Six Enemies of Human Liberty
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First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus in 2002
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ISBN 9780712668422
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Isaiah Berlin
Dedication
Title Page
Note to the Second Impression
Editor’s Preface
Introduction
Helvétius
Rousseau
Fichte
Hegel
Saint-Simon
Maistre
Notes
Index
Copyright
To the memory of Anna Kallin
1896–1984
Isaiah Berlin 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 Revolutions – Social Democratic and Bolshevik.
In 1921 his family came to England, and he was educated at St Paul’s School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At Oxford he was 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. In addition to Freedom and its Betrayal and the simultaneously published Liberty, his published work includes Karl Marx, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas and Three Critics of the Enlightenment. As an exponent of the history of ideas Berlin 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.
Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah Berlin’s Literary Trustees. He has edited several other books by Berlin, and is currently preparing a selection of his letters for publication.
For further information about Isaiah Berlin visit http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/
Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated radio lectures on six important anti-liberal thinkers were delivered on the BBC’s Third Programme in 1952. They are published here for the first time, fifty years on. Freedom and its Betrayal is one of Isaiah Berlin’s earliest and most convincing expositions of his views on human freedom and the history of ideas, views which later found expression in such famous works as ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, and were at the heart of his lifelong work on the Enlightenment and its critics.
In his lucid examinations of sometimes difficult ideas Berlin demonstrates that a balanced understanding and a resilient defence of human liberty depend on learning both from the errors of freedom’s alleged defenders and from the dark insights of its avowed antagonists. This book throws light on the early development of Berlin’s ideas, and supplements his already published writings with fuller treatments of Helvétius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel and Saint-Simon, with the ultra-conservative traditionalist Maistre bringing up the rear.
Freedom and its Betrayal shows Berlin at his liveliest and most torrentially spontaneous, testifying to his talents as a teacher of rare brilliance and impact. Listeners tuned in expectantly each week to the broadcasts and found themselves mesmerised by Berlin’s astonishingly fluent extempore style. A leading historian of ideas, who was then a schoolboy, records that the lectures ‘excited me so much that I sat, for every talk, on the floor beside the wireless, taking notes’. This excitement is at last recreated here for all to share.
Also by Isaiah Berlin
KARL MARX
THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
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 SENSE OF REALITY
THE ROOTS OF ROMANTICISM
THREE CRITICS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
THE POWER OF IDEAS
LIBERTY
Edited by Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer
THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND
I take the opportunity provided by a second impression to correct one or two misunderstandings occasioned by my Preface. The lectures, though unscripted, were not broadcast live, but recorded and edited before transmission. The typescript entitled ‘Political Ideas in the Romantic Age’ (see here) played virtually no part in the construction of the text of the present volume. And there is in existence, to my knowledge, neither a surviving recording nor a transcript of the author’s Flexner Lectures.
A few errors have also been corrected. I should like to thank Lady Berlin, George Crowder, Roger Hausheer and Noel Malcolm for drawing four of them to my attention.
H.H.
FIFTY YEARS AGO, when the six hour-long lectures published in this volume were broadcast on BBC Radio, they created a broadcasting sensation. Never before had a speaker on this scale been allowed to dispense with a prepared script, and the forty-three-year-old Isaiah Berlin was the right person to inaugurate this risky practice. His headlong delivery, his idiosyncratic voice (even though this made it hard for some to understand him), his extraordinary articulacy, his evident absorption in his topic, the unfamiliar but immediately exciting subject-matter – all this combined to create an impact that those who listened at the time still remember today. People tuned in expectantly each week and found themselves mesmerised. John Burrow, then a schoolboy, records that the lectures ‘excited me so much that I sat, for every talk, on the floor beside the wireless, taking notes’.fn1 When the series was over, it was the subject of a Times first leader, which provoked a correspondence on the letters page to which Berlin contributed.fn2
The lectures consolidated Berlin’s growing reputation as a man who could speak about intellectual matters in an accessible and absorbing way, and in his view they also laid the foundation for his appointment five years later to the Chichele Professorship of Social and Political Theory at Oxford.fn3 There was a less flattering side to this celebrity too, one which was always a worry to Berlin: he was afraid he was regarded partly as a showman, a variety turn,fn4 and indeed Michael Oakeshott introduced him (so the story goes) at the London School of Economics the following year, when he gave the first Auguste Comte Memorial Trust Lecturefn5 there, as ‘the Paganini of the lecture platform’. There was some foundation to this fear, for he became a byword for rapid highbrow speech – ‘the only man who pronounces “epistemological” as one syllable’. But this aspect of his public image did no permanent damage to the kind of recognition that counted, recognition of his wide-ranging intellectual resources and his ability to deploy them with unique style, clarity and persuasiveness.
