The Subversive Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin

John Gray, in his Introduction to his book Isaiah Berlin, says that “Berlin’s work is animated by a single idea of enormous subversive force. This is the idea, which I call value-pluralism, that ultimate values are objective but irreducibly diverse, that they are conflicting and often uncombinable, and that sometimes when they come into conflict with one another they are incommensurable.” According to Gray, the political implication of Berlin’s thought is that “the idea of a perfect society in which all genuine ideals and goods are achieved is not merely utopian; it is incoherent.”