Isaiah Berlin: The history of ideas as psychodrama

Abstract

The essay is a ‘personal impression’ of Isaiah Berlin and his liberalism, beginning with some intellectual biography, and turning to the question of how the way Berlin wrote about political ideas illuminates the liberalism he espoused. The essay discounts Berlin’s self-description as a historian of ideas who had abandoned philosophy, and follows Bernard Williams in arguing that the historicity of our political values demands a dialogical approach to their analysis in which we engage with our forebears and contemporaries in an essentially conversational mode. The claim is illustrated with Berlin’s engagement with Alexander Herzen and Romanticism.