ABSTRACT
Isaiah Berlin’s scholarship leads to a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the nature of personal development. Berlin became an Oxford don and stayed so for the rest of his life, apart from the war period when he worked for British Information Services in New York and for the British embassies in Washington and Moscow. However, Berlin’s message that we have to be cautious and able to resist the allure of positive freedom captured and consolidated a liberal trend that endorsed negative freedom. Berlin’s ambition to develop a fundamental and systematic rejection of moral authorities has led him to be highly critical not just of rational moral ideals but also of the process of self-transformation itself. The most politically poignant and morally complex type of behaviour Berlin refers to in his analysis of self-abnegation is that of martyrdom.
