Books: The voice of Isaiah: Britain's most famous living thinker, Sir Isaiah Berlin, is 85 tomorrow. Ben Rogers describes a richly varied intellectual life, while fellow writers assess his importance

IN A short autobiographical sketch Sir Isaiah Berlin once wrote that he had been formed by three traditions. To his Russian origins he owed his life-long interest in ideas; to his English upbringing, his commitment to the values of liberty and tolerance; to his Jewish roots, his sense of the importance of community.

This heady mixture has issued in an extraordinary intellectual career - Berlin possesses the sort of CV that would, one imagines, open doors. After St Paul's School, London, he went up to Corpus Christi College. He was elected to All Souls in 1932 and has been associated with Oxford ever since. There, in the years before the war, he played host to a privileged circle of brilliant young philosophers, including A J Ayer and John Austin, figures who were to dominate 'Oxford philosophy' for the next 20 years. Berlin later came to feel that there was something 'excessively self-centred' about this group's conviction that no other ideas mattered but their own. Nevertheless, these were 'the most interesting, free and lively discussions of philosophy' that he had ever known, and marked a period of 'true intellectual happiness'. When he was 29, Berlin published a study of Marx which 55 years later is still in print. It is the only full-length book he has ever produced. Apart from that, he has mainly written essays, a genre particularly

suited to his layered, conversational style. Tradition has it that during the war Berlin's dispatches from the Washington embassy became Churchill's favourite reading; in Moscow he formed friendships with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova.

Towards the end of the war, a conversation with the Harvard logician H M Sheffer persuaded Berlin of the impossibility of progress in philosophy. Convinced of the importance of ideas in shaping society, he turned to intellectual history and political theory and is now commonly given the credit for establishing both as prestigious academic disciplines. He has written on the thinkers of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment, on 20th-century statesmen, writers and thinkers, on opera, poetry and Russian literature. He has almost single-handedly revived the reputation of the 18th-century anti- rationalists Giambattista Vico, Johann Herder and J G Hamann, and of the 19th-century Russian liberal Alexander Herzen. But he has also offered ambitious and original accounts of the development of liberal and totalitarian ideas. His version of moral pluralism - the impossibility of realising all values in one life or a single society, or of arriving at an overarching criterion by which to grade them - is a major contribution to ethical theory; his 'Two Concepts of Liberty' (1959) remains the most discussed essay in political theory since the war.

Berlin has a reputation as a brilliant conversationalist ('the Dr Johnson of our time') and a scintillating performer ('the greatest living lecturer in the English language'). His own eulogistic essays - on Churchill and Roosevelt, Chaim Weizmann and Einstein, Aldous Huxley and others - are wonderfully vivid, while he himself has been acclaimed and honoured by a circle of well-known admirers. W H Auden, Stephen Spender and Anna Akhmatova have dedicated poems or books to him. Joseph Brodsky and Mario Vargas Llosa are devoted followers. He has been honoured with two Festschriften, the second entitled simply Isaiah Berlin: a Celebration. For his 80th birthday, his friend Alfred Brendel organised an evening of music in his honour at the Royal Festival Hall. At least three doctoral theses and two published monographs have been devoted to his ideas, and he is to be the subject of a Fontana 'Modern Master' volume. He has been awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli Prizes and, for his lifelong defence of civil liberties, the Jerusalem Prize. He holds over 20 honorary doctorates and three honorary fellowships.

So much for Berlin's reputation and accolades. For all his fame, he remains a difficult and elusive thinker, rarely giving interviews and refusing to systematise his wide-ranging ideas; still hard at work, he writes as a philosopher, historian and political theorist, as a Zionist, a Russian and a Briton, as a friend of Enlightenment liberalism and as its critic.

If to many people Sir Isaiah Berlin is little more than a familiar name, his admirers are in no doubt about his major importance to 20th- century thought. Here, some eminent thinkers - friends and critics from the worlds of literature and philosophy - offer personal views of his unrivalled significance.

MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

Sir Isaiah Berlin is one of the last humanists in the Renaissance sense; his thought has made a deep mark on a great variety of disciplines, from philosophy to history, from sociology to literature, from political science to linguistics. Like Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin has defended and promoted the culture of freedom with more insight, persuasiveness and brilliance than any other contemporary thinker, and he has shown, in his writings and by example, that passion for freedom also means tolerance, compassion and understanding for one's adversaries.

