Isaiah Berlin Research Articles

Metaphor as Method in the Writings of Isaiah Berlin

The conventional approach to Isaiah Berlin's writings has been to treat them discursively, as philosophical texts. While such approaches are insightful, there is more to Berlin's writings than his arguments. Among his literary strategies is a comparative approach that involves the use of metaphors, similes, and analogies. As I will argue, Berlin's use of metaphor constitutes a core component of his work, where his meaning is often suggestive more than precise. Berlin's intention seems to be to exhibit those aspects of experience reflective of uncertainty, where our choices are not determined by necessity. Such an intention ostensibly exhibits his value pluralism, as well as an oft-neglected sensitivity to the forms of language. By resorting to metaphors Berlin accomplishes several things: he shows how the intelligibility of experience is partially imagistic, he illustrates how meaning can be structured comparatively but nondiscursively, and he exemplifies the importance of these things for decision making.

Thinking and Acting Together and Apart: Work on Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin

Thinking and Acting Together and Apart: Work on Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin and Feminism: Liberty and Value Pluralism

Isaiah Berlin’s account of freedom is more useful for feminists than is generally recognized, especially when seen in the context of his value pluralism. Focusing on the work of Nancy Hirschmann and Sharon Krause, I argue, first, that Berlin’s concept of negative liberty can be used to resist patriarchy when his notion of the ‘conditions’ of negative liberty is taken into account. Second, positive liberty is also useful to feminists, but Berlin does not, as some feminist (and other) writers suppose, simply reject positive liberty; on the contrary, he sees it as a fundamental human value of great importance. Third, Berlin’s value pluralism makes a crucial contribution. It explains why he distinguishes negative liberty from its conditions and why he does not reject positive liberty as a value. It also explains how feminists can see the value in both negative and positive liberty without trying, paradoxically, to fit them both into a single concept. Further, my liberal-pluralist extension of Berlin’s pluralism locates all these insights within a complex but coherent political outlook which provides a sympathetic resource for feminism.

Negative and Positive Freedom: The Case of Turkey

The meaning of the concept of freedom has constantly changed in history. In Ancient Greece, freedom referred to making a choice and doing something willingly; Hannah Arendt conceptualized it as a necessary discovery made by people in historical periods when the conditions for manifesting the idea of searching the same concept within oneself as an action were insufficient. Today, the concept of freedom has evolved into a dual meaning as negative and positive, shaped by the expressions of Isaiah Berlin. In this sense, the freedoms that we call classical freedoms, which the individual acquires because of being human, without considering the differences in religion, language, gender, and race, are evaluated in the context of negative freedoms. The basis of this understanding is the absence of pressure and coercion from the environment in which the individual lives rather than the creation of surplus value in the individual by external influence. However, with the deterioration of the freedom concept, the gains included in negative freedom have become a problem that the state needs to solve. The need for state intervention in creating a positive effect on the individual has emerged. The concept of positive freedom that emerged in this sense reveals itself in a structure that requires more than the intervention of others; it requires that individuals have control over their selves and that they have an active role in this dominance. Proponents of positive freedom argue that freedom means the individual dominates their own passions, desires, and all obstacles to self-realization. In order to achieve this, the state must firmly stand by the individual regarding collective freedoms. In this context, since the discussions on the concept of rights and freedoms in Turkey spread to negative and positive areas of freedom, this paper aims to show that presenting the concept with a single definition of freedom would be challenging. The re-reading has shown that the rights and freedoms in Turkey are derived from the concept of both positive and negative individual rights. However, it has been observed that the framers of the Constitution limited the fundamental rights and freedoms based on the idea that there should be a limit to the individual’s rights and covered it in the necessary sections in the Constitution to ensure that the fundamental rights and freedoms could not be abused.

Relativism in the British and French Enlightenment

Abstract: Long neglected, the history of relativism has been the topic of a number of surveys in recent years. These studies, however, have been ambivalent on whether relativism really existed in the eighteenth century. Following Isaiah Berlin’s contention that the eighteenth-century witnessed the emergence of pluralism rather than relativism, historians have concluded that the Enlightenment at best prefigured nineteenth-century developments in relativistic thinking. In response, this article argues that relativism was a recognizable thesis in eighteenth-century Britain and France. Its principles and consequences were frequently articulated, either to be rejected or defended, by a wide range of philosophers and imaginative authors, from Ralph Cudworth and Ann Radcliffe to Julien Offray de la Mettrie and Alberto Radicati. This neglected chapter in the history of relativism, I argue, matters for several strands in eighteenth-century studies, as it inflected Enlightenment reflections on aesthetic and moral values, human hierarchies, and cross-cultural relations.

