Editor’s Note: The article we publish below originally appeared in the Spanish edition of Letras Libres, Vol. 24, No. 283 (April 2025). We wish to thank Daniel Gascón, editor of Letras Libres in Spain, for allowing us to share this text with LALT’s readers.

Isaiah Berlin said that as long as politics exists—the activity aimed at organizing human life so that conflict does not result in violence—political theory will exist. He called political theory the application of moral categories to the analysis of politics. He thus made us see it is a second-order discipline, one that works on an unstable object and is dedicated to valuation, something quite close to the subjective realm. This humble characterization of political theory was brought on by a 1930s context affirming philosophy as a science, something that seems like a truncated dream to us now—that is, the project of analytical philosophy.

Nevertheless, being a minor discipline from the point of view of scientific truth, political theory seemed to him an indispensable study because of its practical dimension. This is because applying the moral categories of good and bad, right and wrong to politics as an activity facilitates improvement of our collective life by distinguishing the best from the worst and what is right from what is wrong. That is, political theory is essential because it lets us evaluate politics, our organization of collective life, and, as such, improve it.

But Berlin also understood political theory as a history of ideas. This second statement needs clarification as it has to be understood in a way that is coherent with the previous one. That is, with the definition of political theory as knowledge aimed toward the practical end of improving social life. For Berlin, political activity is informed by ideas that, since they are not reflexive, must be qualified as beliefs. He further argued that his time, a time of extreme ideological polarization in the first half of the twentieth century, was characterized by the hegemony of political creeds linked to totalitarianism. So then, these ideas that are integrated as beliefs in present-day political religions have a genealogy; they were somehow created by thinkers in particular periods and contexts before becoming beliefs that were uncritically accepted by the masses.

For Berlin, the task of the political theorist is the study of these political ideas that are prone to becoming beliefs, ideally at the moment of their birth, in order to avoid the chance that, once installed in the mentality of the masses, they might become powerful tectonic forces impossible to counteract. Since it is theorists who create or invent political ideas, it is up to other theorists to deactivate them, as the study of ideas is their specialty. So the job of political theory is to judge political reality but also to analyze the ideas that inform politics with the aim of improving our collective life and avoiding, as much as possible, the spread of destructive political religions, that is, of totalitarianisms.

Political theory on totalitarian horror

Berlin has been seen by many commentators as a typical Cold War thinker, because the political creed of the twentieth century that he denounced most was, above all, communism, capable of surviving and expanding after the Second World War. Nevertheless, Berlin’s classification as a Cold War thinker is insufficient. It suggests the only battle of ideas he fought in was the one against communism, and this is not only incomplete but also false. Berlin also dealt extensively with fascism but, above all, he was a stubborn critic of political rationalism, that is, of the monsters produced by the sleep of reason. For Berlin, it is the search for a perfect rationally-conceived society that is behind the major ideologies that led to the totalitarian tragedies of the first half of the twentieth century.

As the good British man he was, by choice, he was active in empiricism and was a staunch critic, as I just pointed out, of rationalism in politics. Moreover, he thought the clumsy, rationalist materialism of the French Enlightenment was the lineage of which communism was but a poor and confused offspring, destined to perish. It is curious, and should be studied, how close Berlin comes to Edmund Burke’s criticism of the enlightened French philosophers, whom he holds responsible for the violence and destruction of society that he sees embodied in the French Revolution; yet, every time he is cited, it is to reproach him for his nationalism and narrow-mindedness. Perhaps it is Burke’s anti-Semitism that is responsible for Berlin, being a Burkean in every way, renouncing the master. As is well known, Burke let himself be swept away by his lowest instincts when he made anti-Semitic jokes about his arch-enemy Richard Price, the defender within his own Whig party of French-style sovereign democracy. Price advocated in the Old Jewish Quarter and Burke went after him over and over in hopes of hanging the stigma of crypto-Jew on him, which was a way to denigrate him in the eyes of his contemporaries.¹

