This became politically dangerous when notions of positive liberty were, in the nineteenth century, used to defend nationalism, self-determination and the Communist idea of collective rational control over human destiny. Hegel (all committed to the positive concept of liberty), European political thinkers often equated liberty with forms of political discipline or constraint. While Berlin granted that both concepts of liberty represent valid human ideals, as a matter of history the positive concept of liberty has proven particularly susceptible to political abuse.īerlin contended that under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and G. Berlin associated positive liberty with the idea of self-mastery, or the capacity to determine oneself, to be in control of one's destiny.

Greater ' negative freedom' meant fewer restrictions on possible action. He defined negative liberty as the absence of constraints on, or interference with, agents' possible action. Berlin's work on liberal theory has had a lasting influence.īerlin is best known for his essay Two Concepts of Liberty, delivered in 1958 as his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his writings on individual freedom. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He was knighted in 1957, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. In 1966, he helped to found Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its first President. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. From 1957 to 1967, he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford.

Many of his essays and lectures were later collected in book form.īorn in Riga, now capital of Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, he was the first person of Jewish descent to be elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. He excelled as an essayist, lecturer and conversationalist and as a brilliant speaker who delivered, rapidly and spontaneously, richly allusive and coherently structured material, whether for a lecture series at Oxford University or as a broadcaster on the BBC Third Programme, usually without a script.

Sir Isaiah Berlin was a philosopher and historian of ideas, regarded as one of the leading liberal thinkers of the twentieth century.

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