Isaiah Berlin Research Articles

A objeção de Popper e Berlin à tese do relativismo cultural

PROBLEM: The problematic of this article covers the theoretical position of Karl R. Popper and Isaiah Berlin on the thesis of cultural relativism. OBJECTIVES: This study aims to present Karl Popper's and Isaiah Berlin's counterpoints to the cultural relativism thesis, mainly by examining the texts The Myth of Context and The Search for the Ideal. METHODOLOGY: Using the deductive method, first Popper's theoretical position on the thesis of cultural relativism will be analyzed. After that, Berlin's theoretical position will be analyzed. Finally, both positions will be analyzed in exemplary cases. RESULT: The analysis carried out allows us to criticize the thesis of cultural relativism, according to which any rational discussion is only possible with the sharing of common contexts. It advances by proposing the need for confrontation between different cultures and contexts and the use of in the critique of relativism. CONCLUSIONS: As a conclusion of the paper, according to relativism, rational discussion would only be possible if individuals shared common contexts, including cultural ones. Popper, on the contrary, affirms that our civilization comes precisely from the confrontation of different cultures and, consequently, from the confrontation of different contexts. In the same vein, Isaiah Berlin suggests methodological pluralism in the struggle against relativism; collisions, for him, are part of the essence of values. Berlin advises to criticize those who suggest that these contradictions will be resolved in some perfect world.

Agency versus Insurgency

Agency versus Insurgency

The problem of value pluralism. Isaiah Berlin and beyond

The problem of value pluralism. Isaiah Berlin and beyond

Rousseau i Tocqueville: przeciwstawne wizje republikańskiego wychowania

It is legitimate to speak about two philosophies of education as presented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The first of the philosophies was elucidated in Emil, or on Education and its aim was to provide principles governing the process of upbringing of the man. Philo-sophical grounds for the second one were comprised in The Social Contract, however description of the education itself is delivered by Considerations on the Government of Poland. This concept refers to the civic education, education of the political community mem-ber. Alexis de Tocqueville depicts vision of education that varies fundamentally from the both grounded in Rousseau’s writing. Toc-queville’s vision stays at odds with the philosophy given in Emil, because it concerns civic aspects of the education. It is also not com-pliant with the concept stemming from Considerations, due to the fact that it stresses the role of other than state subjects in the edu-cation. The article comments on all three concepts of education out-lined above and finally relates them to the concept of positive and negative liberty provided by Isaiah Berlin.

Disembodiment, anonymity and oppressive freedom: An ethical enlightenment for virtual ontology

Information communication technology has introduced a platform through which human beings can connect with each other without being physically present. This feature stretches beyond geographical boundaries and places human beings in the same virtual community. Virtuality is not only a limitless, timeless, non-tangible space, but also disembodies human beings. Consequently, this disembodiment conforms to the limitless nature of virtuality, allowing human beings to experience an ontology that is not restricted by physicality. In this state of disembodiment, virtuality gives users the option of navigating the space anonymously. In addition, this feature of a hidden identity further perpetuates the use of freedom in a limitless space, often allowing human beings to conduct actions they would never conduct as embodied beings. In fact, the combination of disembodiment and anonymity augments the limitless nature of virtuality. With no identity, the user can easily be detached from accountability and responsibility. Philosophically, this raises existential and ethical concerns which this article aims to address. The methodological approach that this article will use is a critical approach, which acknowledges that social relations and phenomena are not exempted from challenges. T. H. Green’s rendition of negative and positive freedoms, made famous by Isaiah Berlin, will be used as a theoretical framework. The former freedom will be useful to analyse the freedom used in the context of virtual ontology, while the latter will be used as a way forward for both the users and designers of social media platforms.

