Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty |  | Author: the late Isaiah Berlin
Creator: Henry Hardy
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
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Edition: 2
Pages: 416
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Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1
ISBN: 019924989X
Dewey Decimal Number: 323.44
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Product Description
Liberty is a revised and expanded edition of the book that Isaiah Berlin regarded as his most important--Four Essays on Liberty, a standard text of liberalism, constantly in demand and constantly discussed since it was first published in 1969. Writing in Harper's, Irving Howe described it as "an exhilarating performance--this, one tells oneself, is what the life of the mind can be." Berlin's editor Henry Hardy has revised the text, incorporating a fifth essay that Berlin himself had wanted to include. He has also added further pieces that bear on the same topic, so that Berlin's principal statements on liberty are at last available together in one volume. Finally, in an extended preface and in appendices drawn from Berlin's unpublished writings, he exhibits some of the biographical sources of Berlin's lifelong preoccupation with liberalism. These additions help us to grasp the nature of Berlin's "inner citadel," as he called it--the core of personal conviction from which some of his most influential writing sprung.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 10
 A Philosopher Dedicated to Freedom October 1, 2004
Jeffrey Morseburg (Los Angeles, California)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
The Late Isaiah Berlin was authority on philosophy and a historian of ideas. Born in Latvia, he moved to Russia with his parents when he was six. As an eight year-old he witnessed the May Revolution and the October Bolshevik Revolution that installed Lennin and instituted the Soviet reign of terror. He escaped to England with his family in 1921 where he was educated at St. Paul's School and Oxford, University. His early experience with totalitarianism colored his life's work in the world of ideas and throughout his career he was an articulate and sometimes lonely voice for liberty and the liberal, pluralistic society. This book "Liberty" is a newly edited and expanded edition of Berlin's most famous work "Four Essays in Liberty." Since his death, his editor Henry Hardy had drawn together his books and essays and they have been assembled in new editions.
In "Liberty" he sets out to follow the concept of Liberty. In one of the most illuminating essays he sets out to answer the question: "What is Political Liberty" which then segues into the "The Birth of Greek Individualism." In "Two Concepts of Liberty" he takes western intellectuals to task for the results of the dangerous ideas that they heralded. He cites Henrich Heine who warned us that "philosophical concepts in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilization." In his essay "Historical Inevitably" he attacks the Marxist notion that there are inevitable stages of history, that one stage follows another as winter follows fall and he traces the path of thought in the past terrible epoch in "Political Ideas in the 20th Century." Each of the essays are thoughtful, trenchant and well argued. In a time when far too many intellectuals still adhere to ideas that were the foundation of terror, Isaiah Berlin's advocacy and exploration of human freedom should find a wide audience.
Essays of the master moral philosopher of political liberty April 27, 2006
Shalom Freedman (Jerusalem,Israel)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Henry Hardy the devoted student and editor of the work of Isaiah Berlin has reedited and expanded Berlin's on Liberty. These essays are at the heart of Berlin's liberal political philsophy. And their most well- known conception is the distinction between 'negative and positive liberty'.
This is the way Wikipedia makes the distinction.
"He defined negative liberty as the absence of constraints on, or interference with, agents' possible action. I am more "negatively free" to the extent that fewer opportunities for possible action are foreclosed or interfered with. Positive liberty he associated with the idea of self-mastery, or the capacity to determine oneself, to be in control of one's destiny. While Berlin granted that both concepts of liberty represent valid human ideals, he believed that as a matter of history, the positive concept of liberty has proven more susceptible to political abuse. He argued that under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel (all committed to the positive concept of liberty), European political thinkers were frequently tempted to equate liberty with forms of political discipline or constraint. This became politically dangerous when the relevant ideals of positive liberty were, in the course of the 19th century, used to defend ideals of national self-determination, imperatives of democratic self-government, and the communist notion of humanity collectively asserting rational control over its own destiny. In this way of thinking, Berlin contended, demands for freedom paradoxically become demands for forms of collective control and discipline - those deemed necessary for the "self-mastery" or self-determination of nations, classes, democratic communities, and perhaps of humanity as a whole. There is thus an elective affinity, for Berlin, between positive liberty and political totalitarianism."
Another of Berlin's major essays in this work deals with the conception of 'Historical Inevitability'. Here he is most fierce in his critique of Marxism with its posited inevitable stages of history. Something of a great man himself, Berlin was a strong champion of the idea that great individuals shape human events, and introduce novel transformations of reality.
