Isaiah Berlin — philosopher, historian of ideas with roots in the Russian Empire
Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, then the capital of the Livonia Governorate of the Russian Empire and now of Latvia, on 6 June 1909, the son of Mendel Berlin, a prosperous Jewish timber merchant, and Marie, née Volshonok. In 1915, during the First World War, the family moved to the small town of Andreapol, and in 1917 to Petrograd. There the eight-year-old Isaiah witnessed both revolutions of that year. In 1920 the family was allowed to return to Riga, and soon afterwards emigrated to Britain, in 1920 according to Britannica and in 1921 according to other accounts.
He was educated at St Paul's School in London and, on a scholarship, at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1932 he became a lecturer in philosophy at New College, where he was a fellow from 1938 to 1950; from 1950 he taught at All Souls College. During the Second World War he served in the British Information Services in New York and at the British Embassy in Washington.
In 1945-46 he was posted to Moscow. In November 1945 he met the poets Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, encounters he later described in his essays on Russian writers. He later learned that his relatives who had remained in Riga had been murdered in the Holocaust.
Back at Oxford he turned from analytic philosophy to the history of ideas. The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), an essay on Tolstoy's view of history, became one of his most quoted works, and his essays on nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals were later collected as Russian Thinkers (1978). He was knighted in 1957 and that year became Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory; his inaugural lecture of 1958, Two Concepts of Liberty, distinguishing negative from positive liberty, became a basic text of modern political theory. In 1966 he became the founding president of Wolfson College, Oxford, which he largely created, and from 1974 to 1978 he was president of the British Academy. He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1971.
He died in Oxford on 5 November 1997, aged eighty-eight, and is buried in Wolvercote Cemetery.
Tracing the roots — Riga, Livonia Governorate (now Latvia); Petrograd 1917–1920
Born in Riga in the Russian Empire in 1909, the son of a timber merchant, he lived in Andreapol and then Petrograd, where he saw both revolutions of 1917, before the family returned to Riga and emigrated to Britain in 1920 or 1921. In 1945 he met Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in Russia.
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Riga, Livonia Governorate (now Latvia); Petrograd 1917–1920. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience."