Editing Isaiah Berlin (section)

==Thought==
{{Liberalism sidebar}}
{{quote box|align=right|width=33%|quote = Though like Our Lord and Socrates he does not publish much, he thinks and says a great deal and has had an enormous influence on our times|source= —[[Maurice Bowra]] on Isaiah Berlin's publishing record.<ref>Letter to [[Noel Annan]] quoted in Lloyd-Jones, p. 53.</ref>}}

=== Lecturing and composition ===
Berlin did not enjoy writing, and his published work (including both his essays and books) was produced through dictation to a tape-recorder, or by the transcription of his improvised lectures and talks from recorded tapes. The work of transcribing his spoken word often placed a strain on his secretaries.<ref name=ignatieff113>{{harvnb|Ignatieff|1998|p=113}}</ref> This reliance on dictation extended to his letters, which were recorded on a [[Grundig]] tape recorder. He would often dictate these letters while simultaneously conversing with friends, and his secretary would then transcribe them. At times, the secretary would inadvertently include the author's jokes and laughter in the transcribed text.<ref name=ignatieff113/> The product of this unique methodology was a writing style that mimicked his spoken discourse—animated, quick, and constantly jumping from one idea to another. His everyday conversation was vividly mirrored in his works, complete with intricate grammar and punctuation.<ref name=ignatieff113/>

==="Two Concepts of Liberty"===
{{main|Two Concepts of Liberty}}
Berlin is known for his inaugural lecture, "[[Two Concepts of Liberty]]", delivered in 1958 as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Warburton |first=Nigel |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2wxhpF_O6z0C&pg=PA127 |title=Freedom: An Introduction with Readings |date=2001 |publisher=Psychology Press |others=[[The Open University]] |isbn=978-0-415-21246-5 |language=en |chapter=Two Concepts of Liberty |quote=Isaiah Berlin’s essay 'Two Concepts of Liberty'* is one of the most important pieces of post-war political philosophy. It was originally given as a lecture in Oxford in 1958 and has been much discussed since then. In this extract from the lecture Berlin identifies the two different concepts of freedom – negative and positive – which provide the framework for his wide-ranging discussion. |author-link=Nigel Warburton |chapter-url=https://openlearnlive-s3bucket.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/22/1b/221beec2ccb7db1991ab275509134c013921e6b6?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3D%22a211_reading1.pdf%22&response-content-type=application%2Fpdf&X-Amz-Content-Sha256=UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIA4GIOSMQ5JGMSLFXY%2F20231231%2Feu-west-2%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20231231T081900Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=21600&X-Amz-Signature=9ddb1a9d0edc9cad07d831ad2b83ff577d3420ddb9ba7f62ad5f5ebd8d468c73}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |title=Two Concepts of Liberty |url=https://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/tcl/#:~:text=Isaiah%20Berlin's%20inaugural%20lecture%20as,the%20Romantic%20Age%20(PIRA). |access-date=2023-12-31 |website=berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk}}</ref> The lecture, later published as an essay, reintroduced the study of political philosophy to the methods of [[analytic philosophy]]. Berlin defined "negative liberty" as absence of coercion or interference in private actions by an external political body, which Berlin derived from the Hobbesian definition of liberty. "Positive liberty", Berlin maintained, could be thought of as self-mastery, which asks not what we are free from, but what we are free to do. Berlin contended that modern political thinkers often conflated positive liberty with rational action, based upon a rational knowledge to which, it is argued, only a certain elite or social group has access. This rationalist conflation was open to political abuses, which encroached on negative liberty, when such interpretations of positive liberty were, in the nineteenth century, used to defend nationalism, paternalism, social engineering, historicism, and collective rational control over human destiny.<ref>{{cite book |last=Kocis |first=Robert |title=Isaiah Berlin: A Kantian and Post-Idealist Thinker |date=17 November 2023 |publisher=University of Wales Press |isbn=9781786838957 |series=Political Philosophy Now |pages=71–95 |language=en}}</ref>

=== Counter-Enlightenment ===
{{main|Counter-Enlightenment}}
{{further|Three Critics of the Enlightenment}}
Berlin's lectures on [[the Enlightenment]] and its critics (especially [[Giambattista Vico]], [[Johann Gottfried Herder]], [[Joseph de Maistre]] and [[Johann Georg Hamann]], to whose views Berlin referred as [[the Counter-Enlightenment]]) contributed to his advocacy of an irreducibly pluralist ethical [[ontology]].<ref name=sep/> In ''Three Critics of the Enlightenment'', Berlin argues that Hamann was one of the first thinkers to conceive of human cognition as language – the articulation and use of symbols. Berlin saw Hamann as having recognised as the rationalist's [[René Descartes|Cartesian]] fallacy the notion that there are "clear and distinct" ideas "which can be contemplated by a kind of inner eye", without the use of language – a recognition greatly sharpened in the 20th century by Wittgenstein's [[private language argument]].<ref name=bleich/>

