The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  The world of natural science is the world of the external observer noting as carefully and dispassionately as he can the compresence or succession (or lack of it), or the extent of correlation, of empirical characteristics. In formulating a scientific hypothesis I must, at least in theory, start from the initial assumption that, for all I know, anything might occur next door to, or before or after, or simultaneously with, anything else; nature is full of surprises; I must take as little as possible for granted; it is the business of natural science to establish general laws recording what most often or invariably does occur. But in human affairs, in the interplay of men with one another, of their feelings, thoughts, choices, ideas about the world or each other or themselves, it would be absurd (and, if pushed to extremes, impossible) to start in this manner. I do not start from an ignorance which leaves all doors – or as many of them as possible – open, for here I am not primarily an external observer, but myself an actor; I understand other human beings, and what it is to have motives, feelings, or follow rules, because I am human myself, and because to be active – that is, to want, intend, make plans, speculate, do, react to others self-consciously, be aware of my situation vis-à-vis other conscious beings and the non-human environment – is eo ipso to be engaged in a constant fitting of fragments of reality into the single all-embracing pattern that I assume to hold for others besides myself, and which I call reality. When, in fact, I am successful in this – when the fragments seem to me to fit – we call this an explanation; when in fact they do fit, I am called rational; if they fit badly, if my sense of harmony is largely a delusion, I am called irrational, fanciful, distraught, silly; if they do not fit at all, I am called mad.

  So much for differences in method. But there is also a profound difference of aim between scientific and historical studies. What they seek for is not the same. Let me illustrate this with a simple example. Supposing that we look at an average, unsophisticated European or American school text of modern European history that offers a sample of the kind of elementary historical writing upon which most of us have been brought up. Let us consider the kind of account that one finds (or used to find) in routine works of this type of, say, the causes of the French Revolution. It is not unusual to be told that among them were – to give the headings – (i) the oppression of French peasants by the aristocracy, the Church, the King etc.; (ii) the disordered state of French finances; (iii) the weak character or the stupidity of Louis XVI; (iv) the subversive influence of the writings of Voltaire, the Encyclopaedists, Rousseau and other writers; (v) the mounting frustration of the ambitions of the economically rising French bourgeoisie, barred from its proper share of political power; and so on. One may reasonably protest against the crudity and naïvety of such treatments of history: Tolstoy has provided some very savage and entertaining parodies of it and its practitioners.9 But if one’s main anxiety is to convert history into a science, one’s indignation should take a different and much more specific form. One should declare that what is here manifested is a grotesque confusion of categories, an outrage to scientific method. For the analysis of the condition of the peasants belongs to the science of economics, or perhaps of social history; that of French fiscal policy to the science of public finance, which is not primarily a historical study, but one founded (according to some) on timeless principles; the weakness of the King’s character or intellect is a matter for individual psychology (or biography); the influence of Voltaire and Rousseau belongs to the history of ideas; the pressure of the middle classes is a sociological topic; and so forth. Each of these disciplines must surely possess its own factual content, methods, canons, concepts, categories, logical structure. To heap them into one, and reel off a list of causes, as if they all belonged to the same level and type, is intellectually scandalous: the rope composed of these wholly heterogeneous strands must at once be unwound; each of the strands must then be treated separately in its proper logical box. Such should be the reaction of someone who takes seriously the proposition that history is, or at any rate should be, a natural science or a combination of such sciences. Yet the truth about history – perhaps the most important truth of all – is that general history is precisely this amalgam, a rich brew composed of apparently disparate ingredients, that we do in fact think of these different causes as factors in a single unitary sequence – the history of the French nation or French society during a particular segment of time – and that although there may be great profit to be gained from detaching this or that element of a single process for analysis in a specialised laboratory, yet to treat them as if they were genuinely separate, insulated streams which do not compose a single river is a far wilder departure from what we think history to be than the indiscriminate compounding of them into one string of causes, as is done in the simple-minded schoolbooks.

  History is what historians do, and what at any rate some historians aim at is to answer those who wish to be told what important changes occurred in French public life between 1789 and 1794, and why they took place. We wish, ideally at any rate, to be presented, if not with a total experience – which is a logical as well as a practical impossibility – at least with something full enough and concrete enough to meet our conception of public life (itself an abstraction, but not a deductive schema, not an artificially constructed model), seen from as many points of view and at as many levels as possible, including as many components, factors, aspects as the widest and deepest knowledge, the greatest analytical power, insight, imagination can present. If we are told that this cannot be achieved by a natural science – that is, by the application of models to reality, because models can only function if their subject-matter is relatively ‘thin’, consisting as it does of deliberately isolated strands of experience, and not ‘thick’, that is, not with the texture constituted by the interwoven strands – then history, if it is set on dealing with the compound and not some meticulously selected ingredient of it, as it must be, will, in this sense, not be a science after all. A scientific cast of mind is seldom found together with historical curiosity or historical talent. We can make use of the techniques of the natural sciences to establish dates, order events in time and space, exclude untenable hypotheses and suggest new explanatory factors (as sociology, psychology, economics, medicine have so notably done), but the function of all these techniques, indispensable as they are today, can be no more than ancillary, for they are determined by their specific models, and are consequently ‘thin’, whereas what the great historians sought to describe and analyse and explain is necessarily ‘thick’; that is the essence of history, its purpose, its pride, and its reason for existence.

  History, and other accounts of human life, are at times spoken of as being akin to art. What is usually meant is that writing about human life depends to a large extent on descriptive skill, style, lucidity, choice of examples, distribution of emphasis, vividness of characterisation, and the like. But there is a profounder sense in which the historian’s activity is an artistic one. Historical explanation is to a large degree arrangement of the discovered facts in patterns which satisfy us because they accord with life – the variety of human experience and activity – as we know it and can imagine it. That is the difference that distinguishes the humane studies – Geisteswissenschaften – from those of nature. When these patterns contain central concepts or categories that are ephemeral, or confined to trivial or unfamiliar aspects of human experience, we speak of such explanations as shallow, or inadequate, or eccentric, and find them unsatisfactory on those grounds. When these concepts are of wide scope, permanent, familiar, common to many men and many civilisations, we experience a sense of reality and dependability that derives from this very fact, and regard the explanation as well-founded, serious, satisfactory. On some occasions (seldom enough) the explanation not only involves, but reveals, basic categories of universal import, which, once they are forced upon consciousness, we recognise as underlying all our experience; yet so closely interwoven are they with all that we are and feel, and there
fore so totally taken for granted, that to touch them at all is to communicate a shock to the entire system; the shock is one of recognition and one that may upset us, as is liable to happen when something deep-set and fundamental that has lain unquestioned and in darkness is suddenly illuminated or prised out of its frame for closer inspection. When this occurs, and especially when the categories thus uncovered seem applicable to field after field of human activity, without apparent limits – so that we cannot tell how far they may yet extend – we call such explanations profound, fundamental, revolutionary, and those who proffer them – Vico, Kant, Marx, Freud – men of depth of insight and genius.

