid Zionist. He felt that Zionism was the natural liberation movement of the Jewish people, who after two millennia in exile had a right to their own homeland. Berlin's family was integral to the establishment of the Hasidic dynasty of Lubavitch during the Napoleonic Wars. He was related to Rebbe Menacham Schneerson, a Lubavitcher whose followers believed he was the Messiah, and violinist Yehude Menuhin. Aline Berlin's family was also prestigious in the Russian Jewish community, where as the Barons De Ginsbourg, served as grand bankers in Russia and Paris and as renowned philanthropists. He viewed the Jewish community as an extended family and for Berlin, a "strong family feeling was one of the primary colors of human emotion." Throughout his career, Berlin retained a deep interest in human emotion and its effects on history and ideas.

Berlin was first and foremost a historian of ideas. He was most well known in America for his books Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (1939), Four Essays on Liberty (1969), and Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (1976). At the heart of his philosophy of history is the conviction that the tools of science are the servants of historians rather than their masters. This means that science by itself cannot provide us with predictive explanations that account for social transformation. Natural selection may be able to explain the transformations among species but it cannot explain the more complex changes that take place within the interplay of ideas and political traditions. Furthermore, while the methods of science are indispensable for historical explanation, the historian cannot discover laws of historical development in the sense that the physicist can discover the laws of planetary motion. The historian must appeal to larger explanatory concepts than are to be found within a mechanistic science.

Two such concepts that often appear in Berlin's picture of history are the interrelated concepts of monism and pluralism. Monism represents the tendency on the part of human beings to see unity amidst diversity. More important, it involves a tendency to subordinate individual values to larger social values. Monism is, in many respects, utopian. Monists tend to picture humans as striving toward one ultimate end and individuals as servants of larger historical processes. For example, within psychology a monistic thinker would tend to see all behavior as deriving from a common source or a common principle. Sigmund Freud conceived of all human behavior as deriving from the fundamental desire of individuals to secure their own private pleasure; all human energy is libidinal and all human action is to be understood as the working out of this libidinal energy. Why is Shakespeare a great writer? The Freudian answer is monistic in the sense that Shakespeare's art was his way of sublimating sexual or libidinal energy.

Another kind of monistic thinker was Karl Marx, the 19th-century philosopher and economist whose ideas spawned 20th-century communism. Marx believed that all social behavior had a common root, namely, economics. For Marx, if one wished to explain any social or historical phenomenon, one merely had to discover economic factors that caused the phenomenon. For example, Marx believed that World War I was caused by capitalists in England, France, and Germany who were using their respective governments as a means of eliminating competitors. Both Freud and Marx were monists. Berlin suggested that monistic thinkers tend to see a common thread running through all human events.

Berlin was skeptical of all monisms. He held that the development of ideas and traditions is far more diverse than monists care to admit. Furthermore, there is no utopian ideal that history is moving toward. This view of history colors all of Berlin's other work. To illustrate this skepticism regarding monism we can examine Berlin's views on moral theory. Monism, he argued, has exerted a powerful influence within moral theory. Monistic moral opinions are rooted in the belief that all our moral views must be derivable from a single moral axiom, such as the utilitarian ideal of maximizing social welfare. This moral ideal is monistic in the sense that it is pictured as basic or fundamental and therefore deserving of priority in all moral reasoning. Consequently, any moral opinion or principle that conflicts with this basic rule must be rejected. But this monistic picture of moral priority often comes into conflict with other basic intuitions such as the desire to protect individuals whose legitimate, autonomous behavior seems at odds with social welfare. For Berlin, monism fails precisely because no moral principle has universal priority. Rather, our moral lives are made up of fundamental compromises between competing principles, and there may be no ideal vantage point from which to determine what are the legitimate compromises.

Another example of this conflict between monism and pluralism within our moral lives involves the conflicting duty to respect the individual's right to be left alone (Berlin calls this negative freedom) and the corresponding duty to prevent others from becoming slaves of self-destructive desires such as drugs or alcohol or blatant ignorance. One is positively free when one is governed by "rational motives" and not controlled by irrational desires. Our duty to secure positive freedom may come into conflict with the individual's negative freedom, i.e., his or her right to be left alone. Berlin represents negative freedom as fundamental.

Berlin's pluralism can best be explained by a utopian or monistic critique. Berlin's support for the primacy of negative freedom was grounded largely on his experience with the Cold War and the tendency on the part of communists to use positive freedom as a means of enslaving millions. The communists argued that one can only be rationally free if one lives in a classless society devoid of economic differences. Furthermore, the Stalinist version of communism that controlled the former Soviet Union acted as if any violation of individual rights was permitted as long as it would contribute to the utopian ideal of a classless society. But surely monists need not be identified with Stalinist repression. One can still accept that there are modest versions of monism and utopianism which include both respect for the rights of individuals and modest concern for the public good.

