Isaiah Berlin
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"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) by Isaiah Berlin |
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Sir Isaiah Berlin, OM (June 6 1909 – November 5 1997) was a political philosopher and historian of ideas, regarded as one of the leading liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. He excelled as an essayist, lecturer and conversationalist; a brilliant speaker who made rapid and spontaneous delivery of richly referenced material, coherently structured, whether for a lecture series at Oxford University or as a broadcaster on the BBC Third Programme, usually without notes. Many of his lectures were collected later in book form.
Born in Riga, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, he was the first person of Jewish descent to be elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. From 1957 to 1967, he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. In 1966, he helped to found Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its first President. He was knighted in 1957, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his writings on individual freedom.
Berlin's work on liberal theory has had a lasting influence. His 1958 inaugural lecture, "Two Concepts of Liberty", famous for its distinction between positive and negative liberty, has informed much of the debate since then on the relationship between liberty and other values.
Bibliography
Major works
Apart from Unfinished Dialogue and the 4th edition of Karl Marx, all publications listed from 1978 onwards are compilations or transcripts of various lectures, essays, and letters, edited by Henry Hardy. Details given are of first and current UK editions. For US editions see link above.
- Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, Thornton Butterworth, 1939. 4th ed., 1978, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-510326-2.
- The Age of Enlightenment: The Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, New American Library, 1956.
- Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas, Chatto and Windus, 1976. Superseded by Three Critics of the Enlightenment.
- The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1953. Phoenix. ISBN 978-075380-867-2.
- Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford University Press, 1969. Superseded by Liberty.
- Russian Thinkers (co-edited with Aileen Kelly), Hogarth Press, 1978. 2nd ed. Penguin 2008. ISBN 978-0-14-144220-4
- Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, Hogarth Press, 1978. Pimlico. ISBN 0-670-23552-0.
- Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, Hogarth Press, 1979. Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-6690-7.
- Personal Impressions, Hogarth Press, 1980. 2nd ed., 1998, Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-6601-X.
- The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, John Murray, 1990. Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-0616-5.
- The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History, Chatto & Windus, 1996. Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-7367-9.
- The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (co-edited with Roger Hausheer), Chatto & Windus, 1997. Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-7322-9.
- The Roots of Romanticism (recorded 1965), Chatto & Windus, 1999. ISBN 0-7126-6544-7.
- Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, Pimlico, 2000. ISBN 0-7126-6492-0.
- The Power of Ideas, Chatto & Windus, 2000. Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-6554-4.
- Freedom and its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (recorded 1952), Chatto & Windus, 2002. Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-6842-0.
- Liberty (revised and expanded edition of Four Essays On Liberty), Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-19-924989-X.
- The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism, Brookings Institution Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8157-0904-8.
- Flourishing: Selected Letters 1928–1946, Chatto & Windus, 2004. ISBN 0-7011-7420-X. (Published as Selected Letters 1928–1946 by Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-521-83368-X.)
- Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought, Chatto & Windus, 2006. ISBN 0-701-17909-0. Pimlico, ISBN 978-1-844-13926-2.
- (with Beata Polanowska-Sygulska) Unfinished Dialogue, Prometheus, 2006. ISBN 978-1-59102-376-0/1-59102-376-9.
- (co-edited with Jennifer Holmes) Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, Chatto & Windus, 2009. ISBN 978-0-701-17889-5.