Theįamily spoke English at home but he read his way through his father's library Isaiah Berlin went to school in London and to unversity at Oxford. Unattainable, not merely in practice but even in concept.' Values are incompatible, leads to the idea that utopias are intrinsically 'Now the idea that all values - not all, but some One has to choose in the end,' he argued. The two things (complete freedom and completeĮquality) can't be had together but are both perfectly noble ultimate ends. 'Complete equality means people above other people have to be kept down in order The problem with absolute values, he argued, is He was afraid of, and intellectually opposed to, absolutisms of any kind, and particularly the main intellectual absolutism of the 20th century, Marxism-Leninism. In lectures, essays and broadcasts, he argued for a greater understanding of the essential values of liberal civilisation. The world, I think, perhaps, it comes top of that,' he once said. And if liberalĬivilisation is what we're in favour of, then I think of the great countries of 'I think on the whole, so to speak, people are more tolerant.

When he was 10 the family came to Britain which, he believed, was the best country for him. Russian Revolution made him a convinced anti-Communist, although he was never Witnessing a man being overpowered by police and dragged away during the He was born into a Jewish family in 1909 in the Latvian capital Riga. Open-minded and pleading above all for tolerance. Was perhaps also a fox, intrigued by many ideas, unendingly curious, It was in part a study of Berlin's literary hero, Tolstoy, whom heĭescribed as a fox who wished at times that he was a hedgehog.

Foxes, he wrote, are people who know many things hedgehogs know one big In 1953 Isaiah Berlin published a book called The Hedgehog and the Fox. Of his generation, the death of Sir Isaiah, an extraordinary, life-loving man with a mind like anĮncyclopaedia, leaves a hole in the intellectual life of Britain impossible

Thought by many to be the dominant scholar The philosopher and historian of ideas Sir Isaiah Berlin died in Oxford on Philosopher and political thinker Sir Isaiah Berlin dies BBC News | UK | Philosopher and political thinker Sir Isaiah Berlin dies

Isaiah berlin hedgehog