ABSTRACT
In the 1930s, Martin Heidegger had already described Europe as “caught in the pincers” of the USA and USSR. The image of two great powers encroaching on Europe resonated only more strongly as the Cold War began to frame the geopolitics of the post-War European world. In 1958 Isaiah Berlin delivered his inaugural lecture following his election to the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. The extended text of that lecture was expanded and later published in the same year as “Two Concepts of Liberty”. That text famously examines two senses of the “protean word” liberty or freedom, two of the “more than two hundred” senses of liberty. Berlin conceives the self as fundamentally and from the start run through by a cultural and social inheritance – right down to its inherited resources for self-critique and self-transformation.
