Cover
About the Author
Also by Isaiah Berlin
Title Page
Editor’s Preface
Introduction by Roger Hausheer
The Counter-Enlightenment
The Originality of Machiavelli
The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities
Vico’s Concept of Knowledge
Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment
Montesquieu
Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism
Herzen and his Memoirs
The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess
Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for Identity
The ‘Naïveté’ of Verdi
Georges Sorel
Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power
Author’s Note
A Bibliography of Isaiah Berlin
Index
Copyright
Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, now capital of Latvia, in 1909. When he was six, his family moved to Russia, and in 1917, in Petrograd, Berlin witnessed both Revolutions – Social Democratic and Bolshevik.
In 1921 the family emigrated to England, and Berlin was educated at St Paul’s School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Apart from his war service in New York, Washington and Moscow, he remained at Oxford thereafter – as a Fellow of All Souls, a Fellow of New College, Professor of Social and Political Theory and founding President of Wolfson College. He also held the Presidency of the British Academy. His published work includes Karl Marx, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, Freedom and Its Betrayal, Liberty, The Soviet Mind and Political Ideas in the Romantic Age. As an exponent of the history of ideas he was awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli Prizes; he also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties. He died in 1997.
Dr Henry Hardy, a Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, has edited several other collections of Isaiah Berlin’s work, and is currently preparing an edition of his letters. Roger Hausheer, who is writing an intellectual life of Isaiah Berlin, is Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Bradford.
Also by Isaiah Berlin
*
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
PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS
THE CROOKED TIMBER OF HUMANITY
THE MAGUS OF THE NORTH
THE SENSE OF REALITY
Edited by Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer
THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND
This volume is one of five in which I have brought together, and prepared for reissue, most of the published essays by Isaiah Berlin which had not hitherto been made available in a collected form.1 His many writings were scattered, often in obscure places; most were out of print; and only half a dozen essays had previously been collected and reissued.2 These five volumes, together with the complete list of his publications which this one contains, and subsequent volumes in which I have published much of his previously unpublished work,3 have made much more of his oeuvre readily accessible than before.
The essays in the present volume are contributions to the history of ideas. For various reasons, I omitted nine essays in this field which, other things being equal, would have belonged here. These are ‘Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century’ and ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’, which had already been reissued in Four Essays on Liberty; ‘The Philosophical Ideas of Giambattista Vico’ and ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, which had been revised and published as a separate book, Vico and Herder; ‘Socialism and Socialist Theories’, which has now been reprinted in The Sense of Reality; ‘The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West’, ‘European Unity and its Vicissitudes’, ‘The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will: The Revolt Against the Myth of an Ideal World’ and ‘The Bent Twig: A Note on Nationalism’, which appear in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (in effect a companion volume to this one), together with three essays that appeared after the present volume was first published, and a previously unpublished study of Joseph de Maistre. Details of these additional pieces can be found in the bibliography already mentioned.4
The details of the original publication of the essays that are included here are as follows. ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ appeared in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York, 1968–73: Scribner’s);5 ‘The Originality of Machiavelli’ was published in Myron P. Gilmore (ed.), Studies on Machiavelli (Florence, 1972: Sansoni); ‘The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities’ was the second Tykociner Memorial Lecture, published by the University of Illinois in 1974; ‘Vico’s Concept of Knowledge’ appeared as ‘A Note on Vico’s Concept of Knowledge’ in Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White (eds), Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium (Baltimore, [1969]: Johns Hopkins Press); ‘Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment’ was published in Social Research 43 (1976);6 ‘Montesquieu’ appeared in the Proceedings of the British Academy 41 (1955); ‘Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism’ was a contribution to G. P. Morice (ed.), David Hume: Bicentennial Papers (Edinburgh, 1977: Edinburgh University Press);7 ‘Herzen and his Memoirs’ is the introduction to Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, translated by Constance Garnett (London, 1968: Chatto and Windus; New York, 1968: Knopf); ‘The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess’ was the Lucien Wolf Memorial Lecture (Cambridge, 1959: Heffer, for the Jewish Historical Society of England); ‘Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for Identity’ appeared in Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 22 (1968–9) (London, 1970: Jewish Historical Society of England); ‘The ‘Naïveté’ of Verdi’ was published in Atti del I congresso internazionale di studi verdiani, 1966 (Parma, 1969: Istituto di Studi Verdiani); ‘Georges Sorel’ was a Creighton Lecture published first in The Times Literary Supplement, 31 December 1971, and then in an expanded form in Chimen Abramsky (ed.), Essays in Honour of E. H. Carr (London, 1974: Macmillan); and ‘Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power’ appeared in Partisan Review 46 (1979). I am grateful to the publishers concerned for allowing me to reprint these essays.
