Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Isaiah Berlin
Dedication
Title Page
Foreword by Noel Annan
Editorial preface by Henry Hardy
Introduction by Roger Hausheer
The Pursuit of the Ideal
Philosophical Foundations
The Concept of Scientific History
Does Political Theory Still Exist?
Freedom and Determinism
‘From Hope and Fear Set Free’
Historical Inevitability
Political Liberty and Pluralism
Two Concepts of Liberty
History of Ideas
The Counter-Enlightenment
The Originality of Machiavelli
The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities
Herder and the Enlightenment
Russian Writers
The Hedgehog and the Fox
Herzen and his Memoirs
Conversations with Akhmatova and Pasternak
Romanticism and Nationalism in the Modern Age
The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will
Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power
Twentieth-Century Figures
Winston Churchill in 1940
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Concise bibliography of Isaiah Berlin’s writings
Index
Copyright
Isaiah Berlin was one of the leading thinkers of the century, and one of the finest writers. The Proper Study of Mankind provides a selection of the best of his essays. The full (and enormous) range of his work is represented here, from the exposition of his most distinctive doctrine – pluralism – to studies of Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Churchill and Roosevelt. In these pages he encapsulates the principal movements that characterise the modern age: romanticism, historicism, Fascism, relativism, irrationalism and nationalism. His ideas are always tied to the people who conceived them, so that abstractions are brought alive. His insights illuminate the past and offer a key to the burning issues of today.
Sir Isaiah Berlin, O. M., was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1909. He came to England in 1919 and was educated at St Paul’s School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At Oxford, he was a Fellow of New College (1938–50), Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory (1957–67), first President of Wolfson College (1966–75), a Fellow of All Souls College, and President of the British Academy from 1974–1978. His achievements as an historian and exponent of ideas earned him the Erasmus, Lippincott, and Agnelli Prizes, and his lifelong defence of civil liberties earned him the Jerusalem Prize. He died in 1997.
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
AGAINST THE CURRENT
PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS
THE CROOKED TIMBER OF HUMANITY
THE MAGUS OF THE NORTH
THE SENSE OF REALITY
Isaiah Berlin began his academic career as a philosopher at Oxford and became famous as a historian of ideas. Oxford philosophy is important to him. It rooted him in the English linguistic analytical tradition that descends from Hume, Mill and Russell. That is why when he wrote his account of the two concepts of liberty he was so wary of what is often called ‘positive freedom’. When he wrote (in 1958) it was fashionable to expose the fallacies in Mill’s On Liberty and praise the conception of freedom that T. H. Green, influenced by Hegel and other Continental philosophers, had popularised. Green had argued that when the State interfered and passed laws forbidding pollution or controlling factory machinery, in order to safeguard workers’ lives, the State was not curtailing freedom. Yes, a few men might consider that their freedom had been curtailed, but vastly more people would now be free to do things that hitherto they had been unable to do. The sum of freedom would be increased. ‘Freedom for an Oxford don’, it was said, ‘is a very different thing from freedom for an Egyptian peasant.’1 To accept positive freedom became the hallmark of the intelligent social democrat.
Berlin denounced this proposition as claptrap. If positive freedom is a valid ideal, then what defence is there against the Marxist claim that the State has the right to inflict terrible punishments upon those who oppose its power to compel individuals to act against what they want to do, on the grounds that they should be contributing to the welfare of the mass of the population? For Berlin the classic English interpretation of liberty is correct. It means not being coerced, not being imprisoned or terrorised. Yes, the Egyptian peasant needs food and medicine, ‘but the minimum freedom that he needs today, and the greater degree of freedom that he may need tomorrow, is not some species of freedom peculiar to him, but identical with that of professors, artists and millionaires’.2 It may well be necessary to sacrifice freedom to prevent misery. But it is a sacrifice; and to declare that I am really more free is a perversion of words. It may be that society is more just or prosperous and all sorts of poor people are now able to enjoy holidays abroad or have a decent home. They were free before to enjoy these things but they did not have the money. It is a perversion of language to say that now for the first time they are free.
Perversion of language is not a philosopher’s fad. It matters. It matters if we say we are more free when new laws are passed to compel us to wear seat-belts in cars. We may be safer and the law may be admirable, but we are less free. Suppose we follow Rousseau and argue that no one in his right mind would wish to be a slave of ignoble passions. Suppose I am an alcoholic, a slave to the bottle. Would I not welcome being freed from that slavery? Surely my enlightened self would wish to renounce that part of my liberty that enslaves me to the bottle. Few of us are saints. Saints declare, ‘In thy service is perfect freedom’, renounce worldly vices, and live according to a spiritual rule. But what are we to do with the majority of mankind who are unable to master their sinful passions? Here, says Berlin, the real horror of a purely rational view of life unfolds. For if it can be shown that there is only one correct view of life, people who fail to follow it must be forced to do so. Positive freedom is the road to serfdom.
