¹ Strauss, Leo, “Relativism,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Pangle, T. L. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 15.Google Scholar

² Ibid. Strauss quotes Berlin, Isaiah, Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 50.Google Scholar

³ Strauss, “Relativism,” 17.

⁴ John Kekes and John Gray, for example, argue that value pluralism undermines liberal universalism, a claim I discuss later in this essay. See Kekes, John, “The Incompatibility of Liberalism and Pluralism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 29, no. 2 (April 1992): 141–51Google Scholar; Gray, John, Isaiah Berlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar and “Where Pluralists and Liberals Part Company,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 6, no. 1 (March 1998): 17–36.

⁵ Isaiah Berlin repeats this formulation often. See “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991) and “The Romantic Revolution,” in The Sense of Reality, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996), among others.

⁶ Berlin,“The Pursuit of the Ideal,” 13.

⁷ This seems to be what Berlin means by “incommensurability”—that there is no single standard (such as utility) that would allow for a comparative measurement of all values. See Berlin, Isaiah, “Historical Inevitability,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 102.Google Scholar

⁸ Isaiah Berlin, introduction to Four Essays on Liberty, lvi.

⁹ Ibid. Moreover, any single value, including liberty, is subject to multiple and conflicting interpretations. See Berlin, Isaiah, “Does Political Theory Still Exist?” in Concepts and Categories (New York: Penguin Books, 1950), 149Google Scholar and Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty, 125. Subsequent citations for “Two Concepts” refer to this edition.

¹⁰ Berlin,“The Pursuit of the Ideal,” 13. Berlin, credits this lesson to Machiavelli in “The Originality of Machiavelli,” in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 63Google Scholar.

¹¹ In “Two Concepts of Liberty,” he refers to “pluralism, with the measure of negative freedom that it entails” (“Two Concepts,” 171), but in a later interview he states, “Pluralism and liberalism are not the same or even overlapping concepts. … I believe in both liberalism and pluralism, but they are not logically connected” (Berlin, Isaiah and Jahanbegloo, Ramin, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin [New York: Scribner, 1992], 44)Google Scholar.

¹² Berlin, introduction to Four Essays, lvi.

¹³ Berlin, “Two Concepts,” 166.

¹⁴ Ibid., 165. Berlin also refers in the same essay to the frontiers between the individual and the state as something that “must be drawn,” phrasing that emphasizes the creative role of human agents (ibid., 124).

¹⁵ Berlin, introduction to Four Essays, lxi.

¹⁶ Ibid., xxxi. Yet Berlin also argues that the “domination of this ideal has been the exception, rather than the rule, even in the recent history of the West” (“Two Concepts,” 129).

¹⁷ Berlin, “Two Concepts,” 129.

¹⁸ Ibid., 172.

¹⁹ Ibid. In an interview, Berlin speaks pointedly of Strauss: “He did try to convert me in many conversations when I was a visitor in Chicago, but he could not get me to believe in eternal, immutable, absolute values, true for all men everywhere at all times, God-given Natural Law and the like” (Berlin and Jahanbegloo, Conversations, 32).

²⁰ Berlin, “Two Concepts,” 126.

²¹ Berlin, introduction to Four Essays, xxxi.

²² Two notable exceptions to these efforts to unite pluralism and liberalism are Ira Katznelson and Michael Walzer, whose interpretations affirm the irresolvable tension between the pluralist and liberal lines in Berlin's thought. See Ira Katznelson, “Isaiah Berlin's Modernity,” Social Research 66, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 611–30 and Michael Walzer, “Are There Limits to Liberalism?” The New York Review of Books, October 19, 1995.

²³ See, for example, Frisch, Morton, “A Critical Appraisal of Isaiah Berlin's Philosophy of Pluralism,” Review of Politics 60, no. 3 (1998): 421–33;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Gray, Isaiah Berlin; Kekes, “Incompatibility”; Moore, Matthew, “Pluralism, Relativism, and Liberalism,” Political Research Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2009): 244–56;CrossRefGoogle ScholarTalisse, Robert, “Can Value Pluralists Be Comprehensive Liberals?” Contemporary Political Theory 3, no. 2 (2004): 127–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Gray, Kekes, and Talisse do not rule out a meaningful defense of liberalism altogether. Though they claim that pluralism denies the possibility of liberal universalism, Gray and Kekes allow for more local, context-specific justifications for a liberal ranking of values while Talisse suggests that Rawlsian liberalism is better suited to pluralist conditions than comprehensive liberalism. Frisch and Moore go further, explicitly casting pluralism as relativism, and charging that there is simply no way to rank values at all if the pluralist thesis is accepted. According to Frisch, there is only “arbitrary preference” (427).