Berlin's short work titled The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953) is a masterpiece of literary and interpretative philosophy which contains his description of Leo Tolstoy's philosophical views on history. Tolstoy, like Berlin, was profoundly skeptical that individuals, even powerful individuals such as Napoleon, understand and control the events within history. To see Napoleon as controlling history is similar to assuming that a drop of water can control the direction of the Mississippi River. For Tolstoy there was a pattern to history just as there is a direction to the Mississippi but we are unable to see this pattern just as the fish is unable to see the direction of the Mississippi. Tolstoy accepted that history is determined, but he was very skeptical that the materialistic philosophies of Marx or the spiritualistic philosophies of the German idealists could discern the pattern of human history. Finally, in Berlin's essay entitled "From Hope and Fear Set Free" he tackled the grand assumption of the West; namely, that the growth of knowledge will liberate individuals. His arguments against this view indicate the profound influence that Tolstoy had on his thought.

When asked to write an autobiography, Berlin refused and referred interested persons to the 1981 book, Personal Impressions as his reflections on the important figures whose ideas became visions that shaped their lives. Coupled with his books, Against the Current a book of essays on the history of ideas, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories these philosophical writings provide the interested public with a comprehensive collection of his reflections and ideas. A collection of nine additional essays were released in 1997, based on lectures given between 1950 and 1972, and confirmed again the enormous breadth and erudition of Berlin's scholarship and intellect.

Further Reading

Isaiah Berlin was a clear writer whose literary elegance is marked by a simplicity and clarity that may be unequaled among 20th-century British philosophers. Perhaps his most well-known book is Four Essays on Liberty (1969), which contains his essay "Two Concepts of Liberty." Here he spells out his views on positive and negative freedom. See other Berlin writings discussed in the text. For views on Berlin by contemporaries see Henry Hardy, ed., Personal Impressions: Isaiah Berlin, with an introduction by Noel Annan (1980). Although no autobiography exists, Berlin's views and reflections can be found in all of his works. Additional sources for insights into Berlin include: "The Philosopher of Sympathy: Isaiah Berlin and the Fate of Humanism," New Republic (February 20, 1995); The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History: Isaiah Berlin (1997).

(1909-97) Historian of ideas and political philosopher, holding the Chichele Professorship in Social and Political Thought at All Souls College Oxford University, from 1957 to 1967; also the first President of Wolfson College Oxford from 1966 to 1975. Berlin's major works include Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (1939), The Age of Enlightenment: The Eighteenth Century Philosophers (1956), Four Essays on Liberty (1969), Russian Thinkers (1978), Concepts and Categories (1978), Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (1979), The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (1990), The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (1993), and The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History (1996). Berlin is probably best known for his influential essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (1958). Berlin argues that there are two traditions of thinking about liberty in political thought. One tradition, associated with the rise of liberalism, is committed to the idea of negative liberty, the liberty of people to do as they wish without interference by others. The second tradition is committed to positive liberty, a form of self-mastery which consists in conforming one's actions to the demands of reason or to a normatively preferable higher self. Some thinkers in this tradition have identified the demands of reason or the higher self with the commands of the state, with what Berlin sees as alarming authoritarian implications. Related to the critique of positive liberty is Berlin's thesis of value pluralism, developed in this essay and in many of his works. Whereas theorists of positive liberty tend to think that there is a rationally discernible harmony of values, Berlin holds that there are a plurality of objective goods which are not fully combinable and which are also incommensurable. Individuals and societies must make non-rational ‘radical choices’ between these goods. For Berlin, negative liberty, and liberal institutions which uphold this type of liberty, are of great value because they enable individuals the opportunity to shape their lives through radical choice. Critics argue that the thesis of value pluralism is a weak and uncertain foundation for liberalism. If the thesis is true, then the goods that a liberal society secures will presumably be uncombinable with, and so enjoyed at the expense of, other goods that are secured in non-liberal societies. Since the various goods in question are also presumably incommensurable, we will have no basis on which rationally to prefer a liberal society to a non-liberal society. Much of Berlin's work in the history of ideas focused on retrieving, and making vivid, counter-Enlightenment perspectives which challenge contemporary liberal assumptions. Relatedly, his work explores nationalist philosophies, and can be seen in part as a sustained reflection on the relationship between nationalist and liberal values. (See also freedom.)

— Stuart White

Berlin, Isaiah (1909-97) British political philosopher and historian. Born in Latvia and educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Berlin held Fellowships at All Souls and New College, before becoming President of Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1966 to 1975. He is best known in political philosophy for the distinction between negative and positive liberty, drawn in his Two Concepts of Liberty (1959): that is, although any statement about liberty ought to specify both what one is free to do (positive) and what one is free from in doing it (negative), nevertheless different political philosophies give the one much more importance than the other. Thus liberalism dwells on the virtues of being free from legal and social constraint; idealist and Hegelian theories stress that the most important kinds of freedoms and opportunities can only exist in a structured society, so that the constraints needed to produce such societies may be a necessary means to the best ends. Berlin also energetically opposed the valuefree, historicist view of history of Marxism, notably in Historical Inevitability (1954).

