Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Isaiah Berlin
Dedication
Title Page
Editor’s preface
Introduction by Patrick Gardiner
The Sense of Reality
Political Judgement
Philosophy and Government Repression
Socialism and Socialist Theories
Marxism and the International in the Nineteenth Century
The Romantic Revolution: A Crisis in the History of Modern Thought
Artistic Commitment: A Russian Legacy
Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Nationalism
Rabindranath Tagore and the Consciousness of Nationality
Index
Copyright Page
Sir Isaiah Berlin, OM, was born in Riga, capital of Latvia, in 1909. When he was six, his family moved to Russia; there in 1917, in Petrograd, he witnessed both the Social-Democratic and the Bolshevik Revolutions.
In 1921 his family came to England, and he was educated at St Paul’s School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At Oxford he has been a Fellow of All Souls (where he still is now), a Fellow of New College, Professor of Social and Political Theory, and founding President of Wolfson College. He has also held the Presidency of the British Academy. His published work includes Karl Marx, Four Essays on Liberty, Vico and Herder, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Against the Current and The Proper Study of Mankind. As an exponent of the history of ideas he has been awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli Prizes; he has also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties.
Dr Henry Hardy, editor of this volume and of several other collections of Isaiah Berlin’s work, is a Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. He is currently preparing an edition of Berlin’s letters.
Patrick Gardiner, author of the introduction, taught philosophy for many years at Magdalen College, Oxford. He died in 1997.
Isaiah Berlin’s new collection at last makes available an important body of previously unknown work by one of our leading historians of ideas, and one of the finest essayists writing in English. Eight of these nine essays are published in this book for the first time. Their subjects range from history, philosophy and politics to socialism, romanticism and nationalism. They have the same captivating qualities of readability and wisdom that illuminate all his work.
*
KARL MARX
THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
FOUR ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
VICO AND HERDER
Edited by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly
RUSSIAN THINKERS
Edited by Henry Hardy
CONCEPTS AND CATEGORIES
AGAINST THE CURRENT
PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS
THE CROOKED TIMBER OF HUMANITY
THE MAGUS OF THE NORTH
Edited by Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer
THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND
For Alfred and Irene Brendel
Edited by Henry Hardy
With an introduction by Patrick Gardiner
DURING THE LAST six years I have had the privilege of assembling and editing Isaiah Berlin’s extensive unpublished work: essays, addresses, lectures, broadcasts and discussions (categories that are of course not mutually exclusive) spanning the last sixty years and more. My sometimes elusive sources have included manuscripts and typescripts, recordings (often unscripted),fn1 and transcripts – very various in accuracy – of recordings that no longer exist. The edited typescripts I have accumulated in readiness for selective publication are approximately equal in extent (at some one million words) to Berlin’s hitherto published work.
Two long studies drawn from this corpus of material, on Joseph de Maistre and J. G. Hamann,fn2 have already been published, and the nine pieces selected for inclusion in the present volume are from the same source. They and their harbingers have three properties in common. First, they existed as more or less finished scripts, most if not all of which had been thought of by Berlin at the time of composition as potentially publishable, though for one reason or another they had escaped being printed. Secondly, they seem to me, and to others who have read them, fully to deserve addition to Berlin’s published oeuvre – to put it no less modestly. Finally, they are linked thematically, in that they all exemplify his central concern with ideas and their history, as my subtitle indicates. My hope is that more of the unpublished material will in due course see the light, and that more of Berlin’s published but hitherto uncollected writings will be brought together; but with a few exceptions – chiefly his pieces on Soviet Russia and on Zionism – the present volume, added to its eight predecessors,fn3 completes the collective publication of Berlin’s more finished longer essays.
