Freedom and Its Betrayal: six enemies of human liberty, by Isaiah Berlin

The perils of idealism

Isiah Berlin was not in the first league of philosophers. He was not sufficiently inventive or dogmatic. He was to philosophy what John Betjeman was to poetry: extremely good, and comforting enough to be telling when he was gloomy.

An emigré Jew from Riga, he died in 1997, a national treasure, unable quite to believe his status. The lectures on which Freedom and its Betrayal is based were given on the radio in 1952, 30 years after he arrived in England. The Soviet empire whose birth he had escaped enshrined one version of the Enlightenment project, that of Rousseau (with Helvétius, Fichte, Hegel, Saint-Simon and Maistre, one of Berlin's six anti-libertarians). Perhaps even the war and Holocaust did, too.

These essays are a perfect introduction to Berlin and his life-long preoccupation: the "problem" of the Enlightenment. Many 18th-century thinkers believed that the mass of people had been so repressed by élites that they needed to be strongly led for their own good. The rest is history – unfortunately.

Berlin proposes, with Kant, that the trick is to remember that people are ends in themselves. Value only flows from persons. This is a messy solution: people aren't demonstrably good at living up to their important burden. Worse, if they are, then liberties really are in conflict. (I cannot build my new house and leave my neighbours with the view they had before.) Berlin seems shy of probing what to do about these conundrums. Instead, he is a wonderful guide to the terrain.

In Liberty (Oxford, £12.99), a newly reprinted and augmented version of his 1969 Four Essays on Liberty, he agonises on another piece of Enlightenment fall-out. If man is a part of nature, then his thoughts and actions are "determined". In which case, what can liberty consist in? Berlin lamely says that lots of people who insist that man is determined (eg the Marxists) go on to exhort people to this or that (revolution, say) as though they were free to choose. He could more simply have said: we just behave as though people were free, and therefore responsible. It is an article of faith, not of logic.

Then there is the darkest Berlin. As if the humanitarian liberals had not been bad enough, he notes that moderns are afflicted by their Freudian understanding of themselves. In the pre-modern age, free people were manipulated into being vicious. Now they have come to believe that conformity is a new freedom. In this, Berlin might be paving the way for Adam Curtis and his recent BBC series, The Century of the Self.

Berlin is not much more cheerful about society than his six enemies of freedom. But he isn't dogmatic, and – unlike most philosophers – he would like us to prove him wrong.