ABSTRACT
Izaiah Berlin is a philosopher of history as much as of liberty. His rejection of historical inevitability is of a piece with his more general repudiation of human determinism. His essays in intellectual history, brought together and published in five volumes by his editor, Henry Hardy of Wolfson College, Oxford, develop an interpretation of modern European thought that is novel and profound. The distinctiveness and radicalism of Berlin's species of objective pluralism are easily missed. Its distinctiveness was missed by Leo Strauss when, with characteristic obtuseness and perversity, he condemned Berlin as relativist for whom all values were culture-specific and, in the end, subjective. The implications of Berlin's value-pluralism for political philosophy have gone curiously unnoticed by most, partly, no doubt, because they undermine so much in recent liberal thought. Everything suggests that Berlin's thesis of value-incommensurability is meant to have universal force and that it is, if anything, especially subversive of distinctively Western traditions of rationalism and monism.