I turn now to the origins of the pieces. ‘The Sense of Reality’ was the basis for the first Elizabeth Cutter Morrow Lecture, delivered on 9 October 1953 at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, under the title ‘Realism in History’; some of the matters it deals with have been touched on by Berlin in other essays, for example ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’ and ‘The Concept of Scientific History’, but this is his most sustained treatment, and clearly merits a place in this collection. ‘Political Judgement’, which also has points of contact with ‘The Sense of Reality’, but from a distinctively political angle, was a talk (the sixth in a series of seven entitled ‘Thinking about Politics’) first broadcast on 19 June 1957 on the Third Programme of the BBC: the text is jointly based on a prepared script and on a recording of the broadcast. ‘Philosophy and Government Repression’ was a lecture prepared for a series entitled ‘Man’s Right to Freedom of Thought and Expression’, which was part of the bicentennial celebrations at Columbia University, New York; the lecture was scheduled for 24 March 1954, but in the event Berlin was unable to attend. ‘Socialism and Socialist Theories’ differs from the other pieces by having appeared in print at the time it was written: it was first published in Chambers’s Encyclopaedia (London, 1950: Newnes; New York, 1950: Oxford University Press), and in a revised form in a subsequent edition of the same work (Oxford, New York etc., 1966: Pergamon); the present version incorporates further revisions intended for a new edition of the encyclopaedia which never appeared, and is included partly for that reason, partly because it has not previously been collected, and partly because of its appropriate subject-matter. ‘Marxism and the International in the Nineteenth Century’ was the basis of a lecture given at Stanford University in 1964 at a conference held to mark the centenary of the First International Working Men’s Association. ‘The Romantic Revolution’ was written for a conference in Rome in March 1960, where it was delivered in an Italian translation: during the long gestation of this book the Italian text has appeared in Isaiah Berlin, Tra la filosofia e la storia delle idee: intervista autobiografica, ed. Steven Lukes (Florence, 1994: Ponte alle Grazie), and Dutch and German translations of the original English text in, respectively, Nexus and Lettre international. ‘Artistic Commitment’ is a revised version of a talk first given in the United States in the early 1960s. ‘Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Nationalism’ was the First Humayun Kabir Memorial Lecture, delivered in New Delhi in 1972. ‘Rabindranath Tagore and the Consciousness of Nationality’ was also delivered in New Delhi, on 13 November 1961, at a conference held to mark the centenary of Tagore’s birth.
As in the case of previous volumes, I have received generous and indispensable help from a number of scholars, to whom I offer my very grateful thanks. Patrick Gardiner (to whom I am also indebted for his excellent introduction) and Roger Hausheer read all the essays that I chose, as well as a number that I didn’t, and helped me both to make the selection and to solve a number of specific textual problems. Professor G. A. Cohen read and commented on the pieces on socialism and Marxism, helping me to convince Berlin, who is irremediably sceptical about his work, that they should be included; and Professor Terrell Carver, among other acts of intellectual largesse, has enabled me to add references to the latter essay. Dr Gunnar Beck helped invaluably with Fichte, Andrew Robinson with Tagore, Professor Frank Seeley with Turgenev, Dr Ralph Walker with Kant, Helen McCurdy with several Russian problems. Dr Derek Offord put his expert knowledge of Belinsky and other Russian authors at my disposal with a truly heroic generosity, patience and effectiveness that leave me especially deeply in his debt. I also profited, not for the first time, from the prodigious learning of Dr Leofranc Holford-Strevens. Isaiah Berlin himself with considerable forbearance read and approved my edited text of all the pieces, making a number of revisions in the process. Without his secretary, Pat Utechin, nothing would be possible; and the same has been true since 1990 of the most generous benefactors who have financed my Fellowship at Wolfson College, and of Lord Bullock, at whose instigation the post was created for me. Finally, I should like to thank my editors at Chatto and Windus, Will Sulkin and Jenny Uglow, for their help and support; and Elisabeth Sifton of Farrar, Straus and Giroux for a careful reading of the typescript that yielded numerous refinements.
| April 1996 | HENRY HARDY |
| Wolfson College, Oxford |
fn1 I have deposited copies of the recordings at the National Sound Archive in London.
fn2 ‘Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism’, included with seven published but uncollected essays in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (London, 1990; New York, 1991); and The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (London, 1993; New York, 1994).
fn3 In addition to the two volumes mentioned in the previous note, there are six earlier collections of pieces that had previously been published only one by one in a scattered fashion. These are Four Essays on Liberty (London and New York, 1969), Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London and New York, 1976), Russian Thinkers (London and New York, 1978), Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays (London, 1978; New York, 1979), Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (London, 1979; New York, 1980) and Personal Impressions (London, 1980; New York, 1981). [A selection drawn from these six volumes and from The Crooked Timber of Humanity has also now appeared: The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (London, 1997). H.H.1997.]
ISAIAH BERLIN’S WRITINGS have impinged upon so many distinct spheres of thought and enquiry, and have ramified in such different and at times unexpected directions, that a question may be raised as to what leading conceptions have ultimately guided or held together his varied excursions into these apparently disparate intellectual domains. This is not as straightforward a question as it might look; indeed, in the eyes of some of his admirers it may seem to be quite inapposite, missing the essential point. For they might claim that much of the distinctive value of his achievement lies precisely in the notable absence it displays of any unitary ambitions or systematic pretensions; the range and sheer diversity of what he has written, involving amongst other things a constant readiness to consider on their own terms both sharply conflicting beliefs and the points of view of those holding them, have played a key role in enlarging the horizons of his readers and in loosening the grip of obstructive prejudices or dogmas. Berlin himself has characterised as ‘doctrinaire’ a person who is ‘liable to suppress what he may, if he comes across it, suspect to be true’, and it is certainly the case that his own outlook stands in complete contrast to this. Even so, and notwithstanding the openness and objectivity of approach he has consistently shown, it seems possible to discern in his work the outlines of particular preoccupations and themes that give it an inner coherence not the less impressive for being relatively unobtrusive and unemphatic. What at first sight may appear to be stray or unrelated strands in his thinking frequently turn out on closer examination to be threads in a wider pattern, forming parts of a more inclusive whole. They can be seen, in other words, as contributing to an intricate complex of subtly interconnected ideas rather than as belonging to the framework of some rigid theoretical system. Furthermore, the complex in question can itself be said to reflect the presence of certain overarching concerns whose pervasive influence has manifested itself in various ways throughout Berlin’s intellectual career.
One of these recurrent concerns is with the nature and significance of history, a subject which is central to the title essay of the present collection. Berlin has often denied that he is or ever has been a historian, and it may be that there is some accepted if restrictive sense of the term in which this is so. The fact remains, however, that he has made a unique and celebrated contribution to the history of ideas and hence possesses an intimate working knowledge of issues and problems of the kind to which this branch of enquiry into the human past gives rise. Moreover, in pursuing his studies in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought he has inevitably been confronted by widely varying theories concerning both the character of the historical process and our cognisance of it. Thus when writing his first book, on Karl Marx, he was obliged not only to come to grips with Marx’s own highly influential accounts of the forces governing historical change and development, but also to read the works of such important predecessors as Helvétius, Condorcet, Saint-Simon and Comte. In one way or another these writers shared the conviction, widely current among thinkers of the French Enlightenment, that scientific methods and categories of the type that had proved so successful in advancing our knowledge of the natural world should be extended to the study of humanity and its history. Berlin has described elsewhere how, in the course of investigating the sources of these and allied claims, he sought to understand from within the problems that obsessed those who had propounded them; the ideas of the past (he felt) could only be brought to life by ‘entering into’ the minds and viewpoints of the persons who held them and the social or cultural contexts to which they belonged. In following this procedure, however, he was aware of engaging in a kind of thinking that seemed far removed from what was proposed by the writers he was immediately concerned with, imaginative and empathetic understanding of the sort in question having no apparent parallels or analogues within the natural sciences. Where, on the other hand, he did discern a responsive echo was in the works of two eighteenth-century thinkers of quite a different cast of mind. Vico and Herder were in various respects conspicuously at odds with the prevailing temper of their time, and not least in their attitude to what they held to be the distinctive character of the historian’s subject-matter. This, in their view, made attempts to assimilate historical methodology to that of the sciences misconceived in principle. For whereas in the case of the latter we could never obtain more than a purely ‘external’ knowledge of the phenomena with which they dealt, the cognitive relation in which we stood to the phenomena specific to history was of a wholly dissimilar order. Here it was possible to achieve a direct or inward grasp of the mental processes that found expression in the doings and creations of historical agents; the underlying humanity historians shared with those they sought to comprehend enabled them to ascertain from the inside what it was that moved and activated the subjects of their enquiries, even when – as was frequently the case – this was a matter of recapturing through imaginative effort the interior life of other periods or cultures whose pervasive outlooks and preconceptions differed profoundly from their own. Both Vico and Herder, albeit in varying ways, implied that such an approach was fundamental to any meaningful pursuit of the human studies, and it is a conception of historical practice whose cardinal importance Berlin – in common here with their twentieth-century admirer and follower Collingwood – has likewise insisted upon.
The influence of such contentions, involving an emphasis on the essential autonomy of historical thought and understanding, may be said to lie behind some of the theses advanced in ‘The Sense of Reality’, where the contrast drawn between history and other disciplines recalls the attention Berlin has accorded to various aspects of this complex topic in a number of notable essays. Nevertheless, in the present instance he approaches it from a direction that diverges in significant respects from ones taken in some of his other discussions, his perspective here having more general implications and encompassing practical as well as academic issues. The title given to the piece is indeed indicative of this, and partly reflects his characteristic suspicion of attempts to simplify, or reduce to artificially abstract terms, the ‘dark mass of factors’ that constitutes human existence, whether these are undertaken for purely theoretical purposes or whether with a view to implementing comprehensive plans of a political or social nature. He has always shown himself to be acutely aware of the perennial fascination exercised by the prospect of discovering some infallible formula or universal prescription capable of resolving the multifarious problems presented by the human condition in a way that would leave no loose ends or dangling uncertainties. And in this connection he has also stressed the extent to which in the modern period – that is, roughly since the end of the seventeenth century – such an aspiration has often found expression in efforts to demonstrate that the historical process conforms to ineluctable laws or uniformities which can be understood to hold for the future as well as the past, thus possessing predictive as well as explanatory potential. But he considers none the less that the fascination alluded to represents a temptation which should be resisted, and that the difficulties underlying some of the projects it has given rise to are rooted in misunderstandings that extend beyond the bounds of historical interpretation and methodology, ultimately reaching into the depths and texture of all human life and experience.
