Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Isaiah Berlin
List of Illustrations
Dedication
Title Page
Author’s Preface to the First Edition
Editor’s Preface
Introduction by Noel Annan
Winston Churchill in 1940
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Chaim Weizmann
Einstein and Israel
Yitzhak Sadeh
L. B. Namier
Felix Frankfurter at Oxford
Richard Pares
Hubert Henderson at All Souls
J. L. Austin and the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy
John Petrov Plamenatz
Maurice Bowra
David Cecil
Memories of Virginia Woolf
Edmund Wilson at Oxford
Auberon Herbert
Aldous Huxley
Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956
Epilogue: The Three Strands in My Life
Picture Section
Appendix
Index
Copyright
About the Book
This enthusiastically received collection contains Isaiah Berlin’s appreciation of seventeen people of unusual distinction in the intellectual or political world – sometimes in both. The names of many of them are familiar – Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Chaim Weizmann, Albert Einstein, L. B. Namier, J. L. Austin, Maurice Bowra. With the exception of Roosevelt he met them all, and he knew many of them well. For this new edition four new portraits have been added, including recollections of Virginia woolf and Edmund Wilson. The volume ends with a vivid and moving account of Berlin’s meetings in Russia with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in 1945 and 1956. As Alan Ryan wrote in the Sunday Times, ‘This last essay, in particular, is simply stunning.’
About the Author
Sir Isaiah Berlin, OM, who died in 1997, was born in Riga, capital of Latvia, in 1909. When he was six, his family moved to Russia: there in 1917, in Petrograd, he witnessed both the Social-Democratic and the Bolshevik Revolutions.
In 1921 his family came to England, and he was educated at St Paul’s School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At Oxford he 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. His published work includes Karl Marx, Four Essays on Liberty, Vico and Herder, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Sense of Reality and The Proper Study of Mankind. 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.
Dr Henry Hardy, a Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, has edited several other collections of Isaiah Berlin’s work, and is currently preparing his letters and his unpublished writings for publication.
Lord Annan’s career reflects a lifelong dedication to education and the arts. He has been Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, Provost of University College London, and Vice-Chancellor of the University of London. He has also been Chairman of the Trustees of the National Gallery, a Trustee of the British Museum, and a Director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. His books include Leslie Stephen and Our Age.
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
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
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1 Winston Churchill on his way to 10 Downing Street, 1940
2 Franklin D. Roosevelt
3 Chaim Weizmann in 1945
4 Albert Einstein in Christ Church Meadow, Oxford, 1932
5 Yitzhak Sadeh
6 L. B. Namier
7 Felix Frankfurter in his office in the Supreme Court
8 Richard Pares
9 Hubert Henderson
10 J. L. Austin in 1952
11 John Plamenatz
12 Maurice Bowra in Oxford, 1950
13 Lord David Cecil and the author in the cloisters, New College, Oxford, 1950
14 Virginia Woolf
15 Edmund Wilson, c.1953
16 Auberon Herbert in the garden at Pixton, his home in Somerset
17 Aldous Huxley
18 Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak at a public reading in Moscow, 1946
Photo credits: 1, 2, 4, 6, 10, 12, The Hulton Getty Collection; 3, Bernard Hoffmann/Life © Time Inc. 1945 (print supplied by the Weizmann Archives); 5, Yoram Sadeh; 7, New York Times; 8, 9, The Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford; 11, The Warden and Fellows of Nuffield College, Oxford; 13, 18, author’s collection; 14, Ian Parsons; 15, Sylvia Salmi (print supplied by Farrar, Straus and Giroux); 16, Mrs E. Grant; 17, Chatto and Windus
To the memory of
Geoffrey Wilkinson
1921–1996
AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
THIS VOLUME CONSISTS of writings that resemble what in the eighteenth century were called éloges – addresses commemorating the illustrious dead. All but two of these were composed in response to specific requests: the exceptions, those on Franklin Roosevelt and Lewis Namier, as well as ‘Meetings with Russian Writers’, were not commissioned, and were written because I believed that I had something to say which had not, so far as I knew, been said elsewhere.
The form, and to some extent the content, of these tributes was largely determined by the purposes for which they were intended. Thus the memoirs of Maurice Bowra and John Plamenatz were obituary addresses read at memorial services in Oxford; the article on Chaim Weizmann was delivered as a public lecture in London on a somewhat similar occasion; those on Richard Pares, Hubert Henderson, J. L. Austin, Aldous Huxley, Felix Frankfurter and Auberon Herbert were requested by editors of academic journals or commemorative volumes. The essay on Albert Einstein was the inaugural address read at a centenary symposium in his honour: my intention was to bring out his sharp awareness of social reality and of the importance of truths unwelcome to some of those who paid him homage as a saintly and withdrawn thinker who saw the world through a haze of vague-minded idealism. The essay on Churchill was originally a review of the second volume of his war memoirs; it was written at a time when he was Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons and had begun to be widely and fiercely criticised, sometimes with good reason, on both sides of the Atlantic. I thought, and still think, that his part in 1940 in saving England (and, indeed, the vast majority of mankind) from Hitler had been insufficiently remembered and that the balance needed to be restored. So, too, in the case of President Franklin Roosevelt, I wished to remind readers of the fact that for my generation – those who were young in the 1930s – the political skies of Europe, dominated by Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, Salazar and various dictators in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, were very dark indeed; the policies of Chamberlain and Daladier held out no hope; for those who had not despaired of the possibility of a socially and morally tolerable world the only point of light seemed to many of us to come from President Roosevelt and the New Deal. This article, too, was written largely during the recriminations of the immediate post-war years.