But there is yet another way of denying that human beings are free agents. Are they not the playthings of fate, caught inescapably by the impersonal forces of history? Historical processes are inevitable and, although statesmen pretend that they have the power to control events, human beings are powerless to do so. Climate, demography, the vagaries of the economy, class structures and political forces overwhelm them. It is the mission of the historian, so this line of reasoning continues, to unmask these impersonal forces. History is not an art, it is a science, ‘no more, no less’ as the Cambridge historian J. B. Bury said. One of Berlin’s longest and most dense articles is deployed against this contention, and in his joust against E. H. Carr, the apologist for Stalin’s regime, he was judged to have unhorsed his opponent. To believe in determinism would entail a shattering loss in the concepts with which we discuss morality – praise, blame, regret, forgiveness for instance.
Rooted though Berlin was in the English tradition of philosophy he rejected much that was fashionable among his contemporaries. He thought logical positivism no less disastrous than determinism. The natural sciences were not the paradigm of knowledge. Too much of what we know and value in life is excluded by this way of categorising thought. For what is remarkable about the body of his work is that it recognises how valuable, how challenging, how original were the contributions of the German philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These were the men who were revolting against the soulless, mechanical ideas of the French Enlightenment. Berlin begged his contemporaries to stop regarding them and their analogues in Russia or Italy – Vico, Herder, Hamann, Herzen and Moses Hess – as benighted romantics.
He has praised them for recognising the passion men and women feel for their homeland, their own specific culture, for their nation or for their community – say, a mining village. These were what gave them their sense of identity. Marx ignored this. Berlin knows how Jews in Eastern Europe felt alienated from the society in which they lived; and from this understanding he perceives how Germans in the nineteenth century felt alienated from a Europe dominated by French culture and sophistication – just as in our times Third World countries are alienated by the Western sense of superiority.
Berlin therefore disagreed with the most powerful voices in philosophy because he did something not all that common among philosophers immediately before and after the War. He read the works of philosophers long dead, indeed of some who would not in Oxford have been called philosophers. He did not convict them of error and contrast them with the truth as we know it today. Nor did he divide them into those who point the way to saner times and those whom tyrants have used to justify their cruelty. What he did was to evoke their vision of life and contrast it with other visions of life. That is not all. He denies that there is any way of proving that one vision is more valid or more justifiable than any other. One might find Joseph de Maistre’s analysis of society hateful, but we would be wrong not to realise that it contains some terrible truths, however liberals might shudder at the conclusions Maistre drew from them. Consider Nietzsche. In his works are conclusions which the Nazis tried to translate into political action. But we would be amputating part of our sensibility if we failed to receive Nietzsche’s astonishing understanding of a world no longer willing to accept the sanctions of religion as valid. Or consider Carlyle. Set beside his contemporaries, Marx and Tolstoy, he cuts a very poor figure. But he was nearer the truth than Marx and Tolstoy in reminding us that nations and societies need leaders. We do not have to agree with Carlyle when he praises Frederick the Great and Cromwell for the harshness and inhumanity of their decisions. Marx and Tolstoy were wrong to declare that statesmen are so insignificant that they do not influence events. Churchill, Roosevelt and Ben-Gurion had a crucial influence upon the destiny of their countries.
This way of looking at philosophy sustains Berlin’s belief in pluralism. ‘Pluralism’ is a dingy word. Most people accept that there are many groups and interests in society, and a good society arranges for them to tolerate each other’s existence: indeed the most powerful of all institutions in society, the State, should make a special effort to give minority interests as much scope as possible. Most people think pluralism is a pragmatic compromise. It does not compel us to abandon our belief in socialism or in the beneficence of the inequality produced by the market economy, or our belief that there is a rule, could we but act upon it, that should govern all our lives. But Berlin means something much more disturbing. He takes the unfashionable view that good ends conflict. Equality and freedom frequently conflict; and to get more of one you have to surrender some part of the other. No one can doubt Berlin’s belief in the importance of liberty. But he does not beat a drum-roll for Hayek. Liberty is only one of the good things in life for which he cares. For him equality is also a sacred value, and those who reject equality as a bad dream are unsympathetic to him. He acknowledges that if liberty for the powerful and intelligent means the exploitation of the weak and less gifted, the liberty of the powerful and intelligent should be curtailed. To publish a book in England, however offensive to Moslems, is one thing. But to sell the same book in the old city in Jerusalem with maximum publicity and invite riots and death is another. The need to make distinctions of this kind is the justification of pluralism.