=== Value pluralism ===
{{main|Value pluralism}}
For Berlin, values are creations of mankind, rather than products of nature waiting to be discovered. He argued, on the basis of the epistemic and empathetic access we have to other cultures across history, that the nature of mankind is such that certain values – the importance of individual liberty, for instance – will hold true across cultures, and this is what he meant by objective pluralism. Berlin's argument was partly grounded in [[Ludwig Wittgenstein]]'s later theory of language, which argued that inter-translatability was [[supervenient]] on a similarity in forms of life, with the inverse implication that our epistemic access to other cultures entails an ontologically contiguous value-structure.

With his account of value pluralism, Berlin proposed the view that moral values may be equally, or rather incommensurably, valid and yet incompatible, and may, therefore, come into conflict with one another in a way that admits of no resolution without reference to particular contexts of a decision. When values clash, it may not be that one is more important than the other: keeping a promise may conflict with the pursuit of truth; liberty may clash with [[social justice]]. Moral conflicts are "an intrinsic, irremovable element in human life". "These collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are."<ref name=theproperstudyofmankind/> For Berlin, this clashing of incommensurate values within, no less than between, individuals constitutes the tragedy of human life. [[Alan A. Brown|Alan Brown]] suggests, however, that Berlin ignores the fact that values are commensurable in the extent to which they contribute to the human good.<ref name=modernpolitical/>

==="The Hedgehog and the Fox"===
{{main|The Hedgehog and the Fox}}
"The Hedgehog and the Fox", a title referring to a fragment of the ancient Greek poet [[Archilochus]], was one of Berlin's most popular essays with the general public, reprinted in numerous editions. Of the classification that gives the essay its title, Berlin once said "I never meant it very seriously. I meant it as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously."<ref name=conversations/>

Berlin expands upon this idea to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include [[Plato]]), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include [[Aristotle]]).<ref>{{Cite book |last=Santos |first=Gonçalo |title=Chinese Village Life Today: Building Families in an Age of Transition |date=2021 |publisher=[[University of Washington Press]] |isbn=978-0-295-74738-5 |location=Seattle |pages=xiii}}</ref>

===Positive liberty===
Berlin promoted the notion of "[[positive liberty]]" in the sense of an intrinsic link between positive freedom and participatory, Athenian-style democracy.<ref>Isaiah Berlin, "Two concepts of liberty." ''Liberty Reader'' (Routledge, 2017) pp. 33–57 [https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~mjacovid/Two%20Concepts.pdf online].</ref> There is a contrast with "negative liberty." Liberals in the English-speaking tradition call for negative liberty, meaning a realm of private autonomy from which the state is legally excluded. In contrast French liberals ever since the [[French Revolution]] more often promote "positive liberty"{{snd}}that is, liberty insofar as it is tethered to collectively defined ends. They praise the state as an essential tool to emancipate the people.<ref>Michael C. Behrent, "Liberal Dispositions: Recent scholarship on French Liberalism." ''Modern Intellectual History'' 13.2 (2016): 447–477.</ref><ref>Steven J. Heyman, "Positive and negative liberty." ''Chicago-Kent Law Review''. 68 (1992): 81–90. [https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://scholar.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1306&context=fac_schol  online]</ref>

===Other work===
Berlin's lecture "Historical Inevitability" (1954) focused on a controversy in the [[philosophy of history]]. Given the choice, whether one believes that "the lives of entire peoples and societies have been decisively influenced by exceptional individuals" or, conversely, that whatever happens occurs as a result of impersonal forces oblivious to human intentions, Berlin rejected both options and the choice itself as nonsensical. Berlin is also well known for his writings on Russian intellectual history, most of which are collected in ''Russian Thinkers'' (1978; 2nd ed. 2008) and edited, as most of Berlin's work, by [[Henry Hardy]] (in the case of this volume, jointly with Aileen Kelly). Berlin also contributed a number of essays on leading intellectuals and political figures of his time, including [[Winston Churchill]], [[Franklin Delano Roosevelt]] and [[Chaim Weizmann]]. Eighteen of these character sketches were published together as "Personal Impressions" (1980; 2nd ed., with four additional essays, 1998; 3rd ed., with a further ten essays, 2014).<ref name=pi3/>