On the 31st of October 1958, a middle-aged Russian refugee delivered his inaugural Oxford lecture. Today, that lecture is still read by students of political philosophy. It's called Two Concepts of Liberty. Berlin used the lecture to condense much of what he had learned about human nature from his rather remarkable upbringing. His family first had to flee revolutionary Russia, then dodge Hitler. Berlin has a famous line in the lecture:
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>[...] philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilisation.
This article analyses the relevance of the idea for our own time, drawing links to the current culture wars and the importance of storytelling.
TheStateOfException OP t1_iztblw6 wrote
Reply to Isaiah Berlin and The Power of Understanding Bad Ideas by TheStateOfException
Submission Statement:
On the 31st of October 1958, a middle-aged Russian refugee delivered his inaugural Oxford lecture. Today, that lecture is still read by students of political philosophy. It's called Two Concepts of Liberty. Berlin used the lecture to condense much of what he had learned about human nature from his rather remarkable upbringing. His family first had to flee revolutionary Russia, then dodge Hitler. Berlin has a famous line in the lecture:
​
>[...] philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilisation.
This article analyses the relevance of the idea for our own time, drawing links to the current culture wars and the importance of storytelling.