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A Critical Appraisal of Isaiah Berlin's Philosophy of Pluralism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Morton J. Frisch
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Extract

It could be said that Isaiah Berlin has written more extensively on freedom than anyone since John Stuart Mill, but the essentially rational dimension of freedom has become virtually obliterated in his writings. What Berlin has concealed from himself is the fact that abstract freedom, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found, but at least he has sensed that the limited latitude of alternatives implicit in his moral pluralism would circumscribe the unlimited extension of freedom. It is not enough, however, for him to recognize the precariousness of the full and unrestrained exercise of freedom implicit in that pluralism, for he must face up to the realization that only a standard other than freedom can make limitations on freedom possible. But we are not aware from his published writings that he ever considered that as a possibility.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 60 , Issue 3 , Summer 1998 , pp. 421 - 433
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1998

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References

1 Berlin, Isaiah and Jahanbegloo, Ramin, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1991).Google Scholar

2 Four Essays on Liberty (London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1978)Google Scholar; The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (London: John Murray, 1990).Google Scholar

3 Four Essays on Liberty, p. 168.

4 ibid., p. 169; Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, p. 43.

5 Four Essays on Liberty, p. li.

6 ibid., pp. 169, 171.

7 The Crooked Timber of Humanity, pp. 17–18.

8 ibid., p. 87.

9 ibid., p. 11.

10 ibid., pp. 2–3.

11 Four Essays on Liberty, p. li.

12 The Crooked Timber of Humanity, p. 9.

13 Four Essays on Liberty, p. 184.

14 ibid., p. 163.

15 Speech on Conciliation with America, Works of Edmund Burke, 7th ed., 12 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1881), II: 121.Google Scholar

16 ibid., pp. 159, 172.

17 ibid., pp. 96–97.

18 The Crooked Timber of Humanity, p. 18.

19 Four Essays on Liberty, p. lx.

20 ibid., pp. xl, 129.

21 Politics 1317b

22 Four Essays on Liberty, p. 130.

23 ibid., pp. xl, 129.

24 ibid., pp. 120, 121.

25 ibid., p. 121.

26 ibid., p. lv.

27 ibid., p. lxiii.

28 The Crooked Timber of Humanity, pp. 11–12.

29 ibid., p. 18.

30 ibid., p. 19.

31 Four Essays on Liberty, pp. 169, 171.

32 ibid., p. lii.

33 ibid., pp. 165, 164.

34 ibid., p. 165.

35 Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, p. 41.