A somewhat crackly recording of just one of the lectures – that on Rousseau – survives, and may be listened to at the British Library in London.fn6 This is the closest we can come to recreating today the effect the lectures had in 1952. But there are transcripts (if sometimes very imperfect) of all six lectures, and now that these have been edited it is possible once again to witness Berlin’s exceptional expository fluency, and to feel the impact of this early account of his views on liberty, views made famous in 1958 in his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor, Two Concepts of Liberty. But Freedom and its Betrayal is by no means simply a crude forerunner of a more refined later development. The conception of freedom that infuses these early lectures is in its essentials already fully formed, and this much less dense treatment, especially since it is presented in terms of specific thinkers rather than as an abstract treatise, and includes a great deal that does not appear in the inaugural lecture, is a significant supplement to the work he published in his lifetime.
In my more flippant moments I have thought of subtitling this book ‘Not the Reith Lectures’. Anna Kallin, Berlin’s producer for the BBC Third Programme, had already been responsible for a number of talks of his. She knew he was preparing to give the Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania (as he did in February and March 1952), and she asked him to deliver a version of these on the radio. She was well aware that he would be hard to persuade – for he customarily resisted offers of the limelight – and she was ready to be disappointed. To her delight, however, he was willing. When she heard recordings (now lost) of the Flexner Lectures she had no hesitation in offering him, in addition, the prestigious role of Reith Lecturer, to which he was ideally suited.
But when Kallin’s superiors heard of her coup, they caused her great embarrassment by ruling that Berlin was not a suitable Reith Lecturer. I have found no record of their reasons for this view. It may simply have been that Berlin was not sufficiently established at that time, and that the criteria for choosing Reith Lecturers were more conservative then than they are today. There is no evidence, at any rate, that anti-Semitism was at work. Whatever their reasons, the top brass were immovable, and Kallin had to break the news to Berlin. To her relief, he was not offended.fn7
A word should be said about Berlin’s attitude to the publication of these transcripts. Broadly speaking, it was similar to his view of the publishability of his Mellon Lectures, delivered thirteen years later in Washington, DC, and published in 1999 as The Roots of Romanticism. He knew that the transcripts ought to be heavily revised and no doubt expanded if they were to be brought to a state in which he could contemplate their appearance in book form in his lifetime. As he wrote to Kallin on 11 December 1951, ‘You will easily perceive how it is one thing to say a lot of things in a general fashion to an audience and a very different one to commit words to cold print.’ He certainly intended to publish a book based on the Bryn Mawr Lectures, and to do so within a year or two of their delivery, but, as in other cases, he never managed to complete the necessary work, and the long draft typescript on which both sets of lectures were based was laid aside and forgotten, despite the fact that he had revised it extensively. In 1993 I produced a fair copy of it for him, incorporating all his manuscript alterations and an introduction that he had written subsequently, but I do not believe he ever looked at it. Entitled ‘Political Ideas in the Romantic Age’ (the title under which the Flexner Lectures were delivered), it runs to over 110,000 words, and will, I trust, be published in due course.
I also gave him an earlier draft of the edited transcript of the BBC talks that appears in this book, but this too he could not bring himself to inspect. I thought it almost certain that he would never turn to it, and once mentioned this belief to him, coupling it with an expression of regret. Perhaps out of kindness he said that I could not be certain that nothing would happen: ‘Who knows? In twelve years or so I might suddenly pick it up and feverishly revise it’ (or words to that effect). But he was already well into his eighties, and this was not a task for a nonagenarian.
