Abstract

In this paper A. Walicki draws attention to the Russian inspirations of the conception of liberty worked out by late Sir Isaiah Berlin, and develops an interpretation of Berlin’s liberalism based on its three definitive characteristics. According to Walicki, liberalism in Berlin’s interpretation has become a doctrine left-of-centre, yet at the same time distinct from the British social liberalism of the first decades of the 20th century, when liberalism took a socialist turn following T.H. Green, and especially J. Hobson and L.T. Hobhouse. In contrast to them, Berlin argued that the genuine content of the term „liberty” was the negative freedom; he also thought that Wilsonian „freedom from poverty” as well Dewey’s „freedom as an effective power to do concrete things” are in fact semantic misuses which blur an adequate understanding of freedom properly understood. At the same time, Berlin differed from Sir F.A. Hayek in arguing that a defence of negative liberty cannot be thought an incontestable priority in every possible situation. Not an apologist for capitalism, Berlin argued that freedom has nothing to do with property, and was opposed to excessive amassing of property by individuals. Berlin demanded, most of all, that pluralism is understood and respected, but also that liberty is counterbalanced by equality and justice; he also considered the free-market liberalism an example of an axiological monism. Secondly, Berlin’s liberalism was a worldview typical of intelligentsia. He defined intelligentsia as people who believe in progress, reason, scientific methods and free criticism. In this he continued the work of the French Enlightenment; yet his anti-Cartesian critical approach to reason was due to the influence of the thinkers of the Russian intelligentsia, especially Hercen who was critical of the Enlightenment’s cult of reason, but also of Shestov and Bielinsky. Thirdly, Berlin’s liberal thought was formed in the circumstances in which liberalism was no longer at war with the traditionalist conservatism but with the communist totalitarianism. For this reason, his liberalism, like Popper’s and Talmon’s, could then be interpreted as an ally of the anticommunist right. With communism gone, however, Berlin’s thought cannot be associated with conservative thinking, though it remains a powerful weapon against all sorts of fundamentalisms: religious, neoliberal, and neoconservative alike.Key words LIBERTY, BERLIN