  This kind of historical explanation is related to moral and aesthetic analysis, in so far as it presupposes conceiving of human beings not merely as organisms in space, the regularities of whose behaviour can be described and locked in labour-saving formulae, but as active beings, pursuing ends, shaping their own and others’ lives, feeling, reflecting, imagining, creating, in constant interaction and intercommunication with other human beings; in short, engaged in all the forms of experience that we understand because we share in them, and do not view them purely as external observers. This is what is called the inside view: and it renders possible and indeed inescapable explanation whose primary function is not to predict or extrapolate, or even control, but fit the loose and fleeting objects of sense, imagination, intellect into the central succession of patterns that we call normal, and which is the ultimate criterion of reality as against illusion, incoherence, fiction. History is merely the mental projection into the past of this activity of selection and adjustment, the search for coherence and unity, together with the attempt to refine it with all the self-consciousness of which we are capable, by bringing to its aid everything that we conceive to be useful – all the sciences, all the knowledge and skills, and all the theories that we have acquired, from whatever quarter. This, indeed, is why we speak of the importance of allowing for imponderables in forming historical judgement, or of the faculty of judgement that seems mysterious only to those who start from the preconception that their induction, deduction and sense perception are the only legitimate sources of, or at least certified methods justifying claims to, knowledge. Those who, without mystical undertones, insist on the importance of common sense, or knowledge of life, or width of experience, or breadth of sympathy or imagination, or natural wisdom, or ‘depth’ of insight – all normal and empirical attributes – are suspected of seeming to smuggle in some kind of illicit, metaphysical faculty only because the exercise of these gifts has relatively little value for those who deal with inanimate matter, for physicists or geologists. Capacity for understanding people’s characters, knowledge of ways in which they are likely to react to one another, ability to ‘enter into’ their motives, their principles, the movement of their thoughts and feelings (and this applies no less to the behaviour of masses or to the growth of cultures) – these are the talents that are indispensable to historians, but not (or not to such a degree) to natural scientists. The capacity for knowing which is like knowing someone’s character or face is as essential to historians as knowledge of facts. Without sufficient knowledge of facts a historical construction may be no more than a coherent fiction, a work of the romantic imagination; it goes without saying that if its claim to be true is to be sustained, it must be, as the generalisations which it incorporates must in their turn be, tethered to reality by verification of the facts, as in any natural science. Nevertheless, even though in this ultimate sense what is meant by ‘real’ and ‘true’ is identical in science, in history and in ordinary life, yet the differences remain as great as the similarities.

  This notion of what historians are doing when they are explaining may cast light also upon something that was mentioned earlier; namely, the idea of the inexorable succession of the stages of development, which made it not merely erroneous but absurd to suppose that Hamlet could have been written at the court of Genghis Khan, or that Richelieu could have pursued the policies realised by Bismarck. For this kind of certainty is not something that we derive from a careful inductive investigation of conditions in Outer Mongolia, as opposed to those of Elizabethan England, or of the political relations between the great powers in the nineteenth century as opposed to those in the seventeenth, but from a more fundamental sense of what goes with what. We conceive of historical succession as being akin to that of the growth of the individual personality; to suggest that a child thinks or wills or acts like an old man, or vice versa, is something that we reject on the basis of our own direct experience (I mean by this not introspection, but knowledge of life – something that springs from interaction with others and with the surrounding environment and constitutes the sense of reality). Our conception of a civilisation is analogous to this. We do not feel it necessary to enumerate all the specific ways in which a wild nomad differs from a European of the Renaissance, or ask ourselves why it is that – what inductive evidence we have for the contingent proposition that – the culture of the Renaissance is not merely different from, but represents a more mature phase of human growth than, that of Outer Mongolia two thousand years ago. The proposition that the culture of the Renaissance not merely did not precede, but cannot have preceded, the nomadic stage in the continuous development that we call a single culture, is something bound up so closely with our conception of how men live, of what societies are, of how they develop, indeed of the very meaning of the concept of man, growth, society, that it is logically prior to our investigations and not their goal or product. It is not so much that it stands in no need of justification by their methods or results, as that it is logically absurd to bolster it up in this way. For this reason one might hesitate to call such knowledge empirical, for it is not confirmable or corrigible by the normal empirical methods, in relation to which it functions as base – as a frame of reference. But neither, of course, is it a priori (as Vico and Hegel, who showed original insight into the matter, sometimes imply) if by that is meant that it is obtainable in some special, non-natural way. Recognition of the fundamental categories of human experience differs from both the acquisition of empirical information and deductive reasoning; such categories are logically prior to either, and are least subject to change among the elements that constitute our knowledge. Yet they are not unalterable; and we can ask ourselves to what degree this or that change in them would affect our experience. It is possible, although ex hypothesi not easy, to conceive of beings whose fundamental categories of thought or perception radically differ from ours; the greater such differences, the harder it will be for us to communicate with them; or, if the process goes further, to regard them as being human or sentient; or, if the process goes far enough, to conceive of them at all.