Despite his reservations, he did not think altogether badly of the lectures. He thought some were better than others, but he allowed, all the same, that ‘tidied up’ they ‘might make a booklet’.fn8 I thought they would do so even as they stood, and backed up my judgement by consulting experts who knew more than I do about the subject-matter. They too found some lectures stronger than others, and some of the interpretations by now somewhat out of fashion; but there was general agreement on almost all hands that publication was highly desirable. I hope it goes without saying that the result is not to be taken as carrying Berlin’s own full imprimatur, but I do believe that it fairly represents his views on these enemies of freedom, that it will help his readers to a fuller understanding of these views, and that it is no disservice to his reputation to add these remarkable lectures to his published oeuvre, so long as their provisional, extempore, informal nature is made crystal clear, and no greater claims are made for this volume than its origins justify.
The BBC lectures are not simply an abbreviation of the typescript prepared for the Flexner Lectures. Nor are they simply a re-run of the Flexner Lectures themselves, as the weekly summaries in Bryn Mawr’s College Newsfn9 make clear – though it is hard to itemise the differences in the absence of full transcripts or recordings of the earlier version. Berlin himself sometimes said that the two sets of lectures were more or less the same – for example, in a letter of 22 January 1953 to President Katharine E. McBride of Bryn Mawr College:
I have thought of Bryn Mawr often when I delivered lectures substantially identical with those given under the auspices of Mary Flexner, over the radio in London, when instead of being faced with 100 faces, I looked at a neat functional table and cork-lined walls – and I fear preferred that on the whole: so terrified am I. These lectures have brought in the most astonishing volume of correspondence from the most extraordinary persons who appear to listen to such things and seem to be filled with inarticulate feelings and thought on the subject of history and politics which have come bursting out in the most surprising fashion, and to all of which I suppose I now have the duty of sending some kind of answer.
However, it is clear from the BBC and Bryn Mawr files that the lectures underwent considerable reorganisation before and after Berlin spoke in America, and it would in any case have been very uncharacteristic of him to deliver the same lectures twice, since he was an obsessive reviserfn10 and, besides, almost always created his lectures afresh on the podium, even if he drew on the same body of material on more than one occasion.
Berlin’s description of his terror when facing an audience is a cue for the introduction of Lelia Brodersen (later chief psychologist at Bryn Mawr’s child guidance clinic), who worked briefly as Berlin’s secretary when he was at the College. She was doing graduate work there at the time, was therefore short of money, and was picking up earnings wherever she could find them. In a letter to a friend she gives the most vivid account of Berlin’s lecturing style that I have seen:
Monday evening I went to his lecture on Fichte & was appalled. He bowed hastily, established himself behind the lectern, fixed his eyes on a point slightly to his right & over the heads of the audience, & began as if a plug had been pulled out. For precisely an hour, with scarcely a second’s pause & with really frightful speed, he poured forth what was evidently a brilliant lecture from the little I could catch of it. He never shifted the direction of his gaze once. Without a pause he swayed back & forth, so far that each time one was sure that he was going to topple over, either forward or backward. His right hand he held palm up in the palm of his left hand, & for the whole hour shook both hands violently up & down as if he were trying to dislodge something from them. It was scarcely to be believed. And all the time this furious stream of words, in beautifully finished sentences but without pauses except for certain weird signals of transition such as “… & so it is evident that Kant’s idea of freedom was in some ways very dissimilar to the idea of freedom which Fichte held, WELL!” I was exhausted at the end, & yet I am sure that if ever I saw & heard anyone in a true state of inspiration it was then. It is really a tragedy that communication is almost impossible.fn11
To return to the history of the present text: the four chapters of the long typescript are entitled ‘Politics as a Descriptive Science’, ‘The Idea of Freedom’, ‘Two Concepts of Freedom: Romantic and Liberal’ and ‘The March of History’. If further chapters were written as a basis for the last two lectures, they do not survive. Perhaps shortage of time prevented Berlin from drafting these, though in the case of Maistre he could make use of a typescript prepared some years before.fn12 At any rate, what began as a treatment of six topics, though each topic was predominantly illustrated at Bryn Mawr (in most cases) by the ideas of two individuals, ended up focused on the six figures named in the present chapter titles. Before the final overall title was chosen the lectures are referred to in the BBC file as ‘Six Enemies of Human Liberty’, and I have adopted this as a useful subtitle. I have also separated out the first section of the first lecture as a general introduction to the whole series, since this is what it provides.
