Liberty And Value Pluralism

Berlin is one of the contemporary western famous philosophers and political thinkers. This dissertation is a theoretic study focusing on his thought of value-pluralism and liberty. He based his liberalism on value-pluralism which is the core of his thoughts.This dissertation is made of three chapters besides the preface and the conclusion:The first chapter introduces the historical background and main contents of the value-pluralism. Berlin's value-pluralism directed towards the rationalistic monism which has been a presupposition of western tradition for thousands of years. The key perspectives of value-pluralism are: the plurality and the incommensurability of values, the incommensurability of different culture and civilization.The second chapter mainly elaborates his two kinds of liberties based on value-pluralism. He drew a distinction of the negative liberty and positive liberty. The negative liberty is the liberty free form interference, while the positive liberty is the liberty of self-determination and self-realization. He thought that the positive liberty was easy to be abused and fell into the opposite of liberty-coercion and non-liberty. Only negative liberty is the true liberty.The third chapter evaluates and analyzes the influences of value-pluralism on western political philosophy and its theoretic dilemmas. Value-pluralism is the strong foundation of the liberal toleration as well as great challenge to the liberal universalism. Value-pluralism has been a common mind of western political philosophy, but it has its own theoretic dilemmas. Berlin couldn't succeed in building his liberalism on value-pluralism because of the contradiction of value-pluralism and priority of the negative liberty.