Isaiah Berlin

Based on Wikipedia: Isaiah Berlin

A seven-year-old boy stands at a window in Petrograd, watching a mob drag a man through the street. The man is a police sniper, loyal to the Tsar, being hauled toward what the boy understands will be a terrible fate. This single image—a human being struggling against a crowd of twenty, about to be torn apart—would shape the thinking of one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers of liberty.

Isaiah Berlin spent his life asking a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to be free?

From Revolution to Oxford

Berlin was born in 1909 in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire and now the capital of Latvia. His family was wealthy and Jewish—his father Mendel ran one of the largest timber companies in the Baltic region, with forests in Russia and sawmills fed by logs floated down the Daugava River. The household was strikingly cosmopolitan. Mendel spoke Yiddish, Russian, German, French, and English. His mother Marie added Latvian to her Russian and Yiddish.

The family moved to Petrograd when Isaiah was six, just in time to witness history crack open.

They lived in an apartment building that contained multitudes. Princess Emeretinsky lived there. So did Maximilian Steinberg, the composer, and his wife Nadezhda, who happened to be the daughter of Rimsky-Korsakov. When the October Revolution came in 1917, these social hierarchies inverted overnight. The princess and the composer's wife were soon stoking the building's stoves and sweeping the yards.

Young Isaiah watched both the February and October Revolutions unfold—sometimes from his apartment window, sometimes while walking through the city with his governess. He saw crowds marching on Winter Palace Square. But nothing marked him like that image of the captured sniper. The police loyal to the Tsar were called "Pharaons," a term Berlin later noted never appeared in the history books. They would shoot at revolutionaries from rooftops and attics. When caught, they were dragged away by mobs.

That gave me a permanent horror of violence which has remained with me for the rest of my life.

The Bolsheviks identified the Berlins as bourgeoisie—a dangerous classification. In October 1920, the family fled back to Riga, but antisemitism and bureaucratic harassment followed them. By early 1921, they had reached Britain. Isaiah was eleven years old, and he spoke almost no English.

Within a year, he was fluent.

The Unconverted Jew

Berlin's intellectual abilities announced themselves early and loudly. At St. Paul's School in London, a classmate recalled watching him dominate the debating societies with a "rapid, even flow of ideas" and "confident references to authors whom most of his contemporaries had never heard." His peers sat "mildly stupefied." Yet there was no resentment—Berlin's modesty disarmed hostility before it could form.

He applied to Balliol College at Oxford and bombed the interview. Rather than accept defeat, he simply applied to a different college. Corpus Christi admitted him. He took first-class honors in his final exams, won the John Locke Prize in philosophy (outscoring the young A.J. Ayer, who would become his lifelong friendly rival), then completed another degree in philosophy, politics, and economics in under a year—again with first-class honors.

At twenty-three, Berlin was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College. He was the first unconverted Jew to achieve this honor.

That detail matters. Berlin always resisted being called an English philosopher. "I am a Russian Jew from Riga," he would insist, "and all my years in England cannot change this. I love England, I have been well treated here, and I cherish many things about English life, but I am a Russian Jew; that is how I was born and that is who I will be to the end of my life."

There was a physical marker too. Despite decades at Oxford, his English accent grew more Russian as he aged, the vowels drifting back toward Petrograd.

War, Washington, and Akhmatova

When the Second World War came, Berlin was initially barred from the British war effort—he had been born in Latvia, and his left arm had been damaged at birth. But by 1940, he was working for British Information Services in New York, and later for the embassies in Washington and Moscow.

In Washington, he analyzed American politics with sharp clarity. Of Senator Arthur Capper of Kansas, Berlin wrote that he was "a solid, stolid, 78-year-old reactionary from the corn belt, who is the very voice of Mid-Western 'grass root' isolationism." Such assessments were valued; Berlin was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1946.

But the most consequential encounters of this period happened in Leningrad, in late 1945 and early 1946. Berlin met the poet Anna Akhmatova—one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century—and their conversations stretched through entire nights. The meetings had a powerful effect on both of them. For Akhmatova, they were dangerous. Stalin's regime took note. She immortalized Berlin in her poetry, but the association brought her under increased surveillance and persecution.

A decade later, Berlin married Aline de Gunzbourg, whose background was as cosmopolitan as his own—half Russian aristocracy, half ennobled Jewish banking family, former wife of a nuclear physicist, and winner of the ladies' golf championship of France.

Two Kinds of Freedom

In 1958, Berlin delivered his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. The lecture was called "Two Concepts of Liberty," and it would become one of the most influential works of political philosophy in the twentieth century.

Berlin's argument centered on a distinction that sounds simple but opens into vast complexity.

There is negative liberty—freedom from external interference. This is the freedom to act without someone else blocking you. If no one is preventing you from walking down the street, speaking your mind, or practicing your religion, you possess negative liberty in those domains. Berlin traced this concept to the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

Then there is positive liberty—the freedom to be your own master. This asks not what you are free from, but what you are free to do and to become. Are you capable of self-mastery? Can you govern yourself according to your own rational will rather than being enslaved to impulses, addictions, or circumstances?

Both sound appealing. Both have been used to justify liberation movements. But Berlin argued that positive liberty contained a hidden danger.

Here is the trap: if positive liberty means acting according to your rational self, and if some elite group claims special access to what rationality truly requires, then that group can claim to know your "real" will better than you do. They can force you to be free. They can coerce you for your own good, because the coercion liberates your rational self from your irrational desires.

This was not abstract theorizing. Berlin had watched the Russian Revolution devour his childhood world in the name of liberating humanity. He had seen how nationalism, paternalism, and social engineering could all be justified as helping people achieve their true freedom. The twentieth century was littered with regimes that claimed to be freeing their citizens while crushing them.