²⁴ I include in this grouping George Crowder, William Galston, Amy Gutmann, Steven Lukes, Jonathan Riley, and Daniel Weinstock. See Crowder, George, Liberalism and Value Pluralism (London: Continuum, 2002);Google ScholarGalston, William, “Value Pluralism and Liberal Political Theory,” American Political Science Review 93, no. 4 (1999): 769–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Amy Gutmann, “Liberty and Pluralism in Pursuit of the Non-Ideal,” Social Research 66, no. 4 (1999): 1039–62; Steven Lukes, “The Singular and the Plural: On the Distinctive Liberalism of Isaiah Berlin,” Social Research 61, no. 3 (1994): 687–717; Riley, Jonathan, “Interpreting Berlin's Liberalism,” American Political Science Review 95, no. 2 (2001): 283–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Defending Cultural Pluralism: Within Liberal Limits,” Political Theory 30, no. 1 (2002): 68–96; Weinstock, Daniel, “The Graying of Berlin,” Critical Review 11, no. 4 (1997): 481–501.Google Scholar

²⁵ Distinguishing between “existential” and “moderate” pluralism, Peter Lassman argues that recent political thought “has moved uneasily between the kind of existentialist view put forward by Weber and the attempt to contain it” (Lassman, Peter, “Political Theory in an Age of Disenchantment: The Problem of Value Pluralism: Weber, Berlin, Rawls,” Max Weber Studies 4, no. 2 [2004]: 271CrossRefGoogle Scholar). The interpretations of Berlin that I focus on are devoted to the task of “containing” pluralism. As Lassman points out, “most contemporary political thinkers, and especially those generally thought of as being in the Liberal camp, have spent much of their energy in trying to argue for some grounding for general principles as a counterweight to the demands of pluralism” (ibid., 256). Glen Newey speculates that “liberals could, of course, narrow ‘pluralism’ to refer only to values, or associated conceptions of the political, which they endorse” (Newey, Glen, “Value Pluralism in Contemporary Liberalism,” Dialogue 37, no. 3 [1998]: 516CrossRefGoogle Scholar). I contend that this sort of narrowing is a widespread interpretive strategy in the secondary literature on Berlin.

²⁶ Crowder explains that Berlin sometimes suggests that the “necessity of choice” warrants privileging the “freedom to choose” and thereby liberalism itself. Even if “pluralism shows us that we need to choose among conflicting values, how does it follow that we must value the act of choosing?” (Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism, 81–82).

²⁷ Ibid., 12–13.

²⁸ Ibid., 135–36.

²⁹ Moore, “Pluralism, Relativism, and Liberalism,” esp. 250–51.

³⁰ Galston, William, “Liberal Pluralism: A Reply to Talisse,” Contemporary Political Theory 3, no. 2 (2004): 145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³¹ Galston does regard Berlin's negative liberty as a specific value (Liberal Pluralism, 50–51).

³² Ibid., 28. Galston's argument on behalf of expressive liberty is intended to protect individuals and groups who “live in ways that others would regard as unfree” (ibid., 29). The “rights of exit,” however, must be available to ensure that individuals are not coerced to remain in associations that are hierarchical and directive if they do not wish to (ibid., 122).

³³ Ibid., 51.

³⁴ At times Galston formulates the point more modestly, in negative terms, by claiming that value pluralism “rules out” certain things, namely, “policies whose justification includes the assertion that there is a unique rational ordering of value” (Liberal Pluralism, 58). If Galston means by this that the pluralist doctrine denies the truth of monism, this is surely correct. But it would be a mistake to imagine that value pluralism automatically “rules out” any particular law or practice, as though by philosophical fiat. The political task of arguing and organizing against policies thought to rely wrongly on monistic reasoning persists. While the doctrine of value pluralism may be a tool in this argument and struggle, it is not a substitute for it.

