Sir Isaiah Berlin was a philosopher and historian of ideas, regarded as one of the leading liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. 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. Many of his essays and lectures were later collected in book form.
Born 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. From 1957 to 1967, he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. In 1966, he helped to found Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its first President. He was knighted in 1957, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his writings on individual freedom. Berlin's work on liberal theory has had a lasting influence.
Berlin 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 defined negative liberty as the absence of constraints on, or interference with, agents' possible action. Greater "negative freedom" meant fewer restrictions on possible action. Berlin associated positive liberty with the idea of self-mastery, or the capacity to determine oneself, to be in control of one's destiny. 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.
Berlin contended that under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel (all committed to the positive concept of liberty), European political thinkers often equated liberty with forms of political discipline or constraint. 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. Berlin argued that, following this line of thought, demands for freedom paradoxically become demands for forms of collective control and discipline – those deemed necessary for the "self-mastery" or self-determination of nations, classes, democratic communities, and even humanity as a whole. There is thus an elective affinity, for Berlin, between positive liberty and political totalitarianism.
Conversely, negative liberty represents a different, perhaps safer, understanding of the concept of liberty. Its proponents (such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) insisted that constraint and discipline were the antithesis of liberty and so were (and are) less prone to confusing liberty and constraint in the manner of the philosophical harbingers of modern totalitarianism. It is this concept of Negative Liberty that Isaiah Berlin supported. It dominated heavily his early chapters in his third lecture.
This negative liberty is central to the claim for toleration due to incommensurability. This concept is mirrored in the work of Joseph Raz.
Berlin's espousal of negative liberty, his hatred of totalitarianism and his experience of Russia in the revolution and through his contact with the poet Anna Akhmatova made him an enemy of the Soviet Union and he was one of the leading public intellectuals in the ideological battle against Communism during the Cold War.
Liberty is a revised and expanded edition of the book that Isaiah Berlin regarded as his most important—Four Essays on Liberty, a standard text of liberalism, constantly in demand and constantly discussed since it was first published in 1969. Writing in Harper's, Irving Howe described it as "an exhilarating performance—this, one tells oneself, is what the life of the mind can be."
Berlin's editor Henry Hardy has revised the text, incorporating a fifth essay that Berlin himself had wanted to include. He has also added further pieces that bear on the same topic, so that Berlin's principal statements on liberty are at last available together in one volume. Finally, in an extended preface and in appendices drawn from Berlin's unpublished writings, he exhibits some of the biographical sources of Berlin's lifelong preoccupation with liberalism. These additions help us to grasp the nature of Berlin's "inner citadel," as he called it—the core of personal conviction from which some of his most influential writing sprung.
##本文最初發錶在美國雜誌 Foreign Affairs 上。這本書的標題“自由”,論文自己的標題“二十世紀”,以及雜誌的標題“外國事務”,閤起來大概可以確定這本書的主題:二十世紀關於自由這種政治事務的 ideas。 文章一共八部分。 一,本文寫作模式 1 觀念史傢使用模式來構想材料 ...
評分##中英一起看的。讀完瞭,大受啓發大受震撼,把自由的概念啊,形成啊,政體啊分析地好清楚啊!雖然有一些部分還可能不是很懂。讀完挺佩服John Mill的?摘一句不錯的話:“to realize the relative validity of one‘s conviction’s and stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.” 1958年10月31日,以賽亞•伯林在在牛津大學發錶瞭一篇影響深遠的就職演說,這就是著名的《兩種自由概念》(Two Concepts of Liberty)。該文隨後被印成單行本發錶。在這篇文章中,伯林區分瞭兩種自由的概念,即消極自由(negative liberty)與積極自由(positive liberty)。...
評分##因為哲學課讀的書越來越看不懂/不感興趣瞭所以我決定每本下麵編些不相乾的鬍話,整理的時候就感覺好像自己真有收獲一樣。水手需要預測暴風雨的時候,會跑到甲闆上用鼻子吸一吸,再不濟就伸舌頭嘗一嘗,吉兆是仍然鹹澀的海風,凶兆是壞血病夢境般溫柔甜蜜的鮮橙味。
評分 評分 評分 評分##Practical Philanthropy
評分##與譯林內容一緻。除瞭刪改字詞
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