Isaiah Berlin and the Animal Instinct

Between Aristotle and Hegel, none of the major Western philosophers were married. Is abstract thinking, at its highest, incompatible with the messiness of everyday life? At the age of nineteen, Isaiah Berlin said he was ‘vowed to eternal celibacy’. Was there a connection between his sexual abstinence and his choice of analytical philosophy as a career? During World War II he fell in love with the gentile Patricia de Bendern; this frustrating affair coincided with Berlin’s shift from abstract logic to the history of ideas. In 1956 he took a Jewish bride, Aline Halban. His personal history reflects difficulties in choosing between endogamy and exogamy, Zionism and the diaspora, negative and positive liberty.

In defence of a liberal realism and a realist political ethics: On Edward Hall’s Value, Conflict, and Order

This review argues that Edward Hall’s outstanding new book on the political thought of three outstanding 20th-century thinkers – Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams – has three major substantial contributions to contemporary realism: it offers convincing realist interpretations of their oeuvres, extracts inspiring new ideas from their works for future theorizing and provides powerful arguments in defence of a liberal realist position. However, given Hall’s expertise in Williams’ thought, it might be surprising that the chapters about Hampshire seem the most interesting and most convincing parts of the book because they address some of the most fundamental issues of realism in an especially concise and well-written form.

The American and the Clan

The Henry James novel The American (1877) is analyzed on the basis of a conflict between the twoforms of liberty, which Isaiah Berlin in the end of the 1950s designated as negative and positive. Theconcept of negative freedom is in this interpretation of the novel connected to a contrast between thestate and the clan. With starting point in Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order (2011),and Mark S Weiner in The Rule of the Clan (2013), modern rule of law is in the analysis of the novelregarded as something radically different from clan society.Based on an understanding of the modern state as a guarantee for individual autonomy and liberty, inBerlin’s negative meaning, James depicts in The American, the problems of maintaining liberty, in thenegative sense, in a community organised around the clan.In the novel, the American protagonist Christopher Newman with his lack of prejudices represent forhis French fiancée Claire de Cintréa possible way to freedom. What Newman does, is to offer Claire theopportunity to move from the French aristocracy to the economically strong Americanbourgeoisie—from a kind of feudalism to capitalism. The proposed move coincides with thedevelopmental curve of the novel, which with respect to Claire runs from clan to state.In striking contrast to Newman’s optimized sort of freedom, where neither any internalized norms norany economic limitations prohibit the protagonist from acting in the way that he desires, Claire is thedaughter of a family that represents the old world, with all its limitations and restrictions on negativeliberty. In a highly concrete manner she is prohibited from acting as she wants. This is emphasized inthe question of who to marry.The analysis connects Claire’s family to the ultramontanists and legitimists circles of 19th centuryParisian aristocracy. The terms refer to the ultra-conservative and fiercely anti-liberal movements that,after the French revolution, turned against the modern state power that allegedly forced on the French Catholics secular values.Legitimism and ultramontanism are in the novel intimately connected to maintaining an organisationaround the clan. In contrast to the clan, rule of law, democracy and individual freedom is seen asconsequences of the framework of the modern, liberal state.

Иной взгляд на Россию. Письма из «русского архи­ва»

The article presents previously unpublished letters written by Andrzej Walicki (15.05.1930–21.08.2020), a worldly renowned Polish historian of Russian thought, to Professor Michael Maslin, the head of the Department of the History of Russian Philoso­phy at Lomonosov Moscow State University. Walicki’s letters (1997–2019) together with books, articles and other materials formed his gift to the abovementioned Department. Walicki himself referred to these materials as “my small Russian archive”. The letters are written in excellent Russian and require no additional revision or stylistic improvement. This publication retains the letters in their full originality including some phrases of Pol­ish origin. These unique epistles reveal Walicki’s individual creative worldview. The let­ters contain new information about the details of Walicki’s biography and his work in Poland, Russia, USA, Great Britain, Japan, Australia. The letters provide a unique per­spective on the “flow of ideas”, which was Walicki’s personal conception of understand­ing and interpretation of the Russian intellectual history from the Enligh­tenment through the Russian religious and philosophical Renaissance of the twentieth century. The letters discuss his interactions with Sergei Gessen, Isaiah Berlin, Leszhek Kolakowski, Czeslaw Milosz, George Kline, James Scanlan, Leonard Shapiro, Martin Malia, Richard Pipes, Nicholas Riasanovsky, James Billington etc. A special attention is paid to the critique of the Western and especially Polish Russophobia based on various superstitions and stereo­types about Russia as well on a lack of knowledge, various kinds of bias and blunders. Of considerable interest are Walitsky’s expert assessments of the ge­neral state of the scien­tific historiography of Russian philosophy, its fundamental diffe­rences from Soviet dog­matic Marxism, of which the Polish scientist was a consistent critic.

