Berlin on the RPF

Bio

Isaiah Berlin was a political philosopher and historian of ideas, born in
Riga, the capital of Latvia, to Mendel and Marie Berlin. Mendel owned a
timber business which primarily supplied to Russian railways, and he
and his wife had a passion for arts and culture—especially opera—that
they passed on to Isaiah.

In 1915, when Isaiah was six and the German army was closing in on
Latvia, the family moved to Russia. They settled in Petrograd, where in
1917 he witnessed both the Social Democratic and the Bolshevik
Revolutions. According to his editor Henry Hardy, “On one occasion
[Berlin] saw a terrified, white-faced man being dragged and kicked
through the streets by a mob; this was a formative experience which left
him with an ineradicable loathing of any form of violence.” (from Hardy’s
tribute, “Isaiah Berlin: A Personal Impression,” found at the website The
Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library).

Berlin came to England with his family in 1921, and attended St. Paul’s
School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was appointed a lecturer
in philosophy at New College, and elected a Fellow of All Souls, only the
second Jew elected a fellow in Oxford University. During this period he
wrote a biography of Marx (Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, 1939). In
1938, he became a fellow of New College.

When WWII broke out, Berlin at first continued to teach, but was sent to
New York by the Ministry of Information in 1941, and then worked for the
Foreign Office from 1942 to 1946 at the British Embassy in Washington.

After the war, Berlin decided to shift focus from philosophy to the history of
ideas, and was elected to the Chichele chair of Social and Political Theory
in 1957 (until 1967). His inaugural lecture also became his most famous
work, "Two Concepts of Liberty." Here he distinguishes between positive
and negative liberty, also called positive and negative freedom, and his
concepts of the terms have been both provocative and influential in
debates on liberty. In 1956, he had married Aline Halban, who had three
children already, though she and Berlin never had children together.

Berlin became the founding President of Wolfson College in 1966 (until
1975), and also served as president of the British Academy. Berlin was
awarded the Order of Merit in 1957, and also received many other
honours, including a Knight Bachelorship, and the Jerusalem Prize for his
lifelong defence of civil liberties. He died in Oxford, England.

Positive and negative liberty
In “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Berlin lays out his famous descriptions of
positive and negative liberty. Negative liberty is perhaps what we most
commonly tend to think of when we think of liberty. “I am normally said to
be free to the degree which no man or body of men interferes with my
activity,” says Berlin. This might be described quite simply as freedom
from coercion, where “Coercion implies the deliberate interference of
other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act.” In this
sense, lack of freedom has nothing to do with our inability to do things
which are quite beyond our capacity: the fact that I want to be able to turn
invisible at will, and cannot, does not indicate any infringement on my
liberty. But even negative liberty, solely in terms of freedom of coercion—
cannot be without limit. Unlimited freedom would lead to pandemonium.
Therefore, much of the arguments in ethical discussions hover around
just how big our circle of negative liberty should be.

Berlin contrasts negative liberty with positive liberty, which “derives from
the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master.” This is the
essence of self-realization, not just the liberty to be free from coercion, but
the freedom to achieve our desired ends. While positive liberty still might
discard ridiculous whims such as being able to turn ourselves invisible, it
very much recognizes the influences of our environment in nurturing our
ability to achieve happiness. This, in a large sense, is what Marx was
arguing for when he claimed that man’s subordination of his true spirit to
capitalist means of production was robbing him of his very self. The
factory worker may have the same negative freedoms as the aristocrat:
freedom to keep wealth, freedom to buy what he can, etc. But they are
obviously world’s apart in their “positive” freedom of being able to attain
the life they would like.

But as Berlin points out, defending the idea of positive liberty brings its
own perils. In a sense, it supposes what the good of mankind or society
should be (what it is that will make us happy, or allow us to fulfill
ourselves), and attempts to structure society so that we might achieve it.
On the surface, this might not sound bad. But if, as Marx argued, our very
ideas are shaped by our culture, then we may not, individually, even know
what it is that is good for us. We may be oppressed by a culture which
has for generations robbed us of our positive liberty of self-realization.
And if we accept that idea, it makes it all to easy for some junta or another
to begin dictating how we ought to behave, and what goals are worthy, all
in the name of our own good. As Berlin says, the concept of positive
liberty, at least if taken to extremes, “renders it easy for me to conceive of
myself as coercing others for their own sake, in their, not my, interest.”

(Sources consulted include the Wikipedia article on Berlin, and the The Isaiah Berlin
Virtual Library. To correct errata in this article, please contact the RPF editor.)

Works

NOTE: As Berlin's work is not yet in the public domain, there is little available online.
The following sources are links to Amazon.com.

Liberty (which includes "Two Concepts of Liberty," as well as other
essays)

Karl Marx: His Life and Environment

Freedom and Its Betrayal