The last essay is new and written for this volume. It deals with my visits to Russia in 1945 and 1956. I wanted to give an account principally of the views and personalities of two writers of genius whom I had met and come to know, which I had not found elsewhere, not even in the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandel’shtam and Lydia Chukovskaya, the most detailed and moving accounts that we have of the lives of writers and artists at a terrible time, to which my narrative (a part of which was delivered as a Bowra Lecture under the auspices of Wadham College, Oxford) can claim to be no more than a marginal supplement.
I wish to record my deep gratitude to my friend Noel Annan for writing the Introduction to this miscellany, and to tell him, and his readers, that I am only too well aware of what reserves of sensibility, conscience, time, sheer labour, capacity for resolving the conflicting claims of truth and friendship, knowledge and moral tact, such a task unavoidably draws upon; and to thank him for his great goodwill in agreeing to perform it. Finally, I should like to take this opportunity of once again acknowledging my deep and ever-growing debt to the Editor of this edition of my essays. No author could ask for a better, more disinterested, scrupulous or energetic editor; and I should like to offer Dr Henry Hardy my thanks for exhuming, and putting together, this collection, composed over a long period, against what must, at times, have seemed not inconsiderable odds – some of them due to the idiosyncrasies of the author.
ISAIAH BERLIN
June 1980
EDITOR’S PREFACE
THIS IS THE second edition of one of five volumes 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 previously scattered, often in obscure places; most were out of print; and only half a dozen essays had been collected and reissued.2 These five volumes, together with the complete list of his publications which one of them (Against the Current) contains,3 and subsequent volumes in which I have published much of his previously unpublished work,4 have made much more of his oeuvre readily accessible than before.
The essays in the present volume are tributes to or memoirs of twentieth-century figures whom, with the exception of Roosevelt and Einstein, the author knew personally, together with a chapter on his meetings in 1945 and 1956 with Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova and other Russian writers in Moscow, where he was working in 1945 for the British Embassy, and in Leningrad. Original publication details of the pieces included in the first edition are as follows. ‘Winston Churchill in 1940’ (with ‘Felix Frankfurter at Oxford’, one of only two pieces published in the lifetimes of their subjects) 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 as Mr Churchill in 1940 by John Murray of London in 1964. ‘President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’ appeared in 1955 in Political Quarterly 26 and, as ‘Roosevelt Through European Eyes’, in Atlantic Monthly 196 No 1. ‘Chaim Weizmann’, the second Herbert Samuel Lecture, was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson of London in 1958. ‘Einstein and Israel’, which appeared in the New York Review of Books, 8 November 1979, is the major part of an address given on 14 March 1979 at the opening of a symposium held to mark the centenary of Einstein’s birth – the full address appeared in Gerald Holton and Yehuda Elkana (eds), Albert Einstein: Historical and Cultural Perspectives, the Centennial Symposium in Jerusalem (Princeton, 1982: Princeton University Press). ‘L. B. Namier’ was published in 1966 in Martin Gilbert (ed.), A Century of Conflict (London: Hamish Hamilton), and in Encounter 17 No 5 (November 1966). ‘Felix Frankfurter at Oxford’ was a contribution to Wallace Mendelson (ed.), Felix Frankfurter: A Tribute (New York, 1964: Reynal). ‘Richard Pares’ appeared in the 1958 Balliol College Record. ‘Hubert Henderson at All Souls’ was part of a supplement, devoted to Henderson, to Oxford Economic Papers 5 (1953) – ‘J. L. Austin and the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy’ was a contribution to Sir Isaiah Berlin and others, Essays on J. L. Austin (Oxford, 1973: Clarendon Press). ‘John Petrov Plamenatz’ was the address at Plamenatz’s memorial service in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, in 1975, and was published privately in that year by All Souls College. ‘Maurice Bowra’ was the address at Bowra’s memorial service, also in St Mary’s, in 1971, and was published privately in that year by Wadham College. ‘Auberon Herbert’ was a contribution to John Jolliffe (ed.), Auberon Herbert: A Composite Portrait (Tisbury, 1976: Compton Russell), ‘Aldous Huxley’ to Julian Huxley (ed.), Aldous Huxley (London, 1965: Chatto and Windus). ‘Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956’, an abbreviated version of which was given as a Bowra Lecture on 13 May 1980, was first published in this volume, for which, as the author says, it was specially written.
