1 Isaiah Berlin’s Anti-Procrustean Liberalism: Ideas, Circumstances, and the Protean Individual Jonathan Allen Assistant Professor Department of Political Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
[email protected] Presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (August 28- 31, 2003, Philadelphia, PA) 2 Introduction: Isaiah Berlin’s death in 1997, and the appearance of several new collections of essays by him over the past decade, have resulted in a flurry of writing about his political thought. As always, commentators have divided sharply over the status of his contribution to political thought. Some of his admirers point to the importance and originality of his formulation of the idea of value-pluralism – the notion that multiple moral and non-moral values exist, that they may conflict with one another, and that when they do, such conflict cannot be resolved by appeal to a single, overarching value or by means of a single scale of values. Many see Berlin’s attempt to ally pluralism and liberalism as his most stimulating contribution to political theory, or note the role he played in Oxford and more generally in reviving interest in the history of ideas and in presenting to the English-speaking world a range of thinkers otherwise likely to have been lost to view – Vico, Herder, de Maistre, Sorel, etc. Berlin’s detractors, on the other hand, note the absence from his writings of a book-length defense of his views, or find fault with the accuracy of his work in the history of ideas and with his scholarship in general.1 It might be thought that this difference of opinion is in itself of interest only to those who were personally acquainted with Berlin.