Thus, more than a Cold War thinker, I believe Berlin should be seen as a typical representative of political theory after the Second World War. A political theory that was not devoted to abstractly delineating the characteristics of a just society but, more modestly, to explaining how the totalitarian horror of the twentieth century had been possible.² Interestingly, it is in the ideas, their genesis and their evolution, where they hoped to find an answer; this explains why they devoted themselves to tracing the genealogy of those ideas that, conceived by a perhaps obscure thinker, had spread in a given context until they became a violent political creed capable of abruptly and destructively mobilizing the masses. Berlin was convinced that totalitarianism was explained by a multitude of reasons, but a very important, crucial one was the ideas/beliefs it fed upon. In this he followed the teaching of Heinrich Heine, who connected the thinkers cloistered in their offices to the destructive politics of revolution in the modern age.³ It is no accident that Berlin paid so much attention to Georges Sorel and his study of Leninism as a political creed through which the social psychology of fascism is reached.⁴

The history of ideas as a genealogy of evil, with a certain inquisitorial aspect, was a discipline cultivated assiduously by postwar thinkers, and Berlin was accompanied in this by many others such as Karl Popper and his open society; Hannah Arendt and her origins of totalitarianism; Raymond Aron and the opium of the intellectuals; Michael Oakeshott and rationalism in politics; also Adorno and Horkheimer in their dialect of enlightenment but, above all, Jacob Talmon and his totalitarian democracy, which some, such as Caute, point to as the true source of Berlin’s ideas; and, in a different sense, Elie Kedourie and his nationalism as ideology.⁵ It is interesting to compare the political theory of today with that of the post-war period to see how the latter was structured by political problems of tragic timeliness, whereas in the present the discipline nurtures solipsism and self-reference, completely disinterested in political reality. This explains its irrelevance and the public’s lack of interest in its products.

In 1958, in the first lines of his most famous work, Two Concepts of Liberty,⁶ Berlin attributed the detachment of the world to the philosophy of his time as a discipline, and linked political theory to the dirty war of ideas on the battlefield of the present. Thus, the work of political theory was mediated by the contingency of its object and the fallibility of its judgments, but it was imperative and indispensable for its practical value.

Berlin had been a professor since the 1930s, but his true intellectual activity only began in the post-war period, a time of hope but also of scarcity and persistent ideological combat. He was at the congress on the future of liberty in Milan in 1955 that proclaimed the end of ideology and, as I have noted, he contributed shortly thereafter to the defense of liberal freedom in his famous conference in 1958.⁷ In short, Berlin was a thinker of his time who took up the challenges of the post-war period and turned them into an intellectual exercise that sought to illuminate the way in which ideas had shaped his world, particularly the destructive ideas that had become ideologies.

It seems important to mention that this task undertaken to deal with political evils, which Berlin entrusted to political theory, was not only one of being a witness to his time, but also had an important personal dimension that can be traced through his biography.

Pluralism and liberty

Isaiah Berlin was born in 1909 in Riga, then an important industrial city in Russia and now the capital of Latvia, and died on November 5, 1997 in Oxford, England. His family, of Jewish religion and Russian culture, was in the timber trade. Berlin argued that, although England had treated him very well, he always felt like a Russian Jew. As a result of the war, in 1916 the family moved to Petrograd, today once again St. Petersburg. It was here that Berlin’s character would be shaped under the impact of the Russian Revolution. The image he received as a child of fanaticism, fueled by the idea of a perfect society, would shape his thinking for his entire life. In 1921, the Berlin family moved definitively to London. Isaiah studied at Oxford from 1928 to 1932. This is where his interest in philosophy was awakened. Political theory and the history of ideas were not part of Oxford’s curriculum at the time, and further development of these disciplines at the university was his personal responsibility.

In 1932, he was hired as a professor of philosophy at Oxford. He took part in the birth of analytical philosophy at Oxford within the circle of Ayer, Quine, and Hampshire, but very soon became disenchanted with this kind of thought. The assignment to write what would later become his famous biography of Karl Marx (1939)⁸ rescued him from analytical philosophy and allowed him to dedicate himself to what would, from then on, be his world: the history of ideas. During the Second World War, he carried out information work for the British government in the United States and, later, in the Soviet Union. A confirmed Zionist while also a loyal British patriot, he actively supported the building of the State of Israel but radically rejected the use of terrorism. He refused, for example, to shake hands with Menachem Begin. In 1946, he went back to teaching at Oxford, which he combined with stays as a visiting professor at Harvard and other North American universities. He dedicated the rest of his life to university teaching in different schools at Oxford.

Although some have seen fit to perceive Berlin only as an interpreter of the classics of political thought, there is individual thinking in him that can be boiled down to two subjects to which he made an original contribution. These essential subjects are pluralism and liberty. With regard to the former, Berlin points out that humans have different ends and values, and that even the same person has these, so reconciling them is always complex and incomplete. This is expressed by the idea that our values may be incompatible and that, therefore, the perfect society is not only empirically impossible, but this impossibility is also conceptual. Thus, the ideals of a rationally integrated humanity, when they become programs with which to construct the society of the future, are not only impossible to realize, but are also inhuman. They are inhuman because they seek to fit preconceived models into a reality that is always, given the human condition, pluralistic, and, as such, they require acting with violence on existing, real, flesh and blood men.

This nuclear idea of pluralism fuels his liberal creed, what John Gray has called agonistic liberalism.⁹ In other words, in a society where different values and conflicting final ends coexist, only liberal institutions allow for their peaceful organization.

The other great subject of his thinking is political liberty. His book Four Essays on Liberty (1969) gave him the fame and academic recognition he continues to enjoy today.¹⁰ For Berlin, politics is not separable from ideas, and since, as I mentioned earlier, political ideas are often created by university professors, it is the latter who have the obligation to examine and criticize them before they germinate into fanaticism. His study of the notions of negative freedom and positive freedom contained in political liberty has marked the study and understanding of this concept ever since. For Berlin, these ideas are neither good nor bad in and of themselves. Negative freedom refers to the absence of interference in our free action; the positive freedom to exercise our will to do what it is we want to do. In a way, one and the other are two facets of the same liberty. But, and this is what matters to Berlin, when one or the other is placed as a principle by which to order political activity, the results, experience tells us, are antagonistic.

If the focus is put on protecting negative freedom, this then gives rise to constitutional or liberal systems where sovereignty finds the way to curb the exercise of unlimited power in the rights of individuals and in institutions aimed at controlling, dividing, and limiting this power. On the contrary, history has shown us that emphasizing positive freedom has led to its collectivization and, ultimately, to the elimination of all freedom in the name of a higher liberty. The rationalist creeds of totalitarianisms would be the result of embracing this idea. Moreover, the other books by Berlin—collections of articles dedicated to romanticism, Russian thinkers, Vico and Herder, or to contemporary political or intellectual figures—are basically marked by these two central concerns: pluralism and liberty.

Liberty according to Berlin and Constant

As I have noted, Berlin’s thinking delves into the past, into the history of ideas, to understand the present. This is especially evident in the aforementioned essay, Two Concepts of Liberty, which is from an inaugural conference published in 1958. In it, Berlin distinguishes between negative freedom—the reserve of individual freedom, which is defined by the absence of interference in our free action, with the negative coming from this—and positive freedom, the self-governance that makes us masters in the exercise of our will. Even though this essay has given rise to thousands of written pages, I have the impression that it has not been fully understood. In it, most commentators have sought to see an analytical exploration of the meanings of the concept of liberty. But this purpose is quite far from what was intended by Berlin, who points out that hundreds of definitions of the meaning of liberty have been made, but he is only interested in the two mentioned. And these two meanings are of interest to him because, being embodied in institutions and political projects, they have given rise to very different historical results that give us practical knowledge of how to make our societies better. Or, in any case, of how to make them freer and avoid fantasies that ultimately kill off liberty.

