The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  The proposition that sciences deal with the type, not the individual, was accepted and indeed insisted upon by those philosophical historians, particularly in France, who desired to assimilate their activities to those of scientists. When Renan, or Taine, or Monod preached the necessity of scientific history, they did not merely mean (as I suspect that, for example, Bury did) that historians should seek to be precise, or exercise rigour in observation or reasoning, or apply the findings of the natural sciences to the explanation of human action or experience wherever possible, or that they should grind no axe but that of objective truth, and state it without qualification whatever the moral or social or political consequences. They claimed much more. Taine states this point of view clearly, when he declares that historians work with samples:

  What was there in France in the eighteenth century? Twenty million men … twenty million threads the criss-crossing of which makes a web. This immense web, with innumerable knots, cannot be grasped clearly in its entirety by anyone’s memory or imagination. Indeed all we have is mere fragments … the historian’s sole task is to restore them – he reconstructs the wisps of the threads that he can see so as to connect them with the myriad threads that have vanished … Fortunately, in the past as now, society included groups, each group consisting of men who were like one another, born in the same condition, moulded by the same education, moved by the same interests, with the same needs, same tastes, same moeurs, same culture, same basis to their lives. In seeing one, you have seen all. In every science we study each class of facts by means of chosen samples.

  He goes on to say that one must enter into the private life of a man, his beliefs, sentiments, habits, behaviour. Such a sample will give us

  insight into the force and direction of the current that carries forward the whole of his society. The monograph, then, is the historian’s best tool: he plunges it into the past like a lancet and draws it out charged with complete and authentic specimens. One understands a period after twenty or thirty such soundings: only they must be carried out and interpreted correctly.7

  This is characteristic of the high tide of positivist optimism in which truth is mixed with error. No doubt it is true that our only key to understanding a culture or an age is the detailed study of the lives of representative individuals or families or groups. We cannot examine all the acts and thoughts of all (or even a large number) of the human beings alive during the age in question (or any other age): we generalise from samples. We integrate the results of such generalisations into what Taine calls the total ‘web’. In ‘reconstructing’ the ‘vanished threads’ we make use of chemistry, astronomy, geology, palaeontology, epigraphy, psychology, every scientific method known to us. But the objective of all this is to understand the relation of parts to wholes, not, as Taine believed, of instance to general law. In a natural science – physics and zoology, economics and sociology – our aim is to construct a model (‘the meson’, ‘the mammal’, ‘the monopolistic firm’, ‘the alienated proletarian’) which we can apply, with which we can reach out into the unknown past or future with a fair degree of confidence in the result; for the central criterion of whether or not a study is a true science is its capacity to infer the unknown from the known. The process that Taine describes is not this at all; it is reconstruction in terms of a pattern, an interrelated social whole, obtained from ‘entering into’ individual human lives, provided that they turn out to be ‘typical’ – that is, significant or characteristic beyond themselves. The recognition of what is characteristic and representative, of what is a ‘good’ sample suitable for being generalised, and, above all, of how the generalisations fit in with each other – that is the exercise of judgement, a form of thinking dependent on wide experience, memory, imagination, on the sense of ‘reality’, of what goes with what, which may need constant control by, but is not at all identical with, the capacity for logical reasoning and the construction of laws and scientific models – the capacity for perceiving the relations of particular case to law, instance to general rule, theorems to axioms, not of parts to wholes or fragments to completed patterns. I do not mean that these are incompatible ‘faculties’ capable of functioning in isolation from each other. Only that the gifts are dissimilar, that the qualitative distinctions and similiarities are not reducible without residue to quantitative ones, that the capacity for perceiving the former is not translatable into models, and that Buckle and Comte and Taine and Engels and their cruder or more extremist modern disciples, when they bandy the word ‘scientific’, are sometimes blind to this, and so lead men astray.

  Let me put this in yet another way. Every student of historiography knows that many of the major achievements of modern historians come from their practice of certain rules, which the more reflective among them sometimes express in advice to practitioners of this craft. Historical students are told not to pay too much attention to personal factors or heroic and unusual figures in human history. They are told to attend to the lives of ordinary men, or to economic considerations or social factors or irrational impulses or traditional, collective and unconscious springs of action; or not to forget such impersonal, inconspicuous, dull, slowly or imperceptibly altering factors of change as erosion of the soil, or systems of irrigation and drainage, which may be more influential than spectacular victories, or catastrophic events, or acts of genius; they are told not to allow themselves to be carried away by the desire to be entertaining or paradoxical, or over-rationalistic, or to point a moral or demonstrate a theory; and much else of this kind. What justifies such maxims? They do not follow automatically from the rules of the deductive or inductive disciplines; they are not even rules of specialised techniques (like, say, the a fortiori principle in rhetoric, or that of difficilior lectio in textual criticism). What logical or technical rules can be laid down for determining precisely what, in a given situation, is due to rational or purposive, and what to ‘senseless’ or irrational, factors, how much to personal action, how much to impersonal forces? If anyone supposes that such rules can be drawn up, let him attempt to do so. It seems plain that such maxims are simply distillations of generalised sagacity – of practical judgement founded on observation, intelligence, imagination, on empirical insight, knowledge of what can and what cannot be, something that resembles a skill or gift more than it does factual knowledge8 but is not identical with either; a capability of the highest value to action (in this case to mental labour) which scientific techniques can direct, aid, sharpen, criticise, radically correct, but never replace.

