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Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on…
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Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty (original 1969; edition 2002)

by Isaiah Berlin (Author), Henry Hardy (Editor)

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703532,235 (3.91)2
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 Finally, in anextended preface and in appendices drawn from Berlin's unpublished writings he exhibits some of the biographical sources of Berlin's lifelong preoccupation with liberalism.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 fromwhich some of his most influential writing sprang.… (more)
Member:szarka
Title:Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty
Authors:Isaiah Berlin (Author)
Other authors:Henry Hardy (Editor)
Info:Oxford University Press (2002), Edition: 2nd, Paperback, 416 pages
Collections:Your library, Scanned, Currently reading
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Tags:liberty, philosophy, politics

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Four Essays on Liberty by Isaiah Berlin (1969)

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Showing 4 of 4
This is an important work for students of liberal thought.
  Fledgist | Jun 7, 2007 |
Isaiah Berlin is famous for an account of liberalism resting on two master-ideas: value pluralism and negative liberty, understood as the capacity of individuals, unimpeded by external coercion or constraint, to choose for themselves among competing conceptions of good or valuable lives.

"We must preserve a minimum area of personal freedom if we are not to “degrade or deny our nature. ” We cannot remain absolutely free, and must give up some of our liberty to preserve the rest. But total self-surrender is self-defeating. What then must the minimum be? That which a man cannot give up without offending against the essence of human nature".

Berlin is drawn to the Romantic/historicist view of human beings as individually and collectively self-creating. The core of Berlinian negative liberty is the absence of external coercion. The essence of unfreedom is imprisonment; Berlin declares that "the fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement, by others. The rest is an extension of this sense, or else metaphor".
2 vote antimuzak | Sep 10, 2006 |
Four Essays on Liberty by Isaiah Berlin was once widely cited ( )
  vegetarian | Nov 14, 2012 |
The essays, written between 1950 and 1959, address in turn changing twentith century conceptions of individual liberty; the understanding and use of liberty by historians and other social recorders; the conflict of "negative" and "positive" freedom; and John Stuart Mill, the most prominent philospher on the subject of liberty. ...Four Essays on Liberty reexamines many assumptions, with the view that errors turned into dogma are dangerous and that when rhetoric holds true it is stronger for being tested. -- Classics of Liberty
  Rickmas | Dec 24, 2006 |
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» Add other authors (10 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Isaiah Berlinprimary authorall editionscalculated
Hardy, HenryEditorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Harris, IanContributorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Rozenberga, ZaneTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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Epigraph
The essence of liberty has always lain in the ability to choose as you wish to choose, because you wish so to choose, uncoerced, unbullied, not swallowed up in some vast system; and in the right to resist, to be
unpopular, to stand up for your convictions merely because they are your convictions. That is true freedom, and without it there is neither freedom
of any kind, nor even the illusion of it.

Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and its Betrayal
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To the memory of Stephen Spender
1909-1995
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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 anextended 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 fromwhich some of his most influential writing sprang.

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