‘The Counter Enlightenment’, ‘The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities’ and ‘Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power’ have been left without references (with the exception of passages quoted in footnotes and one long passage), as they originally appeared.8 A few passages – chiefly translations – were rewritten by the author for this volume. Otherwise, apart from necessary corrections, and the addition of missing references, the essays are reprinted essentially in their original form.
I received very generous help from a number of people in editing this volume. Roger Hausheer not only wrote the introduction, but helped extensively with German sources, especially Hamann and Hess. David Robey helped with Machiavelli, Edward Larrissy with Blake, the late Robert Shackleton with Montesquieu, Robert Wokler with Rousseau, Barry Stroud with Hume, Aileen Kelly with Herzen, Lord Blake and Vernon Bogdanor with Disraeli, Terrell Carver with Marx and Jeremy Jennings with Sorel. I could not have managed without the assistance of these scholars, and I record my gratitude to them. Isaiah Berlin himself, with unwavering courtesy, did his best to answer my virtually endless queries, and Pat Utechin, his secretary, provided invaluable help and support. Finally I should like to thank Sir Keith Thomas for pointing out a number of errors in the original edition.
HENRY HARDY
June 1997
Wolfson College, Oxford
1 This volume was first published in London in 1979, and in New York in 1980. The other volumes are Russian Thinkers (London and New York, 1978), co-edited with Aileen Kelly; Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays (London, 1978; New York, 1979); Personal Impressions (London, 1980; New York, 1981); and The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (London, 1990; New York, 1991). There is also a selection of essays drawn from these volumes and their predecessors: The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (London, 1997; New York, forthcoming 1998).
2 Four Essays on Liberty (London and New York, 1969) and Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London and New York, 1976). Other collections had appeared only in translation.
3 The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (London, 1993; New York, 1994) and The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History (London, 1996; New York, 1997).
4 They are, respectively, items 37, 74, 79, 98, 38, 159, 73, 143, 128, 170, 181, 196 and 200. The bibliography should also be consulted for the many smaller pieces in this area, including book reviews.
5 With a bibliography not here reproduced.
6 Its last (free-standing) section, ‘The Workings of Providence’, is not reprinted here.
7 The ‘Additional Bibliographical Material’ appended to this article has not been reproduced here.
8 References have been added in The Proper Study of Mankind (see here).
Essays in the History of Ideas
Edited and with a Bibliography by Henry Hardy
With an Introduction by Roger Hausheer
I have nothing of my own to add to the essays on the history of ideas contained in this book, but I should be exceedingly remiss if I did not take this opportunity of offering my thanks to Mr Roger Hausheer for providing so sympathetic and luminous an account of my views on the topics discussed in these essays. No author could wish for a more understanding, scrupulous or civilised critic. I should like to express my sincere thanks to this most promising young scholar.
ISAIAH BERLIN
September 1978
Two extravagances: to exclude Reason, to admit only Reason.
Blaise Pascal
A man of clear ideas errs grievously if he imagines that whatever is seen confusedly does not exist: it belongs to him, when he meets with such a thing, to dispel the mist, and fix the outlines of the vague form which is looming through it.
J. S. Mill
In our time, what is at issue is the very nature of man, the image we have of his limits and possibilities as man. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits and meanings of ‘human nature’.
C. Wright Mills
Isaiah Berlin’s essays in the history of ideas are not written from a point of view. They are not intended directly to illustrate or support (or for that matter attack or undermine) any single historical or political theory, doctrine or ideology; they range from such wholly diverse figures as Marx, Disraeli and Sorel to topics as apparently remote from one another as nationalism and the theory of knowledge; they are wholly exploratory and undogmatic, raising more tentative but often deeply unsettling questions than they claim to answer; and above all, they represent an utterly independent, scrupulously open-minded, but deeply passionate search for truth. Less, perhaps, than any other thinker does Berlin suppose himself in possession of some simple truth, and then proceed to interpret and rearrange the world in the light of it. Yet his essays are not scattered leaves, blown by the four winds. Nor are they mere occasional pieces, standing in isolation from one another, significant only in the context of their original publication. For in so far as they proceed from a central vision of man and his capacities, and their transformation through historical time – a vision which is richly ramified, complex, and incapable of completion – they are bound lightly and naturally together at many hidden and unexpected levels. Time and again, Berlin raises and illuminates, in the light of vividly concrete historical examples, major issues with which he has dealt in a more abstract manner in his philosophical essays; issues which are not only at the core of his lifelong preoccupation with ideas, but of great intrinsic interest and importance in themselves, and at the forefront of attention today.
His essays sail manfully against the current in at least two ways. Many of them are devoted to intellectual figures of great originality who have either been largely ignored or else regarded with patronising disdain, both by their contemporaries and by later generations of scholars. Indeed, to help rescue from oblivion or neglect, and render historical justice to, thinkers who have been ignored, misrepresented or misunderstood, partly at least because they have dared to oppose the ruling intellectual orthodoxies of their time, is not the least of Berlin’s services to scholarship. His essays on Vico, Hess and Sorel, to take but three examples, would be memorable for this alone. But what makes these essays so strikingly original and exciting is the sense we are given of the gradual birth of seminal new ideas, of the emergence since the mid-eighteenth century of some of the great cardinal notions of the modern world. For in examining the ideas of philosophers, thinkers, and men of vision like Vico, Hamann and Herder, Herzen and Sorel, Berlin displays a uniquely perceptive sensitivity to the deeper stirrings and movements, the dark, uneasy, brooding seasons of the human spirit beneath the bland rationalistic surface of the thought of an age, when a small but at times passionate voice of opposition, overlooked, misinterpreted or ridiculed by its contemporaries, utters in an often fragmentary or semi-articulate form novel ideas about man and his nature which are destined to grow into a world-transforming movement in a later day. From the doctrines of many of these thinkers some of their most powerful inspiration is drawn, directly or indirectly, by the many and various movements of protest which have grown up against some of the monolithic orthodoxies of our own time. And while Berlin is only too keenly aware of the insane excesses to which the views of some of these antinomian thinkers – in particular, perhaps, Hamann, Herder and Sorel – may contribute, and have as a matter of fact contributed, yet the penetrating and painful insights they afford us cannot just be brushed aside. At every step forward in our collective development, Berlin seems to say, we must pause to listen sympathetically to the voices crying out in tortured dissent, or just raised to utter criticism, whether cautiously reasoned or wildly inchoate: we ignore them at our peril, for they may tell us something vital about ourselves; and, in so doing, point towards a larger and more generous (and perhaps more truthful) conception of what men are and can be.
Many of the subjects of his essays, therefore, are agonised men in the grips of a vision so novel and complex that they themselves are unable fully to comprehend and formulate it; they search and grope instinctively, not wholly aware of what it is that they are doing, searching for, attempting to express. This gives rise to the reflection that there may be many levels of intentional action, and that some of the insights of a man of original intellectual vision, and the full implications and consequences of these, may never become transparently clear, either to himself or to others, in his own lifetime; for if he has left some record of what he has thought or felt, the full significance and impact of what he was searching for – what, in effect, his underlying, evolving, still fully to be clarified aims were – may emerge only centuries after his death, when a sophisticated vocabulary and appropriate methods have grown up around the constellation of problems which he was among the very first to touch upon. The classic and most striking case of this is Vico. But in some degree it is surely true of most great writers and thinkers of richly suggestive vision, in so far as they have opened new and permanent doors of insight, perception and understanding.
At the heart of all Berlin’s writings there is a cluster of perennial philosophical problems. The nature of self, will, freedom, human identity, personality and dignity; the manner and degree in which these can be abused, offended against, insulted, and their proper boundaries (whatever these may be) transgressed; the consequences, both probable and actual, of failing to understand them for what they are, and above all of torturing them into conformity with conceptual systems and models which deny too much of their essential nature; the distinction between ‘inner’ human nature as opposed to ‘external’ physical nature, and between the basic categories and methods proper to their investigation – all these problems are touched upon, and our understanding of them enlarged and deepened, by the essays in this volume. Again, the burning issue of philosophical monism, the doctrine that all reality, and all the branches of our knowledge of it, form a rational, harmonious whole, and that there is ultimate unity or harmony between human ends, is discussed and criticised from many angles by close scrutiny of the cardinal doctrines of some of those thinkers who did most to undermine it. Berlin’s preoccupation with the emergence of pluralism, both in the realms of ethical, political and aesthetic values, and in the sphere of human knowledge, so central to his writings in political theory, philosophy of history, and, to a lesser but still important degree, epistemology, is apparent in his choice and treatment of individual thinkers and currents of thought in his essays in the history of ideas. His major excavations in this field have helped bring to light ruined monuments and fragments, strange chunks of intellectual masonry, which seem at times to hint at the shadowy outlines of a phenomenology of European consciousness since the mid-eighteenth century – namely the emergence of novel types of transforming insight and general outlook, with their associated concepts and categories, at certain times and places and in certain thinkers or groups of thinkers – and thereby to throw light upon some of the questions that have troubled him most deeply, not just as an academic philosopher or as a professional scholar, but as a human being.
The history of ideas is a comparatively new field of study: it still craves recognition in a largely hostile world, though there are encouraging signs of a gradual change of heart even in the English-speaking world. There is a growing feeling that investigation of what men have thought and felt, and of the basic ideas in terms of which they have seen themselves and framed their aspirations, may provide a more luminous source of light in the study of man than the established social, political and psychological sciences, for all that many of these have developed an apparatus of specialised terminology and the use of empirical, quantitative methods. For in so far as they tend to view men, both as individuals and groups, as the proper objects of the generalising empirical sciences, as so much passive, inexpressive material moulded by impersonal forces obedient to statistical or causal laws, these sciences tend to leave out, or at least play down, something of central importance: namely that men are defined precisely by their possession of an inner life, of purposes and ideals, and of a vision or conception, however hazy or implicit, of who they are, where they have come from, and what they are at. And indeed, it is just their possession of an inner life in this sense that distinguishes them from animals and natural objects. The history of ideas, because it attempts (among other things) to trace the birth and development of some of the ruling concepts of a civilisation or culture through long periods of mental change, and to reconstruct the image men have of themselves and their activities, in a given age and culture, probably makes a wider variety of demands upon its practitioners than almost any other discipline; or, at least, demands which are special, and often painful. The sharp logical skills of conceptual analysis required in the criticism of ideas, the rich stores of assimilated learning, the vast powers of sympathetic, reconstructive imagination akin to those of the creative artist – the capacity to ‘enter into’ and understand from ‘inside’ forms of life wholly different from his own – and the almost magical power of intuitive divination – these capacities, all ideally possessed by the historian of ideas, rarely come together in one man. This doubtless explains in part why there has never been more than a handful of genuine historians of ideas, and why the history of ideas itself, as a reputable discipline with universally accepted credentials of its own, should still have to battle for recognition.
Yet the great difficulties posed by the cultivation of a field of knowledge, and the consequent rarity of high achievement, are not in themselves alone sufficient to explain its comparative neglect. Are there, perhaps, deeper and less obvious reasons for its ambiguous status? Is it that by burrowing away in the foundations of some of our deepest assumptions it may excavate things long and conveniently forgotten, or taken to be more solid, more fixed and final, than they are? Or reopen painful questions about turnings taken in the course of our collective development, questions some of which may take on a new and disturbing significance today? Before our eyes, the granite bedrock of some of our most familiar and cherished beliefs may dissolve into shifting sand. At all events, many of Berlin’s essays have called into question, implicitly or explicitly, some of the most ancient and most deeply held assumptions of men, at any rate in the western world. And though the analogy is far from perfect, the history of ideas at its best may be able to do for a culture what psychoanalysis claims to be able to do for the individual: to analyse and lay bare the origins and nature not, it is true, of motivation and hidden springs of behaviour, but of the often implicit, deeply embedded, formative ideas, concepts and categories – some of which are more provisional and open to historical change than could have seemed possible before the last half of the eighteenth century – by means of which we order and interpret a major part of our experience, above all in the peculiarly human spheres of moral, aesthetic and political activity; and in so doing enlarge both our self-knowledge and our sense of the scope of our creative liberty.
Berlin’s life has been spent in the study of philosophy and the examination, criticism and exposition of general ideas. If we are to understand the peculiar status the history of ideas holds for him, as well as the unique nature of his own contribution to it, we must know something of the philosophical background out of which his interests grew. Berlin has himself often repeated the sharp-eyed insight that, in the western tradition at least, from Plato to our own day, the overwhelming majority of systematic thinkers of all schools, whether rationalists, idealists, phenomenalists, positivists or empiricists, have, despite their many radical differences, proceeded on one central unargued assumption: that reality, whatever mere appearances may indicate to the contrary, is in essence a rational whole where all things ultimately cohere. They suppose that there exists (at least in principle) a body of discoverable truths touching all conceivable questions, both theoretical and practical; that there is, and can be, only one correct method or set of methods for gaining access to these truths; and that these truths, as well as the methods used in their discovery, are universally valid. Their procedure usually takes the following form: they first identify a privileged class of indubitable entities or incorrigible propositions, claiming an exclusive logical or ontological status for these, and assigning appropriate methods for their discovery; and finally, with a gusto that has deep psychological roots in the instinct for both order and destruction, reject as ‘not real’, confused or, at times, ‘nonsense’ what cannot be translated into the type of entity or proposition which they have chosen as the impregnable model. Descartes with his doctrine of clear and distinct ideas, or Leibniz with his notion of a mathesis universalis, or latter-day positivists with their atomic propositions and protocol sentences, or phenomenalists and sense-data theorists with their sense-qualia, all exemplify this reductionist tendency. Thinkers of this kind are prone, on the basis of their doctrines, to seek to carry out a radical revision of reality, in theory or in practice, relegating much that seems prima facie meaningful or important to their philosophical bonfire; often enough, things of priceless value have been consumed by the flames, and much of what remains has been fearfully mutilated or distorted.
