An illuminating and witty dialogue with one of the greatest intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Ramin Jahanbegloo's interview with Isaiah Berlin grew into a series of five conversations which offer an intimate view of Berlin and his ideas. They include discussions on pluralism and liberty as well as the thinkers and writers who influenced Berlin. This revised edition provided an excellent introduction to Berlin's thought. Ramin Jahanbegloo is an Iranian philosopher, who has taught in Europe and North America. In 2006 he was imprisoned for several months in Iran. He is currently teaching Political Philosophy at Toronto University. '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'. Maurice Bowra 'Berlin never talks down to the interviewer. Conversations here means the minds of the interviewed and interviewer meet on equal terms in language that is transparently clear, informed, witty and entertaining'. Stephen Spender 'He is wise without seeming pompous, witty without seeming trivial, affectionate without seeming sentimental'. Michael Ignatieff 'Isaiah Berlin... has for fifty years in this talkative and quarrelsome city (Oxford) been something special, admired by all and disliked by no-one... a benevolent super-don'. John Bayley http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/

As the essays in this collection make plain, Isaiah Berlin invented neither the term "Counter-Enlightenment" nor the concept. However, more than any other figure since the eighteenth century, Berlin appropriated the term, made it the heart of his own political thought, and imbued his interpretations of particular thinkers with its meanings and significance. His diverse treatment of writers at the margins of the Enlightenment, who themselves reflected upon what they took to be its central currents, were at once historical and philosophical. Berlin sought to show that our patterns of culture, manufactured by ourselves, must be explained differently from the ways in which we seek to fathom laws of nature. Many of the essays in this volume were prepared for the International Seminar in memory of Sir Isaiah Berlin, held at the School of History in Tel Aviv University during the academic year 1999-2000.

There is no more contentious and perennial issue in the history of modern Western thought than the vexed relationship between the genesis of an idea and its claim to validity beyond it. Can ideas or values transcend their temporal origins and overcome the sin of their original context, and in so doing earn abiding respect for their intrinsic merit? Or do they inevitably reflect them in ways that undermine their universal aspirations? Are discrete contexts so incommensurable and unique that the smooth passage of ideas from one to the other is impossible? Are we always trapped by the limits of our own cultural standpoints and partial perspectives, or can we somehow escape their constraints and enter into a fruitful dialogue with others? These persistent questions are at the heart of the discipline known as intellectual history, which deals not only with ideas, but also with the men and women who generate, disseminate, and criticize them. The essays in this collection, by one of the most recognized figures in the field, address them through engagement with leading intellectual historians—Hans Blumenberg, Quentin Skinner, Hayden White, Isaiah Berlin, Frank Ankersmit—as well other giants of modern thought—Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Georg Lukács. They touch on a wide variety of related topics, ranging from the heroism of modern life to the ability of photographs to lie. In addition, they explore the fraught connections between philosophy and theory, the truth of history and the truthfulness of historians, and the weaponization of free speech for other purposes.

For the first time, the full story of the conflict between two of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers—and the lessons their disagreements continue to offer Two of the most iconic thinkers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) and Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) fundamentally disagreed on central issues in politics, history and philosophy. In spite of their overlapping lives and experiences as Jewish émigré intellectuals, Berlin disliked Arendt intensely, saying that she represented “everything that I detest most,” while Arendt met Berlin’s hostility with indifference and suspicion. Written in a lively style, and filled with drama, tragedy and passion, Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin tells, for the first time, the full story of the fraught relationship between these towering figures, and shows how their profoundly different views continue to offer important lessons for political thought today. Drawing on a wealth of new archival material, Kei Hiruta traces the Arendt–Berlin conflict, from their first meeting in wartime New York through their widening intellectual chasm during the 1950s, the controversy over Arendt’s 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, their final missed opportunity to engage with each other at a 1967 conference and Berlin’s continuing animosity toward Arendt after her death. Hiruta blends political philosophy and intellectual history to examine key issues that simultaneously connected and divided Arendt and Berlin, including the nature of totalitarianism, evil and the Holocaust, human agency and moral responsibility, Zionism, American democracy, British imperialism and the Hungarian Revolution. But, most of all, Arendt and Berlin disagreed over a question that goes to the heart of the human condition: what does it mean to be free?