Four essays published since 1980 have been added in this second edition. ‘Yitzhak Sadeh’, which appeared in Midstream 39 No 4 (May 1993), I constructed at the author’s request from two shorter pieces he had written on Sadeh, one previously unpublished, the other, ‘On Yitzhak Sadeh’ (a short talk broadcast on the English-language service of Israeli radio), published in Hebrew translation in Davar, 5 September 1986. ‘Edmund Wilson at Oxford’ appeared in the Yale Review 76 (1987). ‘Memories of Virginia Woolf’ was published as ‘Writers Remembered: Virginia Woolf’ in The Author 100 (1989). ‘David Cecil’ appeared in Reports for 1985–86 and 1986–87; List of Fellows and Members for 1987 (London, [1987]: Royal Society of Literature).
Apart from necessary corrections and the addition of a few references, the reprinted essays appear here essentially in their original form. I have made a few further corrections and added a few further references in this new edition.
Not included here are several other pieces in the same genre, mostly shorter than or overlapping with the pieces in this volume. Their principal subjects are Chaim Weizmann, Meyer Weisgal, Michael Tippett, Randolph Churchill, Jacob Herzog, Arthur Lehning, Jacob Talmon, Teddy Kollek, Yishayahu Leibowitz, Nahum Goldmann, Martin Cooper, David Ben-Gurion, Adam von Trott, John Plamenatz, Yehudi Menuhin, Alexander and Salome Halpern, and H. L. A. Hart; full details can be found in the bibliography already mentioned.5
I remain grateful for all the help I received in preparing the first edition seventeen years ago. Then, as always, Isaiah Berlin patiently answered my queries and Pat Utechin, his secretary, gave indispensable aid. Virginia Llewellyn Smith assisted me with ‘Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956’. I should also like to thank Zvi Dror, Henry Near and Yoram Sadeh for help with ‘Yitzhak Sadeh’, and Helen McCurdy, Rowena Skelton-Wallace and Will Sulkin for help with the second edition.
HENRY HARDY
Wolfson College, Oxford
July 1997
Postscript
Isaiah Berlin died on 5 November 1997. This new edition of Personal Impressions had by then been passed for press, but not actually printed. No changes have been made to the body of the book, but the opportunity has been taken to add, as an epilogue, a slightly shortened version of the address Berlin gave in Jerusalem in May 1979 when he received the Jerusalem Prize for his contribution to the idea of freedom. This moving and perceptive piece – which was printed in Jewish Quarterly 27 Nos 2–3 (Summer/Autumn 1979) and in Conservative Judaism 33 No 2 (Winter 1980) – has always seemed to me, and to others whom I have consulted, to belong in the book, since it is in effect an autobiographical personal impression. I suggested to Berlin more than once that it should be reprinted in this natural context, but he always gave the characteristic reply that it seemed to him too personal, perhaps too self-regarding, to reappear in a collection in his lifetime; thereafter, however, I should do what I thought best. To my bitter regret, I am now free to add this finishing touch to the volume.
H.H.
November 1997
1 The first edition of this volume was originally published in London in 1980, and in New York in 1981; it was the last of four volumes published, in the first instance, under the collective title Selected Writings, which explains the author’s reference here to ‘this edition of my essays’. The other three volumes were Russian Thinkers (London and New York, 1978), co-edited with Aileen Kelly; Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays (London, 1978; New York, 1979); and Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (London, 1979; New York, 1980). The fifth volume followed a decade later: 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, 1998).
2 Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969; New York, 1970) 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 currently most up-to-date version of this bibliography appears in the Pimlico paperback edition (London, 1997).
4 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).
5 See note 3 above. Of the people I have listed, Chaim Weizmann is the subject of items 49 and 84, and the others of items 91, 97, 123, 129, 140, 171a, 173a, 181a, 188a, 191, 192, 192a, 193, 203, 203a and 215 respectively.
INTRODUCTION
Noel Annan
THE ÉLOGE IS not much favoured as a literary form in England today: it is hauled out of the cupboard only for use at memorial services, decently to extol the dead man’s virtues. The profile and the interview, the literary forms now much in use, are designed not to praise but to cut people down to size. This was the vogue which delighted Beaverbrook: he called it ‘lopping off the heads of the tall poppies’. The journalist probes for the weak spot, inserts the banderilla, and so goads the wretched bull that he plunges to the doom of self-exposure. Professional interviewers regard this special skill with grave self-satisfaction. They are unanimous in declaring that it does the victim a positive service: he may not appear admirable but he is at least credible.