As Berlin points out, historical theorising of the type he has in mind by no means conforms to a single pattern, representative accounts ranging from ones founded on mechanically-conceived regularities to others that invoke ‘organic’ or evolutionary laws of development. In the present context, however, his concern is not with distinguishing and commenting on different examples of the genre; rather it is that of questioning the whole notion of constructing a law-governed or systematic theory that would be capable of fitting into a unified scheme the multiplicity and variety of heterogeneous elements of which the historical process is composed. On the latter point he refers with approval to Tolstoy, and it is noteworthy that much that he says on this theme echoes the tone of the Russian writer’s views on history as presented at the close of War and Peace. Not only did Tolstoy exhibit considerable scepticism with regard to the crude simplifications and bland generalities he attributed to the various philosophies of history and society that had so far been produced; he further implied that all projects involving the use of abstractions and schemata of the kind favoured by speculative theorists were bound in the end to founder, their being intrinsically unfitted to comprehend the continuum of ‘infinitesimals’ – the series of countless, minute and interrelated actions and events – that made up the life and story of humanity. In Berlin’s own treatment of the subject one finds a similarly critical attitude taken up towards previous ‘pseudo-scientific histories and theories of human behaviour’, together with a comparable, though by no means identical, emphasis on the manner in which the dense material of history may be expected to resist the imposition of procedures originally adapted to radically different areas of concern and enquiry.
Such affinities are hardly surprising, Tolstoy’s particular gifts as a creative writer making him in Berlin’s eyes especially well equipped to appreciate the richness and diversity of human reality as it is lived and known: the endless variety and individuality of things and people, the subtle cross-currents of feeling involved in both social intercourse and personal relationships, the depths of self-regard and the confusions of aim lying beneath the surface of public life – these were amongst the myriad phenomena which his exceptional powers of observation and imagination captured and which led him to look through the smooth and regular outlines drawn by history’s self-proclaimed interpreters to the uneven and often chaotic details of actual experience they concealed. As is well known, such aspects of Tolstoy’s achievement are eloquently portrayed in Berlin’s penetrating study, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’. There, however, he was largely concerned to contrast Tolstoy’s artistic insight and flair with another, quite opposite, side to his outlook and personality, one that hankered after some monistic or unitary truth which would altogether transcend the problems and distractions that plague our mundane existence. In the present context, on the other hand, he wishes to indicate the relevance of the novelist’s specifically literary abilities to the essay’s general theme, relating them not merely to the activities of historians engaged in reconstructing the past but also to those of politicians and so-called ‘men of action’ in their dealings with the world of practical affairs. Thus in ‘Political Judgement’, which follows ‘The Sense of Reality’ as a companion piece and elaborates on some of its points, Berlin suggests that qualities of mind analogous in certain respects to ones possessed by imaginative writers can be said to play a role both in the study of history and in the conduct of what he terms ‘statecraft’. Like the trained historian, the effective politician needs a developed capacity for a ‘non-generalising assessment of specific situations’; a finely attuned sensitivity to the shifting contours or levels of social existence, and, combined with this, an intuitive ‘feel’ for what is empirically feasible and for what hangs together with what in the intricate and frequently recalcitrant sphere of particular facts or circumstances, have perennially been amongst the distinctive characteristics of outstanding political leaders. Berlin notes that such ‘practical wisdom’ or genius has tended to be treated by the great systematisers of history as representing a haphazard ‘pre-scientific’ approach which is no longer acceptable on theoretical grounds and which stands in need of radical reform or replacement. But he also points out that some of their proposed improvements can scarcely be felt to have constituted an encouraging response to this alleged requirement, the Utopian-style experiments they have inspired resulting in unanticipated consequences of a kind with which – ironically enough – history itself has made us only too familiar.
