Isaiah Berlin: A Life

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This biography was published in 1998, the year after Berlin's death, many years before Ignatieff took the Canadian Liberal Party to their worst result ever. I confess that although I have been involved with politics for most of my adult life, I've had very little time for political philosophy. After reading this biography, I'm willing to concede that I may have missed out. Berlin's work on liberal political philosophy in an age of political extremes was of crucial importance to steer between different brands of totalitarianism in the years leading up to the Second World War, and to give the West friendly criticism during the Cold War. His life as an academic was not particularly interesting, show more but his life as a Russian emigrant who became a loyal British subject (yet always conscious of his origins) it fascinating. The relationship he had with Russian literature was crucial to his philosophy, and his most famous phrase, "The Hedgehog and the Fox" comes from an essay on Tolstoy. His November 1945 meeting with Anna Akhmatova in Moscow had profound effects on them both. Ignatieff clearly admired and loved Berlin, but is not uncritical of his political philosophy which he says looked more at the negative case of illiberalism than the positive case for liberalism; I don't feel qualified to judge.

There is one truly hilarious anecdote which I had not heard before. In the later stages of the Second World War, Berlin was posted to the British Embassy in Washington D.C. and wrote detailed and insightful reports back to Whitehall. Winston Churchill, hearing that Mr Berlin was in London for a few days, invited him for lunch with the Chief of the General Staff and others. But the lunch guest, surprisingly to Churchill, had a strong American accent and yet was only able to give vague and disappointing answers to Churchill's questions about the political and economic situation across the Atlantic. It turned out that there had been a mistake; Churchill had invited not Isaiah Berlin, but the composer Irving Berlin, author of "White Christmas". It seems too good to be true, but it's well documented. show less

Its really the ideas of Berlin's that matter. For me, though I'm not fully in his camp, more left; though the idea that the ideologies of the 20thC were destructive is in line with how my father saw the world: a farm worker, under occupation from Nazis and a frightened teenager in the midst of a civil war, where you cannot be a passive observer. His world view - an uneducated one in terms of book learning, was about the avoidance of extreme views - and when I read Berlin's works and life, I realised that they had reached similar conclusions, using different methods. Extreme politics leads to extreme violence, destruction and instability. I'd still prefer a greater emphasis on the redistribution of resources to benefit all. But that's show more just me. show less

Isaiah Berlin was one of the leading liberal thinkers of the 20th century, and one of its fastest talkers. Born in the Latvian port of Riga in 1909, his family survived the Russian Revolution, but its chilly aftermath forced his Anglophile father to resettle them in Surbiton in 1921. Isaiah assimilated quickly, becoming in his mind equal parts Russian, English and Jewish, and subsequently he became the first Jew to be elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was to spend most of his life studying and lecturing at Oxford, developing his concept of "negative liberty", but although he longed to know one big thing, to be a "hedgehog" in his own famous definition, instead he felt more naturally a "fox", knowing many smaller things. show more This Reynard instinct, however, made him wonderful company, and he became that rarity: a British public intellectual, who made learning attractive.

Michael Ignatieff has written a book that stands somewhere between a biography and a ghost-written autobiography, relying mostly on Berlin's own recollections gathered from conversations between them over a 10-year period. Berlin had his detractors, including himself ("superficial"), and a more critical evaluation of his contribution to philosophy will be written, but Ignatieff captures the human side of this wise and cosmopolitan man, whose deceptive "lightness of being" concealed a soul that stared at the horrors of his century. --David Vincent

Isaiah Berlin refused to write an autobiography, but he agreed to talk about himself - and so for 10 years, before's Berlin's death in November 1997, he allowed Michael Ignatieff to interview him about his past, his ideas, his most intimate memories, and his inner conflicts. show less

3177. Isaiah Berlin / A Life, by Michael Ignatieff (read 22 Mar 1999) This is a great book about a most interesting life. I found the book fun to read, even tho I am in no way qualified to say his "thought" is appreciated by me.