In many ways the editing of these lectures has been similar to that of Berlin’s Mellon Lectures, though in this case there were more different versions of the transcripts, more authorial annotations of these, and more caches of relevant notes to rifle. I shall not repeat here what I said about the editorial process in my preface to The Roots of Romanticism. The main difference here has been the absence of recordings of all but one of the lectures.fn13 This has meant a greater role, here and there, for conjectural restoration of Berlin’s words. The bulk of the book rests on uncorrected transcripts made by members of the BBC staff who, naturally enough, were not familiar with Berlin’s voice or subject-matter, and found the work hard going; at times they were defeated, and the transcript descends into near-gibberish. (To give just one example for fun, Saint-Simon appears as ‘Sir Seymour’.)fn14 Almost always, though, it is clear what Berlin was saying, even if the actual words are occasionally in doubt.
As usual, I have been helped by experts in my search for sources for Berlin’s quotations, as I record in the preamble to the Notes here. But my greatest debt, and the reader’s – apart, naturally, from that to the author – is to the late Anna Kallin,fn15 whose role in Berlin’s intellectual career should not be underestimated. She determinedly pressed him, again and again, to speak on the radio. She cajoled and supported him through the lengthy process of recording, and where necessary re-recording, the lectures – a process which, characteristically, he found stressful (partly because it fed his lifelong self-doubt). She was a brilliant editor: ‘you perform miracles of cutting, condensing, crystallising’, writes Berlin in the letter to her from which I have already quoted, where he also refers to her ‘magical hands’. Their correspondence makes clear how important the personal chemistry was between these two Russian-Jewish exiles. Berlin, then and later, needed an intellectual impresario to enable him to realise his full potential. Anna Kallin filled that role with providential effectiveness, and that is why I have dedicated this book to her memory.
Wolfson College, Oxford |
HENRY HARDY |
May 2001 |
|
fn1 John Burrow, ‘A Common Culture? Nationalist Ideas in Nineteenth-Century European Thought’, unpublished inaugural lecture as Professor of European Thought, Oxford, 7 April 1996, p. 3. See also Lelia Brodersen’s description (here) of the earlier version of the lectures delivered in the USA.
fn2 ‘The Fate of Liberty’, The Times, 6 December 1952, p. 7; letters, 9, 10, 12, 16 (Berlin), 18 December.
fn3 In a piece on his appointment the Sunday Times referred to ‘his famous broadcasts, rapid, vivid, torrential cascades of rich, spontaneous, tumbling ideas and images’ (31 March 1957, p. 3).
fn4 The Radio Times stressed this aspect of Berlin’s appeal too strongly, in his view, observing among other things that he ‘is renowned for his fluent and witty expositions of abstract ideas’ and ‘has a reputation as a conversationalist which extends far beyond Oxford’ (24 October 1952, p. 3). Berlin wrote to his producer Anna Kallin on 26 October saying that this treatment was unacceptable, and that therefore he could not continue to work for the BBC. Evidently he later recanted, but he had been cut to the quick, writing with rare sternness: ‘although I may be a mere jolly & garrulous vulgarisiteur [sic] this is not the capacity in which I thought I was being employed’.
fn5 Published in 1954 as Historical Inevitability.
fn6 By prior appointment. The call number of the recording is T10145W.
fn7 I cannot at present find documentary confirmation of this story, though this may exist: but I remember being struck by it when I came across it, it rings true, and it is unlikely that I invented it. Useful supplementary accounts of the genesis of the lectures and of Anna Kallin’s role can be found in Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London and New York, 1998), pp. 204–5, and Humphrey Carpenter, The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3, 1946–1996 (London, 1996), p. 127.
fn8 Letter to Henry Hardy of 28 March 1989.
fn9 13 February to 19 March 1952.
fn10 ‘I am by nature a correcter and re-correcter of everything I do’: Berlin to Mrs Samuel H. Paul, Assistant to President McBride, 20 June 1951.
fn11 Letter to Sheema Z. Buehne postmarked 2 March 1952. Another letter contains a highly recommended account of the experience of acting as Berlin’s secretary. I am most grateful to Lelia Brodersen for sending me these letters, which are both posted at http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/ under ‘Letters on Berlin’.
fn12 A revised version of this typescript, giving a fuller and in some respects modified account of Berlin’s views on Maistre, appeared as ‘Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism’ in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London, 1990; New York, 1991). The BBC lecture based on it has also appeared, in advance of its inclusion in the present volume (and in a slightly adjusted form), as the Introduction to Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France, ed. Richard A. Lebrun (Cambridge, 1994: Cambridge University Press).
fn13 If any reader knows of the existence of recordings of any of the other lectures – at Bryn Mawr or on the Third Programme – I should be grateful to be given the opportunity to correct the text in the light of these.
fn14 See also here.
fn15 A photograph of Anna Kallin may be viewed at the website http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/, under ‘Broadcasts’.