Taken together, these two articles have an ample sweep and scope that exemplify their author’s singular range and illuminating breadth of vision. They were originally written in the 1950s, and the various allusions they contain to speculative social theories and blueprints may therefore partly be viewed as reflecting the preoccupations of a period acutely conscious of the totalitarian ideologies that continued to hold sway over much of the political landscape. Even so, it would be a mistake to regard such references as possessing no more than a limited or transient significance when judged within the overall perspective of Berlin’s thought. He was almost from the first alert to the dangers inherent in a misplaced ‘scientism’ and the blurring of boundaries it is apt to engender, an early resistance to reductionist trends in epistemology and the philosophy of language prefiguring in some ways the objections he was later to raise against influential doctrines in political and social theory. He has never denied that it was proper and indeed estimable to salute and seek to emulate methods that had promoted the success of the natural sciences within their own domains; but it was another thing entirely to advocate an uncritical extension of these to alien fields of investigation or to quite separate levels of experience. As we have seen, he has attributed misconceptions on the latter score to certain eighteenth-century philosophes and their followers in the approach they adopted to human affairs. That, however, has not been the sole source of his dissatisfaction with the views of such thinkers, the wider reservations he has from time to time expressed in his writings raising questions about his attitude to the Enlightenment as a whole. The nature of some of the uncertainties that have been felt may be gleaned from other essays included in the present volume.
In actual fact, and despite what is on occasions supposed, Berlin has been far from reticent in characterising his own, admittedly complex, position on the subject. Thus he has gone out of his way to praise representatives of the Enlightenment for their courageous opposition to many of the evils of their time, including ignorance, oppression, cruelty and superstition, and for their support for ideals like reason, liberty and human happiness; as he succinctly remarked to an interlocutor,fn1 this put him on their side. At the same time, though, and notwithstanding the attachment he feels to much that they stood for, he also considers that they were prone to give dogmatic credence to assumptions – often traditional in origin – which were by no means self-evident and whose validity their professed respect for empirical principles might have led them to query. These included specific conceptions of a uniform and basically unchanging human nature, together with closely related beliefs in the existence of universal values which were harmoniously realisable by human beings in the course of their lives. Some of the issues arising from such preconceptions are examined in ‘The Romantic Revolution’: here it is argued that the emergence of romanticism in the late eighteenth century constituted a dramatic change in the intellectual climate of the time, the objective status of accepted standards and norms being challenged by subjectivist doctrines in a fashion that had momentous repercussions within the spheres of ethics, aesthetics and politics. In concluding this arresting discussion Berlin suggests that one long-term effect of the resultant clash of outlooks has been that we find ourselves today to be the heirs of two traditions, with a tendency to ‘shift uneasily from one foot to the other’. Equally, however, he maintains that the novel and subversive ideas introduced by the movement indisputably deepened and enriched the understanding of people and societies, both exposing limitations or lacunae discernible in the Enlightenment inheritance and simultaneously opening up fresh possibilities of thought and feeling which had hitherto lain beyond the bounds of the European imagination.
Berlin’s treatment of the above tension between these different standpoints is consonant with the combination of acuity and empathetic insight that pervades his approach to the history of ideas as a whole. On the one hand, he has shown an exceptional ability to grasp from within, and appreciate the force of, intellectual and cultural outlooks that are often opposed to ones to which as a person he feels most sympathetic. On the other, he has been quick to recognise and pinpoint the sinister implications latent in a number of the positions he has so vividly portrayed: not least the shapes of irrationalism and of aggressive forms of nationalism that lurk within some of the doctrines belonging to what he has called the Counter-Enlightenment. On the latter score, what he writes towards the end of his essay on Rabindranath Tagore is indicative of the line he wishes to draw between the beneficent and the destructively chauvinist guises in which nationalism can appear. Here as elsewhere, he comments, Tagore tried to tell the truth without over-simplification, and to that extent was perhaps listened to the less, for – as the American philosopher C. I. Lewis remarked – ‘There is no a priori reason for thinking that, when we discover the truth, it will prove interesting.’ Berlin quotes this observation with approval. In his own writings, however, it can truly be said that the truth invariably proves to be so.
fn1 Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London and New York, 1992), p. 70.
WHEN MEN, AS occasionally happens, develop a distaste for the age in which they live, and love and admire some past period with such uncritical devotion that it is clear that, if they had their choice, they would wish to be alive then and not now – and when, as the next step, they seek to introduce into their lives certain of the habits and practices of the idealised past, and criticise the present for falling short of, or for degeneration from, this past – we tend to accuse them of nostalgic ‘escapism’, romantic antiquarianism, lack of realism; we dismiss their efforts as attempts to ‘turn the clock back’, to ‘ignore the forces of history’, or ‘fly in the face of the facts’, at best touching and childish and pathetic, at worst ‘retrograde’, or ‘obstructive’, or insanely ‘fanatical’, and, although doomed to failure in the end, capable of creating gratuitous obstacles to progress in the immediate present and future.
