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'A magnificent and indispensable volume: the best introduction to the most important and enduring of Berlin's ideas'
JOHN GRAY
Also by Isaiah Berlin
karl marx the age of enlightenment
Edited by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly russian thinkers
Edited by Henry Hardy
concepts and categories against the current personal impressions the crooked timber of humanity the sense of reality the roots of romanticism the power of ideas three critics of the enlightenment freedom and its betrayal
Edited by Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer the proper study of mankind
LIBERTY
ISAIAH BERLIN
Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty Edited by Henry Hardy
With an essay on Berlin and his critics by Ian Harris
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York
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Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
Selection of and introduction to Four Essays on Liberty © Isaiah Berlin i 969 'Five Essays on Liberty' © The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust and Henry Hardy 2002 'Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century' copyright Isaiah Berlin 1950, © Isaiah Berlin 1969 'Historical Inevitability' copyright Isaiah Berlin 1954, © Isaiah Berlin 1969, 1997 'Two Concepts of Liberty' © Isaiah Berlin 1958, 1969, 1997 'John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life' © Isaiah Berlin 1959, 1969 'From Hope and Fear Set Free' © Isaiah Berlin 1964 'Liberty' © Isaiah Berlin 1995 'The Birth of Greek Individualism' © The Isaiah Berlin LiteraryTrust and Henry Hardy 1998 'Final Retrospect' © The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust and Henry Hardy 1998 'The Purpose Justifies the Ways' © The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 1998 Letter to George Kennan © The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2002 'Notes on Prejudice' © The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2001 This selection © Henry Hardy 2002 Editorial matter © Henry Hardy 1997, 2002 'Berlin and his Critics' © Ian Harris 2002 Illustrations © The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2002 The moral rights of the authors and editor have been asserted
Four Essays on Liberty issued as an Oxford University Press paperback 1969 Liberty published in hardback and paperback 2002
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You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this condition on any acquirer
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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
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ISBN 0-19--924988-1 (hbk) ISBN 0-19--924989-X (pbk)
Typeset in Monotype Garamond by Deltatype Ltd, Birkenhead, Merseyside
Printed in Great Britain by T. J. International, Padstow, Cornwall
To the memory of Stephen Spender
1909-1995
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'
1 London and Princeton, 2002, pp. 103-4- The lectures that comprise Freedom and its Betrayal were delivered in 1952. (Berlin uses the words 'freedom' and 'liberty' interchangeably.)
CONTENTS
Illustrations viii
The Editor's Tale ix
five essays on liberty
Introduction 3
Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century 55
Historical Inevitability 94
Two Concepts of Liberty 166
John Stuan Mill and the Ends of Life 218
From Hope and Fear Set Free 252
other writings on liberty
Liberty
The Birth of Greek Individualism 287
Final Retrospect 322
autobiographical appendices
The Purpose Justifies the Ways 331
A Letter to George Kennan 336
Notes on Prejudice 345
Berlin and his Critics by Ian Harris 349
Concordance to Four Essays on Liberty 367
Index 371
ILLUSTRATIONS
A page from the proofs of Four Essays on Liberty xvm
The front cover of the first impression of
Four Essays on Liberty xxm
The source of the title 'Five Essays on Liberty' xxxiv
Berlin's notes for 'My Intellectual Path' 282
Berlin aged twelve, Arundel House School, July 1921 329
The first page of the manuscript of
'The Purpose Justifies the Ways' 330
The first page of the typescript of 'Political Ideas in the
Romantic Age' 348
The end of the bibliography from the Isaiah Berlin Virtual
Library, http://berlin.wollf.ox.ac.uk/, October 2001 365
THE EDITOR'S TALE
Liberty is the only true riches. William Hazlitt1
In the year that Isaiah Berlin died, I was invited by The Times Higher Education Supplement to contribute to their 'Speaking Volumes' series, in which readers write briefly about the book that has influenced them most. I had no hesitation in choosing Berlin's Four Essays on Liberty, which not only bowled me over when I first read it, but also set me on course towards becoming Berlin's editor, and so led, thirty years on, to the publication of this expanded edition of the book.
My THES piece was written just before Berlin's death, and published shortly thereafter.2 Part of what I said seems to me to bear repeating in the present context: