Isaiah Berlin Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Born in the Latvian capital of Riga, Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) was a leading liberal political theorist and historian of ideas. Focusing on themes of liberty and pluralism, Berlin contends that because human life is characterized by incompatible but equally legitimate goals, a just political order will embrace the natural diversity of human choices rather than imposing one fixed ethical system.

In 1917, Berlin’s family moved to Petrograd during the Russian Revolution. They returned to Riga in 1920 and emigrated to London in 1921. Berlin attended Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and was appointed a lecturer at New College in 1932. That same year he received a Prize Fellowship at All Souls, the first Jew to receive such a high honor. During World War II (1932–1945), Berlin worked for the British government in New York (1940–1942), Washington, D.C. (1942–1945); and Moscow (1945–1946), but he remained at Oxford throughout his academic career.

Berlin was knighted in 1957, the same year he was elected Chichele professor of social and political theory at Oxford. In 1966 he became the founding president of Wolfson College, Oxford, and from 1974 to 1978 served as president of the British Academy. He retired from Oxford in 1975. During his life, Berlin also received the prestigious Order of Merit, as well as the Agnelli, Erasmus, Lippincott, and Jerusalem prizes.

Berlin’s most well-known work of political theory is his essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), in which he distinguishes between positive and negative liberty. He defines negative liberty as the absence of external constraints on one’s behavior and positive liberty as the capacity for self-determination. Although these two concepts may appear similar, negative liberty is characterized by the absence of external obstacles, whereas positive liberty requires the presence of a self-determining rational will.

According to Berlin, positive liberty carries a danger of totalitarianism because its advocates are “monists” who contend that there is only one way of acting authentically human and those who behave otherwise are slaves to their passions or ignorance. This provides a justification for those who consider themselves wise to oppress those they perceive to be enslaved to their own appetitive impulses. When the enlightened have overcome the irrational empirical selves of these misguided individuals, their real selves finally will emerge to pursue their true interests, which inevitably will harmonize with those of their enlightened educators. Tracing the history of this positive liberty, Berlin shows how dictators of all ideologies, from Plato’s philosopher-kings to the Nazis, have used this notion to justify the suppression of diversity in the name of their monistic conceptions of the good life.

Berlin sees negative libertarians as pluralists who maintain that there is a range of ways to act authentically human and that persons should be as free as possible from external constraints to pursue their own ideas of the good life. Many of the choices required may be incommensurable, yet for Berlin the ability to decide for oneself from among these competing values is the core of human dignity. Even so, Berlin argues that the pursuit of negative liberty also may become oppressive, as when a pure free market allows some actors to dominate others economically.

Bibliography:

Berlin, Isaiah. The Power of Ideas, edited by Henry Hardy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Liberty, edited by Henry Hardy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Gray, John. Isaiah Berlin. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Ignatieff, Michael. Isaiah Berlin: A Life. New York: Henry Holt, 1998.