This kind of charge is made, and apparently understood, easily. It goes with such notions as the ‘logic of the facts’, or the ‘march of history’, which, like the laws of nature (with which they are partly identified), are thought of as, in some sense, ‘inexorable’, likely to take their course whatever human beings may wish or pray for, an inevitable process to which individuals must adjust themselves, for if they defy it they will perish; which, like the Fates in the line by Seneca, ‘ducunt volentem . . . nolentem trahunt’.fn1 And yet this way of thinking seems to presuppose a machinery in the universe which those who think in these terms do not necessarily accept, which indeed they may, if they are students of history rather than metaphysics, seek to refute by means of negative instances drawn from their own and others’ experience. Nevertheless, even those who try to rebut this way of thinking find that they cannot altogether abandon the concepts in question because they seem to correspond to something in their view of how things happen, although they do not, perhaps, believe in the machinery of determinism which is normally held to be the source of them.
Let me try to make this somewhat clearer. Everyone, no doubt, believes that there are factors that are largely or wholly beyond conscious human control. And when we describe this or that scheme as impractical or Utopian we often mean that it cannot be realised in the face of such uncontrollable facts or processes. These are of many kinds: regions of nature with which we cannot interfere, for example the solar system or the general realm dealt with by astronomy; there we can alter neither the state of the entities in question nor the laws which they obey. As for the rest of the physical world, dealt with by the various natural sciences, we conceive of the laws which govern them as unalterable by us, but claim to be able to intervene to some degree in altering the states of things and persons which obey these laws. Some believe such interventions are themselves subject to laws: that we ourselves are wholly determined by our past; that our behaviour is in principle wholly calculable; and that our ‘freedom’ in interfering with natural processes is therefore illusory. Others deny this in whole or in part, but that does not concern us here, since both sides are willing to grant that large portions of our universe, particularly its inanimate portion, is as it is and suffers what it does whether we will it or no.
When we examine the world of sentient beings, some portions of it are certainly thought to be governed by ‘necessity’. There are, to begin with, the effects of the interplay of human beings with nature – their own bodies and what is external to them. The assumption is made that there are certain basic human needs, for food, for shelter, the minimum means by which life can be carried on, perhaps for certain forms of pleasure or self-expression, communication; that these are affected by such relatively fixed phenomena as climate, geographical formation and the products of a natural environment, which take the form of economic, social, religious institutions, and so on, each of which is the combined effect of physical, biological, psychological, geographical factors, and so forth, and in which certain uniformities can be discovered, in terms of which patterns are observable in the lives of both individuals and societies – cyclical patterns of the kind discussed by Plato or Polybius, or non-recurrent ones, as in the sacred works of the Jews, the Christians, and perhaps Pythagoreans and Orphics, the patterns and chains of being which are to be found in various Eastern religions and philosophies, and in modern days in the cosmologies of such writers as Vico, Hegel, Comte, Buckle, Marx, Pareto, and a good many contemporary social psychologists and anthropologists and philosophers of history. These tend to treat human institutions as not proceeding solely from conscious human purposes or desires; but having made due allowance for such conscious purposes, whether on the part of those who found or those who use and participate in institutions, they stress unconscious or semi-conscious causes on the part of both individuals and groups, and, even more, the by-products of the encounters of the uncoordinated purposes of various human beings, each acting as he does partly for coherent and articulate motives, partly for causes or reasons little known to himself or to others, and thereby causing states of affairs which nobody may have intended as such, but which in their turn condition the lives and characters and actions of men.
