The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  I do not wish to say that individual freedom is, even in the most liberal societies, the sole, or even the dominant, criterion of social action. We compel children to be educated, and we forbid public executions. These are certainly curbs to freedom. We justify them on the ground that ignorance, or a barbarian upbringing, or cruel pleasures and excitements are worse for us than the amount of restraint needed to repress them. This judgement in turn depends on how we determine good and evil, that is to say, on our moral, religious, intellectual, economic and aesthetic values; which are, in their turn, bound up with our conception of man, and of the basic demands of his nature. In other words, our solution of such problems is based on our vision, by which we are consciously or unconsciously guided, of what constitutes a fulfilled human life, as contrasted with Mill’s ‘cramped and dwarfed’, ‘pinched and hidebound’ natures. To protest against the laws governing censorship or personal morals as intolerable infringements of personal liberty presupposes a belief that the activities which such laws forbid are fundamental needs of men as men, in a good (or, indeed, any) society. To defend such laws is to hold that these needs are not essential, or that they cannot be satisfied without sacrificing other values which come higher – satisfy deeper needs – than individual freedom, determined by some standard that is not merely subjective, a standard for which some objective status – empirical or a priori – is claimed.

  The extent of a man’s, or a people’s, liberty to choose to live as he or they desire must be weighed against the claims of many other values, of which equality, or justice, or happiness, or security, or public order are perhaps the most obvious examples. For this reason, it cannot be unlimited. We are rightly reminded by R. H. Tawney that the liberty of the strong, whether their strength is physical or economic, must be restrained. This maxim claims respect, not as a consequence of some a priori rule, whereby the respect for the liberty of one man logically entails respect for the liberty of others like him; but simply because respect for the principles of justice, or shame at gross inequality of treatment, is as basic in men as the desire for liberty. That we cannot have everything is a necessary, not a contingent, truth. Burke’s plea for the constant need to compensate, to reconcile, to balance; Mill’s plea for novel ‘experiments in living’ with their permanent possibility of error – the knowledge that it is not merely in practice but in principle impossible to reach clear-cut and certain answers, even in an ideal world of wholly good and rational men and wholly clear ideas – may madden those who seek for final solutions and single, all-embracing systems, guaranteed to be eternal. Nevertheless, it is a conclusion that cannot be escaped by those who, with Kant, have learnt the truth that ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.’58

  There is little need to stress the fact that monism, and faith in a single criterion, has always proved a deep source of satisfaction both to the intellect and to the emotions. Whether the standard of judgement derives from the vision of some future perfection, as in the minds of the philosophes in the eighteenth century and their technocratic successors in our own day, or is rooted in the past – la terre et les morts – as maintained by German historicists or French theocrats, or neo-Conservatives in English-speaking countries, it is bound, provided it is inflexible enough, to encounter some unforeseen and unforeseeable human development, which it will not fit; and will then be used to justify the a priori barbarities of Procrustes – the vivisection of actual human societies into some fixed pattern dictated by our fallible understanding of a largely imaginary past or a wholly imaginary future. To preserve our absolute categories or ideals at the expense of human lives offends equally against the principles of science and of history; it is an attitude found in equal measure on the right and left wings in our days, and is not reconcilable with the principles accepted by those who respect the facts.

  Pluralism, with the measure of ‘negative’ liberty that it entails, seems to me a truer and more humane ideal than the goals of those who seek in the great disciplined, authoritarian structures the ideal of ‘positive’ self-mastery by classes, or peoples, or the whole of mankind. It is truer, because it does, at least, recognise the fact that human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another. To assume that all values can be graded on one scale, so that it is a mere matter of inspection to determine the highest, seems to me to falsify our knowledge that men are free agents, to represent moral decision as an operation which a slide-rule could, in principle, perform. To say that in some ultimate, all-reconciling, yet realisable synthesis duty is interest, or individual freedom is pure democracy or an authoritarian State, is to throw a metaphysical blanket over either self-deceit or deliberate hypocrisy. It is more humane because it does not (as the system-builders do) deprive men, in the name of some remote, or incoherent, ideal, of much that they have found to be indispensable to their life as unpredictably self-transforming human beings.59 In the end, men choose between ultimate values; they choose as they do because their life and thought are determined by fundamental moral categories and concepts that are, at any rate over large stretches of time and space, a part of their being and thought and sense of their own identity; part of what makes them human.