Berlin was not arguing that negative liberty is simply good and positive liberty simply bad. He was warning that the confusion between them—and especially the rationalist hijacking of positive liberty—had enabled some of history's worst tyrannies.

The Counter-Enlightenment

Berlin spent much of his career studying thinkers who pushed back against the Enlightenment's confidence in universal reason. He called them the Counter-Enlightenment, and he was drawn to figures most philosophers had forgotten or dismissed.

There was Giambattista Vico, the eighteenth-century Neapolitan who argued that human cultures create their own distinct ways of understanding the world—that there is no single ladder of progress all societies must climb. There was Johann Gottfried Herder, who celebrated the diversity of human cultures against the homogenizing tendencies of French rationalism. There was Joseph de Maistre, the reactionary critic of the French Revolution, whose dark vision of human nature Berlin found repellent but intellectually serious.

And there was Johann Georg Hamann, whom Berlin considered one of the most original and underrated thinkers in Western philosophy.

Hamann attacked what Berlin called the Cartesian fallacy—the idea that we can have "clear and distinct" ideas that we contemplate with a kind of inner eye, independent of language. Hamann argued that human thought is inseparable from language, from the articulation and use of symbols. We do not first have pure ideas and then express them in words. The words shape the ideas from the start.

This insight, Berlin noted, would be greatly sharpened in the twentieth century by Ludwig Wittgenstein's arguments about private language. Berlin had actually presented a paper to Wittgenstein at Cambridge in 1940. Wittgenstein rejected Berlin's argument but praised his intellectual honesty and integrity—high praise from a man not known for compliments.

Value Pluralism

Berlin's study of these thinkers led him to a philosophical position he called value pluralism. This is not the same as relativism, and the distinction matters.

A relativist might say that values are arbitrary—your culture has its preferences, mine has different ones, and there is no basis for choosing between them. Berlin disagreed. He believed that human values are genuine values, not just subjective preferences.

But he also believed that these genuine values often conflict with each other in ways that cannot be fully resolved.

Liberty and equality are both real values. But pursuing maximal liberty may create inequalities, and pursuing strict equality may require limiting liberty. Justice and mercy are both real values. But sometimes doing justice means refusing mercy, and showing mercy means foregoing justice. These are not cases where we have simply failed to think clearly enough. The conflicts are built into the nature of values themselves.

For Berlin, this pluralism was connected to his horror of totalitarianism. Systems that claim to have discovered the one true arrangement of human values—the final solution to the problems of society—are claiming something false. And because the claim is false, enforcing it requires crushing the genuine values that conflict with it.

The opposite of pluralism is monism—the belief that all genuine values can, in principle, be harmonized into a single coherent system. Berlin saw monism as one of the most dangerous ideas in human history, however well-intentioned its adherents might be.

The Man Who Couldn't Write

Here is a strange fact about one of the twentieth century's most celebrated essayists: Isaiah Berlin did not enjoy writing.

He could not sit down and compose sentences on paper. Instead, he dictated everything—to a tape recorder, or live to a secretary. His books and essays were transcriptions of his spoken words. His letters were dictated onto a Grundig tape recorder, sometimes while he was simultaneously carrying on conversations with friends in the room. Occasionally his secretary would accidentally transcribe his jokes and laughter into the final text.

This method explains the distinctive texture of Berlin's prose. It moves fast. It jumps between ideas. The sentences have the rhythms of speech—animated, quick, constantly turning. Reading Berlin, you can almost hear him talking.

The transcription work was demanding. Berlin's secretaries reportedly found the job a strain. But the result was a body of work that captures something rare in academic philosophy: a human voice thinking out loud about the deepest questions of how we should live together.

The College Builder

In 1966, Berlin helped found a new college at Oxford: Wolfson College. He became its first president.

The college was designed to embody certain values. It would pursue academic excellence, but unlike many Oxford colleges, it would be based on egalitarian and democratic principles. Berlin, the refugee from revolutionary Russia, had spent his life thinking about liberty and equality. Now he had the chance to build an institution.

He was knighted in 1957 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1971—one of Britain's highest honors, limited to twenty-four living members. He served as president of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. In 1979, he received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defense of civil liberties.

In 1994, at eighty-five, Berlin prepared a short statement to be read on his behalf when the University of Toronto awarded him an honorary degree. He called it his "short credo." It has become known as "A Message to the Twenty-First Century."

The Message

Berlin died on November 5, 1997, in Oxford. He was eighty-eight years old and is buried in Wolvercote Cemetery.

The obituaries competed in superlatives. The Independent called him "a man of formidable intellectual power" with "a rare gift for understanding a wide range of human motives, hopes and fears." The New York Times noted that "his was an exuberant life crowded with joys—the joy of thought, the joy of music, the joy of good friends."

But perhaps the most telling assessment was simpler: Berlin was described as "the world's greatest talker." For a man who could not write, who could only speak his philosophy into existence, who built his life's work from recorded conversations and transcribed lectures, this was fitting recognition.

The boy who watched a man dragged through the streets of Petrograd never stopped thinking about what that violence meant—about how humans could be free without destroying each other, about how we might live with our conflicting values rather than killing for false harmonies. His answers were not systems or blueprints. They were warnings and distinctions, offered in a voice that still sounds, ninety years after he left Russia, like someone genuinely trying to figure things out.

That voice continues. Annual Isaiah Berlin Lectures are held in Oxford, at Hampstead Synagogue, at Wolfson College, at the British Academy, and in Riga—the city where he was born, where the timber business floated its logs down the river, before history swept his family away.