On this view, if we consider how much is independent of conscious human policies – the entire realm of insentient nature, the sciences of which take no heed of human issues; and such human sciences as psychology and sociology, which assume some kind of basic human reactions and uniformities of behaviour, both social and individual, as unlikely to be altered radically by the fiats of individuals – if all this is taken into account, a picture emerges of a universe the behaviour of which is in principle largely calculable. Naturally we tend to come under the influence of this picture, to think of history as growing in inevitable stages, in an irreversible direction, ideally, at least, describable as instances of the totality of the laws which between them describe and summarise the natural uniformities in terms of which we conceive of the behaviour of both things and persons. The life of the fourteenth century was as it was because it was a ‘stage’ reached by the interplay of human and non-human factors – its institutions were those which human needs, half consciously and half quite unawares, caused to come about or to survive, and because the individual and institutional life of the fourteenth century was as it was, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries could not but be as they were, and could not resemble, say, the third or the ninth or the thirteenth century, because the fourteenth century had made that quite ‘impossible’. We may not know what the laws are which social evolution obeys, nor the precise causal factors which function between the life of the individual and that of the ‘social anthill’ to which it belongs, but we may be sure that there are such laws and factors. We realise that this is so if we ask ourselves whether we think that history explains anything, that is, that any light is thrown upon the fifteenth century by what occurred in the fourteenth, in the sense that if we grasp the historical links we shall understand what made the fifteenth century what it was. To grasp this is to see what it is that makes it absurd to suggest that everything in the fifteenth century might have been an exact reproduction of what occurred in the thirteenth century – as if the fourteenth century had never been. And from this there appears to follow that cluster of concepts with which we began. There is a pattern and it has direction; it is not necessarily ‘progressive’, that is, we need not believe that we are gradually approaching some ‘desirable’ goal, however we define desirable; but we are pursuing a definite and irreversible direction; nostalgia for some past stage of it is eo ipso Utopian; for it is like asking for the reversal of the nexus of causes and effects. We may admire the past, but to try to reproduce it is to ignore this nexus. The oak cannot return to the condition of the acorn; an old man cannot, as it were, unlive what he has lived through and literally be young once more, with the body as well as the heart and mind of youth. Romantic hankerings after past ages are virtually a desire to undo the ‘inexorable’ logic of events. If it were possible to reproduce past conditions, historical causality would be broken, which, since we cannot help thinking in terms of it, is psychologically impossible as well as irrational and absurd.
We may be told that such expressions as ‘anachronism’ are surely themselves sufficient to convey this truth: to describe somebody or something as an anachronism is to say that he or it is not characteristic of the general pattern of the age. We do not need much argument to convince us that there is something gravely deficient in a historian who thinks that Richelieu could have done what he did just as well in the 1950s, or that Shakespeare could have written the plays which he wrote in Ancient Rome, or Outer Mongolia. And this sense of what belongs where, of what cannot have happened as against that which could, is said to imply the notion of an irreversible process, where everything belongs to the stage to which it does and is ‘out of place’ or ‘out of time’ if mistakenly inserted in the wrong context.
So far so good. We are committed to no more than that there are some criteria of reality – that we have some methods for distinguishing the real from the illusory, real mountain peaks from cloud formations, real palms and springs from mirages in the desert, real characteristics of an age or a culture from fanciful reconstructions, real alternatives which can be realised at a given time from alternatives realisable, it may be, in other places and at other times, but not in the society or period in question. It is in terms of some such principle that various historical theorists stake out their claims. Asked why Shakespeare could not have written Hamlet in Ancient Rome, Hegelians would speak of the Graeco-Roman spirit, with which such thoughts, feelings and words as Shakespeare’s were not compatible. Marxists might refer to ‘relationships’ and ‘forces’ of production, which in Rome were such as to have ‘inevitably’ generated a cultural superstructure in which Virgil could function, and Shakespeare could not have functioned, as he did. Montesquieu would have spoken of geography, climates, the ‘dominant spirit’ of different social systems; Chateaubriand of the difference made by Christianity, Gobineau of race; Herder, the folk spirit; Taine – race, milieu, the moment; Spengler, the self-contained ‘morphology’ of mutually exclusive cultures and civilisations; and so forth. To be Utopian, to perpetrate anachronisms, to be unrealistic, ‘escapist’, not to understand history or life or the world, is to fail to grasp a particular set of laws and formulae which each school offers as the key to its explanation of why what happens must happen as it does and not in some other order. What is common to all the schools is a belief that there is an order and a key to its understanding, a plan – either a geometry or a geography of events. Those who understand it are wise, those who do not, wander in darkness.
And yet there is something peculiar about this, both in theory and in practice. In theory, because no attempt to provide such a ‘key’ in history has worked thus far. No doubt much valuable light has been thrown upon past conditions by emphasis on hitherto neglected factors: before Montesquieu and Vico, the importance of customs and institutions, of language, grammar, mythology, legal systems; of the influence of environmental and other undramatic, continuous causal factors in explaining why men behaved as they did, and indeed as an instrument for revealing how the world looked to men relatively remote in time or space, what they felt and said, and why and how, and for how long and with what effect – all this was largely unrecognised. Marx taught us to pay more attention to the influence of the economic and social condition of individuals; Herder and Hegel to the interrelations of apparently diverse cultural phenomena and to the life of institutions; Durkheim to unintended social patterns; Freud to the importance of irrational and unconscious factors in individual experience; Sorel and Jung to the importance of irrational myths and collective emotional attitudes in the behaviour of societies. We have learned a great deal; our perspective has altered; we see men and societies from new angles, in different lights. The discoveries which have led to this are genuine discoveries and historical writing has been transformed by them.
