This article compares the thinking of Andrzej Walicki and Isaiah Berlin on the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia and on Soviet totalitarianism. It suggests that Berlin saw totalitarianism as an externally imposed political system, whereas Walicki understood totalitarianism to depend both on external pressure and inner coercion. The article draws on a variety of published and unpublished sources, including personal interviews with Walicki and Berlin’s archives at the New Bodleian Library in Oxford, England.

European culture is distinguished by a special and indeed unique appreciation of freedom. Understanding why we care so much about freedom requires continual reflection on the heart of the matter. This is especially necessary because the concept of freedom has been constantly reworked and remodelled throughout its long history. This article lists five key characteristics and highlights two in particular: the openness of being free, which means that freedom does not itself determine what it is used for; and the fact (...) that freedom is by its nature an extrinsic, not an intrinsic, end. In addition, the article comments on various highly influential aberrations in the explication of the idea of freedom that began early, in the 4th century, with Plato. (shrink)

This paper analyses the intertwinement of legal philosophy and political theory in the British intellectual framework between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with specific regard to Harold Laski's works. I will try to illustrate the transition from 19th-century utilitarianism to H. L. A. Hart and Isaiah Berlin as evolving through important debates which include Laski's contribution. I will argue that a discussion of “juridical” obligation, i.e., the conditions of legal validity, may lie implicitly in these concerns that Laski (...) and other early 20th-century British authors had about “political” obligation—viz., about the nature of the state and its claim to obedience. By approaching Laski's theories and their genealogy through a legal-philosophical perspective, I will contend that this debate about political obligation anticipates to a considerable extent some of the most renowned conceptions of obligation in 20th-century British legal theory. (shrink)