Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty 2nd Edition

If you are at all interested in the topic of personal liberty, you must read Isaiah Berlin. This book includes all of his important work on the topic.

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This volume presents Berlin's main essays on Liberty, including the "Four Essays on Liberty", considered by himself as his most important book. They are preceded by a long "Introduction" which explains his thought and the profound debates to which it gave birth. "Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century" explains the historical-philosophical genesis of the great schools of thought that dominated the turbulent XX Century and which can basically - with an infinity of subtleties, minor coincidences, and internal contradictions - be synthesized in the division between those schools that tried to find totalizing - and frequently totalitarian - solutions for human problems, at least the ones pertaining to public affairs, and those other schools that tried to discover the basic rules of human interaction and respect, building upon which those individuals and the groups voluntarily formed by them may pursue their ends and ideas in an interference-free environment, even taking into account the inevitable confusions and chaos that may ensue. In the background, there is the old and never resolved tension between "security" and "freedom": between the sacrifice of doubt and dissent lest a pretended harmony and consensus on means and ends perils, on the one hand, and the uncomfortable acceptance of a certain degree of cacophony, ups and downs, and conflict, which nevertheless allows for a fecund interplay of the different individuals' freedoms and the fruits of imagination in action.

"The Historical Inevitability" portrays the anxiety, reinforced by the perceived accuracy of prediction of the sciences, to discover the "laws" of History, analogous to sciences' laws, which allow us to find causal and necessary explanations to the results of the human interaction of millions of individuals, which are thus reduced to mere instruments or puppets of huge, impersonal and irresistible forces. This anxiety's children, Relativism and Determinism, annihilate the person and have produced chaos, confusion and great violence.

"Two Concepts of Freedom", the most famous and controversial of his essays, analyzes the difference between negative freedom (freedom "from"), and positive freedom (freedom "to"). Negative freedom rests at the base of individual dignity, and of course it's not absolute. Building from a basic consensus (John Rawls's "overlapping consensus"?) about absolutely unacceptable behaviors in a society (at the same time limits and guarantees of one's own freedom), the individual must be free to do as he pleases, given that he assumes responsibility for the consequences of his actions. Positive freedom is a paradox, since it can be either a complement or a negation of the negative type. It is the freedom to intervene in other people's affairs. In its "benign" version (although Berlin never makes this division explicit), positive freedom can be used to gather wills in favor of the common good. But in its "pernicious" version, this freedom can be used to impose on others behaviors unwanted by them, that is, to impose unacceptable limits to their negative freedom. Which is where it always, almost inevitably, tends to go. Therefore, the fundamental political struggle must be the permanent defense of the negative freedoms. It's difficult to find a more lucid and clear presentation of liberty's dilemmas, as well as of a definition of personal dignity.

"John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life" presents MIll's thought, and above all the central epiphany that, very early on, defined his life: the discovery of emotions, that happiness can not be imposed and not even determined a priori; but that it is an uncertain and difficult task that, if ever, can only be reached, lost, and reappraised by each individual through his free and deliberate action, necessarily confusing, and only limited by other people's freedom. It is, thus, a passionate defense of diversity and the infinite possibilities of human life.

"Free of All Hope and Fear", examines the paradoxical (although not necessarily incompatible) relationship between knowledge and freedom. Am I freer every time I learn something new? Is more education conducive to more freedom? It's hard to affirm or deny it outright. That both knowledge and freedom are good, it seems certain. That all "good" things are always compatible, is not so clear.

"The Birth of Greek Individualism" is, particularly, an iconoclast and provoking essay. It refutes the ingrained idea that, after the battle of Cheronea, in 338 BC, and the dissolution of Athenian splendor, a moral and intellectual decadence prevailed. Maybe not. Maybe that disruption of the "organic community" was not a disaster, but a liberation. For several centuries, knowledge remained free from politics and pursued more fruitful paths, free from the burden of public affairs. The divorce between morals and politics; interior life as the authentic life; morals and happiness as attributes of the individual's, and not of the whole polis; gave way perhaps to a great breathing room, to peace and intellectual progress.

The volume closes with a "Final Retrospective" and three autobiographical texts which round up a magnificent edition of one of the richest, most original, freshest, and most provoking philosophical oeuvres of all time. A work that is more alive than ever, more needed, more authentic and contrary to the inanities of politicians, prophets, ideologues, and other sunder current and permanent charlatans. The product of a truly free mind, at the same time profound and swift, it is certainly one of the best products of philosophy of our time.

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.