Educational Autonomy and the Holocaust: A Comparative Study of Teachers’ Freedom in European Narratives

ABSTRACT While Holocaust memory underscores the significance of freedom, the actual enactment of freedom varies across different countries, posing a vital question for educating about the Holocaust. How do educators navigate this dissonance? Do they serve as conduits for government perspectives, or do they exercise their teacher autonomy? As part of a comparative study examining shifts in Holocaust memory in Europe from 2020 to 2022, my colleagues and I conducted in-depth interviews with 75 Holocaust educators from Poland, Hungary, Germany, and England, inviting them to share their life stories and professional experiences. This article delves into a recurring theme found within these educators’ narratives: the appreciation of freedom and choice. To interpret the significance of this theme, I integrate educational theories on ‘difficult history’ and teacher autonomy with theories of psychological reactance and the freedom quotient (FQ). I draw on Isaiah Berlin's concepts of negative and positive liberty to bridge the personal and societal dimensions. The resulting model provides a framework for the study's findings. As expected, teachers from Poland and Hungary felt their negative liberty was constrained, while those from Germany and England reported a greater degree of autonomy. More surprisingly, limited negative liberty led many interviewees from Poland and Hungary to find powerful ways to express their inner freedom. These included resistance to authority, activism within and beyond the classroom, and the application of diverse and creative pedagogical approaches in EaH. The interviews also pointed to a connection between higher levels of negative liberty in Germany and England, and a plurality of content and goals in EaH within these countries. In light of these findings, I offer policy and educational recommendations.

No Such Thing as Free Speech? Performativity, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in the UK

AbstractThe relationship between academic freedom and freedom of speech features prominently in public and political discussions concerning the role of universities in Western liberal democracies. Recently, these debates have attracted increased attention, owing in part to media framing of a ‘free speech crisis’, especially in UK and US universities. One type of response is to regulate academic expression through legislation, such as the UK’s 2023 Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. This article offers a critical analysis of the assumptions concerning the performativity of speech in this kind of legal intervention. It extends Judith Butler’s discussion of the concept of ‘harmful speech’ as reported by Butler (Excitable speech: a politics of the performative, Routledge Classics, London, 1997) to conceptualize speech-acts as performative not only when it comes to populations, but also when it comes to institutions. Reconceptualizing universities as producing as well as being constituted by speech-acts, the article argues that the effects of free speech legislation need to be considered in the context of the transformation of universities and other political actors (including governments and student unions) in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. It argues that legal enforcement of free speech at universities further obscures the distinction between negative and positive liberties identified by Isaiah Berlin (Two Concepts of Liberty, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1958), and considers this shift as part of the reconfiguration of political ontology in late modernity.

Vrednosni pluralizam u romanima Crni psi i Subota Ijana Makjuana

Ian McEwan, an influential and provocative British novelist and short-story writer, has addressed a variety of issues, distinguishing himself as a socially and politically engaged author. This paper explores contemporary liberalism as depicted in two of McEwan's novels, Black Dogs and Saturday, both charged with moral complexity. The analysis is approached from the perspective of value pluralism, which recognises the plurality of morally correct yet incompatible and incommensu-rable principles or values. These values may conflict with each other, but since all are correct, the conflicts remain unresolved. It is the author's belief that the novels highlight value pluralism through characters who, while navigating a pluralist environment, disclose the challenges and limitations of liberal democracies. The theoretical context this paper relies on is based on ideas of Isaiah Berlin and his notion of value pluralism.

The Definition, Methods and Other Related Issues of Intellectual History ——Also on the History of Martin Luther's Thoughts in China

Intellectual history, tracing the history of human thought, is the understanding and presentation of various thoughts and concepts that have appeared in human history. The Chinese term 思想史 is translated from the English terms “intellectual history” and “history of ideas”, which were once used interchangeably, especially in the 20th century, since at least two reasons: the definition of “idea” and the history of the development of academic disciplines. The use of English terms in confusion is undoubtedly a reflection of the phenomenon of different opinions on the definition of the connotation of the intellectual history. By enumerating the explanations about the meaning of intellectual history of Collingwood, Lovejoy, Isaiah Berlin, Skinner and many other famous, not only to show the ambiguity of what is intellectual history, but also to seek uniformities among the different definitions. It is that intellectual history points to the spiritual creation and experience of human beings, and can guide people to discover and reach the most real place of history. Based on their respective understanding on intellectual history, historians use various research methods to pursue the thoughts and concepts in the course of human history from the perspectives of pure history, philosophical history, social history, etc., in order to find something valuable and meaningful. On the basis of sorting out and analyzing the basic problems of intellectual history, this paper further illustrates the connotation and methods of intellectual history by taking the study of the history of Martin Luther and his thoughts in China as an example.