In this distinction, some have wanted to see a reflection of the liberty of the ancients compared to that of the moderns, as theorized by Benjamin Constant in his famous lecture of 1819. But the differences between the two are significant. For Constant, in fact, the liberty of the moderns is individual freedom, negative freedom, which is embodied in a series of rights that protect us against interference. The liberty of the ancients, on the other hand, corresponds to collective self-governance. Many have wanted to see in Constant a particularist defender of private enjoyment as freedom. But this is an erroneous interpretation because, as moderns, we value our individual freedom but to protect it we need political freedom. That is, for Constant we can only protect individual freedom through political participation; thus, political freedom, collective participation in politics, is the guarantee of enjoyment of modern, individual liberty.¹¹

In Berlin, the conceptualization is different. Negative freedom is associated with the Millian project of liberty, where it is seen as a space in which non-interference by the State must be guaranteed, and whose only limit of non-interference is the freedom of others.¹² Our freedom must respect our neighbor’s, and if it does not, there is the right to limit it; but its danger is not that, in enjoying it, as Constant noted, we might forget the public assembly for its defense, but rather that, by abusing it, we might exploit the weak. Interestingly, Berlin criticizes radical economic liberalism as an undesirable emanation from negative freedom, and this connects it to the criticism the postwar thinkers gathered in Milan made of market liberalism, which is now called neoliberalism and was embodied in the figure of Friedrich Hayek.

Berlin goes so far as to imagine an “autocrat,” a subject to whom I will return to later, who fully respects negative freedom. For Constant, this is unimaginable because the only guarantee of individual freedom is precisely political participation, which curbs the tendency of all power to expand. Here, Constant is with Montesquieu: “Political freedom is only found in moderate states. But it isn’t always present in moderate states; it is there when power is not abused. But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go. Who would have thought it! Even virtue itself needs limits. For power not to be abused, things must be arranged in such a way that power serve as a check to power.”¹³

In a certain way, it seems that Berlin ignored the justification for separation of powers as an instrument to protect freedom. I find it enigmatic why Berlin makes this statement about the possible compatibility between perfect freedom and autocracy because, precisely, autocracy is the exercise of absolute sovereignty, it bears repeating, immoderate and without limits. Friedrich Hayek, in The Constitution of Liberty (1960), deals extensively with this question by addressing the relationship between liberty and democracy, and points to the idea of liberty without democracy as being imaginable, but he seems to conclude that experience disproves this. In this work, Hayek could also be considered a postwar political theorist since he engages in dialogue with many such authors, especially Talmon, and follows him on the central question raised by Alexis de Tocqueville of the relationship between democracy and liberty. Ronald Hamowy, in the notes he adds to the final edition of this work, has rightly connected Hayek’s thinking with Ortega’s to point out the liberal consensus around the relationship between liberty and democracy.¹⁴ In any event—and despite the fact that Hayek has been made out to be an advocate for the compatibility between individual freedom and dictatorship, stemming from some unfortunate statements about Pinochet, which seems to serve as an illustration of Berlin’s quip—his position on this is meridian: “If democracy is a means to preserve freedom, then individual freedom is an essential condition for the functioning of democracy. While democracy is probably the best form of limited government, it becomes absurd if it turns into unlimited government.”¹⁵

For Constant, the danger of the ancients’ liberty lies in the fact that its collective exercise causes individual freedom to disappear and, thus, he is very interested in showing how the republican institutions of collective freedom are contrary to the modern, individual conception of freedom. Here, once again, Berlin strikes out on his own. He tells us, thinking about Kant and his concept of freedom as self-determination, that there is a liberal tradition of positive freedom. But he ends up reconciling with Constant on this point by noting that positive freedom is in danger of being understood collectively and, once this happens, freedom in all its senses disappears. The great ideological creeds of his time would participate in this condition. And he adds something else: that negative freedom is a fragile, rare plant that has only occasionally progressed in some very refined societies.

The incompatibility between liberty and autocracy

In the favorable environment of the Cold War, at the end of the 1950s, when Britain was barely coming out of rationing, and when the welfare state had been in operation for more than a decade, Berlin’s essay was seen as a semi-implicit criticism of communist systems, systems that, in the name of a higher human freedom, had weakened all freedom. That is why it is strange, as I mentioned in passing, that Berlin tells us negative freedom “is not incompatible with certain types of autocracy or, in any case, with the absence of self-governance.”¹⁶

And he continues by mentioning, “Just as a democracy may, in fact, deprive the individual citizen of a great many liberties which he might have in some other form of society, so it is perfectly conceivable that a liberal-minded despot would allow his subjects a large measure of personal freedom. The despot who leaves his subjects a wide area of liberty may be unjust, or encourage the wildest inequalities, care little for order, or virtue, or knowledge; but provided he does not curb their liberty, or at least curbs it less than many other regimes, he meets with Mill’s specification.”¹⁷