It is against this background that we must view, on the one hand, Berlin’s attitude to one of the most influential philosophical currents of his time, that associated with the neo-positivism of Russell and his disciples, and, on the other, his absorbed preoccupation with humane studies and, above all, with the history of ideas. In a number of essays – ‘Logical Translation’, ‘Verification’, ‘Empirical Propositions and Hypothetical Statements’1 – written when he was still teaching and working in the field of general philosophy, Berlin set out to square accounts with logical positivism by offering a critique of some of the central doctrines upon which it rests. These essays, while they represent a kind of valedictory to a particular way of doing philosophy, contain at the same time the seeds of a covert manifesto. Berlin’s keen sense of the irreducibly wide variety of kinds of experience and types of proposition, and of the impossibility of expressing them in or translating them out into one type of proposition, or of analysing all the contents of the universe in terms of one basic kind of entity or ‘stuff’, is here given free expression in the spheres of logic and epistemology. Things are as they are, and we do well not to analyse away what makes them uniquely themselves.
What makes these essays so particularly fascinating and important is twofold: they are written from within the ranks of the philosophical tendency which he criticises, and, in so far as they reveal certain very deep-rooted attitudes and convictions on his own part, they point towards, and help enlarge our understanding of, both his intense interest in the history of ideas and his conception of philosophy’s role. While these essays constitute a fundamental critique of one of the major schools of modern philosophy, and a radical break with it, they are above all the expression of the deep and unsilenceable misgivings of a sympathetic insider, of someone who has fully grasped – perhaps too fully – the aims and methods of the intellectual movement he criticises, and who, try as he will, cannot accept them. Indeed, it is tempting to see an analogy between Berlin’s reaction to the philosophy of Hume, Russell, Ayer, the early Wittgenstein, Carnap, the Vienna Circle and the main strains of neo-positivism, with their reductionist methods of ironing and flattening out, and the rejection by philosophers like Vico of Descartes and the rationalists of his time, or the attitude of visionaries and thinkers like Hamann and Herder to the doctrines of the French Enlightenment. For these, too, were thinkers who understood perfectly the goals and methods of their opponents, and to whom Berlin has subsequently turned and devoted a deep and sympathetic understanding. Yet he is entirely free of their partisan vehemence, remote from their at times alarmingly obscurantist tendencies, and far from blind to the great cardinal merits of the opposition: he acknowledges the great achievements of logical positivism in clearing the ground of much metaphysical nonsense, and time and again in his writings he pays passing tribute to the great triumphs of the natural sciences, which he sees as the most successful single endeavour of the human intellect in modern times; and just as often he reiterates the conviction that all phenomena that are properly tractable by the quantitative methods of the empirical sciences, without violence to or denial of their innermost natures, should be brought under the umbrella of causal or statistical laws.
The inadequacy of simple reductionist frameworks is most keenly felt in that vast, amorphous, volatile area which comprises spiritual, moral, aesthetic and political experience. Here, more than anywhere else, it is deeply misleading and often injurious to apply simple reductionist concepts; and under one aspect, Berlin’s entire philosophical oeuvre may be seen as a long battle, now overt, now covert, but always subtle, resourceful and determined, against the facile application of inadequate models and concepts in the field of human studies. Men should never be blinded by the distorting spectacles of theory to what they know immediately to be true of themselves. Many of his essays offer a sensitive and subtle investigation of the impingement, for example, of our increasingly exact and sophisticated knowledge of the natural, external world upon the inner, moral and spiritual worlds of human experience. The pieces on Vico’s theory of knowledge, the essays on Hamann and Hume, and Sorel, and the essay on nationalism, may be seen to connect in this regard with some of the major concerns of ‘Historical Inevitability’.2 For again and again Berlin warns against two fatal dangers: that of subscribing to all-embracing systems which, while they may afford novel and genuine insight, are yet one-sided and over-simple, incapable of doing justice to enough of the facts while turning all or most attention to those they have brought to light, and seeing all else in terms of them; and that of transferring methods and procedures from one discipline, where they have been enormously successful, to another where they are not at home, in which their application distorts or even destroys the facts.