  All this may be no more than another way of saying something trite but true – that the business of a science is to concentrate on similarities, not differences, to be general, to omit whatever is not relevant to answering the severely delimited questions that it sets itself to ask; while those historians who are concerned with a field wider than the specialised activities of men are interested at least as much in the opposite: in that which differentiates one thing, person, situation, age, pattern of experience, individual or collective, from another. When such historians attempt to account for and explain, say, the French Revolution, the last thing that they seek to do is to concentrate only on those characteristics which the French Revolution has in common with other revolutions, to abstract only common recurrent characteristics, to formulate a law on the basis of them, or at any rate a hypothesis, from which something about the pattern of all revolutions as such (or, more modestly, all European revolutions), and therefore of this revolution in particular, could in principle be reliably inferred. This, if it were feasible, would be the task of sociology, which would then stand to history as a ‘pure’ science to its application. The validity of the claim of this type of sociology to the status of a natural science is another story, and not directly related to history, whose tasks are different. The immediate purpose of narrative historians (as has often been repeated), whatever else it may be besides this, is to paint a portrait of a situation or a process, which, like all portraits, seeks to capture the unique
patterns and peculiar characteristics of its particular subject; not to be an X-ray which eliminates all but what a great many subjects have in common. This is, by now, a truism, but its bearing on the possibility of transforming history into a natural science has not always been clearly perceived. Two great thinkers understood this, and grappled with the problem: Leibniz and Hegel. Both made heroic efforts to bridge the gulf by such doctrines as those of ‘individual essences’ and ‘concrete universals’ – a desperate dialectical attempt to fuse together individuality and universality. The imaginative brilliance of the metaphysical constructions in which the passage of the Rubicon is deducible from the essence of Julius Caesar, or the even more ambitious inevitabilities of the Phenomenology, and their failure, serves to indicate the central character of the problem.

  One way of appreciating this contrast is by examining two uses of the humble word ‘because’. Max Weber, whose discussion of this problem is extraordinarily illuminating, asked himself under what conditions I accept an explanation of a given individual action or attitude as adequate, and whether these conditions are the same as those that are required in the natural sciences – that is to say, he tried to analyse what is meant by rational explanation in these contrasted fields. If I understand him correctly, the type of argument he uses goes somewhat as follows: Supposing that a doctor informs me that his patient recovered from pneumonia because he was injected with penicillin, what rational grounds have I for accepting this ‘because’? My belief is rational only if I have rational grounds for believing the general proposition ‘Penicillin is effective against pneumonia’, a causal proposition established by experiment and observation, which there is no reason to accept unless, in fact, it has been arrived at by valid methods of scientific inference. No amount of general reflection would justify my accepting this general proposition (or its application in a given case) unless I know that it has been or could be experimentally verified. The ‘because’ in this case indicates a claim that a de facto correlation between penicillin and pneumonia has, in fact, been established. I may find this correlation surprising or I may not; this does not affect its reality; scientific investigation – the logic of which, we now think, is hypothetico-deductive – establishes its truth or probability; and this is the end of the matter.

  If, on the other hand, I am told, in the course of a historical narrative (or in a work of fiction, or ordinary life) that x resented the behaviour of y, because x was weak and y was arrogant and strong; or that x forgave the insult he had received from y, because he was too fond of y to feel aggrieved; and if, having accepted these ‘because’ statements as adequate explanations of the behaviour of x and y, I am then challenged to produce the general law which I am leaning on, consciously or not, to ‘cover’ these cases, what would it be reasonable for me to reply? I may well produce something like ‘The weak often resent the arrogant and strong’, or ‘Human beings forgive insults from those they love.’ But supposing I am then asked what concrete evidence I have for the truth of these general propositions, what scientific experiments I or others have performed to establish these generalisations, how many observed and tested cases they rest on, I may well be at a loss to answer. Even if I am able to cite examples from my own or others’ experience of the attitude of the weak to the strong, or of the behaviour of persons capable of love and friendship, I may be scornfully told by a psychologist – or any other devotee of strict scientific method – that the number of instances I have produced is ludicrously insufficient to be adequate evidence for a generalisation of such scope; that no respectable science would accept these few positive or negative instances, which, moreover, have not been observed under scientific conditions, as a basis for serious claims to formulate laws; that such procedures are impressionistic, vague, pre-scientific, unworthy to be reckoned as ground for a scientific hypothesis. And I may further be told that what cannot enter a natural science cannot be called fully rational, but only an approximation to it (an ‘explanation sketch’).