AMOS OZ

Any page written by Isaiah Berlin sounds like his delightful conversation: a blend of Russian

enthusiasm, English moderation, German consistency, French wit and Jewish humour and scepticism, all bound together by his unique playfulness. Berlin teaches us how to conduct a cautious, sober love affair with humanity without losing our heads; how to be a humanist without becoming sentimental about human nature; how to stand for tolerance, pluralism and freedom without falling into wishful thinking. He also teaches us to digest and enjoy ideas, while avoiding the toxic syndrome of ideo-addiction.

Chaim Weizmann once said that you don't have to be mad to be a Zionist - but it helps. Isaiah Berlin has always stood for pragmatic

Zionism, sensitive to the rights of others. To paraphrase Weizmann's aphorism, you don't need to have Isaiah's sense of humour and empathy to be a sane Zionist - but it helps.

L B NAMIER

'You must indeed be a very clever young man to understand what you write.'

From 'L B Namier' in 'Personal Impressions' by Isaiah Berlin, 1980.

SUSAN MENDUS

In one of his most famous essays, Isaiah Berlin divides thinkers into two groups: the foxes, who know many things; and the hedgehogs, who know one big thing. His own significance lies in the fact that he is both fox and hedgehog: he knows that there are many ways of leading a life, many values which can be embraced, and that they are not all compatible. These values are the many things he knows. But Berlin also knows one big thing - that the utopian impulse, the pursuit of a 'single, serene vision', has been responsible for the most appalling political atrocities and acts of inhumanity. Too often Berlin has been criticised for failing to produce a system of ideas - an ironic charge against a man whose life's work has been to show how dangerous it is to put faith in philosophical or political systems.

JOHN GRAY

Berlin's central insight is that moral and political life is an arena of conflict among many fundamental values. We strive for trade-offs among these values and seek compromises between these rival claims, but loss, sometimes tragic loss, is an ultimate fact of the human condition. Berlin's liberalism, unlike those that

have dominated Anglo-American philosophy in recent decades, is a stoical and even tragic doctrine, grounded in the recognition that in moral and politial life we meet dilemmas that reason alone cannot resolve. In my view, his liberalism is the only one which speaks to our current needs and from which we still have something vitally important to learn.

CAROLE PATMAN

Isaiah Berlin's essay on negative and positive liberty set much of the framework for debates on freedom in mainstream political theory since 1958, and the opposition between the two concepts proved congenial to the philosophers of the New Right. The positive/negative dichotomy always had its critics, and has been thoroughly deconstructed by feminists, the followers of Foucault and a variety of post- modernists. Whether these new developments make a difference to an assessment of Berlin's contribution depends a good deal on whether one has any allegiance to any of these camps. Moreover, all these theoretical tools seem ever less adequate in the face of global conditions at the close of the 20th century. Perhaps the most lasting legacy for those of us at Oxford 30 years ago will be the memory of being in the crowd as Berlin made his conspicuous way through the hall to lecture to us on Hegel.

JOHN BAYLEY and IRIS MURDOCH

Remarkable personalities, intellectuals and teachers who communicate by imposing their gifts are not so uncommon, but it is rare to find one with a total power of intellectual receptivity. Isaiah Berlin adds to this power the equally unusual gift of complete sympathy with any person with whom he comes into contact. Somebody in Oxford once asked him if he did not find it boring to talk to so many different people, who specialised in so many obscure subjects. He replied that he was never bored by anyone who was really interested in what he was working on. 'And even if I am,' he went on with a twinkle, 'I don't mind being bored.'

From the poses in which we see him represented, we might infer that the Buddha had the same mysteriously divine gift. He, too, had the tranquillity of an absolute sympathy and response. A colloquy with Berlin is like a kind of thought process or communion. A great friend and former colleague of his, Lord David Cecil, once told us that in discussion with Isaiah he seemed to be experiencing the life of the intellect in its purest and most stimulating form. Never abstract, it seemed a part not only of the intrinsic humour but of the sociability of ideal existence. Isaiah, said David Cecil, could be funny and fascinating about anything: he remembered once discussing with him and two fellow philosophers whether 'toy beer' was a possible concept. Perhaps the Buddha too would have enjoyed conversing with his friends and disciples on the subject of toy beer?

