SOURCE: “The Singular and the Plural: On the Distinctive Liberalism of Isaiah Berlin,” in Social Research, Vol. 61, No. 3, Fall, 1994, pp. 687-717.

In the following essay, Lukes defines Berlin's Liberalism in the context of his counter-Enlightenment scholarship.

John Gray's attack [in his “Against the New Liberalism,” Times Literary Supplement, July 3, 1992] has several objects in view: among them a “tradition of liberal theorizing” that “does little more than articulate the prejudices of an Anglo-American academic class that lacks any understanding of political life in our age,” as exhibited by its “alienated counter culture, hostile to its own society and enamored of various exotic regimes,” and a continuing commitment to egalitarian communism despite the Soviet collapse. Yet the attack seems oddly out of focus, for these targets hardly constitute a united front. For one thing, none of the liberal philosophers Gray attacks (Rawls, Dworkin, Nozick, Ackerman, and Nagel) is either an...