Intellectuals disparage journalists, but the course they have been following runs alongside the journalists’ trail. Social scientists have depersonalised acres of human experience so that history resembles a ranch on which herds move, driven they know not why by impersonal forces, munching their way across the prairie. Critics, like crabs in a rock-pool, scuttle sideways into the recesses of postmodernism and avoid considering how people actually speak and write; or they replace the living artist by an artificial persona composed from his works. No wonder the public buys biographies. Yet how many of the two-volume lives, arid with documentation, fill the throat with dust? Those biographers who are not frightened to paint portraits in the primary colours of virtue and vice seem often to be enslaved by the principle which the harsh-tongued father of the novelist Henry Green characterised years ago as de mortuis nil nisi bunkum; and those who preserve certain reticences prudently let it be known that they did so to avoid damages for libel.
Isaiah Berlin ignores these current fashions. His thought, his theories, always refer to people: the very life he leads pullulates with people. His essays on those who intrigue him are studies in praise. Like the son of Shirach he wants us to praise famous men. But it is not their fame which attracts him, it is their genius. He is not ashamed to worship heroes. He has no wish to pose as God and see with equal eye a hero perish or a sparrow fall. Heroes enhance life, the world expands and becomes less menacing and more hopeful by their very existence. To know a great man is to change one’s notions of what a human being can do or be. To see Shelley plain, to meet as Berlin has done men and women such as Pasternak or Stravinsky, Virginia Woolf or Picasso, Russell or Einstein, he finds exciting. But he does not consider only geniuses. Someone whose prejudices are outrageous and whose behaviour disturbs the bien-pensants may exhibit reckless vitality; and that challenges Berlin to find the precise words which best convey his quality and quiddity. Nor need such people be lions or stars. An obscure scholar with an unusual combination of gifts will make him feel the world well won. He likes people to show attractive qualities: austerity is praiseworthy, but so is gaiety. His austere friend John Austin found few pleasures in life equal to that of being able to praise someone unreservedly, and Berlin, no less than Keynes, who was a devastating critic of people, revels in celebrating men and women whom he admires.
But it would be an error to dismiss these studies in praise as conventional tributes. Like all his writing, they are deceptively entertaining and conceal his true originality of mind. Newspapers picture great scientists making a breakthrough which alters the course of physics or biology, or economists are praised for producing a theory which relates both logically and paradoxically all the variables within their branch of knowledge. These are the means, so it is said, by which knowledge is advanced. But Berlin does not enlarge our understanding in this way. To have done so – to have written an abstract treatise on the history of ideas, a subject which has been distorted and misunderstood precisely because it has so often been reduced to abstractions – would have been to contradict the very message he wants us to receive. He has, of course, written on theories of freedom and on historiography; but these critiques are inadequate in themselves to convey what he has added to his own interpretation of life.
That interpretation is pluralism. How the imagination droops at the mention of that dingy word! ‘We live in a pluralist age’ is the castrating cliché of our times. Most people when they use the term mean that society is formed of numbers of minorities who are moved each by their own interests and values. But since the interests of all these groups conflict they have to learn to tolerate each other’s existence. Indeed the institution which needs to exercise the greatest tolerance is the State itself: although it has to express politically the highest common factor of agreement in society it must be especially sensitive in accommodating those whose views are opposed to the consensus. Not only the State. Every controlling body, every institution, management in its various disguises, should respond to minority feelings. But there is a difficulty in sustaining this theory in practice. When government in all its forms is weakened and drained of blood by giving transfusions to enable minorities to flourish, it becomes incapable of resisting determined and ruthless interest-groups or parties. Having benefited by the application of pluralism, they kick over the theory and elbow the government out by taking over its most important functions; they then blandly declare the interests of all other minorities to be subordinate to their own. Must not a government so hesitant about its legitimacy collapse when its power to give orders is challenged?
Isaiah Berlin’s interpretation of pluralism is far more profound. He does not spend time conjecturing how far the State should or should not yield to pressure groups. What fascinates him is not the political consequences of pluralism but its justification. It needs to be justified not only against its enemies but against many of those who preen themselves on being pluralists but would be indignant if they became aware of the implications of what Berlin is saying. For those who pay lip-service to pluralism fail to understand just how disturbing he is. He believes that you cannot always pursue one good end without setting another on one side. You cannot always exercise mercy without cheating justice. Equality and freedom are both good ends but you rarely can have more of one without surrendering some part of the other. This is dispiriting for progressives who like to believe that the particular goal which at present they are pursuing is not incompatible with all the other goals which they like to think they value as much. But Berlin, disbelieving in panaceas or total solutions, is sceptical of many remedies which purport to cure social ills and to reintegrate those said to be alienated from their society. Masterful men and implacable women, planners, moving their fellow citizens about and disposing of the future of their children, determining how and where they should live in the name of efficiency or equality, justifying the brutality of their decisions by declaring how inescapable these decisions are, do not rejoice his heart. Bureaucrats who take pleasure in defining the rules and regulations which govern everyone else’s jobs awaken in him the suspicion that so far from fulfilling what people want they are more interested in manipulating them. But if for him the ideals of the powerful civil servant insult too wantonly the nature of man, he does not display much enthusiasm for the political movements which grew up to oppose the gospel of efficiency. He has reservations about populism or syndicalism. He wonders how much they care for the liberty of minorities.