Foreword to the Ukrainian Translation of Isaiah Berlin's Article "The Purpose of Philosophy"

The foreword focuses on the life of Isaiah Berlin, his interests, as well as the article “The Purpose of Philosophy”, which is translated into Ukrainian for the first time. Isaiah Berlin's metaphilosophical reflections on philosophy are important for understanding what is the place of philosophy in the system of sciences, what tasks philosophy can solve. This article also explains the value of philosophy for society and man.

The Purpose of Philosophy (Translated by Dmytro Sepetyi)

The Ukrainian translation of Isaiah Berlin's essay "The Purpose of Philosophy".

Isaiah Berlin and International Relations

ABSTRACT Isaiah Berlin is a classic name in political theory, but does he have anything to teach us about international relations? In the Cold War he was a realist disciple of the containment doctrine, indeed a more hawkish container than his friend George Kennan, at least until he saw what was happening in Vietnam. In the aftermath of the Cold War, confronted with an outburst of resurgent nationalism, he seemed more like a utopian idealist, dreaming with Herder of a world of cultural harmony. But that dream is undermined by his own value pluralism, which points towards something more rigorous and interesting, a case for liberal internationalism in tension with its realist rival. From a value-pluralist point of view, realism tends towards moral monism, and liberal internationalism is normatively the more balanced view. However, liberals should still take seriously the central realist insight that security is an especially important value in the anarchic international context.

The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin by Johnny Lyons (review)

The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin by Johnny Lyons (review)

Populism: A Berlinian Critique

How would Isaiah Berlin assess the current wave of authoritarian populism? The question is worth asking both for the light it casts on populism and for what it tells us about Berlin. In several respects, his view of populism is ambivalent: he is surprisingly sympathetic to the Russian populists of the nineteenth century, sharing their concern for genuine democracy and their reservations about elite leadership; he is especially troubled by the possibility of rule by scientific experts, although he does not reject elite judgement entirely; and his assessment of successful political judgement is not as clearly opposed to the kind of charismatic leadership favoured by many populists (for example, the leadership of Donald Trump) as one might expect. It is only in his treatment of individual liberty and value pluralism that Berlin provides anti-populists with more emphatic arguments, especially when his value pluralism is developed as “liberal pluralism.” Overall, the application of Berlin’s ideas to populism highlights some of his familiar themes but also shows how his work can be extended in interesting ways. In particular, his sympathy with the Russian populists suggests that he is more of a democrat than is often assumed, and the application to populism of his famous thesis about the dangers of positive liberty can be extended to negative liberty too.

VALIDITY NOW

ABSTRACTThis review essay offers an extended analysis of Martin Jay's Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History, highlighting Jay's emphasis on the need for intellectual historians to address the question of the present‐day validity of ideas. In this volume of essays on twentieth‐century philosophy and historiography, Jay contends that the perennial tension between historicism and truth value is integral to intellectual history; however, it is establishing the latter that is the most crucial, and perhaps most difficult, part of our practice. In thirteen separate but related pieces, Jay explores subjects such as the common ground shared by Quentin Skinner and Hayden White, the “styles” of thought represented by Walter Benjamin and Isaiah Berlin, and recent French theories of the historical sublime and the “advent” of ideas. This review essay discusses these pieces and compares Jay's essay on historical truthfulness to ancient rhetorical discussions of the many forms of lying about history. Its final section deals with the ways in which insights from the history of science might help us to connect genesis and validity by examining the practices of idea‐ or knowledge‐making, and it argues that validity is also, and perhaps most importantly, something we need to embrace in our roles as teachers. What makes ideas valid is the next generation of thinkers, and to make wise and well‐informed life choices, they need to have a full range of older and newer ideas about the human condition from which to choose.

Liberalism and the problem of domination

We can distinguish two liberal paradigms that stand in opposition to each other. Liberalism as non-domination seeks to eliminate identities resulting from domination and oppression and hindering the emancipation of individuals. Liberalism as recognition holds that ‘the idea of a human world without identities makes no sense’ (Appiah) and considers identities to have their source in individual liberty and to provide the grounds for pluralism. The two liberal paradigms come to largely different results regarding the role of the state and civil society. The paradigm of non-domination tends to enforce individual rights, if necessary against a hostile cultural and religious context. The paradigm of recognition defends mostly individual liberties, if necessary at the expense of certain individual rights. Liberalism stands here in front of a major dilemma: Either it protects individual rights in the sense of freedom as non-domination, or it defends individual liberties in Isaiah Berlin's tradition of negative liberty– in too many cases and in too many parts of the world, liberalism, understood in the terms presented here, cannot have it both ways. This review article argues that the liberal paradigms of non-domination and recognition are complementary; liberalism is about both recognition and non-domination. Following policy recommendation can be drawn: (1) Democratic institutions (parliament, political parties and constitutional courts) and democratic rights (right to vote, right of assembly and freedom of speech) are most efficient in fighting domination. (2) Although social identities are not fixed and open to change, they cannot be engineered by the state or civil society organizations and grow out of some form of social consensus. (3) The consensus around identities takes place within the pluralist public and civil sphere of a community. (4) While the support in the development of individual capabilities by the state is effective against domination, also history and collective memory help to overcome the traumatic experience of domination. (5) Systemic transformation requires the support from below, notably from the civil society, and is based on individual liberties.