There is perhaps no more illuminating flash of self-disclosure in Berlin’s writings than the passage in his essay on his friend John Austin3 where, after depicting the originality and power of Austin’s intellect, his boldness and philosophical fertility, his astonishing capacity for breaking up problems into tiny pieces, he tells us that Austin commanded his affection and respect above all for this passing comment: ‘They all talk about determinism and say they believe in it. I’ve never met a determinist in my life, I mean a man who really did believe in it as you and I believe that men are mortal. Have you?’ Philosophers ruminating in their studies, or natural scientists conducting experiments in their laboratories, might claim to be determinists in theory, but their moral conduct and their practical lives, the words they utter and the judgements they make, belie their surface professions.
For Berlin, philosophy cannot yield a priori knowledge of man’s nature or of the universe; nor by logical translation can it afford us certain and incorrigible empirical knowledge. Thus where Ayer persisted in the path of logical positivism, buttressing, developing and refining his central doctrines, and Austin, like the later Wittgenstein, turned to a close and detailed analysis of the concepts of ordinary language, Berlin was drawn increasingly, in his search for answers to some of the central questions of philosophy, to a concrete historical study of some of the major intellectual developments in western culture since the eighteenth century. This led him to explore and deepen the notion that a large part of the thought and experience of a period is organised by what Collingwood termed ‘constellations of absolute presuppositions’.
What exactly is the role of philosophy for Berlin? He has himself answered this question in a series of important and penetrating essays. ‘The Purpose of Philosophy’, ‘Does Political Theory Still Exist?’, and ‘The Concept of Scientific History’,4 taken together, reveal (among many other things) his conception of the positive and vital place of philosophy in all mental activity, and above all of the history of ideas as a type of philosophical endeavour which may yield a genuine form of knowledge, or self-knowledge, which is entirely sui generis, illuminating and liberating, and discoverable only by the systematic study of the intellectual history of men – of cultures, civilisations, intellectual and political movements, and so forth. Berlin distinguishes a class of questions which are properly philosophical in the sense that there is no universally accredited, ready-made method or set of methods for discovering answers to them; they may differ greatly from one another, some appearing to be questions about matters of fact or value, others about methods of inquiry and the words and symbols which they use; yet what they all have in common is that they do not ‘carry within their own structure clear indications of the techniques of their solution’. They are distinguishable from the two remaining (and to some extent overlapping) classes of questions – the empirical questions of common sense and the natural sciences on the one hand, and the formal ones of mathematics, logic and other deductive disciplines on the other – by being unanswerable by the systematic application of specialised skills or procedures. For Berlin the history of thought is largely the story of the sorting out of issues into one or another of these two classes of questions. But while one constellation of interrelated questions after another has torn itself away from the parent body of philosophy to become an independent, adult, empirical science or formal discipline, the number of irreducible, unanswerable philosophical questions – and here Berlin diverges very sharply from all those philosophers, perhaps the majority, who seek to make these questions vanish by a powerful philosophical solvent – has not diminished, nor do they grow less pressing.
The nature of some of these questions may be made more clear if we remember the crucial distinction, dwelt on by Kant, between the content of experience and the concepts and categories in terms of which we organise and interpret it. For Kant, as Berlin points out, the fundamental categories through which we perceive the external world were universal and immutable, common to all rational, sentient beings. Once they had been discovered and duly analysed, certain fundamental truths about men would be fixed for all time. The vital step taken by Kant was given a revolutionary turn by a succession of thinkers who were more preoccupied with historical and aesthetic questions than with those of epistemology and logic. They grasped, and made a very great deal of, something to which Kant paid little serious systematic attention, namely that, while some of the basic categories and ‘spectacles’ through which we see the world did indeed seem unchanging, others did change, sometimes quite radically, from age to age and culture to culture. The basic empirical content of what a culture saw and heard, thought and felt, might change but little if at all, but some of the models in terms of which it was perceived and organised – the spectacles through which it was viewed – might be transformed. Many of these basic categories and models are as old as humanity itself, while others are more volatile and transient, so that the investigation of their emergence takes on a historical aspect. The study and systematic critical discussion of such models is of the first importance, for it is a question of nothing less than the entire framework of our experience itself; many of these models collide with one another; and some are rendered obsolete by their failure to account for a sufficient number of facets of experience, to be replaced by others which, while they may be more accommodating, often close some of the doors opened by the models they replace. The adequacy of our fundamental presuppositions – how much of our experience they include, how much they leave out, how much they illuminate and how much obscure – should be of central concern to both philosophers and historians of ideas.