³⁵ Gutmann, “Liberty and Pluralism,” 1042.

³⁶ Ibid., 1047.

³⁷ Ibid., 1049. Gutmann includes the latter on the basis of Berlin's statement in “The Pursuit of the Ideal” that “the first public obligation is to avoid extremes of suffering” (17).

³⁸ Riley, “Defending Cultural Pluralism,” 69, 71.

³⁹ Ibid., 78.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 83.

⁴¹ As Galston puts it: “Value pluralism is presented as an account of the actual structure of the normative universe. It advances a truth claim about that structure” (“Value Pluralism,” 770).

⁴² Gunnell, John, “Relativism: The Return of the Repressed,” Political Theory 21, no. 4 (1993): 563.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Gunnell argues that the issue of relativism which pervades political theory is a gripping matter only from within the confines of a “traditional epistemological search for transcontextual certainty” (ibid., 567).

⁴³ According to Frisch, for example, because Berlin denies that there is an “overriding principle” that ought to determine judgment universally, individual “arbitrary” or “mere” preference is the only alternative (Frisch, “A Critical Appraisal,” 424, 427).

⁴⁴ Kekes, John, The Case for Conservatism, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 63.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Gray, “Where Pluralists and Liberals Part Company,” 34.

⁴⁶ Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism, 112. Crowder suggests that the particularist case might be improved by adopting a more capacious sense of “context,” in recognition of the fact that people can and do pursue notions of the good that diverge from and even conflict with local traditions. Yet he also insists that liberals should try to go “beyond context” altogether in their justification for liberalism (ibid., 113, 108).

⁴⁷ Ibid., 108.

⁴⁸ It can be difficult to tell exactly what “radical” signifies for Berlin's readers who attempt to counter such a possibility with a more limited or qualified pluralism, but it seems to designate a version of pluralism that is, in Crowder's words, “indeterminate” in the sense that “no particular value (or set of values) has any ‘morally privileged status’” (Liberalism and Value Pluralism, 80). The authors focused on here are concerned to repudiate that version of pluralism in favor of one that does accord special standing to liberal values.

⁴⁹ Isaiah Berlin, “Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” in Crooked Timber, 33.

⁵⁰ Berlin describes “the human condition” as one in which choice is unavoidable because “ends collide” and “we cannot have everything” (introduction to Four Essays, li).

⁵¹ Gunnell, “Relativism,” 563. Gunnell argues that political theorists ought to refuse relativism as a “pseudo-problem that is sustained by the aspirations of rationalism and foundationalism.”

⁵² Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” 102–3.

⁵³ Berlin describes a process by which we “make out the best, most plausible cases for persons and ages remote or unsympathetic to us or for some reason inaccessible to us; we do our utmost to extend the frontiers of knowledge and imagination” (“Historical Inevitability,” 103).

⁵⁴ Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” 86. Berlin also argues that in cases of conflicts among ultimate ends that require the sacrifice of one end to another, “there is no rule according to which this can be done—one must just decide” (“Isaiah Berlin in Conversation with Steven Lukes,” Salmagundi 120 [1998]: 108). When asked “How do you decide what the bases for human rights are?” Berlin replies simply, “How do you decide anything?” (ibid., 111). In these places and elsewhere Berlin declines to provide the sorts of determinate rules his readers assume to be indispensable for judgment.

⁵⁵ Berlin, Isaiah and Williams, Bernard, “Pluralism and Liberalism: A Reply,” Political Studies 42, no. 2 (1994): 306–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁶ Gutmann presents the “moral minimum” as a “standard” for judgment but seems to regard the minimum itself as a product of human judgment. Gutmann, “Liberty and Pluralism,” esp. 1058.

⁵⁷ Berlin and Jahanbegloo, Conversations, 32.

⁵⁸ For this practice-centered view, see especially Berlin, “Historical Inevitability.” In response to worries over mere subjectivism, for example, Berlin counters, “Where to draw the line—where to exclude judgments as being too subjective … —that is a question for ordinary judgment, that is to say for what passes as such in our society, in our own time and place, among the people to whom we are addressing ourselves” (ibid., 95).

