Essay Two: "Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century" 7

Essay Three: "Two Concepts of Liberty" 11

Essay Four: "Historical Inevitability" 16

ssay One: "John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life".

In this essay Berlin focuses his attention upon one concrete figure, J. S. Mill. Berlin supposes that Mill is one of the greatest theorists of liberty that has ever lived. Mill believed that it is neither rational thought, nor domination over nature, but freedom to choose and to experiment which distinguishes men from the rest of nature. He regarded liberty as more precious than life itself, because life without freedom seems to him like a miserable dwarf-man' s existence. Like Nietzsche, he often used the word "dwarf" in order to show the consequences of human suppression.

Berlin's essay contains three parts: first comes Mill's biography, because it seems that some of his ideas are turned against his father's educational methods. The second part is dedicated to liberty and variety, the third - to such important topic as tolerance. Firstly, the story of John Stuart Mill's extraordinary education. His father, James Mill, like his teacher Bentham and the Fr

In the twentieth century there is a belief in non-rational solutions. Berlin stresses that one of the elements of the new outlook is the notion of unconscious and irrational influences, which conquer the forces of reason. Consequently the answers to problems exist not in rational solutions, but in the removal of the problems themselves by means other than thought and argument. The old tradition saw history as the battle - ground between the easily identifiable forces of light and darkness, reason and obscurantism, progress and reaction. Berlin acknowledges that Freud is the greatest healer and psychological theorist of our time. Freud has discovered that the solution to our problems we may seek not only in rational thought and consciousness, but also in irrational drives and the unconscious. Freud came to the conclusion that in the process of psychoanalytical therapy the problems that seem permanently important to the patient vanished altogether. They vanished because their psychological sources had been diverted or dried up. The problems which appeared at once overwhelmingly important vanish from the patient's consciousness like evil dreams and trouble him no more. It consists in altering the outlook that gave the problem an opportunity to originate. The person that doubts the validity of political institutions is thereby relieved of his burden and freed to pursue socially useful task. It means that the role of the reason or the intellect is not so powerful as we habitually think. Berlin considers that this change of attitude to the function and value of the intellect perhaps is the best indication of the great gap which divided the twentieth century from the nineteenth.

This is liberty as it has been conceived by liberals in the modern world from the days of Erasmus to our own. Every protest against exploitation and humiliation springs from this individualistic and much disputed conception of man. Berlin notices three facts about this position: a) All coercion is bad as such, although it may apply to prevent other, greater evils. Men seek to discover the truth and to develop a certain type of character - critical, original, imaginative, independent and so on -, but truth can be found and such character can be bred only in condition of freedom.

What is genuinely typical of our time is a new concept of the society, the values of which are analysable from some factual hypothesis or metaphysical dogma about history or race or national character. There is one and only one direction in which the history that embody impersonal forces or class structure, can develop. The cosmic forces are conceived omnipotent and indestructible. Only some elite can canalize these forces and control them. The task of these experts is to adjust human beings to these forces and to develop in them an unshakeable faith in the new order. Communists believed that proletariat has this eternal force in the class struggle. Berlin emphasizes that no body of men which has tasted the power or is within a short distance of doing so, can avoid a certain degree of cynism which is generated by the sharp contact between the pure ideal and its realization in some unpredicted form which seldom conforms to the hopes or fears of earlier times.

ench philosophical materialists, admitted man as a natural object and considered that a systematic study of the human species could and should be established on firm empirical foundations. He believed that he had grasped the principles of the new science on man.

Mill believed that men are wise, enlightened and rational, if properly educated, they are capable of reasonable choice, but in fact it is merely an ideal. Approximately in the same time, but in quite different circumstances Dostoevsky had admitted that people by nature are weak, and only rare ones among them are capable of choice. Also Berlin maintained that the mass neurosis of our time is agoraphobia. Men are terrified of disintegration and of too little direc

Some common words found in the essay are:
John Stuart, Fascism Communism, Sir Berlin, Age Berlin, Reformation Liberty, JS Mill, Marx Engels, Soviet Union, View History, Marx Spengler, twentieth century, 'negative' liberty, answer question, essay berlin, private life, john stuart, human nature, individual liberty, nineteenth century, berlin emphasizes, answer question 'what, liberty involved answer, essay historical inevitability, private life public, involved answer question,
Approximate Word count = 8403
Approximate Pages = 34 (250 words per page double spaced)