RONALD DWORKIN

Isaiah Berlin's most lasting contribution may have been to give the liberal tradition, which to many has seemed ahistorical and utopian, an historical base, sensible ambitions, and a humane, wordly touch, without compromising the universalistic nerve of liberal faith, which is the dignity and worth of everyone. He can work that magic because he combines the best talents of two great arts almost never brought together; he is at once an incredibly learned, innovative intellectual historian and a gifted analytical philosopher with a passion for precision and a flair for creative distinctions.

That synergistic combination structures all his work: his famous contrast between negative and positive liberty, for example, which illuminates the complexity of liberal goals, is marked by philosophical rigour, but also by a depth of historical sense, example and prescience no other philosopher can match. He has consistently argued, as a wise caution for liberals, that not all desirable values and virtues can be captured in a single society or life. The most powerful counter-example, however, is himself.

NOEL ANNAN

Most people think pluralism is a pragmatic compromise. It does not compel us to abandon our belief in socialism, or in the beneficence of the inequality produced by the market society, or our belief that there is a rule, could we but act upon it, that should govern all our lives. But Berlin meant something much more disturbing. He took the unfashionable line that good ends conflict; and to get more of one you have to surrender some part of the other . . . Truth is not a unity . . . Berlin recognised that his beliefs were not those to enthuse youth. The young so often want to fight and suffer to create a nobler society. But even when set against the most dedicated and pure socialists of our age, he seems to me to have written the truest and the most moving of all interpretations of life that my own generation made.

From 'Our Age: Portrait of a Generation', 1990.

ALASDAIR MACINTYRE

It is easy to praise Isaiah Berlin and yet to miss the distinctive importance of his work. He has indeed been a distinguished political philosopher, an excellent historian of ideas, a great teacher, an acute political analyst. Yet in each of these he has been matched by others. He is, though, unequalled in his extraordinary capacity, at once scholarly and imaginative, to make us hear and attend to important but hitherto ignored or misunderstood thinkers, especially those with whom he is in radical disagreement. He has thereby enlarged and enriched the great ongoing debates about liberalism and the Enlightenment, recovering crucial aspects of our shared past. He is at the opposite extreme from those brilliant conversationalists who use their gifts to monopolize the conversation. Berlin's splendid performances enable us to listen more intelligently to other voices, not just to his own. How much we owe him.

A J AYER

It can be said of Isaiah as Dr Johnson said of Burke that he is 'such a man, that if you met him for the first time in the street where you were stopped by a drove of oxen, and you and he stepped aside to take shelter but for five minutes, he'd talk to you in such a manner

that when you parted you would say, this is

an extraordinary man.

From 'A Part of My Life', 1977.

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

He was once at an academic conference in New York, where he sat and listened in gnomic silence for two days, never uttering a syllable. Eventually a reporter from the New York Times approached and asked him for a reaction to the proceedings. 'I have nothing to say and I do not propose to say it,' he replied.

He loves conversation and loathes loose talk. So even on his birthday, it will not do to prattle. What one wants to say, awkward as it may be, is that he is the rarest of creatures, a wise man who is also lovable. As to his achievement as historian, philosopher, liberal, Zionist, founder of an Oxford college, friend, husband and, above all, as the last living incarnation of the Silver Age of Russian thought, all that is best left to his biographer.

BERLIN ON BERLIN

I have been over-estimated all my life. I will not pretend that this has been a source of grave distress. As someone once said to me, it is much nicer to receive more than one's due than one's due, and I cannot deny it. All the same, I cannot deceive myself.

SIR ISAIAH BERLIN

1909 Born Riga, Latvia

1917 Witnessed the Revolution in Petrograd

1919 Emigrated with his family to England

1932 First elected Fellow of All Souls

1942-46 Posted to British Embassy in

Washington, then Moscow

1954-65, 1974-87 Member of Board of

Directors of Royal Opera House

1956 Married Aline de Gunzbourg

1957-67 Chichele Professor of Social and

Political Theory at Oxford University

1966-75 First President of Wolfson College,

Oxford

1974-78 President of the British Academy

Favourite maxim:

'Out of the crooked timber of humanity

no straight thing was ever made'

(Immanuel Kant)

(Photograph omitted)