Or consider the plight of Antigone. Sophocles thought she was right to put respect for the corpses of her beloved brothers before her obligation to the law. (‘My nature is to love not to hate.’)3 Sartre took the opposite view. Or consider spontaneity. It is a virtue: but we should not expect to find it uppermost in the abilities of the Cabinet Secretary. Indeed one could argue that spontaneity is the last quality one wants such a high bureaucrat to exhibit. Values collide and often cannot be made to run in parallel. And not only values. Propositions too. Truth is not a unity.
It was on this matter that Berlin dissented from the English analytic philosophers. The summit of his ambition as a young man had been to get the group that centred upon Austin and Ayer to accept some point he had made as original or important. To have done that would have been to establish something that was true. True, because the circle’s discussions – though most of the points made were minute distinctions in logic or perception – were sustained by a great unspoken assumption. The assumption was that all solutions to all major problems can be found if we try hard enough. Philosophers accepted as axiomatic that there could be only one true answer to a question: other answers were errors. Furthermore, all true answers must be compatible with other true answers. Truth is a unity. The good life must conform to these truths which philosophers discovered: otherwise it would not be good. In the end either we or our successors will discover these truths. And when we do we shall be able to reorganise society on rational lines free from superstition, dogma and oppression. Berlin disagreed; and he praised Machiavelli for being the first major thinker to deny that this was so. A politician cannot operate according to the strict morality of personal life.
Is Berlin a relativist? Is he saying that there is no disputing about tastes, or that we can never understand another culture because we cannot get inside it? Certainly not. However different we are from Polynesian islanders or ancient Athenians, the very fact that we can imagine what it would be like to be one means that comparisons between cultures are possible. Our ability to recognise virtually universal values informs every discussion we have about the nature of man, about sanity, about reason. Is he then an anti-rationalist? Impossible for one of his training at Oxford. He is opposed to Oakeshott because he believes reason can be applied to numbers of social problems and produce results. Reason may diminish the bruising conflicts between good ends. Peaceful trade-offs are possible, nor are they always fudges. Reason is needed to sort out the conflicting claims of justice, mercy, privation and personal freedom. It is true that every solution creates a new problem, new needs and demands. If children have got greater freedom because their parents fought for it, the children may make such importunate demands for a juster society that they threaten the very freedom their parents fought for. The ideas that liberated one generation become the shackles of the next. In saying this Berlin was reminding us that philosophers alone cannot explain the nature of being: the historian too can enlighten us. The history of ideas is the gateway to self-knowledge. We need it to remind us that people are not an undifferentiated mass to be organised as efficiently as possible. Efficiency and organisation should not be regarded as the ultimate goals in life. They are means, limited means, to enable men and women to live better and happier lives.
No one has ever made ideas come alive more than Isaiah Berlin. This is not strange, because he personifies them. They live because they are the progeny of human beings, and Berlin is a connoisseur of individual men and women. Nothing pleases him more than to praise famous men, such as Churchill or Roosevelt, because they enhance life and show that the impersonal forces of history, or the so-called laws that govern society, can be defied. Men and women of genius change the world. Even obscure scholars, who certainly will not change the world, can add something to the total sum of comedy, idiosyncrasy, perhaps of tragedy, when their special oddity is revealed. Berlin wants us to understand the immense variety of emotions and ideals in the world we inhabit.
That is why, Berlin insists, it is foolish to expect men and women, still more their ideas, to conform to one set of principles. He likes to play games to bring this home to us. In one of his best-known essays, on Tolstoy, he divides thinkers into hedgehogs and foxes – the hedgehogs who ‘know one big thing’, like Dostoevsky or Aquinas, and the foxes who ‘know many things’, like Turgenev or Hume – Tolstoy being a natural fox who tried to become a hedgehog. Then again he divides statesmen into those of single principle who try to bend events to their will, like Hitler, Trotsky and de Gaulle, and those who sense how events are moving and how their fellow citizens feel, and find the way to give effect to those feelings, like Lincoln, Bismarck, Lloyd George and Roosevelt. He revels in the difference between human beings. He admires austere remote scholars, but also enjoys ebullient, effervescent scholars who prefer vehemence to reticence, pleasure to authority, who deflate the self-important and the pompous. High spirits have their place in a university as well as gravitas. He is not blind to human failings and he dislikes those who are inhuman and insensitive. Indeed some who battle for power and position are evil and sinister. Like Hamlet he stands amazed at ‘What a piece of work is a man’; unlike Hamlet he delights in man.
Berlin, then, is hostile to the pretensions of technocrats and revolutionaries. The technocrats driving through their plans against opposition, sublime in their indifference to the ignorant opposition of those for whom they are certain a better future exists, appal him by their lack of humility. The revolutionaries, oblivious to suffering, equally appal him. Sometimes it may be necessary to go to war, assassinate a tyrant, overthrow law and order. But there is an even chance that no improvement will result. One of his favourite quotations, which he uses time and again, is from Kant: ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.’4 He recognises that the young may pass him by. The young so often want to fight and suffer to create a nobler society. But, even when set against the most dedicated and pure socialists of my generation, he seems to me to have written the truest and the most moving of all the interpretations of life that my own generation made.
