Isaiah Berlin, RIP

National Review, Dec 8, 1997 by Kenneth Minogue

SIR Isaiah Berlin, Britain's most distinguished intellectual, has died at age 88, loaded down with honors both political and academic. Born in Riga, he came to England as a boy and for most of his academic life was at the center of power in Oxford as a fellow of All Souls College and later as president of Wolfson College. But his wider fame rested on three books which the general public found no less stimulating than his fellow academics did.

The first, published in 1953, was a study of Tolstoy that launched the idea, taken from an ancient Greek poetic fragment, that thinkers are either hedgehogs (who understand everything in terms of one grand idea) or foxes (who see the world through many ideas). This distinction was reasonably profound, and also a delicious parlor game. The second was an attack on the idea of historical inevitability -- the idea that led Communists to imagine that they were riding an irresistible wave of history. The third and most famous -- Two Concepts of Liberty (1959) -- identified the liberal idea of freedom with the condition of being left alone ("negative" liberty), in contrast with the "positive" idea that we are free only when we are virtuous. Berlin thought the positive idea led to totalitarianism, because dictators such as Robespierre and Lenin always arrogated to themselves the power to judge what was virtue.

Accompanying these works was a stream of scholarly essays in which the ideas of less well-known figures in philosophy and literature were explicated. These works struck a popular chord without making concessions to popularity. They were also part of Berlin's response to the Communist threat during the Cold War. He took from nineteenth-century Romanticism the view that ways of life were irreducibly plural, and that there were no absolute values which could be validly imposed on other people. At the same time, he denied being a relativist.

Berlin was a great traveler. He loved the United States (where he served in the British Embassy during the Second World War), and he enchanted academic audiences with an effervescent lecturing style in which the words tumbled over each other in a stammering stream which became an extraordinarily lucid account of some relatively unknown figure -- Herzen or Belinsky, for example -- who nonetheless turned out to have much to say to our condition. As did Isaiah Berlin.