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.
EDITORIAL PREFACE
Henry Hardy
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 a
s 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
Note by Roger Hausheer
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.
INTRODUCTION
Roger Hausheer
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 reje
ction 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.
The Proper Study of Mankind Page 2
