Abstract

This dissertation argues that Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls can be seen as seminal contributors to two quite distinct revivals of political theory in the latter half of the twentieth century. It suggests that coming to grips with the different underlying character of these revivals and writers is important to understanding political theory and liberalism today. However, while the importance Berlin's of Berlin's work is increasingly recognized, there remain puzzling controversies concerning its overall character and import and in particular concerning its relationship to the dominant forms of American political thought, and Rawls' work in particular. This dissertation offers a novel interpretation of Berlin's political thought and liberalism, and a preliminary exploration of its relationship with Rawls' political thought. ;The reading of Berlin develops the following principal themes: Berlin was a moderate but consistent historicist primarily concerned with the interpretive self-understanding of his own form of life; Berlin was a strong but distinctive pluralist who argued for a limited but open-ended range of recognizable and rivalrous ultimate values and for an agitated equilibrium of these values in public life; Berlin focused the bulk of his critical energy on defending an internally pluralistic range of traditionally liberal values within this agitated equilibrium, with an emphasis on liberty and pluralism. He nonetheless recognized that there were other equally ultimate values, not distinctively liberal, which were legitimate and deserving of consideration and even defense. Berlin's essential insight is into the contemporary rivalry of equally ultimate values revealed by the historicist exercise of the sympathetic imagination. ;This interpretation of Berlin's thought suggests some deep points of dispute with Rawls' Political Liberalism, in particular over the regulative role of Rawls' political conception of justice in public reason. This dissertation argues that, when explored, these points of disagreement reveal two very different approaches to contemporary political thought, Berlin's grounded in an embrace of strong moral and political pluralism as the basis of political theory, and Rawls' grounded in an effort to tame such "simple" pluralism through the elaboration of a consensual normative framework of public life.