Ich bin ein Berliner

...Two Concepts of Liberty" takes up over 50 printed pages, but its argument is easily summarized...

...There is always a temptation to interpret a long, exceptionally successful life in terms of one or a few intentions embraced in youth—"planful competence," as my father christened it...

...Even so, his academic reputation was ambiguous until late in his career...

...Dworkin went on to suggest "that there might be a way to create a liberal society in which all values 'hang together in the right way.' " Positive liberty remains very much alive...

...BERLiN's liberalisni can be all too easily "explained" by those who wish to trace its biographical development: the childhood refugee from Bolshevism who learns to make himself a place at Oxford...

...For Berlin it was a meta-value made urgent by the irreconcilable diversity of other values and the cultures in which they arose...

...His talent was for synthesis, not for scholarship...

...The psychological roots of a thinker's positions are naturally the business of the biographer, and Ignatieff finds Berlin something of an anomaly: "He had few brushes with tragedy himself, but he did have a deep sense of inner dividedness...

...Second Thoughts ICH BIN EIN BERLINER By Christopher Clausen When Sir Isaiah Berlin died in November 1997 at the age of 88, he left behind a controversy over the significance of his long and varied career that still rages...

...As paraphrased in the New York Times, Dworkin argued that "a man might think that high taxes, levied for the sake of social equality, were a serious constraint on his liberty...

...Two Concepts of Liberty" came under such strong immediate attack, Ignatieff judges, because it "put into question the elitist paternalism of his own milieu...

...When Berlin was a teenager newly resident in England, his adoring mother would bring him breakfast in bed, urge him to do something energetic, ask him "What is the plan for the day...

...The audience he cared about was the educated middle classes, not the specialists, though he knew he must earn their respect...

...Two years after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, few of Berlin's readers can have wished to defend the Soviet system...

...But he challenged the whole postwar social democratic tradition by pointing out that the values at the heart of it—equality, liberty and justice—contradicted each other...

...But there was far more to him than that, as Michael Ignatieff spells out in Isaiah Berlin: A Life (Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt, 338 pp., $30.00), a biography that manages to be both authorized and independent...

...the essay, not the monograph...

...He also wrote shrewd, influential articles on Churchill, whom he knew, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he never met despite having been a diplomat in Washington during World War II...

...Born in Latvia (then part of Russia) in 1909,Berlin was brought to England as a child and for the rest of his life flourished spectacularly despite being the foreign-born son of a Jewish timber merchant...

...No wonder he found negative liberty such an attractive concept...

...Any doctrine that identifies liberty with self-realization of a particular kind, as distinct from the right of ordinary people to act on their present desires, endorses positive liberty...

...Governments should not be in the Utopian, inevitably tyrannical business of transforming human nature...

...Originally a philosophy don, Berlin became in the 1940s one of the founders and most distinguished practitioners of the history of ideas, writing important essays on a host of Russian and European thinkers from Machiavelli in the Renaissance through Vico and Herder in the Enlightenment to Herzen, Tolstoy and Marx (the subject of his only fulllength book) in the 19th century...

...Having written his Marx, he knew that he was not cut out to be a scholar in the British mold," Ignatieff explains...

...When he received his knighthood, an old flame congratulated him for his services to conversation...

...A confidant of Virginia Woolf in his 20s and Winston Churchill in his 30s, knighted in his 40s, the recipient of every important academic honor the English-speaking world has to offer, he continues to inspire in some critics the suspicion that he was a thoroughly charming lightweight who got everything he wanted in life by knowing everyone of importance...

...The fox," as Ignatieff puts it, "had discovered that he was a hedgehog after all...

...At a conference this fall at New York University on Berlin's intellectual legacy, the legal scholar Ronald Dworkin maintained that he was too pessimistic for believing that worthwhile goals frequently conflict...

...Today, with much of the press and the scholarly community equating anti-Communism with McCarthyism, Berlin's reputation on the Left has undergone somewhat the same shift as George Orwell's: not exactly a conservative, but in some respects a tool of reactionary forces in a repressive era...

...Negative liberty" is the absence of human coercion, the freedoms of conscience, speech, mobility, and so on—in short, the right to live our lives as we choose while respecting the right of others to do the same...