But the ‘key’ escapes us. We can neither, as in astronomy or even geology, given initial conditions, confidently reconstruct – calculate either the past or the future of a culture, of a society or class, of an individual or a group – save in instances so rare and abnormal, with such gaps, with the assistance of so many ad hoc hypotheses and epicycles, that direct observation is more economical and more informative than such attempts at scientific inference. If we ask ourselves how much we really can tell about a given period in a culture or a given pattern of human action – a war, a revolution, a renaissance of art or science – from knowledge of even its immediate antecedents or consequences, we must surely answer: scarcely anything at all. No historian, however steeped in sociology or psychology or some metaphysical theory, will attempt to write history in so a priori a fashion. When Hegel attempted this, with the courage of his anti-empirical prejudices, the result was seen as somewhat erroneous even by his followers; so too Spengler, when he insists that the streets of Greek cities were straight and crossed each other at right angles because of the geometrical spirit of the Greeks, is easily shown to be writing rubbish. The theorists of history certainly supposed that they were providing historians with wings enabling them to span great territories rapidly, as compared with the slow pedestrian rate of the empirical fact-gatherer; but although the wings have been with us now for more than a century, nobody has, as yet, flown; those who, as Henri Poincaré remarked in an analogous connection, tried to do so came to a sorry end. The attempts to substitute machines, methods of mass production, for the slow manual labour of antiquaries and historical researchers have all broken down; we still rely on those who spend their lives in painfully piecing together their knowledge from fragments of actual evidence, obeying this evidence wherever it leads them, however tortuous and unfamiliar the pattern, or with no consciousness of any pattern at all. Meanwhile the wings and the machinery are gathering dust on the shelves of museums, examples of overweening ambition and idle fantasy, not of intellectual achievement.
The great system-builders have in their works both expressed and influenced human attitudes towards the world – the light in which events are seen. Metaphysical, religious, scientific systems and attitudes have altered the distribution of emphasis, the sense of what is important or significant or admirable, or again of what is remote or barbarous or trivial – have profoundly affected human concepts and categories, the eyes with which men see or feel and understand the world, the spectacles through which they look – but they have not done the work of a science as they claimed, have not revealed new facts, increased the sum of our information, disclosed unsuspected events. Our belief that events and persons and things belong where they belong inevitably, inexorably, and per contra our sense of Utopia and anachronism, remain as strong as ever; but our belief in specific laws of history, of which we can formulate the science, is not too confident – if their behaviour whether as historians or as men of action is any evidence – even among the minority of those who pursue such topics. It is unlikely, therefore, that the first springs from the second; that our disbelief in the possibility of ‘a return to the past’ rests on a fear of contradicting some given law or laws of history. For while our attitude towards the existence of such laws is more than doubtful, our belief in the absurdity of romantic efforts at recapturing past glories is exceedingly strong. The latter cannot, therefore, depend upon the former. What, then, is the content of our notion of the inevitable ‘march of history’, of the folly of trying to resist what we call irresistible?
Impressed (and to some degree oppressed) by true considerations about the limits of free human action – the barriers imposed by unalterable and little alterable regularities in nature, in the functioning of human bodies and minds – the majority of eighteenth-century thinkers and, following them, enlightened opinion in the last century, and to some degree in our own, conceived the possibility of a true empirical science of history which, even if it never became sufficiently precise to enable us to make predictions or retrodictions in specific situations, nevertheless, by dealing with great numbers, and relying on comparisons of rich statistical data, would indicate the general direction of, say, social and technological development, and enable us to rule out some plans, revolutionary and reformist, as demonstrably anachronistic and therefore Utopian – as not conforming to the ‘objective’ direction of social development. If anyone in the nineteenth century contemplated seriously a return to pre-Raphaelite forms of life it was unnecessary to discuss whether this was or was not desirable; it was surely enough to say that the Renaissance and the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution had in fact occurred, that factories could not be dismantled and great mass industries turned back into small-scale crafts, as if the discoveries and inventions and changes in forms of life which these had brought about had never been, that there had been advance in knowledge and civilisation, in the means of production and distribution, and that whatever might occur next, it was beyond the wit and strength of man to deflect a process which was as uncontrollable as the great uniformities of nature. Opinions might differ as to what the true laws of this process were, but all were agreed that there were such laws, and that to try to alter them or behave as if they were not decisive was an absurd day-dream, a childish desire to substitute for the laws of science those of some whimsical fairy-tale in which everything is possible.