1 Four Essays on Liberty (London and New York, 1969), p. 124.
2 ibid., pp. 124–5.
3 Sophocles, Anitgone, line 523.
4 See pp. 16, 241, 603, 641 below.
Isaiah Berlin is widely and justifiably regarded as one of the best English essayists of the twentieth century. His enthusiastically acclaimed collections of essays, published during the course of the last quarter of a century, have proved enduringly popular and inspirational. His canvas is broad – from philosophy and the history of thought to portraits of contemporaries, from political ideas to the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia. His exemplary lucidity and his rare penetration are familiar to and valued by a very wide readership.
This anthology is a response to the suggestion that the time is ripe to re-present Berlin’s work to a new generation of readers who may not have encountered his previous collections, not all of which are now equally readily available. Our aim has been twofold: to provide within one set of covers a selection from the best of Berlin’s published essays, and to exhibit the full range of his work. Though several of the essays are virtually self-selecting by these criteria, the choice of others is closer to being arbitrary, and there will certainly be readers familiar with Berlin’s writings who would prefer a somewhat different list of contents. We ourselves omitted some essays only with the greatest reluctance, in the attempt to keep the volume within manageable proportions: ‘The Philosophical Ideas of Giambattista Vico’, ‘European Unity and its Vicissitudes’ and ‘Fathers and Children’ might be picked out for special mention in this connection. We happily allow, then, that adjustments at the margins would have been possible, though we are clear that enough of the central core is here to make this a defensible way of fulfilling the aims which we have set ourselves.
Such a defence is implicit in the introduction. Indeed, I should make clear that, despite my use of the first person plural, it was Roger Hausheer who took the lead in making the selection. He has made a long and careful study of Berlin’s oeuvre, and is therefore ideally placed to identify its landmarks, and to provide the new visitor with the overview that follows. The main credit for the generosity and scope of this anthology is his, though we have modified its contents in discussion, and take joint responsibility for the result. Selection and title (the latter being my suggestion) have been graciously approved by the author. The subheadings within the list of contents are meant only as rough signposts, partly to guide those who prefer to read the essays in an order other than that in which they are printed: although the printed order has a certain logic, each essay stands on its own, and it may well be, for example, that some readers will find the rather more abstract essays in the earlier sections easier to approach if read after the more historically concrete studies that follow.
The responsibility for textual editing has been mine, though Roger Hausheer’s help, especially with German sources, has been invaluable. Most of the essays have already appeared in collections edited by me (jointly with Aileen Kelly in the case of ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’), and here I have made only minor further corrections, also adding references for previously unreferenced quotations, so far as I could.1 The three essays that do not fall into this category, since they appeared in volumes published before I became Isaiah Berlin’s editor, are ‘Historical Inevitability’, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ and ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’: here too I have mostly added references where there were none (as throughout the first two of these pieces) and checked translations and existing references, amending where necessary; I have also broken up some extremely long paragraphs and made a number of (mostly minor, copy-editorial) corrections, but the texts remain, of course, essentially unchanged. The author has added a clarificatory footnote about Herder and relativism here; this also has a bearing on some of the references to relativism in the other pieces. Such overlap between the essays as naturally occurs, given their independent origins, has been left, in order not to damage their individual integrity.