THE SIX THINKERS whose ideas I propose to examine were prominent just before and just after the French Revolution. The questions they discussed were among the perennial questions of political philosophy, and, to the extent to which political philosophy is a branch of morals, moral philosophy also. Moral and political philosophy are vast subjects, and I do not here wish to analyse what they are. Suffice it to say that for our purposes we can, with a certain amount of exaggeration and simplification, reduce the questions to one and one only, namely: ‘Why should an individual obey other individuals? Why should any one individual obey either other individuals or groups or bodies of individuals?’ There are, of course, a great many other questions, such as ‘Under what circumstances do people obey?’ and ‘When do they cease to obey?’, and also questions apart from obedience, questions about what is meant by the State, by society, by the individual, by laws, and so forth. But for the purposes of political philosophy, as opposed to descriptive political theory or sociology, the central question seems to me to be precisely this one: ‘Why should anyone obey anyone else?’
The six thinkers with whom I am concerned – Helvétius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Saint-Simon and Maistre – dealt with these questions at times not very distant from each other. Helvétius died in 1771 and Hegel in 1831; the period concerned is therefore not very much more than half a century. The six also have certain qualities in common in virtue of which it is interesting to consider them. To begin with, they were all born in what might be called the dawn of our own period. I do not know how to describe this period – it is often referred to as that of liberal democracy, or of the ascendancy of the middle class. At any rate, they were born at the beginning of a period of which we are perhaps living at the end. But whether or not this period is passing, as some people think, it is clear that these are the earliest thinkers to speak a language which is still directly familiar to us. No doubt there were great political thinkers before them, and perhaps more original ones also. Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and St Augustine, Dante and Machiavelli, Grotius and Hooker, Hobbes and Locke enunciated ideas which in certain respects were more profound, more original, bolder and more influential than those of the thinkers I shall discuss. But these other thinkers are divided from us by history, we cannot read them altogether easily or with familiarity, they need a kind of translation. No doubt we can see how our ideas derive from the ideas of these earlier thinkers, but they are not identical with them, whereas I should like to maintain that the six thinkers in question speak a language which still speaks directly to us. When Helvétius denounces ignorance or cruelty or injustice or obscurantism; when Rousseau delivers his passionate diatribes against the arts and the sciences and the intelligentsia, and speaks (or thinks he speaks) for the simple human soul; when Fichte and Hegel glorify the great organised whole, the national organisation to which they belong, and speak of dedication and mission and national duty and the joys of identifying oneself with other people in the performance of a common task; when Saint-Simon speaks of the great frictionless society of producers of the future, in which workers and capitalists will be united in a single, rational system, and all our economic ills, and with them all our other sufferings as well, will at last and for ever be over; when, finally, Maistre gives his horrifying picture of life as a perpetual struggle between plants and animals and human beings, a blood-soaked field in which men – puny, weak and vicious – are engaged in perpetual extermination of each other unless held back by the most vigorous and violent discipline, and only at times rise beyond themselves to some huge agony of self-immolation or self-sacrifice – when these ideas are enunciated, they speak to us and to our age. This is another thing which is interesting about these thinkers. Although they lived towards the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth, the kind of situation to which they seem relevant, which they seem to have perceived, to have described with an uncanny insight, is often characteristic not so much of the nineteenth century as of the twentieth. It is our period and our time which they seem to analyse with astonishing foresight and skill. That, too, makes them worthy of our consideration.
