The Age of Freedom
BBC Radio 3, 26 March 2002
Contextualised extracts from Freedom and its Betrayal
BRIDGET KENDALL… And we consider the more sinister side of freedom, first with Isaiah Berlin’s ground-breaking radio lectures, fifty years ago.
ISAIAH BERLIN…there is not a dictator who in the years after Rousseau did not use this monstrous paradox in order to justify his behaviour. The Jacobins, Robespierre, Hitler, Mussolini, the Communists all use this very same method of argument, of saying men do not know what they truly want – by wanting it for them, by wanting it on their behalf, we really are giving them what in some occult sense, without knowing it themselves, they want
…
KENDALL… even more has changed since our last contributor wrote about freedom in 1952. Isaiah Berlin also knew Russia well. He was in Russia and six years old[1] when the Bolshevik Revolution took place. But he spent most of his life as philosopher and historian of ideas in Britain, at Oxford University, where many of his writings were concerned with the idea of freedom. His six radio lectures on the subject were in fact first broadcast exactly fifty years ago this year, in 1952, on what was then the BBC’s Third Programme. So it’s entirely appropriate on this fifty-year anniversary, that we should now hear an excerpt from one of them.
ISAIAH BERLINIndeed, the central question which occupied thinkers like Machiavelli and Bodin, Hobbes and Locke, was this very question. Nothing is more familiar or more natural in the history of political thought than the question how men’s desire for liberty can be reconciled with the necessity for authority. It is clear to all political thinkers that individuals desire to be free – that is to say, they desire to do what they want to do, without being prevented from doing it by other people, or coerced into doing something they don’t want to do – and that this is one of the chief ends or values for the sake of which people are prepared to fight, one of the values which is necessary for the purpose of leading the kind of life which above all they wish to lead. On the other hand, of course, there is the necessity for organised existence. Men live in society, for whatever reason; and because men live in society, individuals cannot be allowed to do whatever they like, because this may get in the way of other people, and frustrate their ends. Therefore some kind of arrangement has to be made.
KENDALLIsaiah Berlin speaking on the BBC’s Third Programme fifty years ago …
[1] Eight years old, in fact. He was born on 6 June 1909.