This is an important work for students of liberal thought.

Isaiah Berlin is famous for an account of liberalism resting on two master-ideas: value pluralism and negative liberty, understood as the capacity of individuals, unimpeded by external coercion or constraint, to choose for themselves among competing conceptions of good or valuable lives.

"We must preserve a minimum area of personal freedom if we are not to “degrade or deny our nature. ” We cannot remain absolutely free, and must give up some of our liberty to preserve the rest. But total self-surrender is self-defeating. What then must the minimum be? That which a man cannot give up without offending against the essence of human nature".

Berlin is drawn to the Romantic/historicist view of human beings as individually and collectively self-creating. The core of Berlinian negative liberty is the absence of external coercion. The essence of unfreedom is imprisonment; Berlin declares that "the fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement, by others. The rest is an extension of this sense, or else metaphor".

Four Essays on Liberty by Isaiah Berlin was once widely cited ( )

The essays, written between 1950 and 1959, address in turn changing twentith century conceptions of individual liberty; the understanding and use of liberty by historians and other social recorders; the conflict of "negative" and "positive" freedom; and John Stuart Mill, the most prominent philospher on the subject of liberty. ...Four Essays on Liberty reexamines many assumptions, with the view that errors turned into dogma are dangerous and that when rhetoric holds true it is stronger for being tested. -- Classics of Liberty