Isaiah Berlin

Sir Isaiah Berlin was a British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas, born into a Russian-Jewish family in Riga in 1909. As a boy in Petrograd he witnessed the Russian Revolution, and in 1921 his family moved to England. From 1957 to 1967 he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford; his inaugural lecture, Two Concepts of Liberty (1958), set negative liberty, the absence of interference, against positive liberty, self-mastery. He became the founding president of Wolfson College, Oxford, in 1966, and his work on liberal theory and value pluralism, and his opposition to Marxism and communism, has had a lasting influence.