But these reservations give no comfort to conservatives. Unlike Michael Oakeshott, Berlin is not sceptical of reason in politics or of theories as such. He may have no views about monetarism or deficit budgeting or on other statistical or sociological analyses: but he does not regard such efforts to apply reason to politics as valueless. Such theories, the product of abstract reason and analysis, may, if put into practice, diminish the bruising and dispiriting conflicts between good ends. Life is not one long struggle against impaling oneself on the horns of a dilemma: peaceful trade-offs are possible, nor are they always agonising. Sometimes equality and liberty may be reconciled; sometimes not; but Berlin disagrees with those who deny that tangles of this sort can be combed out. Again, participatory populism is not a form of political organisation likely to make the blood surge through his veins; but if it could be shown that it led to a clear advance towards greater equality he would not reject it. Unlike even moderate conservatives he regards equality as one of the ultimate goals for men, a sacred value, obliged no doubt to yield when other sacred values would have to suffer if they were to collide with it, but to be realised so long as it cannot be shown to be doing irreparable damage. If many people are starving and can be fed if the liberty of the few is curtailed, then the few must lose their liberty. If that gives pain, well, pain must be given. All Berlin asks is that there should be no equivocation and it should be frankly admitted that liberty was curtailed – in a good cause. Nor has he sympathy with the conservative notion that all culture is founded on inequality, nor with a view dear to some intellectuals that art is the supreme value in life which must be protected and fostered at whatever cost. If the agonising choice had to be made between the destruction of, say, Rome, glistening with the treasures of the ages, and the loss of the independence of a nation and the subjugation of its citizens to a tyranny, Berlin would throw his lot for scorched earth and resistance. Some might guess that in his sympathy for Turgenev he would follow him in loathing the right and fearing the left; and if he were faced with the alternatives which confronted Turgenev in nineteenth-century Russia the guess would be right. Berlin finds reactionary regimes odious, and terrorist revolutionaries insupportable. But within the range of Western democratic politics he follows his fancy.
To want to maximise a particular virtue is common enough: to admit that it is not always possible to do this without fatally diminishing others is not. Unfortunately people, Berlin argues, want to be assured that in fact they can always follow simultaneously all good ends. They therefore listen respectfully to political thinkers who declare that this can be done. Such sages declare that they have discovered a better kind of freedom, positive freedom, which will reconcile the desire for justice, equality, opportunity for self-fulfilment with their wish to be as free and live under as few prohibitions as possible. Positive freedom is the benign name given to the theory which maintains that not merely wise philosophers but the State, indeed governments themselves, can identify what people would really want were they enlightened, if they understood fully what was needed to promote a good, just and satisfying society. For if it is true that this can be identified then surely the State is justified in ignoring what ordinary people say they desire or detest. What people say is the mere rumbling of their lower self, a pathetic underdeveloped persona insufficiently aware of all the possibilities of life, often the slave of evil passions. Who in his senses would want to be a slave to the bottle? Who would not agree that art is vital to anyone who wants to lead a full life? But since all too many people are alcoholics and vast numbers of people care not at all for art, the State is compelled to enforce sobriety and propagate art so long as it is healthy and opens men’s eyes to a better future.
People are often convinced by this vision of freedom because they want to believe in a common-sense view of goodness. Surely goodness must be indivisible, surely truth is beauty and beauty truth, surely the different aspects of truth and goodness can always be reconciled. But Berlin declares that sometimes they cannot. Ideology answers the questions ‘How should I behave?’ and ‘How should I live?’ People want to believe that there is one irrefutable answer to these questions. But there is not.
There is not, because life is more than a series of solutions to problems. Berlin’s pluralism has far deeper roots than politics. It is grounded in his understanding of linguistic philosophy and of history. Other philosophers grew weary of John Austin’s devastating ability to dissect a proposition and expose error in their own arguments. ‘You are like a greyhound’, Berlin remembers Ayer saying to Austin, ‘who doesn’t want to run himself, and bites the other greyhounds, so that they cannot run either.’ But Berlin found Austin sympathetic, not so much for the ferocity with which he argued, but because Austin, like the later Wittgenstein, rejected the doctrine that one could assemble a logically perfect language capable of reflecting the structure of reality. Unlike Ayer, who started with the verification principle and rejected an argument if it appeared to conflict with that principle, Austin believed that the only way to analyse knowledge, belief and experience was to study how people actually use words; and he rejected distinctions between empirical and logical truths – between those terms necessary to what Berlin calls ‘all or nothing’ philosophies.