Details of the original publication of the essays are as follows: ‘On the Pursuit of the Ideal’, an abbreviated version of which was read on 15 February 1988 at the ceremony in Turin at which the author was awarded the first Senator Giovanni Agnelli International Prize ‘for the ethical dimension in advanced societies’, was published privately by the Agnelli Foundation, and also appeared in the New York Review of Books, 17 March 1988; ‘The Concept of Scientific History’ appeared as ‘History and Theory: The Concept of Scientific History’ in History and Theory 1 (1960); ‘Does Political Theory Still Exist?’ was published first in French as ‘La théorie politique existe-t-elle?’ in Revue française de science politique 11 (1961), and then in English in Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (eds), Philosophy, Politics and Society, 2nd Series (Oxford, 1962: Blackwell); ‘“From Hope and Fear Set Free”’2 (the Presidential Address for the 1963–4 Session) appeared in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 64 (1964), and is reprinted here by courtesy of the Editor of the Aristotelian Society; ‘Historical Inevitability’, the first Auguste Comte Memorial Trust Lecture, was delivered on 12 May 1953 at the London School of Economics and Political Science, published by Oxford University Press in London in 1954, and reprinted in revised form in Four Essays on Liberty (London and New York, 1969: Oxford University Press); ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, the author’s Inaugural Lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University, was delivered on 31 October 1958, published by the Clarendon Press in Oxford in the same year, and reprinted in revised form in Four Essays on Liberty; ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ appeared in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. 2 (New York, 1973: Scribner’s); ‘The Originality of Machiavelli’, the first draft of which was read at a meeting of the British section of the Political Studies Association in 1953, was published in a shortened form, as ‘The Question of Machiavelli’, in the New York Review of Books, 4 November 1971, and in full 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; ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, which began life as a lecture delivered to Johns Hopkins University in 1964, appeared in Earl R. Wasserman (ed.), Aspects of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1965: Johns Hopkins Press), and was reprinted in revised form in Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London, 1976: Hogarth Press; New York, 1976: Viking); ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’ first appeared, in a shorter form, as ‘Lev Tolstoy’s Historical Scepticism’ in Oxford Slavonic Papers 2 (1951), and was reissued with additions under its present title in 1953 in London by Weidenfeld and Nicolson and in New York by Simon and Schuster; ‘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), and was also published, as ‘The Great Amateur’, in the New York Review of Books, 14 March 1968; ‘Conversations with Akhmatova and Pasternak’, given as a Bowra Lecture in Oxford on 13 May 1980, appeared in the New York Review of Books, 20 November 1980, and is a shorter version of ‘Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956’, which is to be found in Personal Impressions (see here); ‘The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will: The Revolt against the Myth of an Ideal World’ was published in an Italian translation in Lettere italiane 27 (1975), and first appeared in its original English form in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (see here); ‘Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power’ appeared as ‘El nacionalismo: descuido del pasado y poder actual’ in Diálogos 14 No 6 (November–December 1978), and under its present title in Partisan Review 46 (1979); ‘Winston Churchill in 1940’, commissioned as a review of the second volume of Churchill’s war memoirs, first appeared in 1949 in Atlantic Monthly 184 No 3 (as ‘Mr Churchill’) and Cornhill Magazine 981 (as ‘Mr Churchill and F.D.R.’), and was reissued in book form in 1964 as Mr Churchill in 1940 (London: John Murray; Boston/Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin/Riverside Press); ‘President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’ appeared in 1955 in Political Quarterly 26 and, as ‘Roosevelt Through European Eyes’, in Atlantic Monthly 196 No 1. I am grateful to the publishers concerned for allowing these essays to be reprinted. They are drawn from seven previously published collections, as detailed in the concise bibliography at the end of this volume.
As before, I have depended heavily on the expert knowledge of a number of scholars, especially in the search for the sources of quotations that I have not found in the author’s notes. Professors F. M. Barnard and H. B. Nisbet have devoted many hours (as has Roger Hausheer) to helping me with Herder’s dismayingly large corpus, and my gratitude for their generosity is especially heartfelt; Professor Hans Dietrich Irmscher and Dr Regine Otto have very kindly solved a number of the problems that remained. Professor T. J. Reed has been a ready help with other German sources, in the face of repeated enquiries, and Dr Andrew Fairbairn (whose patience is also exemplary) mainly but by no means exclusively with quotations from eighteenth-century French authors. Other problems have been solved for me by Edward Acton, J. H. Burns, Terrell Carver, R. F. Christian, Julie Curtis, Timothy Day, John Derry, Paul Foote, Michael Freeden, Patrick Gardiner, Gwen Griffith Dickson, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, David Howells, Michael Inwood, John H. Kautsky, Richard Lebrun, Meira Levinson, Helen McCurdy, David Miller, J. C. O’Flaherty, Bruce Phillips, Leon Pompa, H. T. Mason, David Place, Michael Quinn, Philip Schofield, the late Elisabeth Stopp, J. L. H. Thomas and Ralph Walker.
For other kinds of help I should like to thank Adrian Hale, Librarian of Wolfson College; Marion Maneker of Viking Penguin; Will Sulkin, Jenny Uglow and Rowena Skelton-Wallace at Chatto and Windus; and Pat Utechin, the author’s secretary, whose support has been no less indispensable to me this time than on numerous previous occasions. I am grateful to Lord Annan for allowing us to use as a foreword an adapted version of his discussion of Isaiah Berlin in Our Age (London, 1990: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; New York, 1990: Random House), and for making the adaptations. Finally I express once more my great gratitude to the benefactors who have financed the Fellowship that has enabled me to undertake my current work on Isaiah Berlin, and to Lord Bullock for being my advocate with them.