When I say that they have these curious powers of prediction, I should like to say that they are prophets in another sense also. Bertrand Russell once said that the important consideration to keep in mind when reading the theories of the great philosophers (other than mathematicians or logicians, who deal with symbols and not with empirical facts or human characteristics)1 is that they all had a certain central vision of life, of what it was and what it should be; and all the ingenuity and the subtlety and the immense cleverness and sometimes profundity with which they expound their systems, and with which they argue for them, all the great intellectual apparatus which is to be found in the works of the major philosophers of mankind, is as often as not but the outworks of the inner citadel – weapons against assault, objections to objections, rebuttals of rebuttals, an attempt to forestall and refute actual and possible criticisms of their views and their theories; and we shall never understand what it is they really want to say unless we penetrate beyond this barrage of defensive weapons to the central coherent single vision within, which as often as not is not elaborate and complex, but simple, harmonious and easily perceptible as a single whole.
All our six thinkers had some such vision. What they did was bind it upon their disciples, their readers, and indeed even upon some of their opponents. For one of the ways in which a philosopher or a thinker can be great is by doing precisely that. One might almost say that thinkers may be divided into two kinds. In the first place there are those who answered questions which had previously been put, and which had tormented men before, and answered them with a degree of perception, of insight, of genius, in such a way that these particular questions never needed to be asked again, at least in the fashion in which they had been asked before. Newton, for example, was a thinker of this type. He answered questions which had puzzled many men before; he answered them with simplicity, with lucidity, and provided an answer of immense power and coherence. This could also be said of Berkeley and of Hume, and of thinkers who are not strictly professional philosophers, for example of Tocqueville, or of a novelist like Tolstoy. These are all people who answered the ancient, tormenting questions which had puzzled mankind for many centuries, and answered them in such a way that for some people at any rate this seemed to be the final solution.
But there are thinkers who are great in another way, namely, not by answering questions which had been put before, but by altering the nature of the questions themselves, by transforming the angle of vision from which the questions seemed to be questions; not so much by solving the problems as by so powerfully affecting the people to whom they talked as to cause them to see things ‘in a very different light’, in which what had been a puzzle and a question before no longer arose, or at any rate did not arise with quite such urgency. And if the questions are modified, the solutions no longer seem to be required. People who do this tamper with the very categories, with the very framework, through which we see things. This kind of tampering can of course be very dangerous, and can cast both light and darkness upon humanity. I have in mind thinkers like Plato and Pascal, Kant and Dostoevsky, who in some special sense are regarded as ‘more profound’, ‘deeper’ thinkers than other men of genius, because they penetrate to a level where they affect people in a way which transforms their entire vision of life, so that they come out, as it were, almost converted, as if they had undergone a religious conversion.
I do not wish to claim for the six thinkers that they were all, or all equally, men of genius, of dangerous genius, in this remarkable sense. What distinguishes them is that those who followed their views, those who were affected by them, were not affected by this argument or that argument, did not see such thinkers simply as the end of a long period of elaboration consisting of other thinkers of whom they were merely the leaders, or to whom they were merely superior in some way. Rather they were affected by them as one is affected by someone who suddenly transforms one’s view of things by placing them in a different relationship from that in which they were before. In this respect, too, all six are thoroughly deserving of our close consideration.
There is another quality, and a more curious one, which is common to them. Although they all discussed the problem of human liberty, and all, except perhaps Maistre, claimed that they were in favour of it – indeed some of them passionately pleaded for it and regarded themselves as the truest champions of what they called true liberty, as opposed to various specious or imperfect brands of it – yet it is a peculiar fact that in the end their doctrines are inimical to what is normally meant, at any rate, by individual liberty, or political liberty. This is the liberty which was preached by the great English and French liberal thinkers, for example; liberty in the sense in which it was conceived by Locke and by Tom Paine, by Wilhelm von Humboldt and by the liberal thinkers of the French Revolution, Condorcet and his friends, and, after the Revolution, Constant and Madame de Staël; liberty in the sense in which the substance of it was what John Stuart Mill said that it was, namely the right freely to shape one’s life as one wishes, the production of circumstances in which men can develop their natures as variously and richly, and, if need be, as eccentrically, as possible. The only barrier to this is formed by the need to protect other men in respect of the same rights, or else to protect the common security of them all, so that I am in this sense free if no institution or person interferes with me except for its or his own self-protection.
In this sense all the six thinkers were hostile to liberty, their doctrines were in certain obvious respects a direct contradiction of it, and their influence upon mankind not only in the nineteenth century, but particularly in the twentieth, was powerful in this anti-libertarian direction. There is hardly any need to add that in the twentieth century this became the most acute of all problems. Since the way in which these men formulated the problem, being among the earliest to do so, is particularly fresh, particularly vivid and particularly simple, the problem is often best examined in this pristine form, before it gets covered over with too many nuances, with too much discussion, with too many local and temporal variations.
