Four Essays on Liberty

A collection of four essays from the 1950s, published together in 1969 with a long new introduction answering critics. 'Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century' surveys the ideologies of the age. 'Historical Inevitability' attacks the belief that history follows laws which make individual responsibility and moral judgement idle. 'Two Concepts of Liberty', Berlin's 1958 Oxford inaugural lecture, distinguishes negative liberty, the area within which a person is left free from interference, from positive liberty, the wish to be one's own master. Berlin warns that positive liberty, by appeal to a higher or true self, has been used to justify coercing people for their own sake, and he links his defence of negative liberty to value pluralism: human goods are many, sometimes incompatible, and no single solution can reconcile them all. 'John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life' presents Mill as a defender of variety and choice. Critics, including Charles Taylor, argue that negative liberty alone cannot explain why some freedoms matter more than others.

Its distinction between negative and positive liberty is still the starting point for most arguments about freedom, and its value pluralism is a sober defence of liberal tolerance.