Liberty

出版者:Oxford University Press

作者:Isaiah Berlin

页数:416

出版时间:2002-3-7

价格:USD 34.95

装帧:Paperback

isbn号码:9780199249893

具体描述

Liberty is a revised and expanded edition of the book that Isaiah Berlin regarded as his most important—Four Essays on Liberty, a standard text of liberalism, constantly in demand and constantly discussed since it was first published in 1969. Writing in Harper's, Irving Howe described it as "an exhilarating performance—this, one tells oneself, is what the life of the mind can be."

Berlin's editor Henry Hardy has revised the text, incorporating a fifth essay that Berlin himself had wanted to include. He has also added further pieces that bear on the same topic, so that Berlin's principal statements on liberty are at last available together in one volume. Finally, in an extended preface and in appendices drawn from Berlin's unpublished writings, he exhibits some of the biographical sources of Berlin's lifelong preoccupation with liberalism. These additions help us to grasp the nature of Berlin's "inner citadel," as he called it—the core of personal conviction from which some of his most influential writing sprung.

作者简介

Sir Isaiah Berlin was a philosopher and historian of ideas, regarded as one of the leading liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. He excelled as an essayist, lecturer and conversationalist; and as a brilliant speaker who delivered, rapidly and spontaneously, richly allusive and coherently structured material, whether for a lecture series at Oxford University or as a broadcaster on the BBC Third Programme, usually without a script. Many of his essays and lectures were later collected in book form.

Born in Riga, now capital of Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, he was the first person of Jewish descent to be elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. From 1957 to 1967, he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. In 1966, he helped to found Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its first President. He was knighted in 1957, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his writings on individual freedom. Berlin's work on liberal theory has had a lasting influence.

Berlin is best known for his essay Two Concepts of Liberty, delivered in 1958 as his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. He defined negative liberty as the absence of constraints on, or interference with, agents' possible action. Greater "negative freedom" meant fewer restrictions on possible action. Berlin associated positive liberty with the idea of self-mastery, or the capacity to determine oneself, to be in control of one's destiny. While Berlin granted that both concepts of liberty represent valid human ideals, as a matter of history the positive concept of liberty has proven particularly susceptible to political abuse.

Berlin contended that under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel (all committed to the positive concept of liberty), European political thinkers often equated liberty with forms of political discipline or constraint. This became politically dangerous when notions of positive liberty were, in the nineteenth century, used to defend nationalism, self-determination and the Communist idea of collective rational control over human destiny. Berlin argued that, following this line of thought, demands for freedom paradoxically become demands for forms of collective control and discipline – those deemed necessary for the "self-mastery" or self-determination of nations, classes, democratic communities, and even humanity as a whole. There is thus an elective affinity, for Berlin, between positive liberty and political totalitarianism.

Conversely, negative liberty represents a different, perhaps safer, understanding of the concept of liberty. Its proponents (such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) insisted that constraint and discipline were the antithesis of liberty and so were (and are) less prone to confusing liberty and constraint in the manner of the philosophical harbingers of modern totalitarianism. It is this concept of Negative Liberty that Isaiah Berlin supported. It dominated heavily his early chapters in his third lecture.

This negative liberty is central to the claim for toleration due to incommensurability. This concept is mirrored in the work of Joseph Raz.

Berlin's espousal of negative liberty, his hatred of totalitarianism and his experience of Russia in the revolution and through his contact with the poet Anna Akhmatova made him an enemy of the Soviet Union and he was one of the leading public intellectuals in the ideological battle against Communism during the Cold War.

目录信息

The Editor's Tale
Five Essays on Liberty
Introduction
Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century
Historical Inevitability
Two Concepts of Liberty
John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life
From Hope and Fear Set Free
Other Writings on Liberty
Liberty
The Birth of Greek Individualism
Final Retrospect
Autobiographical Appendices
The Purpose Justifies the Ways
A Letter to George Kennan
Notes on Prejudice
Berlin and his Critics by Ian Harris
Index
· · · · · · (收起)

读后感

总算读了柏林的这本书，还顺便读了邓晓芒和周枫的辩论。记得甘阳老师当初讲两种自由的区分时，是比较赞同柏林，站在消极自由的立场上的，而当时具体的语境则是对五四的反思。中国的现代之路，特别是建国之后的历史，被当做了“积极自由的爆发”的典型案例；而自由中国的重建则...  

人类的生活目的不可能未有分歧。在目的一致的地方，便只存在手段问题，例如共产主义革命认为政治与道德问题最后都能转化为技术问题而得到解决。 观念能够产生足以摧毁文明的巨大力量，而正是需要其他观念，才能进行化解与对抗。（P168）政治理论争端中最激烈的是服从与强制的问...  

“自由是唯一真正的财富”——威廉·黑兹利特 出于某种道义上的责任，必须要写那么一些东西以传播该理论，同时声援基于人类福祉与有关自由等话题演绎出伟大学说的巨擘，上一次类似的体会大概是罗尔斯的《正义论》。 《论自由》这本书其实已经在半年或一年前就已经看完，最初...  

中国的政治体制，教育，经济发展模式等等都需要改革，中国缺发明家，缺企业家，缺教育家，这些是众所周知的事实。很多人都不满，都知道需要改革，却没有人能给出怎么改？这是当下全体国人的迷茫。中国当代缺思想家。 懂人文的不懂经济，懂经济的不懂人文，做实务的提不出合适的...  

中国的政治体制，教育，经济发展模式等等都需要改革，中国缺发明家，缺企业家，缺教育家，这些是众所周知的事实。很多人都不满，都知道需要改革，却没有人能给出怎么改？这是当下全体国人的迷茫。中国当代缺思想家。 懂人文的不懂经济，懂经济的不懂人文，做实务的提不出合适的...  

用户评价

Although Sir Isaiah Berlin has shown his apparent indifference to values in history, such as freedom and justice, and holds a superficial attitude towards values' conflict, still he displays the outstanding taste of a Classic liberalist——a writing style of prudent and fluent, and most important, explicit sightseeing and distinction.

读Berlin就仿佛是一个英国老绅士在你对面，语调冷静克制，但藏不住厚重的情怀。自由四论。还是要相信一些使人生之为人的原则，不管遥不遥远。

從南校運過來的書。導修前重讀two concepts of liberty

初读会受益于伯林的强梳理能力，让对自由的讨论有起点可寻。但因为始终没有给出清晰哪怕很薄的界定，使得内部诸多不一致。如果采取“同情式”的理解，可能要回到他当时要揭示的价值多元论命题，当然这又是一个棘手的问题。

2006年写毕业论文竟然参考过，估计是纯粹装逼，八成都没读吧