Austin too was a theorist. He invented the theory of the illocutionary use of language (performatory, ascriptive and prescriptive expressions), and he believed in systems and in teamwork for cracking philosophical conundrums, which Berlin did not – much. But Austin did not take problems and force them into a Procrustean bed of a single all-embracing system. Whereas some logical postivists faced with a problem reformulated it in their own terms so that it ceased to be the problem it was, or else rejected it as a pseudo-problem, Austin took every problem as it came. Like Dr Johnson, Austin had a fine scorn for determinism as a doctrine which flew in the face of all experience; and this too Berlin found sympathetic. He does not see human beings as flies struggling vainly in the cobweb of historical causation, incapable of acting as free agents.
But sympathetic as Austin was to him personally and encouraging as his precept was to consider language as an act, something people do in a particular situation, Berlin’s pluralism stands independent from Oxford philosophy; and it is arguable that it is never more palpable and convincing than when he writes about people. Nobody else in our time has invested ideas with such personality; no one has given them corporeal shape and breathed life into them more than Berlin; and he succeeds in doing so because ideas for him are not mere abstractions. They live – how else could they live? – in the minds of men and women, inspiring them, shaping their lives, influencing their actions and changing the course of history. But it is men and women who create these ideas and embody them. Some are scholars enclosed in their hermetic world, despising histrionics, intrigue, ambition – the game of getting on and cashing in. They recoil when confronted with brutal discourtesy, or mere counter-assertion in argument, intended to bludgeon an opponent to the ground, because they find such behaviour intensely distasteful. And yet, wholly admirable as such men are and impressive as their standard of value is, theirs is not the only way of reflecting upon life, nor are their values the one sure guide for mankind. Isaiah Berlin has compared the murmur of Bloomsbury to chamber music: and chamber music certainly resembles that exchange of views, voice answering voice, between intellectuals, like a never-ending series of telephone calls, which so delighted him as a young don in the 1930s. But this is not the only kind of existence to be regarded as admirable or profitable. Chamber music is indeed an austere and demanding musical form: neither Beethoven nor Bach wrote more profound works than the posthumous quartets or the partitas. But symphonies, great choral works and operas demanding a huge orchestra and more than half a dozen soloists also delight and astonish us, and we would think it absurd if some pedant declared that they were all vulgar or grandiose.
Why then should we not recognise that the world of affairs has its own validity and is governed by its own rules? Why should we not admit that statesmen cannot be scholars or scholars statesmen, just as long ago the Church divided mankind into the laity, the secular clergy and ‘religious’? ‘Life’, writes Berlin, ‘may be seen through many windows, none of them necessarily clear or opaque, less or more distorting than any of the others.’ Bloomsbury had a right to their own scale of values: but they were in error when they assumed that all sensible and intelligent individuals should conform to it. It is all very well to believe that you have discovered the truth about ethics, history, painting and personal relations; but to declare that anyone in the vast world who does not accept these conclusions is either a fool or a knave is grotesque. Statesmen must, therefore, display very different qualities and live by ideals far removed from those of the scholars who later interpret them. Pluralism means the acceptance of a multitude of ideals appropriate in different circumstances and for men of different callings. Indeed there are different kinds of statesmen and it would be foolish to judge that one type inspired by one set of ideas is necessarily worse than another type acting under the influence of a different set of ideas. At one point, in describing Roosevelt, Berlin contrasts two types of statesmen, the first consisting of men of single principle and fanatical vision, ignoring men and events and bending them to their powerful will, the second consisting of men who possess delicate antennae which enable them to sense how events are moving and how their fellow citizens feel, to divine where the means lie for effecting what they desire; ‘the distinction I am drawing’, writes Berlin, ‘is not a moral one, not one of value but one of type’. In each category some are noble or attractive, some dubious or deplorable. On the one hand there stand Garibaldi, Trotsky, Parnell, de Gaulle, Woodrow Wilson and Hitler; on the other Bismarck, Lincoln, Lloyd George, Masaryk, Gladstone and Roosevelt.
Immediately we begin to see that many of the moral judgements commonly made about politics are simply untrue. It is not true that good men alone bring dignity and prosperity to their people. But neither is it true, as so-called realists like to argue, that desirable ends in politics are nearly always achieved by employing undesirable means. Honourable and conscientious men have all too often failed ignominiously to govern well, while ruffians and fanatics have imposed law and order upon chaotic conditions and replaced enfeebled popular governments by vigorous despotic regimes. But it is also true that tyrants such as Hitler have died seeing the empire they created crumbling before their eyes, while indomitable leaders such as Ben-Gurion, pursuing justice and independence, lead their compatriots out of the wilderness and die lapped by the waves of their gratitude. Berlin is no Mosca or Michels, the kind of political realist who relishes telling his readers that, if the State is to defy its enemies, society to be stable and the masses happy, the ticket you buy for such a performance will cost you dear in lost liberties, the deaths of innocent creatures and the execution of opponents of the regime. Too high a price and Berlin, like Ivan Karamazov, would return his ticket.1 He is not a party man. He joins no camp and excludes as few visionaries as possible. Both Tolstoy and Marx he considers mistaken but far fuller of truth than of error, and worthy of the deepest respect. Belinsky, a fierce believer in one ideology after another, dedicated to propagating the truth as he saw it, intolerant of anyone whom he considered to be wilfully living a life of error, is most unlike Weizmann, the politician whom Berlin so admires; but the human race would be impoverished without men such as Belinsky. That is why he chooses the éloge as his paradigm. It is a way of expressing the variety of life, or reminding us how in someone who at first sight seems antipathetic or perverse good qualities abound: how the person in question lives by standards entirely appropriate to his calling. For unless society acknowledges that men both do and should live according to different ideals, the men and women within it will not be free.
