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Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin was a Riga-born British philosopher and historian of ideas who spent most of his career at Oxford, where he became the founding…

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On the Coordinates: 6.4.2 Rights and Liberty

Also known as Sir Isaiah Berlin

1909 – 1997 · Riga; Petrograd; London; Oxford

Traditions: Analytic

Schools: Liberalism

Isaiah Berlin was a Riga-born British philosopher and historian of ideas who spent most of his career at Oxford, where he became the founding president of Wolfson College. His lecture "Two Concepts of Liberty" (1958) distinguished negative liberty, freedom from interference, from positive liberty, self-mastery or self-government, and warned that the positive idea could be turned to justify coercion. He also defended value pluralism, the view that genuine human values can conflict without any single scale to rank them.

Key ideas

  • Negative liberty concerns the area within which a person is left free from interference by others.
  • Positive liberty concerns being one's own master, and can be distorted into coercing people for the sake of their 'true' selves.
  • Value pluralism: genuine values such as liberty and equality can clash, and choosing between them may involve real loss.
  • The history of ideas, including the thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment, is essential to understanding political thought.

Major works

  • Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (1939)
  • The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953)
  • Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)
  • Four Essays on Liberty (1969)

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In the Coordinates

The questions of philosophy where Isaiah Berlin takes a place, from The Coordinates of Thought.