⁵⁹ Ibid., 87–88.

⁶⁰ “Particularist” is Crowder's term for views such as Gray's and Kekes's; “traditionalist” is Kekes's description of his own position. See Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism, esp. chap. 5; Gray, “Where Pluralists and Liberals Part Company”; Kekes, A Case for Conservatism.

⁶¹ This view is similar to Richard Rorty's controversial endorsement of “ethnocentric” liberalism, according to which liberals accept that justificatory procedures are “local and culture-bound” (Rorty, Richard, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 208Google Scholar).

⁶² Gray and Kekes both nod to internal complexity, yet ultimately rely on monistic portraits of culture when they describe how conflicts among values will be negotiated. According to Kekes, within a particular tradition, there is “only one true answer to the question of which of two conflicting values in its domain is more important in a particular situation” (A Case for Conservatism, 63). Although Kekes briefly acknowledges that “in any society, there are a plurality of traditions,” he continuously invokes “tradition” as that which settles value conflict, without explaining why or how a single tradition, among many possible traditions, will be regarded as authoritative or explaining why we should believe that such a tradition is itself free from value conflict and therefore capable of generating “objective” rankings of values. Similarly, Gray notes that communities are not “seamless” but he treats “ways of life” as coherent enough to ensure “local settlements” which definitively resolve value conflict (Gray, “Pluralism and Toleration in Contemporary Political Philosophy” and “Where Pluralists and Liberals Part Company”).

⁶³ This point is frequently made by Third World feminists, who challenge the tendency among Western feminists to depict non-Western cultures in unitary, single-dimensional ways, namely, as uniformly oppressive toward women. Uma Narayan, for example, has criticized that mode of representation as well as the depiction of feminism in non-Western contexts as simply a form of “Westernization.” Narayan argues that both views “fail to perceive how capacious and suffused with contestation cultural contexts are.” This perspective does not “acknowledge that Third-World feminist critiques are often just one prevailing form of intra-cultural criticism of social institutions” (Narayan, Uma, Dislocating Cultures [New York: Routledge, 1997], 9Google Scholar).

⁶⁴ Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” 11.

⁶⁵ Ibid.

⁶⁶ Berlin, Isaiah, “My Intellectual Path,” in The First and the Last (New York: New York Review of Books, 1999), 50–51.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Drawing heavily on Vico's and Herder's work, Berlin argues that “members of one culture, can by the force of imaginative insight, understand (what Vico called entrare) the values, the ideals, the forms of life of another culture or society, even those remote in time or space” (“Pursuit of the Ideal,” 10).

⁶⁸ Berlin, “Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth Century European Thought,” in Crooked Timber, 85.

⁶⁹ Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” 102.

⁷⁰ Despite the centrality of “liberal values” to Riley's limited pluralism, he is somewhat vague when it comes to specifying what these are or how exactly they would authorize a “two-tier” ranking of cultures. Riley notes that Berlin does not specify a set of rights that could be used to sort cultures into Riley's categories of “barbaric” and “minimally liberal,” but suggests that “perhaps not a lot should be made of this.” Riley then identifies a set of rights (subsistence, not being attacked by others, freedom from arbitrary arrest and enslavement, freedom to emigrate, some degree of freedom of thought and expression) that he says “are not contingent on their recognition by the laws or customs of a given society” (“Defending Cultural Pluralism,” 89).

⁷¹ Riley emphasizes Berlin's “near-universalism” in support of his position. There are certainly elements of this in Berlin's thinking, as discussed in the first section above. At times he suggests that there are “common values” shared by all human beings and, similarly, that there may be “goods” in the interest of all people (Berlin, introduction to Four Essays, xxxi; Berlin and Jahanbegloo, Conversations, 39). (When speaking of goods that are “in the interest of all human beings,” it is not clear whether Berlin is claiming that they in fact exist or noting that a belief along these lines is the basis for human rights claims.) We also saw, however, that he is reluctant to specify them and that he historicizes such declarations, noting that there are goods, such as negative liberty, that have been widely recognized in the modern West. For a brief but useful consideration of the question of universal values in Berlin's thought, see Crowder, George and Hardy, Henry, “Berlin's Universal Values—Core or Horizon?” in The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007).Google Scholar

⁷² This challenges Daniel Weinstock's claim that Berlin endorses a definition of “the human” which involves substantive moral content and can therefore determine pluralism's “limits” (Weinstock, “The Graying of Berlin”). In my view, “the human” for Berlin is a much more capacious and less determinate category than Weinstock allows.

