Humanists

http://www.humanists.freeserve.co.uk

Publications:
ISAIAH BERLIN A Life by Michael Ignatieff

Published by Vintage 2000. ISBN 0 09 9577313. UK price £8.99

The London Evening Standard said, “Enthralling ... More than an authorised biography ... An affectionate and admiring, but none the less independently minded portrait .. A serious book, but also a vivid, lively and uplifting one”.

The book includes the important quote from The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays published in 1997:

Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience. If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral. But if I curtail or lose my freedom, in order to lessen the shame of such inequality, and do not thereby materially increase the individual liberty of others, an absolute loss of liberty occurs. This may be compensated for by a gain in justice or in happiness or peace, but the loss remains, and it is a confusion of values to say that although my ‘liberal’ individual freedom may go by the board, some other kind of freedom - social or economic - is increased.