This passage is unclear and seems to indicate that the totalitarian democracy denounced by Constant, Tocqueville, and Talmon can destroy the freedoms enjoyed by citizens in other unspecified societies. The first statement forms part of the liberal consensus; a democracy that ignores the limits that individual rights impose on the exercise of sovereign power is nothing more than a disorderly despotism, just as Constant said. However, its lack of clarity arises from the fact that it does not name the societies in which negative freedom is indeed enjoyed. It seems to refer to constitutional states, but this is left ambiguous. And it gives the impression that, for symmetry with this argument, he is forced to formulate the opposite: that there can be freedom and no democracy. That is, that there is a disconnect between individual freedom, the private preserve of personal sovereignty, and democracy understood as government by the majority.

Curiously, Berlin only uses the word autocrat/autocracy twice in his text on the two concepts of liberty. The other is to emphasize that Stoicism, as a philosophy of inner refuge, can be linked to the end of the Greek democratic polis in the face of “centralized Macedonian autocracy.” On the same page, in a footnote, he expands on this idea by indicating that “the quietism of the eastern sages was also a reaction to the despotism of the great autocracies.”¹⁸ Certainly, the connection between autocracy and stoicism seems obvious. And the growing popularity of the Stoicism we are experiencing these days is worrying, with a veritable avalanche of books on Stoicism as self-help, while at the same time we are witnessing the belligerent and global growth of autocracies. It is worth remembering Seneca’s lesson. For him, with the virtues of the Roman people lost, order can only be the result of the concentration of power in a sovereign, the emperor, who imposes it. But for this power to give rise to peace and happiness for subjects, it must be a power that limits itself. This is the subject of De Clementia. It is not known whether Seneca addresses these words to Nero out of cynicism or with good will, because by then the emperor had already stained his hands with the blood of Britannicus. In any case, the power of the emperor is sketched out by Seneca in a portrait that presents Nero as if he were speaking of himself:

Have I, of all mortals, been approved and chosen to act on the earth in place of the gods? I am the arbiter of life and death for its peoples; what lot and position each man has is placed in my hands; from my lips fortune proclaims what should be bestowed on each mortal; from my utterances people and cities find reasons for rejoicing; no place prospers at all without my good-will and favor; all these thousands of swords, which my peace has restrained, would be drawn at my nod; it is my right to declare which tribes shall be utterly exterminated, which shall be transported, which shall be given their liberty and which shall be deprived of it, which kings shall become slaves and the heads of which should be crowned, which cities shall be destroyed and which shall rise.¹⁹

Seneca connects the need for a despot who maintains peace and order with the degradation of the Roman people since, having lost their virtues, he maintains, only by means of an absolute sovereign can society be protected. Anne Applebaum has shown that this same argument is used by today’s autocrats to legitimize themselves: they sully the democrats’ respectability through destructive campaigns to create skepticism in the population, which allows them to prosper.²⁰ For Berlin, the autocrat can be a protector of negative freedom but also the despot who imposes renunciation on his subjects, who provides them with the false freedom to do without everything. Berlin tells us that the freedom of the Stoic sage must be rejected as false freedom. Berlin is right here, without a doubt, but we are left without knowing how liberty and autocracy can be reconciled. I believe Berlin’s argument is confusing and Constant is more clairvoyant because he understands that absolute sovereignty, whether exercised in the name of one or many, always means the disappearance of liberty, of modern liberty, of individual freedom.

The new meaning of autocracy

The vocabulary with which we conceptualize political reality is subject to a strange dynamic. In general, there is little innovation in the terms we use. But as we need to adjust to changes in societies, their meaning changes, to the point that, given how old many of these words are, they end up being reversed. For example, the word democracy has passed in its millennial history from meaning, as Aristotle told us, the unjust government of a multitude in their own benefit to being called a form of limited government, with universal suffrage and guaranteed rights.