⁷³ William Galston also argues that Berlin's moral universe is “divided by a horizontal line—universality below the line, pluralism above.” Galston is more circumspect about this division than is Riley, noting that “the real argument concerns the location of the line” (Galston, , “Moral Pluralism and Liberal Democracy: Isaiah Berlin's Heterodox Liberalism,” Review of Politics 71, no. 1 [2009]: 97CrossRefGoogle Scholar). However, Galston, like Riley, fails to acknowledge that Berlin's notion of the human horizon, which he draws upon, appears to include values and practices that we would want to judge as immoral. But see Ferrell, Jason, “Isaiah Berlin: Liberalism and Pluralism in Theory and Practice,” Contemporary Political Theory 8, no. 3 (2009): 300CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who argues that Berlin's human horizon is not constituted by liberal values alone, as some readers suggest.

⁷⁴ Berlin, “My Intellectual Path,” 53. My italics.

⁷⁵ For example, Berlin remarks that if he encounters people who worship trees “not because they are symbols of fertility or because they are divine … or because this grove is sacred to Athena—but only because they are made of wood; and if when I ask them why they worship wood they say ‘Because it is wood’ and give no other answer; then I do not know what they mean. If they are human, they are not beings with whom I can communicate. … They are not human for me” (“The Pursuit of the Ideal,” 11–12).

⁷⁶ Berlin approvingly attributes to Vico the view that “to understand is not to accept” (Crooked Timber, 86).

⁷⁷ At times Berlin's universalist readers seem attuned to judgment of this sort, as when Crowder describes an Aristotelian “context-centred practice of practical reason” that can resolve value conflicts without recourse to an “absolute formula” and when Galston argues that significant deliberation and reason-giving are possible in the absence of algorithmic procedures. (“Philosophic assumptions about how the practice of judgment must work” conceal this possibility, however.) (George Crowder, “Berlin, Value Pluralism, and the Common Good: A Reply to Brian Trainor,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 34, no. 8 (2008): 932; Galston, Liberal Pluralism, 35.) Yet both treat judgment on behalf of liberalism as altogether different. Practical judgment comes into play only in specific instances of conflict “within” an already-established “political framework” (Crowder, Value Pluralism and Liberalism, 187). Liberalism—the “framework” itself—is thought to require, and to enjoy, a different kind of justification. As I have been suggesting, however, Berlin's thought does not support this moral foundationalist portrait. Even liberalism—though it may often act for us as an unquestioned “framework”—is not authorized by transcontextual absolutes, but by practices of human judgment and commitment.

⁷⁸ Berlin famously concludes “Two Concepts of Liberty” by quoting Joseph Schumpeter: “To realise the relative validity of one's convictions … and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian” (“Two Concepts,” 172).

⁷⁹ This also means that it is a mistake to treat liberal societies as uniform, as simply “converted.” As Berlin repeatedly reminds us, there are real conflicts among the values that liberalism holds dear, which means that the difficulties of judgment and justification are never missing for members of a liberal polity. Moreover, every liberal culture contains illiberal elements, giving the lie to the view of a single, unified cultural context that determines judgments or renders the activities of argumentation and justification unnecessary.

⁸⁰ Among the interpretations focused on here, there is a common assumption that the identification of certain absolutes as intrinsic to value pluralism will solve the problem of liberalism's justification. There is an unspoken but prevalent and unfounded belief that if value pluralism can be shown to involve “limits” or a “moral minimum,” then the problem of reason-giving and persuasion disappears.