Let us now return to the central question which all political philosophers sooner or later must ask: ‘Why should anyone obey anyone else?’ By the time Helvétius began writing, this question had been answered altogether too variously. He was living at a time when, in other provinces of human interest, in the sciences for example, enormous strides had been made, particularly in the late sixteenth century and the seventeenth century, by men like Galileo and Descartes and Kepler, and that group of distinguished Dutchmen whose names I shall not cite, and who contributed so much to the subject, although their unique merits are still relatively unrecognised.
But all these men were overtopped by Newton, whose eminence was unique in the annals of mankind. Among all the men of his age the radiation of his name and achievement really was the greatest. He was praised by the poets, he was praised by the prose writers. He was regarded almost as a semi-divine being. He was so regarded because people thought that at last the whole of physical nature had been adequately and completely explained. This was because Newton had triumphantly managed to express in very few, very simple and very easily communicable formulae laws from which every movement and every position of every particle of matter in the universe could in principle be deduced. Everything which had previously been explained by other means, sometimes theologically, sometimes in terms of obscure metaphysics, at last seemed bathed in the light of the new science. Everything was interconnected, everything was harmonious, everything could be deduced from everything else. The laws in terms of which this could be done were, again, very few and easily acquired by anyone who chose to take the trouble to learn them. One needed for this no special faculty, no theological insight, no metaphysical gifts, merely the power of clear reasoning and of impartial observation, and of verifying observations by means of specially arranged experiment wherever this was possible.
In the sphere of politics, in the sphere of morals, no such coordinating principle, no such authority, could apparently be found. If it was asked why I should obey the ruler or rulers of the State, why anyone should ever obey anyone else, the answers were altogether too many and too various. Because, as some said, this was the word of God, vouchsafed in a sacred text of supernatural origin; or perhaps by direct revelation to men whose authority in these matters is recognised through the medium of a Church; or perhaps given by direct revelation to the individual himself. Or because God had himself ordained the great pyramid of the world – that is what someone like Filmer said in the seventeenth century, for example, or the great French bishop Bossuet. The king must be obeyed because this is the order of the world, commanded by God, and perceived by both reason and faith, and the commands of God are absolute, and to ask for the source of their authority is itself impious. Because, said others, the command to obey the ruler is issued by the ruler, or by his agents. The law is what the ruler wills, and because he wills it, whatever his motive, it may not be examined at all. That is the theory of absolute monarchy. Because, still other people said, the world has been created (or perhaps, as some said, exists uncreated) in order to fulfil a particular plan or purpose. This view is called natural teleology, according to which the universe is a kind of gradual unrolling of a divine scroll, or perhaps a self-unrolling of a scroll in which God is regarded as immanent. That is to say, the whole of the world is a kind of self-development, the gradual development of an incarnate architect’s plan. In terms of this great plan everything in the universe has a unique place, that is, has a place which derives from its function, from the fact that it is needed by the plan to perform this particular task, live this particular life, if it is to fit into the general harmony. That is why everything in the universe is as it is and where and when it is, and acts and behaves as it does. I myself, since I am what I am, where I am and when I am, and in the particular circumstances in which I happen to be placed, must fulfil my function in such a place only by acting and being thus and thus, and not otherwise; by obeying this rather than that authority, because that is part of the plan, part of the scheme of things. If I do not do this, and of course in a minor way I may be able to obstruct the plan, then I shall be disturbing the harmony of the design, and frustrate others, and ultimately frustrate myself, and so be unhappy. In the end the plan is more powerful than I, and if I disobey it too far I shall be crushed by the gradual working out of the plan, which will sweep me away. Some people modified this view and said it may not be absolutely indispensable that you fulfil your part of the plan, not quite inexorable, for the plan is not quite so tight and inevitable as all that, but perhaps it is the most convenient or economical or rational method of securing that necessary minimum which a man needs for the purpose of being happy, or being well, or anyhow in order that life should prove not too intolerable to him. There was still a plan, though you could live to some degree outside it, but not so well, not so comfortably, not so satisfyingly as by adjusting yourself to it.
conditioned