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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Philosopher Dedicated to Freedom, October 1, 2004
This review is from: Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty (Paperback)
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.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
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Essays of the master moral philosopher of political liberty, April 26, 2006
This review is from: Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty (Paperback)
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.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Stimulating but Perhaps Dated, February 25, 2007
This review is from: Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty (Paperback)
Berlin's considerable reputation rests largely on his essays. In his chosen areas of political philosophy and intellectual history, he produced no major systematic works. His essays, particularly those in the history of ideas, are long, insightful, and informed by impressive breadth of knowledge and a humane temperament. He was a consistently excellent and sometimes elegant writer. Of all his essays, he felt his most substantial work was the writings on Liberty collected in this volume. The core of this book is the Four Essays on Liberty, which appeared originally as a book of that title about 40 years ago.
How good are these essays? They were written originally in the late 1940s through late 1950s and were directed, at least in part, at issues that preoccupied British intellectuals of that period. The backdrop was the Cold War, and debates about the justification of socialist ideals and the nature of socialism. Most of these essays have not worn well. I don't think there is much original or profound in either the first or last essays of the four; Political Ideas in the 20th Century, and John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life. I suspect most critical readers will find the essay entitled Historical Inevitability to be fairly pedestrian. This leaves the most celebrated of these essays, Two Concepts of Liberty. It is on this essay and some of his best historical studies that Berlin's reputation rests.
In Two Concepts, Berlin developed his famous distinction between "negative" and "positive" concepts of liberty. He particularly focused on how a certain rationalist conception of "positive" liberty can become, though often via a tortuous route, a justification for attacks on "negative" liberty and assault basic human rights. Berlin argues that this conception of "positive" liberty leads to the great crimes of the 20th century. This leads to an eloquent plea for some form of pluralism in regard to ultimate human goals. Berlin develops this argument brilliantly and with a self-assured writing style that is a pleasure to read.
But how good is his argument? As he himself points out, there are circumstances underwhich the distinction between "negative" and "positive" liberty can be cloudy, casting doubt on the utility and reality of this distinction. He is incorrect in assigning blame for all the terrible crimes of the 20th century to the rationalist view of "positive" liberty. This is certainly a fair criticism with respect to Marxism and the great crimes of Marxist states. But does it apply to Fascism and violent nationalism? These movements were marked by wholesale rejection of rationalism and exaltation of emotion, quite different from what he describes as the rationalist wellspring of all the crimes of the 20th century.
Berlin is an interesting and thought provoking essayist but not a major figure in political thought or intellectual history.
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