Sir Isaiah Berlin (6 June 1909 – 5 November 1997) was a British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas.
Born into a Russian-Jewish family in Riga, he moved to Petrograd at the age of six, where he witnessed the Russian Revolution. In 1921, his family moved to England, and he was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1932, at the age of 23, Berlin was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. In addition to his own output, he translated works by Ivan Turgenev from Russian into English. During the Second World War he worked for the British Diplomatic Service.
From 1957 to 1967 Berlin was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was the president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. In 1966 he played a role in creating Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its founding president. Berlin was appointed a CBE in 1946, knighted in 1957, and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1971. He was the president of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties, and in 1994 he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at the University of Toronto, for which occasion he prepared a "short credo" (as he called it in a letter to a friend), now known as "A Message to the Twenty-First Century", to be read on his behalf at the ceremony.
Although he became increasingly averse to writing for publication, his improvised lectures and talks were sometimes recorded and transcribed, and many of his spoken words were converted into published essays and books, both by himself and by others, especially by his principal editor from 1974, Henry Hardy. Annual Isaiah Berlin Lectures are held, in Oxford, at Hampstead Synagogue, at Wolfson College, Oxford and at the Taylor Institute (organised by Italian Studies at Oxford), at the British Academy, and in Riga. Berlin's work on liberal theory and on value pluralism, as well as his opposition to Marxism and communism, has had a lasting influence.
Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga (present-day Latvia) on 6 June 1909 into a wealthy Jewish family, the only son of Mendel Berlin, a timber trader (and a direct descendant of Shneur Zalman, founder of Chabad Hasidism), and his wife Marie (née Volshonok). His family owned a timber company, one of the largest in the Baltics, as well as forests in Russia, from where the timber was floated down the Daugava river to its sawmills in Riga. As his father, who was the head of the Riga Association of Timber Merchants, worked for the company in its dealings with Western companies, he was fluent not only in Yiddish, Russian, and German, but also in French and English. His Russian-speaking mother, Marie (Musya) Volshonok, was also fluent in Yiddish and Latvian. Isaiah Berlin spent his first six years in Riga, and later lived in Andreapol (a small timber town near Pskov, effectively owned by the family business), and then in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg). In Petrograd, the family lived first on Vasilevsky Island and then on Angliiskii Prospekt on the mainland. On Angliiskii Prospekt, they shared their building with other tenants, including an assistant Minister of Finnish affairs named Ivanov, Princess Emeretinsky, and the composer Maximilian Steinberg with his wife Nadezhda Rimskaya-Korsakova, the daughter of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. With the onset of the October Revolution of 1917, the fortunes of the building's tenants were rapidly reversed, with both Princess Emeretinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov's daughter soon being made to stoke the building's stoves and sweep the yards. Berlin witnessed the February and October Revolutions both from his apartment windows and from walks in the city with his governess, where he recalled the crowds of protesters marching on the Winter Palace Square.
One particular childhood memory of the February Revolution marked his lifelong opposition to violence, with Berlin saying:
Well I was seven and a half and something, and then I was – did I tell you the terrible sight of the policeman being dragged – not policeman, a sharp shooter from the rooftop – being dragged away by a lynching bee […] In the early parts of the revolution, the only people who remained loyal to the Tsar was the police, the Pharaon, I've never seen [the term] Pharaon in the histories of the Russian Revolution. They existed, and they did sniping from the rooftops or attics. I saw a man like that, a Pharaon […]. That's not in the books, but it is true. And they sniped at the revolutionaries from roofs or attics and things. And this man was dragged down, obviously, by a crowd, and was being obviously taken to a not very agreeable fate, and I saw this man struggling in the middle of a crowd of about twenty […] [T]hat gave me a permanent horror of violence which has remained with me for the rest of my life.
Feeling increasingly oppressed by life under Bolshevik rule, which identified the family as bourgeoisie, the family left Petrograd, on 5 October 1920, for Riga, but encounters with antisemitism and difficulties with the Latvian authorities convinced them to leave, and they moved to Britain in early 1921 (Mendel in January, Isaiah and Marie at the beginning of February), when Berlin was 11. In London the family first stayed in Surbiton where he was sent to Arundel House for preparatory school, then within the year they bought a house in Kensington and six years later in Hampstead.
Berlin's native language was Russian, and his English was virtually nonexistent at first, but he reached proficiency in English within a year at around the age of 12. In addition to Russian and English, Berlin was fluent in French, German, and Italian, and he knew Hebrew, Latin and Ancient Greek. Despite his fluency in English, however, in later life Berlin's Oxford English accent would sound increasingly Russian in its vowel sounds. Whenever he was described as an English philosopher, Berlin always insisted that he was not an English philosopher, but would forever be a Russian Jew: "I am a Russian Jew from Riga, and all my years in England cannot change this. I love England, I have been well treated here, and I cherish many things about English life, but I am a Russian Jew; that is how I was born and that is who I will be to the end of my life."
Berlin was educated at St Paul's School in London. According to Michael Bonavia, a British author (and son of Ferruccio Bonavia) who was at school with him, he
made astonishing feats in the school's Junior Debating Society and the School Union Society. The rapid, even flow of his ideas, the succession of confident references to authors whom most of his contemporaries had never heard, left them mildly stupefied. Yet there was no backlash, no resentment at these breathless marathons, because Berlin's essential modesty and good manners eliminated jealousy and disarmed hostility.
After leaving St Paul's, Berlin applied to Balliol College, Oxford, but was denied admission after a chaotic interview. Berlin decided to apply again, only to a different college: Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Berlin was admitted and commenced his literae humaniores degree. He graduated in 1928, taking first-class honours in his final examinations and winning the John Locke Prize for his performance in the philosophy papers, in which he outscored A. J. Ayer. He subsequently took another degree at Oxford in philosophy, politics and economics, again taking first-class honours after less than a year on the course. He was appointed a tutor in philosophy at New College, Oxford, and soon afterwards was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, the first unconverted Jew to achieve this fellowship at All Souls.
While still a student, he befriended Ayer (with whom he was to share a lifelong amicable rivalry), Stuart Hampshire, Richard Wollheim, Maurice Bowra, Roy Beddington, Stephen Spender, Inez Pearn, J. L. Austin, and Nicolas Nabokov. In 1940 he presented a philosophical paper on other minds to a meeting attended by Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge University. Wittgenstein rejected the argument of his paper in discussion but praised Berlin for his intellectual honesty and integrity. Berlin was to remain at Oxford for the rest of his life, apart from a period working for British Information Services (BIS) in New York City from 1940 to 1942 and for the British embassies in Washington, D.C., and Moscow from then until 1946. Before crossing the Atlantic in 1940, Berlin took rest in Portugal for a few days. He stayed in Estoril, at the Hotel Palácio, between 19 and 24 October 1940. Prior to this service, however, Berlin was barred from participation in the British war effort as a result of his being born in Latvia, and because his left arm had been damaged at birth. In April 1943 he wrote a confidential analysis of members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the Foreign Office; he described Senator Arthur Capper from Kansas as "a solid, stolid, 78-year-old reactionary from the corn belt, who is the very voice of Mid-Western "grass root" isolationism."