  It is a corollary of this that one of the difficulties that beset historians and do not plague natural scientists is that of reconstructing what occurred in the past in terms not merely of our own concepts and categories, but also of how such events must have looked to those who participated in or were affected by them – psychological facts that in their turn themselves influenced events. It is difficult enough to develop an adequate consciousness of what we are and what we are at, and how we have arrived where we have done, without also being called upon to make clear to ourselves what such consciousness and self-consciousness must have been like for persons in situations different from our own; yet no less is expected of the true historian. Chemists and physicists are not obliged to investigate the states of mind of Lavoisier or Boyle; still less of the unenlightened mass of men. Mathematicians need not worry themselves with the general outlook of Euclid or Newton. Economists qua economists need not grasp the inner vision of Adam Smith or Keynes, still less of their less gifted contemporaries. But it is the inescapable business of the historian who is more than a compiler or the slave of a doctrine or a party to ask himself not merely what occurred (in the sense of publicly observable events), but also how the situation looked to various representative Greeks or Romans, or to Alexa
nder or Julius Caesar, and above all to Thucydides, Tacitus or anonymous medieval chroniclers, or to Englishmen or Germans in the sixteenth century, or Frenchmen in 1789 or Russians in 1917, or to Luther, or Cromwell, or Robespierre or Lenin.

  This kind of imaginative projection of ourselves into the past, the attempt to capture concepts and categories that differ from those of the investigator by means of concepts and categories that cannot but be his own, is a task that he can never be sure that he is even beginning to achieve, yet is not permitted to abjure. He seeks to apply scientific tests to his conclusions, but this will take him only a little way. For it is a commonplace by now that the frontiers between fact and interpretation are blurred and shifting, and that what is fact from one perspective is interpretation from another. Even if chemical and palaeographic and archaeological methods yield some hard pebbles of indubitable fact, we cannot evade the task of interpretation, for nothing counts as a historical interpretation unless it attempts to answer the question of how the world must have looked to other individuals or societies if their acts and words are to be taken as the acts and words of human beings neither wholly like ourselves nor so different as not to fit into our common past. Without a capacity for sympathy and imagination beyond any required by a physicist there is no vision of either past or present, neither of others nor of ourselves; but where it is wholly lacking, ordinary thinking – as well as historical thinking – cannot function at all.

  The contrast which I am trying to draw is not that between the two permanently opposed but complementary human demands: one for unity and homogeneity, the other for diversity and heterogeneity, which Kant has made so clear.10 The contrast I mean is one between different types of knowledge. When the Jews are enjoined in the Bible to protect strangers, ‘for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt’,11 this knowledge is neither deductive, nor inductive, nor founded on direct inspection, but akin to the ‘I know’ of ‘I know what it is to be hungry and poor’, or ‘I know how political bodies function’, or ‘I know what it is to be a Brahmin.’ This is neither (to make use of Gilbert Ryle’s useful classification) the ‘knowing that’ which the sciences provide, nor the ‘knowing how’ which is the possession of a disposition or skill, nor the knowledge of direct perception, acquaintance, memory, but the type of knowledge that an administrator or politician must possess of the men with whom he deals. If the historian (or, for that matter, the contemporary commentator on events) is endowed with this too poorly, if he can fall back only on inductive techniques, then, however accurate his discoveries of fact, they remain those of an antiquarian, a chronicler, at best an archaeologist, but not those of a historian. It is not only erudition or belief in theories of human behaviour that enabled Marx or Namier to write history of the first order.