Berlin, Sir Isaiah (1909-1997), was a Latvian-born British philosopher, historian of ideas, and diplomat. Berlin was one of the greatest thinkers of the 1900’s, a writer, lecturer, and teacher of profound learning. Berlin was known for his support of liberalism in a nonreligious society. His view of freedom contributed to moral and political philosophy in the late 1900’s. This view is set out in his book Four Essays on Liberty (1969), in which he makes a case for “negative” freedom, rather than “positive” freedom. “Negative” freedom, according to Berlin, is “freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others.” For Berlin, “positive” freedom, the liberty to be one’s own boss, was not the fundamental freedom. In this matter, he was following the ideas of the English philosopher John Stuart Mill. Berlin also strongly supported the view that the aims of human life cannot be directed to a single goal, such as happiness, but must be guided to more than one goal. Such a philosophical view is known as ethical pluralism.
As a philosopher, Berlin disagreed with the supporters of logical positivism, who maintained that statements are meaningless unless they can be proved scientifically. This attitude excluded whole areas of human experience, because, according to the positivists, statements about art, music, or religious belief, for instance, are meaningless because they are unprovable by objective scientific methods. Berlin, who was an informed lover of both art and music, found this attitude unacceptable.
Berlin wrote many essays. Perhaps the best known is The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), which contrasts the struggle between following a single unifying principle and following many and sometimes contradictory theories. Berlin explored determinism and free choice in Historical Inevitability (1955). Many of Berlin’s writings were collected in four volumes. The first was Russian Thinkers (1978). It was followed by philosophical writings in Concepts and Categories (1979); essays on the history of ideas in Against the Current (1980); and Personal Impressions (1981), which discusses important people in Berlin’s life and their ideas.
Berlin was born on June 6, 1909, into a Jewish family in Riga, Latvia, then part of the czarist Russian Empire. His family moved to the United Kingdom in 1919. Beginning in the 1930’s, Berlin worked as a scholar at Oxford University, where he became a fellow of several colleges. During the 1940’s, he worked for the British intelligence services, serving in the British embassies in Washington, D.C., and in Moscow. From 1957 to 1967, he held the Henry Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. He was president of Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1966 to 1975 and of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978). Berlin was a great supporter of and adviser to the state of Israel, and in 1977, he won the Jerusalem Prize for his defense of human liberty. This was one of many awards that Berlin received. He was knighted in 1957 and awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. Berlin died on Nov. 5, 1997.