The history of ideas, then, is a comparatively late-born and highly sophisticated child of advanced civilisation. At the earliest, it may be thought to have come into being during the last half of the eighteenth century, a close relative of historicism, pluralism and relativism, and of the various historically based comparative disciplines: anthropology, philology, linguistics, etymology, aesthetics, jurisprudence, sociology, ethnology. Its central preoccupation consists in a large-scale extension of the ancient injunction ‘know thyself’ to the collective historical whole, the civilisation or culture, in which the individual self is embedded, and of which it is in no small measure a product. It is above all else concerned to tell us who and what we are, and by what stages and often tortuous paths we have become what we are. It stresses the continuity of ideas and emotions, of thought and practice, of philosophy, politics, art and literature, rather than artificially prising them apart, as usually happens with the more specialised branches of the humane studies. The central objects of its inquiry are the all-pervading, ruling, formative concepts and categories peculiar to a culture or period – or indeed a literary school or a political movement, an artistic genius or a seminal thinker, in so far as these have been the first to raise issues and advance ideas which have passed into the common outlook of subsequent generations. For Berlin does not deal only with great thinkers: the history of ideas is not the story of a succession of great philosophers, where one system of ideas or theories begets another, as if by a process of parthenogenesis; rather, he is interested in the emergence of ideas, in many types of intellectual personality, varied, original, eccentric, often dissident and outside the mainstream of their time, in opposition to the orthodox dogmas and received presuppositions which they help to overturn.
What the history of ideas is able to offer as a branch of philosophy, and as a relatively new source of genuine knowledge and enlightenment, is insight into the origins of, and literally world-transforming shifts in, the basic conceptual patterns in terms of which we understand ourselves and acquire our identity as human beings. These underlying, ubiquitous presuppositions, precisely because they are of a high degree of generality and themselves serve as the means whereby we order a very large part – the human part – of our experience, have usually remained submerged and unexamined: the task of the historian of ideas is to try to get outside them, to make them the objects of reflection and systematic study, thereby bringing them out into the light where they can be openly criticised and evaluated. Many of our values and ideals, properly analysed and examined, their origins and evolution properly traced and described, will be revealed for what they are: not timeless, objective, unshakeable, self-evident truths derived from the eternal and immutable essence of human nature, but the late and fragile blossoms of a long, untidy, often painful and tragic, but ultimately intelligible historical process of cultural change. The criteria applied in such critical discussion must themselves in turn be subjected to scrutiny, and what exactly they are for Berlin is a question to which we will turn later.
In one sense, then, Berlin’s entire oeuvre is a long and sustained rejection of a view of philosophy and truth, and of the methods of inquiry into man’s true capacities and condition, which, in the western tradition at least, has been central for more than two thousand years; a view the shortcomings of which struck him early on in life, and which he has continued to expose with resourcefulness and vigour, under a wide variety of aspects and with a wealth of concrete historical detail, thereby shedding light from many unexpected angles upon some of the most pressing problems of our own time.
Perhaps the profoundest and most far-reaching shift in general ideas since the Reformation, and one still powerfully active in our world today, is the revolt, which first became articulate in the second third of the eighteenth century, at first in Italy and then with gathering force in the German-speaking world, of a succession of antinomian thinkers against the central rationalist and scientific traditions of the west. To this literally world-transforming current of ideas, from which so many modern movements of thought and feeling derive – in particular European romanticism, nationalism, relativism, pluralism, and the many currents of voluntarism of which existentialism is the most recent expression in our own time – Berlin has devoted some of his finest and most illuminating essays. In his article ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ Berlin examines the main ideas of some of these thinkers. In the case of Vico, whose apparent isolation from this group of thinkers in time and place makes his lonely anticipation of most of their central doctrines all the more extraordinary, the archenemies were, on the one hand, Descartes with his doctrine of clear and distinct ideas, his contempt for historical and humane studies generally, and his attempts to assimilate all forms of knowledge to that of one kind, namely mathematics; and, on the other, the natural law theorists with their cardinal assumption of a fixed, universal human nature, identical in all places and times. For Hamann and Herder, and the many later thinkers directly or indirectly influenced by their radical innovations, the insidious enemies were the more fanatical and dogmatic philosophes of the French Enlightenment, whose central doctrines were held to be devitalising distortions of the truth, masking more than they illuminated. Despite their many differences, the thinkers of the French Enlightenment held in common a stock of fundamental presuppositions which went almost wholly unchallenged: that human nature is the same in all times and places; that universal human goals, true ends and effective means, are at least in principle discoverable; that methods similar to those of Newtonian science, which had proved so successful in bringing to light the regularities of inanimate nature, should be discovered and applied in the field of morals, politics, economics, and in the sphere of human relationships in general, thus eradicating vice and suffering and what Helvétius termed ‘interested error’. What all these rationalist thinkers shared was the belief that somewhere, by some means, a single, coherent, unified structure of knowledge concerning questions of both fact and value was in principle available. They sought all-embracing schemas, universal unifying frameworks, within which everything that exists could be shown to be systematically – i.e. logically or causally – interconnected, vast structures in which there should be no gaps left open for spontaneous, unattended developments, where everything that occurs should be, at least in principle, wholly explicable in terms of immutable general laws. It is this proud and shining column, which Berlin identifies as the central mainstay of the rational and scientific edifices of western thought, which some of the thinkers in this volume undermined and caused to totter.
