Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty [Paperback]

Isaiah Berlin (Author), Henry Hardy (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 27, 2003

Isaiah Berlin's celebrated radio lectures on six formative anti-liberal thinkers were broadcast by the BBC in 1952. They are published here for the first time, fifty years later. They comprise one of Berlin's earliest and most convincing expositions of his views on human freedom and on the history of ideas--views that later found expression in such famous works as "Two Concepts of Liberty," and were at the heart of his lifelong work on the Enlightenment and its critics. Working with BBC transcripts and Berlin's annotated drafts, Henry Hardy has recreated these lectures, which consolidated the forty-three-year-old Berlin's growing reputation as a man who could speak about intellectual matters in an accessible and involving way.

In his lucid examination of sometimes complex ideas, Berlin demonstrates that a balanced understanding and a resilient defense of human liberty depend on learning both from the errors of freedom's alleged defenders and from the dark insights of its avowed antagonists. This book throws light on the early development of Berlin's most influential ideas and supplements his already published writings with fuller treatments of Helvétius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, and Saint-Simon, with the ultra-conservative Maistre bringing up the rear. These thinkers gave to freedom a new dimension of power--power that, Berlin argues, has historically brought about less, not more, individual liberty.

These lectures show Berlin at his liveliest and most torrentially spontaneous, testifying to his talents as a teacher of rare brilliance and impact. Listeners tuned in expectantly each week to the hour-long broadcasts and found themselves mesmerized by Berlin's astonishingly fluent extempore style. One listener, a leading historian of ideas who was then a schoolboy, was to recount that the lectures "excited me so much that I sat, for every talk, on the floor beside the wireless, taking notes." This excitement is at last recreated here for all to share.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Isaiah Berlin lectures collected in this volume were originally aired on BBC radio in 1952. They appear here in print for the first time, thanks to editor Henry Hardy, who produced these fine essays from BBC transcripts and Berlin's own notes. It is perhaps better to read Berlin than hear him; as Hardy points out in his introduction, the late thinker had the unfortunate habit of speaking rapidly. A contemporary once said he was "the only man who pronounces 'epistemological' as one syllable." Yet they are a joy to have in any form, as Berlin is a clear and crisp communicator of ideas. Political theory is not always the most engaging subject matter, but on these pages Berlin makes it accessible as he probes the legacies of "six thinkers who were hostile to liberty"--namely Helvetus, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Saint-Simon, and Maistre. He doesn't exactly beat around the bush. Rousseau, he writes, "claims to have been the most ardent and passionate lover of human liberty who ever lived." But Berlin's own verdict is quite different: He "was one of the most sinister and most formidable enemies of liberty in the whole history of modern thought." Reading these jarring essays is like listening to a favorite college professor lecture on a topic he knows well. --John Miller --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* In 1952, the BBC broadcast six lectures by Berlin on philosophers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who profoundly affected subsequent European history and, balefully, traditional understandings of personal freedom. The talks captivated an enormous listenership and established Berlin as the premier popular authority on philosophy in Britain and America. This book publishes those lectures for the first time. Their subjects are Helvetius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Saint-Simon, and Maistre; that is, five progressives who favored the proposition that a person should be able to choose what he wants to do and acquire, provided he harms no others, and one conservative who distrusted such liberty. As each progressive developed his political thought, he saw the need for negating that kind of liberty. Helvetius' utilitarianism, Rousseau's concept of the general will, Fichte's triumphalist nationalism, Hegel's historical dialectic, and Saint-Simon's elitism all militate against personal freedom of choice because all assume that what is good for every human is ascertainable by reason and, because it is good, enforceable upon all. Practical politics informed by those progressive ideas produced those twentieth-century plagues, fascism and communism. Well before then, Maistre denounced reason, asserted that humans were basically self-destructive, and that only such irrational institutions as the church and hereditary monarchy, enforcing such irrational social arrangements as marriage and the loyalty of soldiers, kept societies intact. Of course, the tenor of Maistre's conservatism helped rather than hindered the revolutionaries he loathed after they seized power. Berlin's first great public successes remain utterly, indeed inspirationally, absorbing. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (January 27, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691114994
• ISBN-13: 978-0691114996
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #808,864 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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