Well, since democracy is government that protects the rights of individuals through the political participation of citizens, the opposite of democracy will be government by a single person who exercises power without any limit, in accordance with their own despotic wishes. Until recently, such regimes were described as authoritarian or dictatorships. But now the word autocracy has reached a large audience because it allows for unification in a single denomination of a form of government that can formally manifest itself in very different ways, in republics or in monarchies; with or without elections and political parties and without political pluralism.

In the Spanish language, the word is relatively new. It does not appear in the Diccionario de autoridades but does indeed appear in the DRAE (the dictionary of the Real Academia Española), where it is noted that autocracy is the “system of government in which the will of one person is the supreme law” and an autocrat is a “person who exercises on their own the supreme authority of a state,” adding: “this title was given especially to the Emperor of Russia.” The Shorter Oxford Dictionary is more specific. The word does not enter the English language, in its political sense, until practically the middle of the nineteenth century, and becomes synonymous with absolute government. “Autocrat” had already appeared in this language at the beginning of the same century to name a monarch with unlimited authority or an absolute and irresponsible ruler. But we are also reminded that it was one of the titles of the Tsar. In fact, from 1721 until the disappearance of his monarchy in 1917, the Russian Tsar held the title of “emperor and autocrat of all Russia” and of “emperor and autocrat of all the Russias.”

In Russia’s first constitution, the “Fundamental Laws,” enacted by Nicholas II on April 23, 1906, the meaning of tsarist autocracy was made explicit by affirming the emperor’s supremacy over the law, the Church, and the Duma. Article 4 provided that: “The autocratic supreme power is established in the figure of the emperor of all Russia. It is a divine mandate that his authority be respected and fulfilled not only out of fear but as a duty of conscience.” The title of autocracy sought to confirm that absolute sovereignty should remain embodied in the monarch and that this person had a sacral, almost divine character. In short, that an autocrat is an absolute ruler who exercises total sovereignty, which places him above men and laws. In fact, “Император и Самодержец Всероссийский,” Romanized as “Imperator i Samoderzhets Vserossiyskiy,” is often translated, into Spanish and other languages, as “absolute sovereign,” even if it literally specifies “emperor and autocrat of all Russia.”

The term “autocracy” has become widespread nowadays to refer to those political regimes whose common characteristic, regardless of their differences, is that they are not democratic. This is done, for example, by the V-Dem Institute, which distinguishes between liberal democracies, electoral democracies, elective autocracies, and closed autocracies.²¹ The word is also used by Anne Applebaum in her aforementioned excellent and terrifying recent book, entitled Autocracy, Inc. and subtitled “The dictators who want to run the world.” In contrast to the traditional image of the autocratic state, in which an evil man does whatever he wants thanks to control of the army and politics, and where there are also collaborationists and perhaps some brave opponents, what we see today is something quite different. Autocracies have changed radically and no longer respond to the old model. Applebaum argues that autocracies today are sustained through a network of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists operating across borders. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another, and the police from one autocracy train and teach the police from another.

For Applebaum, the autocrats are rewriting the rules of trade and of international government while spreading the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of the USA and the West. The members of Autocracy, Inc. are united not by an ideology but rather by a common desire for power, wealth and impunity, and by the belief that democratic ideas, whether they come from their own internal opposition or from the democratic world, are dangerous and must be destroyed. Among the “modern autocrats are communists, monarchists, nationalists and theocrats. Their regimes have different historical roots, aims and aesthetics […] and they do not operate as a bloc but as a confederation of companies, united not by ideology but by the brutal and obtuse determination to preserve their wealth and personal power […] Instead of ideas, the leaders who run Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan […] share the determination to deprive their citizens of all influence or public voice, to roll back all forms of transparency or responsibility, and to repress everything, at home or abroad, that defies them.”²² Applebaum argues that, if we want to save democracies, we will have to change the way we see the world and fight the autocrats with new weapons.