As Berlin is careful to point out, there had indeed been dissent from this central assumption on the part of a sceptical and relativist tradition stretching back to antiquity; and in the modern era thinkers from Bodin to Montesquieu, by emphasising the vast variety of customs, mores, institutions, general outlooks and beliefs, had administered a series of gentle shocks to the supporting pillar. Yet none of these had sufficed to bring the structure crashing down. In this respect, Berlin’s treatment of Montesquieu is particularly valuable. He does not deny that the great French thinker is quite rightly thought of as one of the true fathers of the French Enlightenment. Despite Montesquieu’s use of metaphysical concepts such as natural law and natural purpose, his approach was essentially empirical and naturalistic; he believed, above all, in the direct evidence yielded by observation. His central doctrines were absorbed into the texture of nineteenth-century liberal thought and practice, what had once seemed novel and arresting became commonplace, and successive social and political thinkers looked back on him as a distinguished predecessor with nothing new to say to them. Yet looking back at him with the accumulated experience of the first half of the twentieth century, Berlin feels more disposed to emphasise the sceptical note running through all his writings, that lack of enthusiasm for all sweeping and simplistic projects for large-scale change which upset and irritated a good many of his more optimistic contemporaries with their starker, simpler, more rationalistic vision. For while he himself claimed that he had founded a new science in the spirit of Descartes, he knew in his heart that the very nature of his material was resistant to such methods, and his practice belies his professions. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, he could never bring himself to regard concrete specific detail as mere material for illustrating general rules or laws. He respects, and indeed delights in, the irreducibly unique and particular for its own sake; and is deeply distrustful of the concept of man in general. For Montesquieu each type of society possesses an inner spirit or dynamic principle which informs all its most diverse ramifications. It is the duty of statesmen and lawgivers to understand this inner spirit or organising force, and to rule or legislate in conformity with it. Different societies have different needs and pursue different goals: what is good for one in one situation and at one stage of development is not necessarily equally good for others in different conditions; hence there are and can be no universal, final solutions to human problems, and no ultimate rational standards or criteria for adjudicating between human ends. There was something essentially subversive of Enlightenment dogma in this attitude, and his distrust of rapid, simple, sweeping solutions to complex problems, managed by rationalistic philosophers in the light of universalistic theories, brings Montesquieu closer to Vico and Herder than to Voltaire and the Encyclopédie. And indeed, as Berlin brings out so clearly, there is a contradiction at the heart of his social and political thought: although he is a pluralist rather than a monist and is not obsessed by some single ruling principle, and although he is indeed unique in his time for his inexhaustible awareness of the varieties of forms of life and society, he nevertheless believes that, no matter how much the means and secondary ends of men may vary, their ultimate, fundamental ends are the same: satisfaction of basic material needs, security, justice, peace and so forth. Berlin thus puts his finger on an irreconcilable tension in Montesquieu’s thought between the belief that to each society belong its own peculiar customs, moral outlooks, modes of life on the one hand, and the belief in justice as a universal, eternal standard and the passion for legality on the other. Berlin offers a convincing explanation by suggesting that both attitudes spring from an intense fear of despotism and arbitrariness. At all events, the contradiction remains unresolved, and Montesquieu’s thought represents for Berlin a sharp divergence from the ideals at the core of the Enlightenment, though not a dramatic break with them.
The capacity of pluralist notions to upset is further explored in the learned and ingenious essay on Machiavelli. Here Berlin advances the thesis that for some four hundred years Machiavelli has caused sharp disagreement between scholars and civilised men, and deeply troubled Christian and liberal consciences, not because of his alleged immorality and Satanism, but because, by advancing an alternative system of morality to that prevalent in his own day and since, he was perhaps the very first thinker to cast doubts, at any rate by implication, upon the very validity of all monist constructions as such. In Berlin’s interpretation of him, Machiavelli is not, as most commentators have asserted, a mere political technician, interested only in operational means and indifferent to ultimate ends; nor is he a detached, objective political scientist, simply observing and offering a neutral description of the ways of men. Far from divorcing ethics from politics, as Croce and others have maintained, Machiavelli looks beyond the officially Christian ethics of his time (and, by implication, beyond other related moral outlooks, Stoic or Kantian or even utilitarian), which are essentially concerned with the individual, to a more ancient tradition, that of the Greek polispolispatriaof