For 'Five Essays on Liberty' - the second edition of Four Essays with which this new collection begins - I have added, for reasons that will already be apparent, 'From Hope and Fear Set Free', finally removing the quotation marks that signalled the Swinbur- nian origin of its title,1 since the accurate but perhaps pedantic punctuation ' "From Hope and Fear Set Free" ' (just as in the case of ' "The Purpose Justifies the Ways"') has seemed to cause more difficulties than enlightenment. I have also edited the text of the original four essays and their Introduction, breaking up some long sentences and paragraphs in line with wishes Berlin had expressed too late to OUP, adding and correcting references, quotations and translations as necessary, reinstating a handful of late alterations overruled by OUP for the first edition on practical grounds, and generally ironing out wrinkles - without, of course, making any
' A line from Swinburne's The Garden of Proserpine.
alterations of substance.[5] 'Two Concepts of Liberty' and 'Historical Inevitability' had already received most of this treatment for their inclusion in the one-volume selection from Berlin's writings published in 1997 as The Proper Study of Mankind, and have not been significantly further revised here. But because Four Essays has been so widely cited in the literature, I have provided a concordance showing where the page numbers of the first edition began, so that references to that edition can easily be looked up in this one.
OTHER WRITINGS ON LIBERTY
The reprinting of already published articles is in principle to be reprobated, but in this case there are extenuating circumstances.
A. H. M. Jones, Athenian Democracy (Oxford, i960), p. v
I have also added a number of other writings that bear on the same subject, so that they can all be conveniently consulted together in one place. Indeed, the essay on the Greeks has not hitherto been collected, and the penultimate appendix not previously published. The inclusion of 'Liberty' and of the excerpts from 'My Intellectual Path' entitled 'Final Retrospect' breaches my general rule that the same material should not appear in more than one collection edited by myself:[6] but as these are short items the duplication is perhaps venial, and they do so evidently belong here. 'From Hope and Fear Set Free' is another such exception, of course, since it has already appeared in Concepts and Categories (1978); but the special reasons that apply here have already been made clear. I have wavered about also adding 'Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty' from Russian Thinkers (1978), since it does throw a good deal of light on the topic of the present volume; but it is another full-length piece, and since its approach is more prosopographical, its inclusion here seemed in the end not essential. The other obvious candidate would have been Berlin's 1952 lecture series, Freedom and its Betrayal, this, however, is being published by Chatto and Windus and by Princeton University Press as a separate volume at the same time as Liberty.
Remarks on each of the additional items now follow seriatim.
Liberty
This short summary of Berlin's views on liberty provides a useful orienteering guide for the newcomer. Berlin drafted it in preparation for his appearance in 1962 in an Associated Television film on freedom of speech, the first of a series of five (sic) programmes collectively entitled The Four Freedoms, presented by Bamber Gascoigne. What Berlin actually said in the film is very different from the remarks he prepared in advance, as usually happened; and out of nearly ten minutes of recorded material (a transcript survives) only two minutes were used in the broadcast.
In 1993 Ted Honderich invited Berlin to contribute an article on liberty to a volume he was editing, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Berlin did not feel able to write a new piece. He had written nothing substantial since 1988, when he published his intellectual credo, 'On the Pursuit of the Ideal', a response to the award of the first Agnelli Prize for his contribution to ethics.[7]Although his intellect was undiminished, and he continued to compose short occasional pieces, it seemed clear that - reasonably enough in his eighties - he had in effect laid down his authorial pen.
He asked me, however, whether there was anything among his papers that could be made use of; I offered him this short item, which he had dismissed as nugatory when I first drew it to his attention. Slightly to my surprise, therefore, he now found it 'not bad', revised it, and offered it to Honderich, who happily accepted it as it stood.
The Birth of Greek Individualism
It was also in 1993 that Jeffrey Perl, the editor of Common Knowledge, told Berlin, in a letter inviting him to contribute an article, that the journal had been set up under the influence of his work, especially on the subject of pluralism. In his reply Berlin ventured a degree of scepticism about this assertion, but allowed that he felt 'profoundly flattered by the possibility, let alone the probability', of its truth. He also regretfully declined the invitation to write for the journal, partly because of his general disinclination
mentioned above - to undertake new writing, but also because he did not believe he was equipped to deal with the specific topic suggested by Professor Perl.
Not long after Berlin's death I came across this exchange of letters among his papers, and told Perl that, in the light of his original invitation, Berlin's Literary Trustees would be happy to offer him one of Berlin's unpublished pieces. I selected this particular essay because it deals with a topic not covered except in passing in any of Berlin's other publications, and because Berlin himself had told me that he thought something might one day be made of it.
The essay is an edited version of the text Berlin prepared as a basis for the first of his three Storrs Lectures at Yale in i 962; as mentioned above, these were entitled 'Three Turning-Points in the History of Political Thought'. The second and third turning-points
Machiavelli and romanticism - are well covered in his other published essays, especially 'The Originality of Machiavelli', reprinted in both Against the Current (1979) and The Proper Study of Mankind, and 'The Romantic Revolution', which appears in The Sense of Reality (1996). There is also now, of course, The Roots of Romanticism (1999).
Final Retrospect
The two excerpts included under this heading are taken from 'My Intellectual Path', a retrospective autobiographical survey written towards the end of Berlin's life. In February 1996, in his eighty- seventh year, he received a letter from Ouyang Kang, Professor of Philosophy at Wuhan University in China, inviting him to provide a summary of his ideas for translation into Chinese and inclusion in a volume designed to introduce philosophers and students of philosophy in China to contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, hitherto largely unavailable to them in their own language.
Despite his de facto authorial retirement, the Chinese project caught his imagination; he regarded this new readership as important, and felt an obligation to address it. He told the Professor that he would try to write something. With a single sheet of notes before him, he dictated a first draft on to cassette. The transcript was at times rough-hewn, and stood in need of the editing he invited, but scarcely any intellectual additives were needed to produce a readable text. When he had approved my revised version, making a few final insertions and adjustments, he said, with his characteristic distaste for revisiting his work, that he did not wish to see the piece again. It was to be the last essay he wrote. It was published in the New York Review of Books in the year after his death, and also in The Power of Ideas (2000). I have included the two most directly relevant sections here because they bring up to date, albeit more briefly, the view of his critics which occupies much of the Introduction to 'Five Essays on Liberty'. It would have been possible to add other sections, especially those on monism, pluralism and the pursuit of the ideal, but it seemed best to mirror the structure of that Introduction more narrowly.