There is no longer ideology but rather interests

From Applebaum’s reflection, what seems important to retain is that autocrats have no ideology but rather interests and, as such, the dedication to the study of ideas promoted by post-war political philosophy, and by Isaiah Berlin in particular, can be a melancholy and erroneous commitment if what interests us is to conceptualize and analyze today’s politics with the intent of improving it. If we think about who sat at the table with the dictator Maduro, an autocrat, in his self-appointment as the president of Venezuela on January 10, 2025, we can see that there were despots and propagandists of every stripe, united by interests and not by ideas, from communists to the extreme right. If anything, the only idea they shared was an equal contempt for liberal democracy.

Thus, unlike what happened at the time of the ideological paroxysm of the early twentieth century, when political religions mobilized the masses against democracy, now the threat doesn’t come from ideas but rather from undermining the legitimacy of democracy. That is, from a negative discourse in which the autocrat presents himself as a guarantor of order and security in the face of the decadence of liberal societies, discredited inside and outside of their borders. But this new threat to democracies comes not only from the global alliance of autocrats of all shapes and sizes. Also, within liberal democracies, pluralism as a value has been substituted by the affirmation of a personalist politics of the strong man, the commander.

Erika Frantz and others have recently pointed out something that seems particularly relevant to me, which is that, while after the end of the Second World War democracies were normally toppled by coups d’état or by force, today, on the contrary, they are eroding at the hands of democratically elected rulers who retain power by slowly undermining their institutions. To understand this development, these authors propose the need to study “the role of personalist political parties […] parties that exist mainly to promote the career of their leaders.” They confirm that the data shows “the rise of personalist parties around the world is facilitating the decline of democracy.” And this is because “personalist parties lack the incentives and capacity to counteract a leader’s efforts to expand executive power.” In this way, leaders of personalist parties are quite likely to succeed in dismantling institutional constraints on their government. And they conclude with a pessimistic diagnosis that is consistent with the strained climate democracies are experiencing today: “These attacks on political institutions have an impact on society as a whole, deepening political polarization and weakening the commitment of those who defend democratic norms. As such, the personalism of the ruling party erodes the horizontal and vertical limitations that weigh on a leader, ultimately degrading democracy and increasing the risk of democratic failure.”²³

Contrary to what Berlin thought, today there are no good autocrats who respect the liberty of their subjects; and, even worse, autocracy and democracy are not necessarily incompatible, since from the latter you can end up at the former. Political theory as a history of ideas was aimed toward the practical purpose of defending societies that had made the protection of individual freedom the organizing principle of their constitutional system. Berlin spoke of negative freedom as a fragile and rare plant that prospered in very few places and demanded a lot of civilization. Back then, in his time, these exceptional societies of liberty confronted systems of ideas that, in the beginning of secularization, behaved like political religions, like systems of ideas converted into beliefs that mobilized the masses. But, in the post-secular time in which we now live, it seems that the practical goal of defending liberal democracy no longer works solely through the history of political ideas, through a genealogy critical of destructive creeds.

It seems, on the contrary, that what this fragile plant of liberal democracy needs today, if we do not want it to wither away, is more democracy understood as separation of powers, the rule of law, judicial independence, independent public opinion, and political participation. Constant said, in his famous conference, that political participation is not only an instrument to protect liberty but also a school for citizen education. Without these ingredients, the new autocrats, whether elected or self-appointed, will put an end to democracy without the need to offer an ideology. Berlin emphasized that, as long as politics existed, there would be political theory, because the practical need to improve our societies will always be with us. In this, undoubtedly, he is still fully contemporary.

An initial version of this text was presented as a talk at the Thought Seminar at the Civismo Foundation, Madrid, January 17, 2025.

Translated by Lori Gerson

Originally published in Letras Libres, Spanish edition, Vol. 24, No. 283 (April 2025) as part of “Conversaciones Globales”, a project supported by Open Society Foundations.

1 Frans de Bruyn, “Anti-Semitism, Millenarianism, and Radical Dissent in Edmund Burke’s ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 34, n.º 4 (Summer, 2001), pp. 577-600. A vitriolic criticism of Burke by Jeremy Fox can be read at:  https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/edmund-burke-unspoken-villainy/.

