Isaiah Berlin

Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909 to 1997) was a British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas. Born into a Russian-Jewish family in Riga, he moved to Petrograd at the age of six, where he witnessed the Russian Revolution, and in 1921 his family moved to England. He was educated at St Paul's School in London and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and in 1932 was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College. He translated works by Ivan Turgenev from Russian into English and worked for the British Diplomatic Service during the Second World War. His essay The Counter-Enlightenment examines critics of Enlightenment rationalism.