In due course I will get to my reasons for not joining in the chorus of adulation for Berlin, and why arriving at a more temperate estimate of him seems to me important to our general intellectual health. These ideas were thereby prevented from having the salutary influence they might have exerted at certain crucial and difficult moments.

In my judgment, too, he suffered as a person from a serious character flaw that robbed even what many conservatives would consider his best and most valuable ideas of any real force in practice. But there are also grounds for believing that he was overrated as a thinker (whether one classifies him as a political philosopher or more precisely as a historian of ideas). Now, there can be no question that in some ways Berlin was an admirable figure. He was celebrated for the brilliance of his mind, for the profundity of his thought, for the depth and range of his learning and-not least-for his steadfast defense of liberal values against their rivals both on the Left and on the Right.

By the time Sir Isaiah Berlin died in 1997 at the age of eighty-eight, a thick layer of piety and even reverence had long since come to surround his name, and accordingly the obituaries both here and in England took it more or less for granted that he had been, if not the leading political philosopher of the age, then at least a strong contender for that position.

Isaiah berlin tolstoy