Celebrating Isaiah Berlin: 20 years After

Speaker: Dr. Ramin Jahanbegloo is a political philosopher.   Professor and Vice Dean and Executive Director, Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Peace Studies, Jindal Global Law School

 

Chair: Shri Ashok Vajpeyi

 

By the time Isaiah Berlin died in November 1997 at the age of 88, a worldly fame had long since come to surround his name as the great political thinker of the age. He was also celebrated as one of the leading liberal thinkers of the century and as a remarkable historian of ideas. An acute practical analyst of international politics, a biographer of Marx and a translator of Turgenev in English, a longtime participant in Jewish affairs, a director of the Royal Opera House, a President of the British Academy and the founder of Wolfson College at Oxford, Isaiah Berlin was a man for all seasons and a humanist with diverse intellectual interests. It would be difficult to approach Berlin as a systematic thinker and philosopher or to reduce his writings to a systematic statement. Yet, while Berlin’s work ranges across many disciplines and embraces a varied cast of concepts and ideas, there is one principal leitmotif behind all his concerns and convictions. For Berlin the history of ideas was not a way to analyze the belief-systems of the past or portray the progress from one idea to another, but rather an art of understanding men’s relationships to each other and to their institutions