Like all thinkers of importance Isaiah Berlin writes in a style which is entirely his and his alone and without which he could not express his meaning. In recent years it has become even more personal as he records what he has to say on tape and amends the transcript to produce the final draft. Such a method would be ruinous for most writers; but Berlin’s mind is of such distinction that he thinks and speaks, whether in a room among friends or on the rostrum delivering a lecture, in long periods, clause upon clause, the predicate lengthening out into a profusion of participles, a manner which in the hands of other men would have become a cumbersome imitation of Cicero. He is not a Henry Moore shaping a great mass of stone which relates human beings to the elemental forces of nature. Rather he resembles a Seurat, a pointilliste who peppers his canvas with a fusillade of adjectives, epithets, phrases, analogies, elucidations and explanations so that at last a particular idea, a principle of action, a vision of life emerges before our eyes in all its complexity; and no sooner have we comprehended it than he begins using the same methods to create a conflicting or, it may be, a complementary vision of life, so that by contrast we may understand the first conception better. He will always use two words where one will not do. He has no fear that his reader will get lost in the labyrinth of his sentences because they have the rhythm and the spring of the spoken word. He defends what he calls Churchill’s Johnsonian prose. The self-conscious revival of the style of a bygone age, such as the Gothic Revival, need not be fake; it can be genuine. And Churchill’s prose is a projection of himself and his vision of history, highly coloured, vivid, big, bright, unsubtle, addressed to the world at large, not a vehicle for introspection or the private life, but suffused with deep sentiment for his own country and its place in the hierarchy of nations. Berlin’s style reflects his own sense of values no less faithfully.
For, of course, he is a man with a sharp sense of right and wrong. No one should suppose that a pluralist is a relativist. He is as much entitled to his vision of life as the Catholic or the Marxist. Berlin reminds us that a vision should not be expected to be as precise as an equation.
Nor do we complain of ‘escapism’ or perversion of the facts [he writes] until the categories adopted are thought to do too much violence to the ‘facts’. To interpret, to relate, to classify, to symbolise are those natural and unavoidable human activities which we loosely and conveniently describe as thinking. We complain, if we do, only when the result is too widely at variance with the common outlook of our own society and age and tradition.
That is, not the conventional wisdom or even the accepted beliefs of a culture, but the very concepts and categories in which we can hardly help thinking, being who we are and when and where we exist. What, then, is Isaiah Berlin’s own vision of life and what are the virtues he particularly esteems?
His heart has always been given to the life of the mind and to Oxford. Oxford has sustained him as a scholar and he has tried to repay the debt by helping to found a graduate college and assuming other duties he would not otherwise have willingly performed. He has deliberately chosen to praise men very different in temperament from himself, austere or withdrawn figures, not perhaps noted for their ebullient humour, scholars who thought a day lost if fourteen hours had not been spent in the Bodleian, college men whose minds sucked up like a sponge details in the accounts such as the singular low rate of interest earned by the reserve building fund. He practised pluralism in life: he genuinely admired those who were, like himself, indisputably intellectuals but more severe and dry. Yet even among such he cannot help making us aware that it is useless to expect them all to exhibit the same good qualities. Hubert Henderson and Richard Pares were good college men, but would it not be ludicrous to blame the shy Plamenatz for detesting committees and the noise of repartee in the common room after a feast? And would it not be equally ludicrous to condemn those who liked noise, such as Maurice Bowra, who preferred vehemence to reticence, pleasure to austerity, exuberance to melancholy, intellectual gaiety and the deflating of the establishment, the self-important and the pompous, to pietas and gravitas? High spirits are also part of what a university should prize. Professors such as Felix Frankfurter, effervescent, dispelling the prim self-consciousness that is the bane of academic communities, preferring the company of his younger colleagues to the right-thinking conventional men who consider themselves to be the arbiters of academic life – they too are essential to a great university.
