Isaiah Berlin's hatred of violence began with a scene outside his window
As a boy of seven in revolutionary Petrograd, Isaiah Berlin watched a crowd drag away a policeman who had been firing from the rooftops. He said the sight left him with a lifelong horror of violence. That child became one of Britain's great defenders of liberal freedom and a sharp critic of communism.
Berlin was born in Riga in 1909, the only son of a wealthy timber merchant whose company floated logs down the Daugava to its sawmills. The family moved to Petrograd, where he witnessed both revolutions of 1917 and saw aristocratic neighbours, among them Rimsky-Korsakov's daughter, reduced to sweeping yards. Branded bourgeois under Bolshevik rule, the family left in 1920, met antisemitism in Riga, and settled in England early in 1921.
He arrived with almost no English and was fluent within about a year; he also spoke French, German and Italian and read Hebrew, Latin and Greek. Yet he insisted he was not an English philosopher but a Russian Jew from Riga. Rejected by Balliol after a chaotic interview, he went to Corpus Christi, took first-class honours, and beat A. J. Ayer to the John Locke Prize. At 23 he won a prize fellowship at All Souls, the first unconverted Jew to do so.
Wartime took him to New York, Washington and Moscow for British diplomatic and information services. In Leningrad in 1945 and 1946 he met the poet Anna Akhmatova; the encounters moved them both and brought her serious trouble. In 1940, Wittgenstein rejected a paper of his on other minds but praised his honesty.
From 1957 to 1967 he held Oxford's Chichele chair of social and political theory, and in 1966 he helped create Wolfson College as its first president, with a deliberately egalitarian ethos. Knighted in 1957, he later led the British Academy and won the Jerusalem Prize for defending civil liberties. He disliked writing for print, so many books grew from transcribed talks edited by Henry Hardy. His work on value pluralism remains influential. He died in Oxford in 1997.
Source: Isaiah Berlin