HENRY HARDY
November 1996
Wolfson College, Oxford
To the above I should like to add several expressions of gratitude of my own: to Lord Bullock and Lord Annan for their help and encouragement; to the Master and Fellows of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, for electing me to a Visiting Fellowship, in 1994–5; and to the Leverhulme Trust for a generous Research Award for the same period – all of which enabled me, in the most congenial surroundings, to make a start on an intellectual life of Isaiah Berlin, of which the piece that follows is a small offshoot. And not least to my co-editor for coming to my aid by radically shortening (and on occasion revising) an introduction which, as first drafted, turned out to be too long and too elaborate for the purpose in hand.
ROGER HAUSHEER
1 Where I have failed, I should be exceedingly grateful to hear from anyone who can supply missing references.
2 The title is a line from Swinburne’s The Garden of Proserpine.
It is paradoxical that at a time of unprecedented moral and political confusion there should be an upsurge of interest in popular expositions of science, whose subject-matter is fully comprehensible only to a handful of experts. Yet the very realm that matters to us most, and is accessible to all of us in virtue of our humanity, namely that of the human studies, seems not to have captured the popular imagination to the same degree. This is especially regrettable since, largely unnoticed by the general public, an advance in the understanding of human beings has taken place over the past two hundred years whose relevance to present concerns can scarcely be exaggerated. Isaiah Berlin’s work forms an indispensable part of this advance, of which it can indeed be seen as a kind of summation.
Berlin has spent most of his long life reflecting on certain central human problems, especially questions of human identity and value, association and organisation, political theory and practice. To no small degree his interest in these issues has arisen from his life. Born in Riga, a Jewish subject of the Russian Tsar, he was a child in Petrograd during the early stages of the Russian Revolution, where he witnessed an episode which filled him with a lasting hatred of violence. Coming to England at the age of eleven, he rapidly adapted to his new environment, and has had a dazzling academic career at Oxford. His origins left him with three major allegiances – Jewish, Russian and English. It was perhaps this early collision in the formation of a supremely intelligent and sensitive man that first stimulated his interest in the cluster of issues that have always preoccupied him. His childhood was disrupted by one of the great political storms of the century, and his early middle life dominated by the Second World War and his work as a political analyst in Washington and Moscow. Also, though he rarely speaks of this, no account of his life can leave out the persecution and loss of many close relatives in the Nazi holocaust and under the Soviet tyranny.
There is therefore an authentic quality in what he says about the great issues of our time which is often lacking in the writings of academics. Again, unlike many intellectuals, Berlin has had close links with public life. His network of connections has made him a privileged observer of, at times an active participant in, some of the major events of the day. His famous wartime dispatches from Washington and his intimate association with Chaim Weizmann during the period leading up to the foundation of the State of Israel are just two of the better-known instances.
There is, besides, his special intellectual temperament, his remarkable ability to enter into and recreate a wide diversity of outlooks. It is his capacity for self-transposition into minds of radically differing temperaments in other times and places that makes him such a perceptive explorer of the modern condition; and his voyage of discovery may come to be seen as an analogue in the mental sphere of those pioneering explorations of the external world which have formed the major triumphs of Western humanity since the Renaissance. He is one of the earliest, most prescient participants in a peculiarly modern predicament in which ever more people are finding they share, namely the clash of cultures and values which permeates our world. In this area there is no contemporary thinker who has more to say to us.
Yet though, as Noel Annan’s foreword makes clear, Berlin is justly renowned, his reputation is still one-sided – partly because it has fallen victim to itself: his brilliance as a lecturer and talker and his great gift for friendship sometimes distract attention from his intellectual achievement. To meet him is to know at once why he is so celebrated. But it is a large step from here to immersion in the entire corpus of his writings. Moreover, the sheer scale of his activity in many prima facie unrelated fields has meant that he will be admired by different readers for apparently disconnected parts of his oeuvre, with scarcely any realisation that these are all fragments of a total picture.
Again, real obstacles stand in the path of a full reception of his views in all their often subversive originality. To begin with, the influence of scientific patterns of thought on our general outlook has become extremely pervasive; and the overwhelming majority is today uncritically in thrall to more or less crude forms of scientism. This general temper constitutes a major barrier to an understanding of Berlin’s achievement, though no thinker has battled more doggedly against it. Furthermore, since a large part of Berlin’s attention has been devoted to examining the deepest of structures, the categories which form the ultimate moulds of our experience, his readers face the sheer difficulty of seeing what is so close to them – part of themselves and their perceptual equipment – that it cannot be ‘seen’ at all, only sensed, gestured at.
There is also the danger of a kind of emotional rejection of some of Berlin’s claims. Some of our dearest ideals and beliefs, part of the bedrock of our conception of ourselves, are revealed as less solid and timeless than we had thought, which can be deeply unsettling. In addition, the doctrine of objective pluralism, the core of Berlin’s contribution, subverts major rationalist tenets that have held sway for at least two thousand years, and which underlie the political doctrines not just of the great oppressive system-builders but also of even the mildest modern liberals. An important preliminary to understanding Berlin’s achievement is to clear away these misapprehensions, dispelling irrational resistance, and tying together the strands of his contribution to our understanding of ourselves as free, creative, self-critical beings. From this standpoint all his essays seem like parts of a single design which is slowly uncovered.
