In Search of the Decent Society: Isaiah Berlin and Raymond Aron on Liberty

ABSTRACT Jeremy Waldron has argued that Berlin ignored the importance of institutions and constitutions and worked with an impoverished conception of social and political design. Political structures, legal and political institutions, constitutional design, mechanisms of representation and the rule of law: all this remained untouched by Berlin, who seemed, in Waldron’s opinion, largely uninterested in the actual political institutions of liberal society. In this essay, I argue that what may be missing in Berlin—close and sustained attention to, and interest in, institutions and social context—can be found in the works of his prominent contemporary, Raymond Aron (1905-1983), who also wrote about liberty during the Cold War. As such, Aron’s An Essay on Liberty can and should be read as a complement to Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.”