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I argue that Isaiah Berlin's pluralistic liberalism is best interpreted as a sophisticated form of liberal rationalism, as Berlin himself suggests. His value pluralism, even if it is viewed (as his critics typically view it, with considerable justification) as claiming that any choice between conflicting incommensu
rable values cannot be a rational choice, does not subvert his liberalism. Rather, this agonistic pluralism emanates from his liberal rationalism, which pictures reason as too weak to resolve conflicts of incommensurables. Yet, reason remains strong enough to discover that certain basic liberal values, including those associated with some minimum core of equal rights, are far more important than any competing values created by mankind. Berlin apparently sees his pluralistic liberal rationalism as a genuine rationalism that, in stark contrast to mainstream utopian rationalisms which wildly exaggerate the power of reason, makes suitable room for the valid insights provided by the romantics.
Sir Isaiah Berlin's (1969, 1991, 1999) work has recently been interpreted as a muddled and halfhearted version of liberalism (e.g., Crowder 1994; Gray 1995,1998; Ignatieff 1999; Kateb 1999). The main problem, according to the critics, is his "agonistic" brand of value pluralism, which holds that plural basic values (and constellations of values, or cultures) are not only incompatible but also incommensurable in the sense that they cannot be rationally compared or ranked in cases of conflict. Such pluralism undermines the possibility of liberal rationalism, given that liberal and nonliberal values are incommensurable in the sense described. As Gray puts it, "Berlin's agonistic liberalism-his liberalism of conflict among inherently rivalrous goods-grounds itself on the radical choices we must make among incommensurables, not upon rational choice" (1995, 8, emphasis added). "Radical choice" is "ungoverned by reason," "without criteria, grounds, or principles," and is at "the heart of Berlin's liberalism" (pp. 23, 61). Morgenbesser and Lieberson (1991, 3-7) confirm that Berlin gives many examples of this "radical kind of choice" arising "as part of the normal human situation." As they also point out, he credits Machiavelli for implicitly suggesting that " `ends equally ultimate, equally sacred, may contradict each other, that entire systems of value may come into collision without possibility of rational arbitration"' (p. 6, emphasis added; quoting Berlin 1981, 74).
If the critics are right, Berlin's...