Isaiah Berlin

Sir Isaiah Berlin (6 June 1909 – 5 November 1997) was a British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas.

Born into a Russian-Jewish family in Riga, he moved to Petrograd at the age of six, where he witnessed the Russian Revolution. In 1921, his family moved to England, and he was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1932, at the age of 23, Berlin was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. In addition to his own output, he translated works by Ivan Turgenev from Russian into English. During the Second World War he worked for the British Diplomatic Service.

From 1957 to 1967 Berlin was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was the president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. In 1966 he played a 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 the president of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties, and in 1994 he received the honorary degree 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 known as "A Message to the Twenty-First Century", to be read on his behalf at the ceremony.

Although he became increasingly averse to writing for publication, his improvised lectures and talks were sometimes recorded and transcribed, and many of his spoken words were converted into published essays and books, both by himself and by others, especially by his principal editor from 1974, Henry Hardy. Annual Isaiah Berlin Lectures are held, in Oxford, at Hampstead Synagogue, at Wolfson College, Oxford and at the Taylor Institute (organised by Italian Studies at Oxford), at the British Academy, and in Riga. Berlin's work on liberal theory and on value pluralism, as well as his opposition to Marxism and communism, has had a lasting influence.