Though in one sense Berlin is a philosopher, concerned to analyse our basic concepts and categories, he is also extremely curious about the huge diversity of human life. His interest in history, literature and the arts, in politics and social life – in every expression of human existence and behaviour – has been wide-ranging. His desire for knowledge for its own sake was a prime motive for his wartime decision to abandon pure philosophy: he wished to know more at the end of his life than at the beginning. And it was not by chance that the cumulative discipline he turned to was the history of ideas. Already while writing on Marx in the 1930s he had encountered the scientific, sociological approach of the French Enlightenment. As an empiricist and believer in rational methods, he was bound to be sympathetic to their desire to sweep away theology and metaphysics, superstition, tradition and blind authority. Why should there not be a science of man on a par with the Newtonian system in physics? Condorcet had spoken of the day when there would be a naturalistic sociology which would study humans as the life sciences study bees and beavers. It was this programme that provided the central intellectual inspiration of the French Revolution. Yet although the Revolution was a cleansing storm, it did anything but achieve its positive goal of a lasting rational social order. And by the time Berlin was writing his book on Marx, he knew that the most recent heir of the scientistic Enlightenment tradition, the Bolshevik Revolution, had spawned an oppressive dictatorship that overshadowed even the excesses of the French Revolutionary era. Something in the fundamental premisses of this entire approach to the study of society was amiss.
In the course of such reflections Berlin was bound to encounter the whole cohort of thinkers who, from the beginning, had rebelled against this entire outlook. It was to the enemies of the Enlightenment that Berlin turned to gain insight into the foundering of a general tendency with whose overall ambitions he was in total sympathy, but some of whose unexamined assumptions he had begun seriously to doubt.
Among these assumptions is that everything should be studied with objective detachment as mere material which can be exhaustively described, classified or brought under causal laws. For scientific purposes, nothing has an independent life of its own outside the system of laws that govern its behaviour or beyond the classificatory schema into which it falls. The unaccountable, the unpredictable, the undescribable are excluded by a method which is by its very nature deterministic. In the case of physics, for example, which for the Enlightenment was the paradigm of science, things have no purposes – ‘final causes’ – no inner lives or ideals; there are only causal regularities. No doubt Aristotle had been guilty of anthropomorphism when he attributed final causes to everything, including the universe itself; but the tendency of Enlightenment thinkers was to eliminate purposes altogether. This seemed unduly austere, especially when they came to study man and his works.
More generally, the new scientific world-picture rested upon three cardinal presuppositions common to most systematic Western thought from the time of Plato. These are that the cosmos constitutes a single harmonious whole, whose structure exists independently of any observer; that we can discover what this structure is, and find answers to all our questions, of theory and practice; and that we will then possess a seamless, coherent body of knowledge, in which no proposition can contradict another.
It is against these monolithic dogmas that so much of Berlin’s work is directed. At times he attacks them directly, at other times he exposes their shortcomings by examining the ideas of some of their most formidable opponents. He separates the human realm, where freedom, choice and self-conscious purposive action are central, from the world of impersonal forces. His first step is to defend a non-deterministic form of human freedom. ‘“From Hope and Fear Set Free”’ represents in this respect a blow struck against one of the central orthodoxies running through the history of Western philosophy.
The question of free will and determinism has preoccupied Berlin all his life. In this essay he takes issue with the ancient doctrine that any increase in knowledge entails an increase in liberty. In its strongest form this view virtually identifies rationality and freedom. The doctrine of classical self-determinism, that true liberty is rational self-direction, Berlin rejects. I cannot be considered free if nothing, including myself and my own nature, can conceivably be other than it is. In that case the notions of freedom and responsibility become otiose.
The next step is taken at the level of collective human life when, in ‘Historical Inevitability’, Berlin attacks deterministic theories which see history as obeying unalterable laws. Such views are inspired partly by the success of the natural sciences, partly by the deep-rooted belief in teleology according to which all things, like human beings, pursue purposes; and not least by our perennial desire to abdicate responsibility. Berlin exposes all these positions as dogmatic and unempirical. But he also points to a more general argument against determinism which takes us to the very core of his vision of man.
