Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire, into a Jewish family that witnessed the Russian Revolution in Petrograd before moving to Britain in 1921. He studied at Oxford, where he spent most of his career, and served as a British diplomat in Washington and Moscow during and after the Second World War. His 1958 lecture Two Concepts of Liberty distinguished freedom from interference from the ideal of self-mastery. He was knighted in 1957, became the founding President of Wolfson College, Oxford, and served as President of the British Academy.

Berlin's essay on two concepts of liberty is one of the most cited texts in modern political philosophy, and his value pluralism shaped later liberal theory and debates on multiculturalism. He was admired as a defender of liberal tolerance during the Cold War, and some admirers called him a liberal saint. Critics on the right, such as Roger Scruton, and on the left, such as Christopher Hitchens, accused him of complacency or evasiveness on the political issues of his time. Leo Strauss and others argued that his pluralism collapses into relativism, while philosophers including Charles Taylor challenged his preference for negative liberty. His work also revived interest in Counter-Enlightenment thinkers.