⁸¹ The 1848 Declaration of Sentiments, which held that all men and women are created equal, is an example of this sort of effort. The judgment presented in that document is neither the consequence of discovering and applying an absolute standard nor is it simply a case of narrowly local and insular reason-giving. It conforms to neither of the options presented by the relativism paradigm. As Linda Zerilli has argued, the claim that men and women are equal does not follow from the concept of political equality, which was defined in the United States strictly in relation to white, propertied males: “The Declaration of Sentiments did not simply apply this concept [of political equality] like a rule to a new particular (women)” (Zerilli, Linda, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005], 162Google Scholar). Linking the principle of equality to gender relations was a creative act, designed to persuade. The Declaration's expression of judgment also cannot be understood as “preaching to the converted,” since it countered the views of the Founding Fathers as well as those of most nineteenth-century Americans. For an interpretation of the Declaration as a model of reflective judgment, see Zerilli, Feminism, chap. 4.

⁸² This mode of justification resembles Rorty's pragmatist version, according to which Western liberal pragmatists' “justification of toleration, free inquiry, and the quest for undistorted communication can only take the form of a comparison between societies which exemplify these habits and those which do not, leading up to the suggestion that nobody who has experienced both would prefer the latter” (Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 29). I believe this statement is generally consistent with Berlin's, but Rorty relies on a conception of “community”—the milieu in which dialogue and reason-giving occur—as either “ours” or “theirs.” He represents communities as internally consistent (more monistic than pluralistic) and closed off from other forms of life, understandings that Berlin explicitly challenges. Rorty's portrait of judgment and persuasion largely conforms to the localist model of justification which the relativism paradigm juxtaposes to universalism. As I have been arguing, Berlin displaces this binary.

⁸³ Amira Mashhour, for example, argues that the “deterioration of women's rights in many countries has nothing to do with their Islamic nature but rather with their patriarchal nature” and that “common ground can be found between Islamic law and gender equality” (Mashhour, , “Islamic Law and Gender Equality—Could There Be a Common Ground?” Human Rights Quarterly 27, no. 2 [2005]: 563CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Her analysis demonstrates that Sharia is not static but evolving, with various interpretations not only between countries but within the same country, in different contexts and eras. Although mainstream interpretations tend to be conservative, feminist Ijtihad exist and should be developed further in order to pursue greater gender equality in Islamic countries. Mashour cites Tunisia's laws banning polygamy and granting women equal rights to divorce as men as examples of the way in which gender equality can be sought and justified in “congruence with Sharia.” See also Obermeyer, Carla Makhlouf, “A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Reproductive Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1995): 366–81CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, which argues that there are “commonalities” between Western notions of reproductive rights and principles that define gender rights in Islam, which can serve as the basis for international and cross-cultural feminist projects.

⁸⁴ Berlin, “Alleged Relativism,” 85.

⁸⁵ Berlin declares, “Genuine belief in the inviolability of a minimum extent of individual liberty entails [an] absolute stand” (“Two Concepts,” 165). Importantly, what is “absolute” here is not a Straussian “eternal principle” to be discovered but rather a stand that is taken.

⁸⁶ Jason Ferrell (“Isaiah Berlin: Liberalism and Pluralism”) argues that although Berlin's liberalism cannot be “derived from” his pluralism, Berlin nonetheless offers an “insightful defense of liberalism,” which proceeds by linking pluralism and liberalism together via other concepts. Most notably, Ferrell believes Berlin theorizes philosophy as the “bridge” between pluralism and liberalism: the condition of pluralism underlies the critical, question-asking activity of philosophy, and such philosophy flourishes under liberalism. Ferrell's contention that Berlin presents a “plausible case” for liberalism despite the fact that he does not claim for it “a priori universality or eternal validity” overlaps with my own.

⁸⁷ Zakaras, Alex, “Isaiah Berlin's Cosmopolitan Ethics,” Political Theory 32, no. 4 (2004): 510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸⁸ Keenan, Alan, Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).Google Scholar

⁸⁹ Lefort, Claude, “The Question of Democracy,” in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. Macey, David (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 19.Google Scholar

⁹⁰ Keenan argues that democratic politics is “animated” by the ideal of openness. Such openness is “twofold,” involving both the openness of inclusion and the openness to question. But, as Keenan writes, “it turns out that the people cannot be fully open, either in the sense of fully inclusive and general, or in the sense of fully open to question.” Collective life requires “particular foundations, traditions, and institutional forms that cannot be fully general or open to question” (Democracy in Question, 10–11).