Few modern thinkers have been as aware as Berlin of the central categories that constitute our notion of human beings. We have known since Kant that there is a framework of categories by which our conception of the external world is bounded. We see, think and act in terms of these, and while we can be made aware of them, they cannot themselves be objects of a science. The intensely difficult enquiry that reveals such categories can be extended in two directions. It can be pressed deeper into the realm of subjectivity, revealing its basic structures; and it can explore the historical emergence of some of the deepest presuppositions about what we are as human beings. While Berlin’s contribution has lain largely in the latter sphere, what he says about the former is nevertheless of great interest. He is intensely aware of a primordial ‘sense of reality’ prior to all further thought and rational analysis, including predictive science. The pages where he describes this, particularly in ‘Historical Inevitability’ and ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, shine with a luminosity rare in modern philosophy. This primitive sense is the root of our conviction that we are free beings in some absolutely non-deterministic sense. So basic is this conviction that our entire moral vocabulary rests upon it: notions such as responsibility, praise, remorse and desert stand or fall with it. We cannot think it away without thinking away so much of our fundamental sense of our humanity that the attempt proves impossible. To seek to explain this unanalysable ‘categorial’ awareness in scientific terms is like trying to make the base of the mountain balance on its summit: it lies several levels below and beyond the reach of causal concepts.
There are, then, compelling reasons why humans cannot be studied just as natural objects exhaustively explainable by natural science. In ‘The Concept of Scientific History’ in particular, Berlin shows how history differs from science, and explains why a science of history is conceptually impossible. This essay, together with ‘Does Political Theory Still Exist?’, suggests a programme for the type of history of ideas that Berlin advocates. Human beings interpret themselves in terms of very general models. Some of these are as old as humanity itself, and so virtually universal; others change, sometimes dramatically, through history. The Western tradition in political thought has seen a succession of such models. As they become antiquated, do too little justice to the altering patterns of experience, they are replaced by others. No model can encompass the whole of experience once and for all: each is exclusive and at best casts light on a portion of human life. But unlike superseded scientific theories, these models retain a permanent value, for each opens its own special doors of self-understanding; and it should be a central concern of historians of ideas in each generation to ask questions of these models and to evaluate their relevance to the unique problems of their own day. Berlin has spent his life engaged in this activity, with some remarkable results.
Virtually all Berlin’s work in the history of ideas revolves around what he sees as the greatest revolution in our basic outlook since the Renaissance: the rebellion against monism. The writer whose work, for Berlin, contains the earliest premonitions of this shift is Machiavelli. He, Berlin tells us, was probably the first to juxtapose starkly two mutually exclusive systems of morality: Christian ethics, which aim at the perfection of the individual life; and those of Republican Rome, which aim at the power and the glory of the body politic. No criteria exist for choosing between these two equally valid systems. It is this, and not Machiavelli’s ‘Machiavellianism’, that has exercised us ever since. It marks the first irreparable fracture in the belief in a single universal structure of values.
Further cracks were opened up by the strange, isolated genius Giambattista Vico. On Berlin’s interpretation, Vico was the first to state explicitly that humans do not possess an unalterable essence; that they understand their own works and the world of history which they themselves make in a way in which they cannot understand the world of external nature; that there is a distinction between the knowledge we acquire as agents, from inside, and that which we acquire by observation, from outside; that a culture has a pervasive pattern by which all its products are marked; that all human institutions and creations are forms of self-expression; that permanent standards in art or life are not available and that everything human should be judged in terms of the canons of its own time and place; and that a new variety of knowledge must be added to the two traditional types (deductive and empirical) – a form of knowledge whereby we enter into the mental universe of other ages and peoples by recreative imagination.
The implications for Berlin’s own conception of cultural history are apparent: the works of Vico gave birth to the cardinal distinction between the sciences and the humanities. The fatal consequence for monism is that if an unbridgeable gap exists between these two provinces, then a breach has been blown in the dogma that all knowledge must form a seamless whole.
It is in the German world that Berlin sees the revolt against the central Enlightenment dogmas as really taking hold. The Sturm und Drang movement railed against all forms of political organisation; and in every sphere of life rejected rules as such. It was the great counter-rationalist J. G. Hamann who first did this consciously. He was against all abstraction. Scientific generalisations had at best an instrumental value: they could not yield unassailable knowledge. True knowledge is given to us only by the senses, and by spontaneous imagination and insight. Everything worth knowing is known by direct perception. Hamann’s theory of language, according to which it does not map a pre-existent timeless reality but creates its own world, with the implication that there are as many worlds as languages, has a very modern ring; and had an immense impact on his disciple J. G. Herder.
For Berlin, Herder is of central importance. By uncovering some of the principal categories that have transformed the modern world he made a permanent contribution to human self-understanding. Three novel ideas originate with him: populism, the belief that men can realise themselves fully only as members of an identifiable culture with roots in language, tradition, history; expressionism, the notion that men’s works ‘are above all voices speaking’, forms of communication conveying a total vision of life; and pluralism, the recognition of an indefinite variety of cultures and systems of values, all equally ultimate, and incommensurable with one another, so that the belief in a universally valid path to human fulfilment is rendered incoherent.