...Political or legal liberty, Berlin says, comes in two forms: negative and positive...

...He had found 'the one big thing' that was to order his intellectual life thereafter: the theme of freedom and its betrayal...

...Positive liberty" is a hazier concept that Berlin seems to define in several different ways...

...There, the author seems to be saying, is where positive liberty leads—a degree of intolerance and coercion that makes a mockery of liberty in any recognizable form...

...The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition...

...Marxism, which ridicules "bourgeois" freedoms (what Berlin calls negative liberty) in the name of the supposedly more authentic freedom of fully achieved Communism, is the most salient modern example, though by no means the only one...

...Even many liberals, however, quarreled from the start with his indulgence for ordinary, unregenerate human nature and its desires...

...Negative liberty includes the freedoms that liberalism has traditionally stood for since its beginnings in the 17th century...

...the intellectual Right quarreled with the notion that there was no unambiguous ideal of the good for a nation or society to embody...

...Besides, he loved company too much to spend the best years of his life in the library...

...To take a mundane example that Berlin does not use, the social goal of raising the standard of living through technology often runs afoul of the desire to preserve the natural environment...

...The chief problem with positive liberty, for Berlin, is that worthy human ends, ideals and truths are plural and often incompatible...

...Isaiah Berlin seems on the contrary to have been a man so intelligent, engaging and lucky that almost everything worked out for him spontaneously...

...They were in conflict, and their resolution was painful and protracted...

...His career casts a new light on the meaning of the word "Establishment," for Berlin was swiftly elevated into that nebulous entity first as an Oxford undergraduate, then as the first Jew elected a Fellow of All Souls, and never suffered any serious reverses...

...Although "The Hedgehog and the Fox' turned a mysterious sentence from the Greek philosopher Archilochus into a cliché ("The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing"), "Two Concepts of Liberty," delivered as Berlin's inaugural lecture for the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory at Oxford in 1958, remains his most important single piece of work...

...Taking the side of the West in the Cold War was not so controversial in 1958 as it has become since Vietnam...

...Seventeen of his essays have been republished, with useful introductions and bibliography, in The Proper Study of Mankind (Farrar Straus Giroux, 644 pp., $35.00...

...Although "the theme of freedom and its betrayal" can be seen as a key to Berlin's mature interests, Ignatieff does not press the implication...

...For whatever combination of reasons, he gave the liberal tradition both its most searching modern critique and its most impressive modem defense...

...Berlin's approach to this theme explains much of the controversy about him...

...He has been equally fortunate in his biographer...

...To free a man, Isaiah insisted, was to free him from obstacles—prejudice, tyranny, discrimination—to the exercise of his own free choice," Ignatieff observes...

...the middle-aged traveler who visits Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in the worst days of Stalin...

...In reply he would fume, "There is no plan, none whatever...

...Despite Berlin's emphasizing that the absolutism underlying positive liberty "is an attitude found in equal measure on the Right and Left wings in our days," one can hardly miss his identification of its most extreme and cautionary manifestation with Communist totalitarianism...

...the mild-mannered Jewish diplomat who experiences World War II at a still impressionable age...

...But its core is the conviction that human selves or societies, when properly understood, have one ideal form that is better than all others, and that true freedom means the opportunity to realize this form...

...Of course, the same experiences might have moved a different person to another political outlook altogether—say, to value security and order above liberty...

...Liberty was, as Lord Acton said, the highest political end, not a means to other ends...

...His deepest loyalties were not conveniently layered one on top of the other...

...The moderate Left took it as an attack on the kinds of social engineering they favored...

...This gives its value to freedom as Acton conceived of it—as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out of our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea could one day put right...

...In practical politics," Ignatieff notes, "Berlin was neither a conservative nor a laissez-faire individualist, but a New Deal liberal, convinced that individuals could not be free if they were poor, miserable and undereducated...

...It did not mean telling him how to use his freedom...

...If, as I believe," he states near the end of the essay, "the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict—and of tragedy—can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social...

...In addition to studies of individual thinkers and doers, Berlin composed major essays on such general topics as historical inevitability and the meanings of liberty in modern society...

...But that man's notion of liberty should then be argued with, showing him that there really is no conflict...