Introduction

Although the concept of freedom is nearly universally praised, it is also highly abstract, and thus deeply contested in terms of its content. The combination of these factors has given “freedom” a tremendous mobilizing force for competing political projects. Numerous critics of the French Revolution noted this (including Burke and Kant), but it was perhaps not until Hegel that it was given a full philosophical analysis. Hegel wrote, “No idea is so generally recognized as indefinite, ambiguous, and open to the greatest misconceptions (to which it therefore actually falls a victim) as the Idea of Liberty. . . . When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength.”2 Isaiah Berlin’s lecture continues this tradition of analyzing the unique force and danger of the modern language of freedom.