Vico and China by Daniel Canaris

Reviewed by: Vico and China by Daniel Canaris Harry Liebersohn Daniel Canaris, Vico and China ( Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 2020). In the series Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment. Pp. 296. £65.00 paper. Seeking the sources of modern scientific thought, Ernst Cassirer in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29) turned first to theories of language—and, within the history of linguistic theory, he gave special pride of place to the writings of Giambattista Vico as the forerunner of later theories of language. From the relative obscurity of his home in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Naples, Vico pioneered a philosophy of history that has been cited during the past century by an impressive cluster of commentators, including Cassirer, Benedetto Croce, Edmund Wilson, Isaiah Berlin, Erich Auerbach, Jonathan Israel, and Edward Said—all of whom, in different ways, looked to him as the founder of something leading up to the thought of their own time, possibly the Counter-Enlightenment or radical Enlightenment or a culturally diverse cosmopolitanism. Vico has become a favorite choice for twentieth and twenty-first century genealogies of the present. In his erudite study of Vico and China, Daniel Canaris calls into question such appropriations of Vico for later intellectual movements. Instead he follows up leads that contextualize Vico in his own time and place. Canaris sharply defines his monograph around Vico's changing assessments of China; within this topic his choice of context is Vico's relationship to the theological debates of his time, especially those swirling around the Jesuits and their enemies. Without being wholly dismissive, Canaris's introduction criticizes recent post-colonial studies, as well as scholarship invoking the Enlightenment or Counter-Enlightenment, as having lost sight of dimensions of Vico's thought that emerge when it is taken more seriously on its own terms. Naples, writes Canaris, was a center of transmission of knowledge about China. As such, it could not avoid the polemics surrounding the Jesuits and their approach to Chinese missionary work. Their policy of accommodationism, closely associated with Matteo Ricci, took as point of departure the notion of a shared natural philosophy guiding both pre-Christian thinkers in the West and Confucius; Jesuits also argued for tolerance toward Confucian rites, which they maintained were purely civil and did not interfere with the work of conversion. The arguments for and against these Jesuit positions culminated in "three authoritative papal declarations in 1704, 1715 and 1742" (18–19); they were reinforced by the founding of the Collegio de Cinesi in the late 1720s by an opponent of the Jesuits, Matteo Ripa, in the late 1720s. According to Canaris, Vico had good contacts on both sides of the pro- and anti-Jesuit controversies. His monograph traces how Vico's views on China took shape through his initial attraction to, and later repudiation of, Jesuit writings, a process Canaris relates to a wider campaign to delegitimize Jesuit thought. Canaris's book is organized with close attention to the changes over time in Vico's view of China. Chapters one to three examine the highly favorable view of Chinese civilization in Vico's study of law, the Diritto Universale (Universal Right, 1720–22). As chief sources for his understanding of China, Vico had at his disposal works that included both Ricci's diaries and his dialogue between a Confucian and a European scholar, On the True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (1603). Canaris praises Ricci's writings, and more generally those of the early Jesuit missionaries, for their nuanced portrayal of China, noting Ricci's special admiration for both Confucius as the equal of any Western pagan philosopher and China's political [End Page 742] system, with its meritocratic selection of mandarins. Another source that shaped Vico's understanding of China was a Jesuit response to the order's detractors in the form of a monumental translation of neo-Confucian works, the Confucius Sinarum philosophus (1687). The compilers of this work, according to Canaris, went beyond Ricci and tried to present Confucian texts as part of "a coherent philosophical system" (114). With an impressive body of Jesuit works as guide, how did Vico initially account for the ethical and political excellence of...

