SOURCE: “A Critical Appraisal of Isaiah Berlin's Philosophy of Pluralism,” in The Review of Politics, Vol. 60, No. 3, Summer, 1998, pp. 421-33.

In the following essay, Frisch argues that despite his allegiance to the equal authority of several incomparable and incommensurate values, Berlin, in fact, had an implicit standard of values.

During the past year Isaiah Berlin died at the age of 88. He has undoubtedly been one of the leading British essayists in political philosophy in the twentieth century, covering a very wide range of topics in that discipline. One might justly say that he has written more extensively on human freedom than anyone since John Stuart Mill. Born in Latvia, Berlin attended Corpus Christi College, Oxford, from 1928-32 and seems there to have taken the first important steps toward the influential role in British and Western intellectual life which he came to hold. His academic career was interrupted by...