Isaiah Berlin

British · 1909 to 1997

Isaiah Berlin was born on 6 June 1909 in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire, the only son of a Jewish timber merchant. The family moved to Petrograd in 1915, where young Isaiah witnessed both revolutions of 1917 from his window, including a mob dragging away a man accused of sniping, a scene he later said left him with a permanent horror of violence. Facing growing antisemitism after the Bolsheviks took power, the Berlins left for Riga in 1920 and settled in London the following year, when Isaiah was eleven. He attended St Paul's School before going up to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he took first-class honours in classics and then in philosophy, politics and economics. In 1932 he was elected a fellow of All Souls College, the first Jew to hold a prize fellowship there, and he taught philosophy at Oxford for the rest of his career, apart from wartime service with British Information Services in New York and Washington and a posting to the British Embassy in Moscow, where in 1945 and 1946 he had two long, unforgettable conversations with the poet Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad. As Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory from 1957, he delivered the 1958 lecture Two Concepts of Liberty, distinguishing freedom from interference from freedom to self-govern, an argument that reshaped how political philosophers talked about liberty. He became increasingly reluctant to write for publication, so most of his later books were assembled by his editor Henry Hardy from taped lectures and talks rather than composed as manuscripts. Berlin helped found Wolfson College, Oxford, in 1966 and served as its first president. He was knighted in 1957 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1971. He died in Oxford on 5 November 1997, at the age of eighty-eight.