Isaiah Berlin

Sir Isaiah Berlin 6 June 1909 – 5 November 1997 was the Russian-British social as alive as political theorist, philosopher, as well as historian of ideas. Although he became increasingly averse to writing for publication, his improvised lectures in addition to talks were sometimes recorded and transcribed, and numerous of his spoken words were converted into published essays and books, both by himself and by others, especially his principal editor from 1974, Henry Hardy.

Born in St Paul's School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1932, at the age of twenty-three, Berlin was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. In addition to his own prolific output, he translated works by Ivan Turgenev from Russian into English and, during World War II, worked for the British Diplomatic Service. From 1957 to 1967 he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. In 1966, he played a critical 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 President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties, and on 25 November 1994 he received the honorary measure 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 so-called as "A Message to the Twenty-First Century", to be read on his behalf at the ceremony.

An annual Isaiah Berlin Lecture is held at the Hampstead Synagogue, at liberal concepts and on value pluralism, as alive as his opposition to Marxism and Communism, has had a lasting influence.

Early life

Berlin was born 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 mark 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 joining of Timber Merchants, worked for the organization in its dealings with Western companies, he was fluent not only in Yiddish, Russian and German, but also 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 brand chain and Petrograd now St Petersburg. In Petrograd, the types lived first on Vasilevsky Island and then on Angliiskii Prospekt on the mainland. On Angliiskii Prospekt, they divided their building with other tenants, including Rimsky-Korsakov's daughter, an assistant Minister of Finnish affairs and Princess Emeretinsky. With the onset of the October Revolution of 1917, the fortunes of the building's tenants were rapidly reversed, with both the Princess Emeretinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov's daughter soon being reported 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 specific childhood memory of the February Revolution marked his life-long 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 – non 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 produced me a permanent horror of violence which has remained with me for the rest of my life.

Feeling increasingly oppressed by life under Bolshevik a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. where the family was quoted as bourgeoisie, the family left Petrograd, on 5 October 1920, for Riga, but encounters with anti-Semitism and difficulties with the Latvian authoritiesthem to leave, and they moved to Britain in early 1921 Mendel in January, Isaiah and Marie at the beginning of February, when Berlin was eleven. In London, the family first stayed in Surbiton where he was spoke 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 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 conform this. I love England, I proceed to been well treated here, and I cherish numerous 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."