The Culture of Political Despair

Reflections on Seyla Benhabib’s a. Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.

Mencius and Berlin on Freedom

Isaiah Berlin argues for negative liberty and criticizes positive liberty as a kind of fake liberty which may lead to the problem of despotism. However, for Mencius, in order to confront a corrupted social system, one has to be a great man which exactly implies the idea of positive liberty. This paper argues that while both negative and positive liberties are implicated in Mencius’ thought, Mencius’ main concern is positive liberty implied in the idea of a great man; and the ground of his implicit acceptance of negative liberty is different from Berlin’s. I also explore how Mencius’ philosophy can respond to Berlin’s criticism of positive liberty. This study attempts to evaluate positive liberty, and to affirm its significance in the light of Mencius’ philosophy.

How did negative liberty become a liberal ideal?

ABSTRACT This article aims to situate Isaiah Berlin’s influential conceptualization of the liberal idea of liberty in negative terms in the history of political ideologies, thus contributing to the understanding of the development of liberalism as an ideological tradition. More specifically, the article contributes to the understanding of two central themes in the ideological history of negative liberty. First, it shows that negative liberty has repeatedly served as an ideological weapon against radical democratic politics, while also pointing to an important shift in the manner of its employment: between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, we argue, negative liberty had turned from a deflationary device associated with excessive democracy into a moderate ideal endangered by totalitarian democracy. The second theme that we highlight and account for is the late development of the association of the liberal conception of liberty with the idea of negativity.

The many shades of light: Isaiah Berlin, the Counter-Enlightenment, and the Haskalah

ABSTRACT Intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin saw a totalitarian and dogmatic tendency within the Enlightenment tradition which he called “optimistic monism,” that is, the idea that personal freedom and cultural differences have to be sacrificed for universal goals and the progress of human perfection. Thus, he turned to the proponents of the “Counter-Enlightenment” in order to render the negative traits of enlightened universalism visible. Although the Haskalah would have served well as an example of a pluralistic critique of enlightened monism, it is quite surprising that Berlin hardly wrote anything about the Jewish Enlightenment or its contemporary critics. This paper argues that this is due to a misinterpretation of Moses Mendelssohn as well as to a specific Jewish version of Berlin’s own Counter-Enlightenment, which connects to his Zionism as an answer to the failure of assimilation.

God’s Monism: A Further Reply to Beata Polanowska-Sygulska

Against Beata Polanowksa-Sygulska (BP-S), I insist on the incompatibility between the pluralism of comprehensive world-views and belief in the monist, universalist tenets of the principal world religions, noting that God the Father and God the Son were both monists. I argue that my position is entailed by Isaiah Berlin’s rejection of the unique truth of any one comprehensive outlook, and that both Berlin and BP-S confuse toleration with acceptance. I reject the charges that my position is monistic, and that I give insufficient attention to conflict within individual values, which can in any case be treated as conflict between values.

In Search of the Decent Society: Isaiah Berlin and Raymond Aron on Liberty

ABSTRACT Jeremy Waldron has argued that Berlin ignored the importance of institutions and constitutions and worked with an impoverished conception of social and political design. Political structures, legal and political institutions, constitutional design, mechanisms of representation and the rule of law: all this remained untouched by Berlin, who seemed, in Waldron’s opinion, largely uninterested in the actual political institutions of liberal society. In this essay, I argue that what may be missing in Berlin—close and sustained attention to, and interest in, institutions and social context—can be found in the works of his prominent contemporary, Raymond Aron (1905-1983), who also wrote about liberty during the Cold War. As such, Aron’s An Essay on Liberty can and should be read as a complement to Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.”