  Implicit in this approach is Descartes’ criterion, the setting up of the methods of mathematics (or physics) as the standard for all rational thought. Nevertheless, the explanation that I have given in terms of the normal attitude of the weak to the strong, or of friends to one another, would, of course, be accepted by most rational beings (writers and readers of history among them) as an adequate explanation of the behaviour of a given individual in the relevant situation. This kind of explanation may not be admissible in a treatise on natural science, but in dealing with others, or describing their actions, we accept it as being both normal and reasonable; neither as inescapably shallow, or shamefully unexamined, or doubtful, nor as necessarily needing support from the laboratory. We may, of course, in any given case, be mistaken – mistaken about particular facts to be accounted for, about the attitudes of the relevant individuals to one another, or in taking for granted the generalisations implicit in our judgement; these may well be in need of correction from psychologists or sociologists. But because we may be in error in a given instance, it does not follow that this type of explanation is always systematically at fault, and should or could always be replaced by something more searching, more inductive, more like the type of evidence that is alone admitted in, say, biology.

  If we probe further and ask why it is that such explanations – such uses of ‘because’ – are accepted in history, and what is meant by saying that it is rational to accept them, the answer must surely be that what in ordinary life we call adequate explanations often rest not on specific pieces of scientific reasoning, but on our experience in general, on our capacity for understanding the habits of thought and action that are embodied in human attitudes and behaviour, on what is called knowledge of life, sense of reality. If someone tells us ‘x forgave y because he loved him’ or ‘x killed y because he hated him’, we accept these propositions easily, because they, and the propositions into which they can be generalised, fit in with our experience, because we claim to know what men are like, not, as a rule, by careful observation of them as psychological specimens (as Taine recommends), or as members of some strange tribe whose behaviour is obscure to us and can only be inferred from (preferably controlled) observation, but because we claim to know (not always justifiably) what – in essentials – a human being is, in particular a human being who belongs to a civilisation not too unlike our own, and consequently one who thinks, wills, feels, acts in a manner which (rightly or wrongly) we assume to be intelligible to us because it sufficiently resembles our own or those of other human beings whose lives are intertwined with our own.

  This sort of ‘because’ is the ‘because’ neither of induction nor of deduction, but the ‘because’ of understanding – Verstehen – of recognition of a given piece of behaviour as being part and parcel of a pattern of activity which we can follow, which we can remember or imagine, and which we describe in terms of the general laws which cannot possibly all be rendered explicit (still less organised into a system), but without which the texture of normal human life – social or personal – is not conceivable. We make mistakes; we may be shallow, unobservant, naïve, unimaginative, not allow enough for unconscious motives, or unintended consequences, or the play of chance or some other factor; we may project the present into the past or assume uncritically that the basic categories and concepts of our civilisation apply to remote or dissimilar cultures which they do not fit. But although any one explanation, or use of ‘because’ and ‘therefore’, may be rejected or shaken for any of these or a hundred other reasons (which scientific discoveries in, say, physics or psychology, running against the complacent assumptions of common sense, may well provide), all such explanations cannot be rejected in toto in favour of inductive procedures derived from the natural sciences, because that would cut the ground from beneath our feet: the context in which we think, act, expect to be understood or responded to, would be destroyed.

  When I understand a sentence which someone utters, my claim to know what he means is not, as
a rule, based on an inductively reached conclusion that the statistical probability is that the noises he emits are, in fact, related and expressive in the way that I take them to be – a conclusion derived from a comparison of the sounds he utters with a great many other sounds that a great many other beings have uttered in corresponding situations in the past. This must not be confused with the fact that, if pressed to justify my claim, I could conduct an experiment which would do something to support my belief. Nevertheless, my belief is usually a good deal stronger than that which any process of reasoning that I may perform with a view to bolstering it up would, in a natural science, be held to justify. Yet we do not for this reason regard such claims to understanding as being less rational than scientific convictions, still less as being arbitrary. When I say that I realise that x forgave y because he loved him or was too good-natured to bear a grudge, what I am ultimately appealing to is my own (or my society’s) experience and imagination, my (or my associates’) knowledge of what such relationships have been and can be. This knowledge, whether it is my own, or taken by me on trust – accepted uncritically – may often be inadequate, and may lead me to commit blunders – a Freudian or a Marxist may open my eyes to much that I had not yet understood – but if all such knowledge were rejected unless it could pass scientific tests, I could not think or act at all.