Liberalism and İsaiah Berlin's eccentric position

This thesis is about İsaiah Berlin's understanding of liberty. Berlin considers liberty as two categories. These concepts of liberty are positive and negative liberties. Whereas Berlin calls the positive form of liberty as liberty of the Ancients; Berlin calls negative form of liberty as liberty of the moderns. Positive liberty is the control over one's self. Negative liberty is the way to act without hindrance. However Berlin puts an annotation for positive liberty and adds that it can inspire totalitarian regimes as he sees a connection between positive liberty and monistic understanding. The second subject of this thesis is idea of value pluralism, which Berlin developed due to his reluctant approach to positive liberty and the close relationship between positive liberty and the monistic understanding that has been going on since Plato. For Berlin, idea of value pluralism entails the rejection of monism. There is no question which value is better or superior for Berlin. At the same time, Berlin does not define himself as a relativist. In this regard, the idea that Berlin developed in order not to give credit to relativism and to be on the side of pluralism is the concept of common moral horizon. However, the concept of common moral horizon that Berlin put forward is an extremly abstract and ambiguous concept. Berlin's stance on where this concept begins and ends is highly abritrary and unsystematic. Thinkers such as John Gray and Jonathan Riley, on the other hand, have tried to overcome the crisis that liberalism has been in in the last century by trying to draw Berlin into liberalism, based on the concept of common moral horizon put forward by Berlin. However, it becomes impossible for us to place Berlin within liberalism, as the value pluralism developed by Berlin, the lack of a fixed direction in history and his ideas, such as conflicting values, are exactly opposite to the liberalism's monist, universal and rationally comparable understanding. Keywords: Liberalism, Positive Liberty, Negative Liberty, Monism, Pluralism