born June 9, 1909, Riga, Latvia
died Nov. 5, 1997, Oxford, Eng.
Latvian-born British political philosopher and historian of ideas.
His family immigrated to Britain in 1920. Educated at the University of Oxford, Berlin taught there from 1950 to 1967, serving as president of Wolfson College from 1966 to 1975 and thereafter teaching at All Souls College. His writings on political philosophy are chiefly concerned with the problem of free will in increasingly totalitarian and mechanistic societies. His most important works include Karl Marx (1939), The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), Historical Inevitability (1955), The Age of Enlightenment (1956), and Four Essays on Liberty (1969).