Isaiah Berlin S Cold War Liberalism

This book offers a succinct re-examination of Berlin’s Cold War liberalism, at a time when many observers worry about the emergence of a new Cold War. Two chapters look closely at Berlin’s liberalism in a Cold War context, one carefully analyses whether Berlin was offering a universal political theory – and argues that he did indeed (already at the time of the Cold War there were worries that Berlin was a kind of relativist). It will be of value for scholars of the cold war and of security issues in contemporary Asia, as well as students of history and philosophy.

Isaiah Berlin’s liberalism seems both dated and essential in an era of ideological extremes. Berlin’s vision of liberalism rejected metaphysics, philosophies of history, and particular conceptions of the good, setting a pattern for Anglo-American political thought that is still influential and may offer resources for understanding the resurgence of ideology in the twenty-first century, but one that also seems to be firmly embedded in the Cold War opposition of liberalism against Marxism. In this volume, ten political theorists reconsider Berlin’s thought—especially his famous essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty”—in the light of contemporary political developments such as populism. Several contributors focus on Berlin’s neglected idea of political “maturity” as holding a key to his thought, making it an important site of contestation over his legacy. Others analyse Berlin’s notoriously fraught definition of liberty and his understanding of value pluralism; situate him as a Cold War liberal; and relate his work to that of contemporaries such as Raymond Aron and Leo Strauss. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Review.

A Mind and its Time offers the most detailed account to date of the genesis and development of Isaiah Berlin's political thought, philosophical views, and historical understanding. Drawing on both little-known published material and archival sources, it locates Berlin's evolving intellectual interests and political positions in the context of the events and trends of interwar and post-war intellectual and political life. Special emphasis is placed on the roots of Berlin's later pluralism in philosophical and cultural debates of the interwar period, his concern with the relationship between ethics and political conduct, and his evolving account of liberty. Berlin's distinctive liberalism is shown to have been shaped by his response to the cultural politics of interwar period, and the political and ethical dilemmas of the early Cold War era; and to what Berlin saw as a dangerous embrace of an elitist, technocratic, scientistic and "managerial" intellectual and political stance by liberals themselves. At the same time, Berlin's attitude toward what he called "positive liberty" emerges as far more complicated and ambivalent than is often realized. Joshua L. Cherniss reveals the multiplicity of Berlin's influences and interlocutors, the shifts in his thinking, and the striking consistency of his concerns and commitments. In shedding new light on Berlin's thought, and offering a better understanding of his place in the development of liberal thought in the twentieth century, he makes fresh contributions both to understanding the intellectual history of the twentieth century, and to discussions of liberty and liberalism in political theory.

The Cold War roots of liberalism’s present crisis By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era—among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling—transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In his iconoclastic style, Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy—a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism.

DIV Two high-voltage scholars engage in a bitter conflict in this irresistible tale of principle and politics in the Cold War years /div

Isaiah Berlin remains one of the seminal political philosophers of the twentieth century. This book explains his enduring relevance as we face the challenges of the twenty-first.

In this book, leading scholars from East Asia and beyond debate Michael Oakeshott's views on liberal democracy and totalitarianism and their implications for East Asia today. His ideas on rationality in politics, the nature of liberal democracy, and how democracy can defeat anti-liberal politics are explored in ten penetrating essays.

For the first time, the full story of the conflict between two of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers—and the lessons their disagreements continue to offer Two of the most iconic thinkers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) and Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) fundamentally disagreed on central issues in politics, history and philosophy. In spite of their overlapping lives and experiences as Jewish émigré intellectuals, Berlin disliked Arendt intensely, saying that she represented “everything that I detest most,” while Arendt met Berlin’s hostility with indifference and suspicion. Written in a lively style, and filled with drama, tragedy and passion, Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin tells, for the first time, the full story of the fraught relationship between these towering figures, and shows how their profoundly different views continue to offer important lessons for political thought today. Drawing on a wealth of new archival material, Kei Hiruta traces the Arendt–Berlin conflict, from their first meeting in wartime New York through their widening intellectual chasm during the 1950s, the controversy over Arendt’s 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, their final missed opportunity to engage with each other at a 1967 conference and Berlin’s continuing animosity toward Arendt after her death. Hiruta blends political philosophy and intellectual history to examine key issues that simultaneously connected and divided Arendt and Berlin, including the nature of totalitarianism, evil and the Holocaust, human agency and moral responsibility, Zionism, American democracy, British imperialism and the Hungarian Revolution. But, most of all, Arendt and Berlin disagreed over a question that goes to the heart of the human condition: what does it mean to be free?