A third center of Berlin's thought has to do with his 'pluralism' his sense of the differing ideals and values different societies have. His pluralism however is what he called an 'objective pluralism' as he thought that there are certain values such as 'individual liberty' which should prevail in all societies.
Ultimately though he claimed that both for the individual and for society 'ideal ends' often conflict, and that perfect realization in action, is therefore impossible. Life for Berlin moral decision for Berlin thus has a tragic element of incompleteness and contradiction.
In this sense of our limitation deriving from our own ideal ends and actions, Berlin 's thought ultimately corresponds to arguments concerning the limitations of Mind which have been made in modern thought regard to a wide variety of other areas of human inquiry, from theology to mathematics.
not another conservative or neo-liberal October 3, 2005
Michael Gerlinger (Frankfurt, Germany)
10 out of 13 found this review helpful
I've read amazon reviews of this book that seemed to claim Berlin's liberalism for some kind of conservative or neo-liberal stance.
I find this misleading. I hope that nobody will be kept from looking into Berlins writings by that.
It is true that, especially in this book, Berlin argues against the fallacies of Marxism. And some shorter texts that the editors published here for the first time and an editorial essay make altogether clear, that Berlin intended a defence against the totalitarian currents in contemporary thinking of his time – being a victim of the Russian Revolution himself.
I read these essays very closely to see whether Berlin appeared to me like some kind of precursor of neo-liberlism (like Leo Strauss) but he is nothing of the kind. I am quite sure, that given the different situation today he would argue just as concisely against the neo-liberal ideology as he did against Marxism. For instance he admits that certain material means have to be furnished for freedom to be properly acted out. He does not leave everything to the supposedly free (if poor) individual. But active social politics were not the problem of his time. The welfare state was growing if anything rather too strong than to weak – it is missing today when the state is abused by neo-liberals.
His point was to defend freedom against any claim that there was „only one true way of seeing things“ which is precisely what Marxism did and what the preachers of the Washington Consensus etc. and propagandists like Fukuyama with his silly „end of history babble“ do today.
Berlin's argument is basically defensive – against the totalitarian impact of nationalism and communism. That is why he favors „negative freedom“ instead of positive freedom (i.e. the aspect: who governs which he links to the well-known totalitarian concept of true self, higher self, higher political conscience and so forth in the name of which so much manipulation and pressure was executed).
But while one sympathizes with his motives and his scepticism one can't overlook that negative freedom is just one important aspect. Berlin writes the basic image of freedom was the man tied to a tree or put in jail. Negative freedom meant being free from such (political) obstacles.
He doesn't seem to see that he is confusing liberty and liberation.
The main question (to this reader) is: what will we do once we ARE liberated?
That leads me to the question of inner freedom, i.e. psychological aspects of consciousness that Berlin avoids like most other scholars. That doesn't help.
If one wants to understand why man – born free – always enslaves himself again, negative freedom (liberation) alone is no answer.
Berlin stresses – although sceptically – the importance of knowledge to avoid prejudice and nationalism. But he doesn't care enough about the functioning of the subject that is supposed to use this knowledge.
He might have argued like so many before and after him that this was much to tricky terrain. But so is history, so is politics.
Freedom of the wolves has often meant death of the sheep April 14, 2007
Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Liberty is a very precious and rare quality of a living condition.
As I. Berlin states, `The periods and societies in which civil liberties were respected, and variety of opinion and faith tolerated, have been very few and far between, oases in the desert of human uniformity, intolerance and oppression.'
I. Berlin explains clearly that liberty has two faces: a positive and a negative one.
Positive liberty is the answer to the question: who controls? Am I my own master?
Negative liberty circumscribes the area wherein a third person can prevent anybody to make a free choice.
On these bases, a free society can be organized, with 1) absolute rights (not absolute powers) and 2) frontiers, defined in terms of rules, within which men should be inviolable.
For the author, freedom is not an end, but a means to create `room for personal ends', for happiness. He rightly criticizes E. Fromm: freedom is the opportunity to act, not action itself.
Philosophically, freedom has been ferociously contested by the determinists, the defenders of `historical inevitability' (Hegel, Marx, Bacon, Fourier, Comte). The author remarks judiciously that if the world is ruled by determinism, nobody is responsible: there is no free will, no morality, and no justice. Individual choice is an illusion. Determinism represents the world as a prison.
A more brutal kind of determinism is presented by those who believe that there is a final answer, a unique goal, a central principle that governs our life. This principle and its executioners provoked barbarous consequences.
