Mark Lilla is Professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is the author of G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (1993) and the editor of New French Thought: Political Philosophy (1991). His latest book is The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. »

The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin

Edited by Mark Lilla
Edited by Ronald Dworkin
Edited by Robert B. Silvers

In the fall of 1998, one year after the death of Isaiah Berlin, the New York Institute for the Humanities organized a conference to consider his intellectual legacy. The scholars who participated devoted much of their attention to the question of pluralism, which for Berlin was central to liberal values. His belief in pluralism was at the core of his philosophical writings as well as his studies of contemporary politics and the history of ideas. The papers given at the conference and collected in this volume concentrate on three aspects of Berlin's concept of pluralism. Aileen Kelly, Mark Lilla, and Steven Lukes trace the development and consequences of his distinction between "hedgehogs," thinkers who have a single, unified theory of human action and history, and "foxes," who believe in multiplicity and resist the impulse to subject humanity to a universal vision. Ronald Dworkin, Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, and Charles Taylor examine how liberalism can be sustained in the face of Berlin's insight that equally legitimate values, such as liberty and equality, may come into irreconcilable conflict. Avishai Margalit, Richard Wollheim, Michael Walzer, and Robert Silvers take up Berlin's advocacy for the State of Israel and his hopes for it as a place where the often contrary values of liberalism and nationalism might find harmonious resolution. The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin includes not only the panelists' contributions but also transcripts of the lively exchanges among themselves and with audience members following each session. The two days of discussion preserved here demonstrate the continuing vitality and relevance of Isaiah Berlin's thought in today's social and political debates.

Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga in 1909. In 1916 his family moved to Petrograd, where he witnessed the Russian Revolution, and in 1921 he emigrated to England. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and became a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he was later appointed Professor of Social and Political Theory. He served as the first president of Wolfson College, Oxford, and as president of the British Academy. He died in 1997.

Isaiah Berlin's books include Karl Marx, Four Essays on Liberty, Vico and Herder, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Magus of the North, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, and Three Critics of the Enlightenment.

Special offer: Purchase The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin and get The First and the Last for only $10.49!

Reviews

Isaiah Berlin was original, and he is as hard to come to terms with as Machiavelli or Hume. All I can say is that he seems to me to have offered the truest and most moving interpretation of life that my own generation made.
— Noel Annan

Also see:

The First and the Last By Isaiah Berlin Tributes by Noel Annan, Stuart Hampshire, Aileen Kelly, Avishai Margalit, and Bernard Williams vividly recall Berlin as conversationalist, music lover, philosopher, and friend. The perfect introduction to Berlin's ideas.

The Reckless Mind By Mark Lilla The Reckless Mind is a study of how a number of important twentieth-century European intellectuals came to support tyrannical regimes and totalitarian political ideas.

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