Isaiah Berlin (1909 - 1997) was a British-Russian-Jewish philosopher and political theorist. In many ways, Berlin’s life and thought strongly reflect the political conditions and developments of 20th century Europe. In his youth he witnessed Russia’s 1917 February Revolution and the subsequent Bolshevik October coup. His family left Soviet Russia for the UK (after anti-semitism prevented them from staying in Latvia) in 1920. His important contributions to political philosophy were shaped and informed in a large part by the climate of the Cold War.
Berlin was a defender of pluralism, individualism, empiricism, and liberalism. He was critical of authoritarianism, holism, collectivism, totalitarianism, and social engineering. His best known essay, Two Concepts of Liberty, analyses and criticises a tradition (stemming from Rousseau and Hegel through Marx, with roots in Plato) that conflates liberty (in a “positive” sense of being self-determining rather than merely unconstrained) with a narrow notion of rational action. This tendency can foster totalitarianism, as certain groups that are deemed more rational than others can seek to impose their own vision and values on the rest of society in the name of “liberation”, even where this involves coercion against individuals. This logic of “forcing people to be free” has underpinned the movements and ideologies of communism, fascism, paternalism, and some forms of (so-called) liberalism.
For Berlin, although some liberty has to be traded for other social goods and values, a minimum level of “negative liberty” (freedom from coercion) is necessary for society. Likewise, where some liberty has to be given up, this should not be justified through the doublethink that this is paradoxically increasing freedom.
Berlin’s other work includes The Hedgehog and the Fox, The Counter-Enlightenment, Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty, and Russian Thinkers. Asides from his analysis and defence of political freedom, his work covered intellectual history and discussion of important political and social theorists, especially those who went against contemporary currents.
1) Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.
Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)
2) To manipulate men, to propel them towards goals which you — the social reformer — see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.
Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)
3) All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.
Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)
4) If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind, or cannot understand the darker pages of Hegel, it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act.
Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)
5) One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals - justice or progress or the happiness of future generations, or the sacred mission or emancipation of a nation or race or class, or even liberty itself, which demands the sacrifice of individuals for the freedom of society. This is the belief that somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heart of an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution.
Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)
6) Rousseau is the greatest militant lowbrow of history, a kind of guttersnipe of genius.
Freedom and its Betrayal (1952)
7) The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor.
Five Essays on Liberty (1969)
8) Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.
Five Essays on Liberty (1969)
9) It is a terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right: have a magical eye which sees the truth: & that others cannot be right if they disagree.
Notes on Prejudice (1981)
10) Happy are those who live under a discipline which they accept without question, who freely obey the orders of leaders, spiritual or temporal, whose word is fully accepted as unbreakable law; or those who have, by their own methods, arrived at clear and unshakeable convictions about what to do and what to be that brook no possible doubt. I can only say that those who rest on such comfortable beds of dogma are victims of forms of self-induced myopia, blinkers that may make for contentment, but not for understanding of what it is to be human.
The Pursuit of the Ideal (1988)