German Idealism and Tragic Maturity

ABSTRACT Isaiah Berlin viewed value conflict as tragic, as it requires the sacrifice of some values for others. It is a mark of maturity, he thought, to accept this tragic truth. This view raises certain conceptual problems that can be attributed to Berlin’s subtle departures from the German authors (Kant, Schelling, and Hegel) who originated the doctrine of tragic maturity—figures who had, in turn, transformed the earlier idea that enlightenment is a natural and morally neutral process of maturation. Kant moralized the notion of enlightened maturation by portraying it as contingent on our courage to bring it about, such that we are responsible if we remain immature. This theory of maturity rested on the idea, which would have been uncongenial to Berlin, that we are intelligible creatures inhabiting the noumenal realm, duty bound to exercise moral freedom, even though this duty surpasses our ability to carry it out, as we also inhabit the phenomenal realm, where our natural inclinations tend to make us resist laboring to fulfill our duties. However, according to Kant, the metaphysical limitations we face as individuals can be transcended to an extent, allowing us to make moral progress as a species—so long as we do not lazily persist in our immaturity. Schelling built upon Kant’s notion of freedom to bring out the tragic and heroic dimension of individual moral life, where the tragedy is our doomed but noble struggle to exert moral freedom in a world of natural necessity. Hegel turned these metaphysical notions in a more recognizably Berlinian direction by extending Schelling’s account of tragic conflict to conflicts of values. But he identified the ultimate tragic hero as an ethical totality that enacts eternal justice by reconciling such conflicts, while Berlin attempted to repudiate both the notion of a historical totality and the possibility of reconciliation on empirical grounds, even though these are metaphysical claims. Thus, Berlin asserted the absolute, trans-historical necessity of tragic value conflict, while the evidence for this assertion was merely his personal conviction that in his particular time and place, specific values were, as a matter of empirical fact, tragically irreconcilable. In this manner he illicitly portrayed Cold War value pluralists (such as himself) as courageously accepting the tragic inevitability of value conflict, while Marxists, the legatees of Hegel and thus German Idealism, immaturely shrank from this reality by embracing the fantasy of total reconciliation.

Paternalism, Individualism, and the Politics of Maturity

ABSTRACT We must, Isaiah Berlin argues, make tragic tradeoffs as we navigate the clash of incommensurable and irreconcilable values and ends of modernity. To deny this is to succumb to a politics of immaturity, and to the totalitarian temptation. The twentieth century taught that to resist final-solution fantasies, we must resist the allure, if not reject the value, of positive liberty, the liberty of self-mastery and self-rule. Two decades in, has the twenty-first century taught a different lesson? Have we learned that negative liberty, liberty from rule, with its antipaternalistic ethic of ultra-individualism, harbors its own politics of immaturity, and a demagogic temptation? I argue that this is the more frequent, if less fatal, threat to human dignity and decency today, and that we therefore ought to rebalance the scales in the tragic tradeoff of positive for negative liberty.

Two Cheers for “Two Concepts”: Isaiah Berlin’s Skeptical, Tragic Liberalism

ABSTRACT Returning to Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” offers a defense of liberal democracy that can help us come to terms with its limits, as well as the implicit tradeoffs that are an inescapable feature of politics in a liberal democracy. While critics of Berlin are right to note his neglect of Enlightenment constitutionalism, his skeptical liberalism is illuminated by comparative constitutional law, where we see how different constitutional regimes balance different values—such as democracy, liberty, and equality—in different ways that are attuned to the particulars of place and history that both Berlin and critics of liberalism insist are so important.

What (If Anything) Is Wrong with Positive Liberty?

ABSTRACT Isaiah Berlin’s criticisms of positive liberty are often read as mere artefacts of his Cold War context. But are they good criticisms? This article evaluates Berlin’s three main worries about positive liberty—the inner-citadel worry, the moralization worry, and the tyranny worry. I find that while they may be reasonable worries to have about any concept of liberty, they are not compelling criticisms of positive liberty in particular.