The problem of value pluralism permeates modern political philosophy. Its presence can be felt even when it is not explicitly the central topic under investigation. Political thinkers such as Max Weber, Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire derive pessimistic, sometimes tragic, conclusions from their reflections upon pluralism. On the other hand, there is a more optimistic view represented by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas that sees value pluralism as a problem that is easier to live with. This book presents the first accessible overview for both post- and undergraduate students of the way in which this problem has been understood and responded to by modern political thinkers.

Isaiah Berlin’s liberalism seems both dated and essential in an era of ideological extremes. Berlin’s vision of liberalism rejected metaphysics, philosophies of history, and particular conceptions of the good, setting a pattern for Anglo-American political thought that is still influential and may offer resources for understanding the resurgence of ideology in the twenty-first century, but one that also seems to be firmly embedded in the Cold War opposition of liberalism against Marxism. In this volume, ten political theorists reconsider Berlin’s thought—especially his famous essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty”—in the light of contemporary political developments such as populism. Several contributors focus on Berlin’s neglected idea of political “maturity” as holding a key to his thought, making it an important site of contestation over his legacy. Others analyse Berlin’s notoriously fraught definition of liberty and his understanding of value pluralism; situate him as a Cold War liberal; and relate his work to that of contemporaries such as Raymond Aron and Leo Strauss. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Review.

The revised and updated edition of Goodin and Pettit’s highly-acclaimed contemporary political philosophy anthology, bringing together the field’s most important readings in a single volume Unparalleled in the breadth and scope of its coverage, this newly-revised third edition traces the evolution of political philosophy as a contemporary practice, and raises important questions about the impact of current political events. Fully updated to include 49 contemporary and classic selections from the most distinguished scholars in political philosophy Offers expanded coverage of international affairs and political oppression Includes essays which represent a diversity of political and ideological positions, and features interdisciplinary voices in politics, law, and economics Edited by two of the field’s most highly-respected scholars The ideal collection of primary readings to accompany the Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, Second Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2012) for coursework in political philosophy

'I gradually came to the conclusion that I should prefer a field in which one could hope to know more at the end of one's life than when one had begun.' So thought Isaiah Berlin toward the end of the Second World War, when he decided to bid farewell to philosophy in favour of the history of ideas. In The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin Johnny Lyons shows that Berlin's approach to intellectual history amounted to the pursuit of philosophy by other means, creating a more original and fruitful engagement with his lifelong subject. By recasting Berlin as a philosopher who took humanity and history seriously, Lyons reveals the underlying unity of his wide-ranging and disparate ideas and throws into sharp relief the enduring moral charm of his outlook. Lyons emphasises aspects of Berlin's thinking that have largely been neglected. These include his recognition of historical contingency and of the importance of truth in human affairs, his scepticism about the so-called implications of determinism for our everyday understanding of freedom, and his deeper reasons for thinking that negative liberty should be valued. This introduction to Berlin's thought, and particularly its examination of these mainly overlooked elements of his outlook, reveals a new Berlin, one with surprising and urgent contemporary relevance to the debates that continue to dominate philosophy, politics and intellectual history today.

Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) was the greatest intellectual historian of the twentieth century. But his work also made an original and important contribution to moral and political philosophy and to liberal theory. In 1921, at the age of eleven, Isaiah Berlin arrived in England from Riga, Latvia. By the time he was thirty he was at the heart of British intellectual life. He has remained its commanding presence ever since, and few would dispute that he was one of Britain's greatest thinkers. His reputation extends worldwide--as a great conversationalist, intellectual historian, and man of letters. He has been called the century's most inspired reader. Yet Berlin's contributions to thought--in particular to moral and political philosophy, and to liberal theory--are little understood, and surprisingly neglected by the academic world. In this book, they are shown to be animated by a single, powerful, subversive idea: value-pluralism which affirms the reality of a deep conflict between ultimate human values that reason cannot resolve. Though bracingly clear-headed, humane and realist, Berlin's value-pluralism runs against the dominant Western traditions, secular and religious, which avow an ultimate harmony of values. It supports a highly distinctive restatement of liberalism in Berlin's work--an agnostic liberalism, which is founded not on rational choice but on the radical choices we make when faced with intractable dilemmas. It is this new statement of liberalism, the central subject of John Gray's lively and lucid book, which gives the liberal intellectual tradition a new lease on life, a new source of life, and which comprises Berlin's central and enduring legacy. In a new introduction, Gray argues that, in a world in which human freedom has spread more slowly than democracy, Berlin's account of liberty and basic decency is more instructive and useful than ever.