What is Jewish (If Anything) about Isaiah Berlin’s Philosophy?
Department of History, Stanford University, 450 Serra Mall, Building 200, Stanford CA 94305, USA
Religions 2012, 3(2), 289-319; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel3020289
Received: 23 March 2012
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Revised: 28 March 2012
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Accepted: 31 March 2012
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Published: 13 April 2012
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Between Religion and Ethnicity: Twentieth-Century Jewish Émigrés and the Shaping of Postwar Culture)
This paper has two central aims: First, to reappraise Isaiah Berlin’s political thought in a historically contextualized way, and in particular: to pay attention to a central conceptual tensions which animates it between, on the one hand, his famous definition of liberalism as resting on a negative concept of liberty and, on the other, his defense of cultural nationalism in general and Zionism in particular. Second, to see what do we gain and what do we lose by dubbing his philosophy Jewish. The discussion will proceed as follows: after describing the conceptual tension (Section 1), I will examine Berlin’s discussion of nationalism and explain why comparisons between him and Hans Kohn as well as communitarian interpretations of him are incomplete and have limited merit. I will continue with a brief discussion of Berlin’s Jewishness and Zionism (Section 3) and explain why I define this position “Diaspora Zionism”. The two concluding sections will discuss Berlin’s place within a larger Cold War liberal discourse (Section 5) and why I find it problematic to see his political writings as part of a Jewish political tradition (Section 6).
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Keywords:
Berlin, Isaiah (1909–1997); Kohn, Hans (1891–1971); Namier, Lewis B. (1880–1960); Shklar, Judith N. (1928–1992); nationalism; communitarianism; Cold War liberalism; Jewish political tradition
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License
MDPI and ACS Style
Dubnov, A.M. What is Jewish (If Anything) about Isaiah Berlin’s Philosophy? Religions 2012, 3, 289-319. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel3020289
AMA Style
Dubnov AM. What is Jewish (If Anything) about Isaiah Berlin’s Philosophy? Religions. 2012; 3(2):289-319. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel3020289
Chicago/Turabian StyleDubnov, Arie M. 2012. "What is Jewish (If Anything) about Isaiah Berlin’s Philosophy?" Religions 3, no. 2: 289-319. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel3020289
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