Nowhere does Isaiah Berlin better reveal his commitment to Oxford and the life of the mind than in his incomparable essay on John Austin, worthy to rank with Keynes’s memories of his early beliefs, in which he describes Austin pursuing truth without regard for friend or foe or for the consequences, and with a single-mindedness which Berlin found later only when he got to know Keynes’s mentor G. E. Moore. There will be some who will regard his description of what was actually discussed in that seminar as final proof that British philosophy loses itself in a wilderness of pedantry. They will be wrong. Philosophers of every age, Plato’s disciples, the Schoolmen, Cartesians, Hegelians, have always worked on minute points, or upon sharply defined problems such as perception and epistemology. Berlin is not complacent. Looking back, he thinks those young dons such as himself who took part in Austin’s seminar were too self-centred to publish much. They were gratified enough if one of their points won acceptance from the rest of the group. But, as he says, those who have never believed that they and their colleagues were discovering for the first time new truths which would have profound consequences for their subject, ‘those who have never been under the spell of this kind of illusion, even for a short while, have not known true intellectual happiness’.
Scholars are often bores – even the greatest among them. One day when Berlin was a young man a scholar called on him who was regarded by some people as a genius and by others as a champion among bores. This was Namier and, as Berlin says, ‘He was, in fact, both.’ Not that Berlin was bored. Not even when Namier explained to him slowly and at length, not once but several times, that he was wasting his life because Marx was someone unworthy to occupy his attention and because ideas were merely the product of men’s sub-conscious drives for power, glory, wealth and pleasure, was he cast down. When Namier explained that the reason why England was a Great Power, at once humane and civilised, was precisely that the English recognised how unimportant ideas were and kept intellectuals firmly in their place, he became even more interested and over the years treasured with amusement examples of Namier’s more terrifying insults. For this mounting interest there were two reasons. Unlike other scholars who when told that their subject is worthless write off their persecutor as a maniac, Berlin asked himself why it was that Namier thought as he did and what sort of a man he was. Namier seemed to him to be both the most anti-metaphysical of rationalists, at one with the analyses of Mach and Freud or later of the Vienna circle, yet at the same time a Jew and, like Disraeli, a nationalist and a romantic. What was more he was an East European Jew. What was best he was a Zionist.
From the time that he was a boy at St Paul’s Isaiah Berlin has been a Zionist. This loyalty has inspired some of his finest writing. Some Zionists despise and hate Jews who assimilate successfully to the culture of the country in which they live: but not Berlin. He has no quarrel with the children or grandchildren of those whom Namier called ‘trembling Israelites’, men and women of Jewish descent who have long ceased to tremble, and live happily among their neighbours, accepted for what they are, who are free from envy, anxiety and apprehension and who do not observe Jewish rituals or festivals and indeed may be hostile to religion as such. He may, it is true, regard as faintly odious the contortions of those Jews who attract attention to their origins by their efforts to suppress them, who wince at hearing the name of Zion mentioned and would prefer to be strolling in the Long Room at Lord’s wearing the tie of the Marylebone Cricket Club. Similarly, although he does not seek out their company, he would not decline to talk to those Foreign Office officials whose whole training has been devoted to fostering sound pro-Arab policies and distrust of Israel. He knows well that some of those whom he fascinates harbour in their secret heart mild anti-Semitic views, upper-class people who almost forget he is a Jew because, devoid of anxiety or resentment about the matter, he is as secure in his Jewishness as they are in their cocoon. Indeed he has a keen eye for those snubs, insults, pin-pricks and acts of exclusion to which even now Jews are subjected in ordinary life. Others, smooth as Jacob’s hands, may make light of such things or ignore them; but for him such humiliations convince him of the necessity of the State of Israel. He did not become a Zionist because the Jews should inhabit their natural land promised them by Jehovah. He became a Zionist because he wanted there to be somewhere on earth where Jews are not always in a minority, fearful that, if they did not behave well and ape an alien culture, the Gentiles would despise them – or even murder or expel them. You feel that he speaks for himself when, writing about Weizmann, he notes how ‘martyrs, failures, casualties, victims of circumstance or of their own absurdities – the stock subjects of the mocking, sceptical Jewish humour – filled him with distress and disgust’. The mordant, sophisticated jokes of central European Jews (‘I have bad luck: every time I buy a dwarf it grows’) – jokes full of avant-garde sophistication, cynicism, and vulgarity masking a desperate political fanaticism – are not for him. Again, when he speaks of Weizmann’s love of England, the respect which as an East European Jew he had for its humane democracy, its civil liberty, legal equality, toleration, moderation, dislike of extremes and lack of cruelty, even its taste for the odd and the eccentric, Berlin is saying something about his own love for the country in which his parents settled.
For a few years during the War Berlin worked on the staff of the British Embassy in Washington, and he has measured all the imponderables, the might-have-beens, the swing of the pendulum of fate which led to the collapse of his hopes and those of Weizmann that Britain might have been the willing midwife at the birth of Israel. He never excuses his own misapprehensions but nor does he admit error when in fact despite events he was at the time right.
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