Quotes:

"To understand is to perceive patterns."

Not to be confused with Isaiah Berlin (rabbi).

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
Notable ideas	Positive and Negative liberty Counter-Enlightenment Value pluralism
Influenced by Vico · Herder · Herzen · Constant  · Montesquieu  · Tolstoy · Bentham · Mill · Marx
Influenced Many contemporary liberal and other thinkers

Sir Isaiah Berlin, OM (6 June 1909 – 5 November 1997) was a philosopher and historian of ideas, regarded as one of the leading liberal thinkers of the twentieth century^{[citation needed]}. He excelled as an essayist, lecturer and conversationalist; and as a brilliant speaker who delivered, rapidly and spontaneously, richly allusive and coherently structured material^{[citation needed]}, whether for a lecture series at Oxford University or as a broadcaster on the BBC Third Programme, usually without a script. Many of his essays and lectures were later collected in book form.

Born in Riga, now capital of Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, he was the first person of Jewish descent to be 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.

Contents 1 Life 2 His work 2.1 "Two Concepts of Liberty" 2.2 Other work 3 Bibliography 4 Notes 5 See also 6 Further reading

Life

Sign marking Berlin's childhood home

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^[1]) and Saint Petersburg, witnessing both the February and October Revolutions of 1917.

Feeling increasingly oppressed by life under Bolshevik rule, the family left Petrograd 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.^[2] 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.^[3] 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). As an undergraduate, 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 and J. L. Austin. He was 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). In 1956, he married Aline Halban, née de Gunzbourg.

Berlin died in Oxford in 1997, aged 88.^[4] He is buried there in Wolvercote Cemetery.

His work

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"Two Concepts of Liberty"

Berlin is best 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. He defined negative liberty as the absence of constraints on, or interference with, agents' possible action. Greater "negative freedom" meant fewer restrictions on possible action. Berlin associated positive liberty 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, as a matter of history the positive concept of liberty has proven particularly susceptible to political abuse.

Berlin contended that under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel (all committed to the positive concept of liberty), European political thinkers often equated liberty with forms of political discipline or constraint. This became politically dangerous when notions of positive liberty were, in the nineteenth century, used to defend nationalism, self-determination and the Communist idea of collective rational control over human destiny. Berlin argued that, following this line of thought, 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 even humanity as a whole. There is thus an elective affinity, for Berlin, between positive liberty and political totalitarianism.^{[citation needed]}

Conversely, negative liberty represents a different, perhaps safer, understanding of the concept of liberty. Its proponents (such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart 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.^{[citation needed]} It is this concept of Negative Liberty that Isaiah Berlin supported. It dominated heavily his early chapters in his third lecture.

This negative liberty is central to the claim for toleration due to incommensurability. This concept is mirrored in the work of Joseph Raz.

Berlin's espousal of negative liberty, his hatred of totalitarianism and his experience of Russia in the revolution and through his contact with the poet Anna Akhmatova made him an enemy of the Soviet Union and he was one of the leading public intellectuals in the ideological battle against Communism during the Cold War.

Other work

Berlin's essay "Historical Inevitability" (1954) 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, conversely, 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; 2nd ed., 2008), edited, like most of Berlin's work, by Henry Hardy (in the case of this volume, jointly with Aileen Kelly).

Berlin's writings on the Enlightenment and its critics (especially Giambattista Vico, Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Georg Hamann) – for whom Berlin used the term "the Counter-Enlightenment" – and particularly Romanticism, contributed to his advocacy of an ethical theory now usually termed value pluralism.^[5] 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 part of 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, 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."^[6]

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, Chato and Windass, 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.

Notes

1. ^ Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, p. 21.
2. ^ Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, p. 31.
3. ^ Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, p. 33.
4. ^ Philosopher and political thinker Sir Isaiah Berlin dies, BBC News, 8 November 1997. URL accessed 21 May 2006.
5. ^ "Isaiah Berlin", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
6. ^ Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind', Chatto and Windus, 2007, 238, 11.

See also

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Isaiah Berlin

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

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)

Academic offices
Preceded by New creation	Founder-President of Wolfson College, Oxford 1965–1975	Succeeded by Sir Henry Fisher

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Persondata
NAME	Berlin, Isaiah
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	British political philosopher and historian of ideas; liberal thinker; Professor of Social and Political Theory; wrote on positive and negative liberty, value pluralism, Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment
DATE OF BIRTH	6 June 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH	Riga, Russia (now Lithuania)
DATE OF DEATH	5 November 1997
PLACE OF DEATH	Oxford, Oxfordshire, England

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