Theoretical Reviewing Of Overlapping Consensus In The Context Of Abortion Debate

Since the beginning of the late modern era, modern constitutions have been trying to keep both group
 rights as minority rights and individual rights. But, in some cases, it is still ambiguous if an action or a
 phenomenon must refer to individual rights or group rights. Abortion discussions, with regard to political
 rights, are one example of these ambiguous cases. In this context, whereas Liberal view tends to regard
 abortion as individual rights of a woman, Communitarian view can be against it by pointing out the right
 to life and this case may lead to a kind of liberal constitutional crises. This article gains importance as such
 constitutional crises still emerge even nowadays. John Rawls’s theory of overlapping consensus in Political
 Liberalism tries to solve these political conflicts that emerged in liberal constitutions by prioritizing public
 reason. This article conceptionally aims to examine Rawls’s theory in terms of prioritization and value
 relativity in abortion discussions. The method of article is hermeneutics. In order to extend the universe of
 the discussion, some important thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Isaiah Berlin and John Gray, who have
 related studies on the topic, were included. In conclusion, it is asserted that Rawl’s theory is weak both
 practically and theoretically as to the principle of utilitarianism violates the rights of communitarians.

The hedgehog, fox, and quasi-hedgehog approaches in Isaiah Berlin’s, David McLellan’s, and G. Stedman Jones’ Marx research

Isaiah Berlin divides thinkers into two categories—monist hedgehogs and the pluralist foxes; for him, Marx belongs to the first category. According to such distinction, the research approaches can be classified into the hedgehog approach and the fox approach, the former highlighting the unique essence of the objects and the latter striving to display various characteristics of the objects. Berlin, McLellan, and Stedman Jones are famous for their research on Marx, which relates to the composition of intellectual biography rather than to other scholarly projects and genres. Berlin’s research represents the hedgehog approach since he summarizes Marx’s thought as a monist conception of history, while McLellan’s research exemplifies the fox approach by covering multiple facets of Marx’s life and thought. Although both Berlin and McLellan begin to study Marx because of their interest in the hedgehog approach, Berlin adopts the hedgehog approach despite his opposition to it, and McLellan employs the fox approach while showing a great appreciation of the hedgehog one. Whether to hold fast to their own theoretical position or not is the crucial reason for which they study Marx and even intellectual history using different approaches. Accordingly, Stedman Jones’ Marx research embodies the quasi-hedgehog approach as it sees more facets of Marx than the hedgehog approach but is less comprehensive than the fox approach. In fact, the hedgehog (quasi-hedgehog) approach and the fox approach have their advantages and disadvantages, and the purpose of reflection is to clarify the scope of application for each.

“Freedom In”: A Daoist Response to Isaiah Berlin

“Freedom In”: A Daoist Response to Isaiah Berlin

어떤 자유?

The aim of this work is to shed light on the ideal of “another freedom” expressed by Pushkin in the poem “From Pindemonte” in the context of modern concepts of freedom. It specifically intends to argue against the view of A. Etkind, who understands “another freedom” as equivalent to Isaiah Berlin's “negative freedom.” Whether Etkind's view is valid is examined in the context of the debate over Berlin's theory of freedom in modern political philosophy. Pushkin, who belongs to liberals, shares with Berlin the position of anti-rationalism and anti-utopianism. Modern republican critique of Berlin's liberal view of freedom can also be applied to Pushkin's political ideal of “enlightened despotism” in his later years. As such, there are several valid reasons to regard Pushkin's “another freedom” as the same paradigm as Berlin's “negative freedom.” However, Pushkin's position is different from Berlin's value pluralism. Pushkin's “another freedom” is not limited to “negative freedom.” In Pushkin's poem, both ‘autonomy’ and ‘authenticity’ of “positive freedom” are embodied. In a strict sense, Pushkin's “another freedom” differs from Western liberals' understanding of freedom. “Another freedom” that Pushkin wants is ‘anarchist individualism’ in its essence. The fundamentally different attributes of Pushkin's “another freedom” and Berlin's “negative freedom” in pursuit of the universal ideal of freedom of private life raise the issue of cultural differences in understanding the concept of freedom, which will be discussed in another study.