  It may be that the ideal of freedom to choose ends without claiming eternal validity for them, and the pluralism of values connected with this, is only the late fruit of our declining capitalist civilisation: an ideal which remote ages and primitive societies have not recognised, and one which posterity will regard with curiosity, even sympathy, but little comprehension. This may be so; but no sceptical conclusions seem to me to follow. Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. ‘To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions’, said an admirable writer of our time, ‘and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.’60 To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity.

  1 This essay is based on an Inaugural Lecture delivered in 1958.

  2 Engels in Anti-Dühring (1877–8): Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin, 1956–83), vol. 19, p. 195. Cf. ‘Lettres de Henri Saint-Simon à un américain’, eighth letter, in L’industrie (1817), vol. 1: pp. 182–91 in Oeuvres de Saint-Simon et d’Enfantin (Paris, 1865–78), vol. 18.

  3 I do not, of course, mean to imply the truth of the converse.

  4 Helvétius made this point very clearly: ‘The free man is the man who is not in irons, not imprisoned in a gaol, nor terrorised like a slave by the fear of punishment.’ It is not lack of freedom not to fly like an eagle or swim like a whale. De l’esprit, first discourse, chapter 4.

  5 The Marxist conception of social laws is, of course, the best-known version of this theory, but it forms a large element in some Christian and utilitarian, and all socialist, doctrines.

  6 Émile, book 2: p. 320 in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and others (Paris, 1959– ), vol. 4.

  7 ‘A free man’, said Hobbes, ‘is he that … is not hindered to do what he has a will to.’ Leviathan, chapter 21: p. 146 in Richard Tuck’s edition (Cambridge, 1991). Law is always a fetter, even if it protects you from being bound in chains that are heavier than those of the law, say some more repressive law or custom, or arbitrary despotism or chaos. Bentham says much the same.

  8 R. H. Tawney, Equality (1931), 3rd ed. (London, 1938), chapter 5, section 2, ‘Equality and Liberty’, p. 208 (not in previous editions).

  9 Constant, Principes de politique, chapter 1: p. 275 in Benjamin Constant, De la liberté chez les modernes: écrits politiques, ed. Marcel Gauchet ([Paris], 1980).

  10 J. S. Mill, On Liberty, chapter 1: p. 226 in Collected
Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto/London, 1981–), vol. 18.

  11 ibid., p. 224.

  12 ibid., chapter 3, p. 268.

  13 ibid., pp. 265–6.

  14 ibid., chapter 4, p. 277.

  15 This is but another illustration of the natural tendency of all but a very few thinkers to believe that all the things they hold good must be intimately connected, or at least compatible, with one another. The history of thought, like the history of nations, is strewn with examples of inconsistent, or at least disparate, elements artificially yoked together in a despotic system, or held together by the danger of some common enemy. In due course the danger passes, and conflicts between the allies arise, which often disrupt the system, sometimes to the great benefit of mankind.

  16 See the valuable discussion of this in Michel Villey, Leçons d’histoire de la philosophie du droit (Paris, 1957), which traces the embryo of the notion of subjective rights to Occam.

  17 Christian (and Jewish or Muslim) belief in the absolute authority of divine or natural laws, or in the equality of all men in the sight of God, is very different from belief in freedom to live as one prefers.

  18 Indeed, it is arguable that in the Prussia of Frederick the Great or in the Austria of Joseph II men of imagination, originality and creative genius, and, indeed, minorities of all kinds, were less persecuted and felt the pressure, both of institutions and custom, less heavy upon them than in many an earlier or later democracy.