2 Bhikhu Parekh has been the great advocate of this political theory against those who noted that, until the arrival of John Rawls and his A Theory of Justice in 1971, the discipline was dead. Time puts everything in its place, and tedious Rawlsian scholasticism has been forgotten while the post-war classics still remain strong. On this debate see Bhikhu Parekh, “Traditions in political philosophy,” in A New Handbook of Political Science, R. Goodwin and Hans-Dieter Klingenmann (eds.), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996.

3 Heinrich Heine, Sobre la historia de la religión y la filosofía en Alemania. La escuela romántica, Madrid, Tecnos, 2015. Translation by Manuel Sacristán Luzón.

4 Georges Sorel, Reflexiones sobre la violencia, Madrid, Alianza, 2016. Prologue by Isaiah Berlin.

5 Karl Popper, La sociedad abierta y sus enemigos, Barcelona, Paidós, 2017 [1945]; Hannah Arendt, Los orígenes del totalitarismo, Madrid, Alianza, 2006 [1951]; Raymond Aron, El opio de los intelectuales, Barcelona, Página Indómita, 2018 [1955]; Michael Oakeshott, El racionalismo en la política y otros ensayos, México, FCE, 2000 [1962]; also Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialéctica de la Ilustración, Madrid, Trotta, 2016 [1944-47]; Jacob Talmon, Los orígenes de la democracia totalitaria, Madrid, Olejnik ediciones, 2023 [1952]; David Caute, in his book which is not very merciful with Berlin, Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2013, suggests that the original is nothing more than plagiarism of Talmon; Elie Kedourie, Nacionalismo, Madrid, Alianza, 2015 [1960].

6 Isaiah Berlin, Dos conceptos de libertad. El fin justifica los medios. Mi trayectoria intelectual, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 2014. Edition, introduction, translation, and notes by Ángel Rivero.

7 On the end of ideology and the Milan Congress in 1955, see my introduction to Daniel Bell, El final de la ideología, Madrid, Alianza, 2015 [1960].

8 Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, Madrid, Alianza, 2015. Edition corrected and updated by Ángel Rivero.

9 John Gray, Isaiah Berlin, Alfons el Magnànim, ivei Valencia, 1996. Ángel Rivero, “John Gray y el liberalismo agonístico de Isaiah Berlin”, Revista de Libros, January 1, 1997, available at: https://www.revistadelibros.com/john-gray-y-el-liberalismo-agonistico-de-isaiah-berlin/.

10 Isaiah Berlin, Sobre la libertad, Madrid, Alianza, 2017. Edition by Henry Hardy and Ángel Rivero for the Spanish version. Berlin considered his book Four Essays on Liberty his most important and original work. This definitive edition changes the title of the work and respects Berlin’s final wish to include a fifth essay, which the publisher did not let him add at the time due to delays that the author’s doubts created for the book’s production.

11 Benjamin Constant, La libertad de los modernos, Madrid, Alianza, 2019. Edition by Ángel Rivero.

12 John Stuart Mill, Sobre la libertad, Madrid, Alianza, 2013. Prologue by Isaiah Berlin.

13 Montesquieu, El espíritu de las leyes, Madrid, Alianza, 2015, book XI, chapter 4, p. 586.

14 Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume XVII, The Definitive Edition, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2011 [1960]. Edition by Ronald Hamowy. Ortega y Gasset’s analysis of the relationship between liberalism and democracy is found in Chapter V of his book Castilla y sus castillos, Madrid, Afrodisio Aguado, 1942. Ortega’s inspiration is French and, when reading him, one cannot stop thinking about the castle of La Brède where Montesquieu wrote The Spirit of Laws.

15 Friedrich A. Hayek, op. cit., pp. 182-183.

16 Isaiah Berlin, Dos conceptos de libertad. El fin justifica los medios. Mi trayectoria intelectual, op. cit., p. 73.

17 Id.

18 Ibid., p. 88.

19 Lucio Anneo Séneca, Sobre la clemencia, Madrid, Alianza, 2018, L. I, 2.

20 Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, London, Allen Lane, 2024, p. 122 and next.

21 https://www.v-dem.net/

22 Anne Applebaum, op. cit., pp. 2-3.

23 Erica Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, and Joe Wright, The Origins of Elected Strongmen: How Personalist Parties Destroy Democracy from Within, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2024.

Photo: Roman Petrov, Unsplash.