Isaiah Berlin's reflections on liberty are profound and still very actual.
Not to be missed.
Great treatise on the meaning of liberty August 13, 2007
Michael A Neulander (VA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I read this book for a graduate class in Philosophy. Berlin in the book is talking about different understandings on liberty. How do liberals think about liberty? Not only liberals think about liberty, many isms do, there are many different ways to think about liberty. Berlin makes a few distinctions on liberty. In "Two Concepts of Liberty," he distinguishes between political liberty and individual Liberty. Political Liberty, democratic liberty having a vote and participating, like in Greek city-state. No limit on power of the government over any aspect of citizen's life, but a citizen has some control over government through his vote. Not all are citizens, women, slaves, etc. Liberals are interested in individual liberty; choose the activities they want to do. A tension between Political Liberty and Individual Liberty. Political Liberty implies that there is majority rule through the vote. Maybe a majority won't impose on people, but that can change through the majority vote. If you have a system that you set up to insure certain individual rights like the U.S. does you protect certain liberties like the 1st amendment to free speech. These rights are taken away from voting on by the majority and to change them you need a super majority. This takes away Political Liberty, so there is that antagonism between both liberties. Unless you are an anarchist, there are certain functions and liberties that must be given up to the government. The more individual freedoms you keep from government the less value Political Liberty has to citizens the fewer things we get to decide.
The famous concepts Berlin distinguishes between are Positive Liberty and Negative Liberty. 1. Positive Liberty means self-control over your own life. 2. Negative liberty means you are free from interference from other people. Other people can't force you to do something. Positive liberty is self-mastery, self-control. Negative liberty means you are free from interference from other people. Others can't compel you to act in a way you don't want to act. At first these sound like two sides of the same coin. What Berlin points out historically is that people who believe in Positive Liberty have taken it in a very different direction than those that believe in Negative Liberty. What they (Positive Liberty adherents) have done is to infer that from each person you can distinguish between what he or she thinks he or she wants, and what his or her better self or true self would want. Therefore, there is this idea that we all might have certain desires that we want but that they are not expressive of our real essence. An obvious case is an addict who has some part of them that really don't want the drug. Even though they put all their time and energy in getting the drug it might be tempting to think that they really don't want the drug. Once they got the distinction between ordinary desires that you are aware of and the desires that you truly want, then the Positive Liberty people are tempted to say that for someone to really have charge of their life to really have liberty than we have to make sure that they are doing what their true self wants to do, not the self that they are consciously aware of, not the self not the desires that seem to them to be strongest. But what the angels of their better nature want, that's real freedom. Even when the person is protesting that that isn't what they want, if you are making them do what their true self wants really then you are making them do good. Kant would be a supporter of this view.
We have two aspects of human nature. The numeral self and nominal self. The numeral self is our true self and is the basis of morality this is why we are morally obligated to do things because our true self accepts a certain kind of law and imposes it on us. We are obligated to obey it because it is a law our true self chooses even though we may not be consciously aware of it, we may have all kinds of desires pulling us in different directions. We are obligated to do it because it is what our true self chooses. Rousseau is very much in this tradition. He says people can be forced to be free. Historically, this is the direction that many people who believe in Positive Liberty go in.
The Negative liberty people tend to say that other people don't tell them what to do. They could have gone the same route thinking about two kinds of selves, and they could say negative liberty is when your lower self doesn't tell your higher self what to do, but that historically hasn't happened. That is not the kind of liberty they have been thinking about. Liberals generally belong to this kind of negative liberty position. The kind of liberty liberals tend to care about is freedom from other individuals or the government. Free to the extent no one tells you what to do, none of this true self-stuff. You are free if other people can't stop you from doing what you want to do. All the different liberals are going to believe that people should have a significant amount of this kind of (negative), liberty. All the critics of liberalism are not all going to want to take all this kind of liberty away, but they are going to definitely say that liberty is not as important as the liberals think it is and that it ought to be restricted in some significant ways.
Berlin says, once you see how the Positive Liberty idea was developed, it turns out not to have the same kind of tension with Political Liberty that Negative Liberty does. Since, you could always have the view what peoples true selves want can be discovered by a kind of democratic process, so that what the majority votes for is what everyone wants, even the minority, they just didn't really know what they wanted. We all really want what is best for our community, as Rousseau would say.
Recommended reading for anyone interested in philosophy, political science, and history.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 10
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