Re-Visiting Berlin: Why Two Liberties are Better Than One

Isaiah Berlin delivered his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Political Philosophy at Oxford, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in 1958. In the almost fifty years since, it has attained a canonical status, particularly as an introduction to the idea of political liberty. Michael Sandel, for example, calls it ‘perhaps the most influential essay of post-war political theory’ (Sandel, 1984: 7). Ronald Dworkin describes the essay as provoking the current ‘renaissance’ of political theory (Dworkin, 1991: 100). It has also, however, found more than its share of critics, including both Sandel and Dworkin. Indeed, the essay’s enduring popularity stands in an odd contrast with the consistently negative reception commentators have given the general political position Berlin attempted to defend. Three readings have predominated in loosely successive waves: in the first, Berlin is presented as a classical English liberal defending the overriding importance of negative liberty; on the second, Berlin was a highly original and subversive strong pluralist demonstrating the irresolvability of ultimate value conflicts; and, on a third, synthetic reading, Berlin defended a modern variant of liberalism as entailed by pluralism. These readings evidently interpret Berlin’s purposes quite differently, but in the end come to similarly skeptical conclusions concerning his success. Readers of Berlin as a classical liberal, such as Dworkin, Charles Taylor, Leo Strauss, Quentin Skinner, C. J. Galipeau and Michael Ignatieff, raise concerns that Berlin was unable to satisfactorily justify the special status he claimed for negative liberty or to define its limits. His liberalism was therefore ungrounded and undefined. Pluralists readers like John Gray and John Kekes argue that Berlin’s compelling pluralism actually undermined his liberalism. His position was therefore inconsistent. Finally, liberal pluralist readers like William Galston and (the recent) George Crowder argue that although pluralism can be shown to entail liberalism, Berlin himself failed to establish this linkage. His theory was therefore inchoate. Each of these established readings of Berlin contrast strikingly with Berlin’s