  19 ‘Negative liberty’ is something the extent of which, in a given case, it is difficult to estimate. It might, prima facie, seem to depend simply on the power to choose between at any rate two alternatives. Nevertheless, not all choices are equally free, or free at all. If in a totalitarian State I betray my friend under threat of torture, perhaps even if I act from fear of losing my job, I can reasonably say that I did not act freely. Nevertheless, I did, of course, make a choice, and could, at any rate in theory, have chosen to be killed or tortured or imprisoned. The mere existence of alternatives is not, therefore, enough to make my action free (although it may be voluntary) in the normal sense of the word. The extent of my freedom seems to depend on (a) how many possibilities are open to me (although the method of counting these can never be more than impressionistic; possibilities of action are not discrete entities like apples, which can be exhaustively enumerated); (b) how easy or difficult each of these possibilities is to actualise; (c) how important in my plan of life, given my character and circumstances, these possibilities are when compared with each other; (d) how far they are closed and opened by deliberate human acts; (e) what value not merely the agent, but the general sentiment of the society in which he lives, puts on the various possibilities. All these magnitudes must be ‘integrated’, and a conclusion, necessarily never precise, or indisputable, drawn from this process. It may well be that there are many incommensurable kinds and degrees of freedom, and that they cannot be drawn up on any single scale of magnitude. Moreover, in the case of societies, we are faced by such (logically absurd) questions as ‘Would arrangement X increase the liberty of Mr A more than it would that of Messrs B, C and D between them, added together?’ The same difficulties arise in applying utilitarian criteria. Nevertheless, provided we do not demand precise measurement, we can give valid reasons for saying that the average subject of the King of Sweden is, on the whole, a good deal freer today [1958] than the average citizen of Spain or Albania. Total patterns of life must be compared directly as wholes, although the method by which we make the comparison, and the truth of the conclusions, are difficult or impossible to demonstrate. But the vagueness of the concepts, and the multiplicity of the criteria involved, are attributes of the subject-matter itself, not of our imperfect methods of measurement, or of incapacity for precise thought.

  20 ‘The ideal of true freedom is the maximum of power for all members of human society alike to make the best of themselves’, said T. H. Green in 1881. Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract: p. 200 in T. H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Writings, ed. Paul Harris and John Morrow (Cambridge, 1986). Apart from the confusion of freedom with equality, this entails that if a man chose some immediate pleasure – which (in whose view?) would not enable him to make the best of himself (what self?) – what he was exercising was not ‘true’ freedom: and if deprived of it, he would not lose anything that mattered. Green was a genuine liberal: but many a tyrant could use this formula to justify his worst acts of oppression.

  21 ‘A wise man, though he be a slave, is at liberty, and from this it follows that though a fool rule, he is in slavery’, said St Ambrose. It might equally well have been said by Epictetus or Kant. Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 82, part 1, ed. Otto Faller (Vienna, 1968), letter 7, § 24 (p. 55).

  22 Social Contract, book 1, chapter 8: p. 365 in Oeuvres complètes (op. cit., p. 195 above, note 2), vol. 3; cf. Constant, op. cit. (p. 198 above, note 1), p. 272.

  23 op. cit. (p. 16 above, note 1), vol. 8, p. 290, line 27, and p. 291, line 3.

  24 ‘Proletarian coercion, in all its forms, from executions to forced labour, is, paradoxical as it may sound, the method of moulding communist humanity out of the human material of the capitalist period.’ These lines by the Bolshevik leader Nikolay Bukharin, especially the term ‘human material’, vividly convey this attitude. Nikolay Bukharin, Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda [Economics in the Transitional Period] (Moscow, 1920), chapter 10, p. 146.

  25 Kant’s psychology, and that of the Stoics and Christians too, assumed that some element in man – the ‘inner fastness of his mind’ – could be made secure against conditioning. The development of the techniques of hypnosis, ‘brain washing’, subliminal suggestion and the like has made this a priori assumption, at least as an empirical hypothesis, less plausible.

  26 op. cit. (p. 195 above, note 2), p.309.

  27 It is not perhaps far-fetched to assume that the quietism of the Eastern sages was, similarly, a response to the despotism of the great auotocracies, and flourished at periods when individuals were apt to be humiliated, or at any rate ignored or ruthlessly managed, by those possessed of the instruments of physical coercion.

  28 It is worth remarking that those who demanded – and fought for – liberty for the individual or for the nation in France during this period of German quietism did not fall into this attitude. Might this not be precisely because, despite the despotism of the French monarchy and the arrogance and arbitrary behaviour of privileged groups in the French State, France was a proud and powerful nation, where the reality of political power was not beyond the grasp of men of talent, so that withdrawal from battle into some untroubled heaven above it, whence it could be surveyed dispassionately by the self-sufficient philosopher, was not the only way out? The same holds for England in the nineteenth century and well after it, and for the United States today.

  29 Or, as some modern theorists maintain, because I have, or could have, invented them for myself, since the rules are man-made.

  30 In practice even more than in theory.

  31 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, chapter 16: p. 137 in Benedict de Spinoza, The Political Works, ed. A. G. Wernham (Oxford, 1958).

  32 Two Treatises of Government, second treatise, § 57.

  33 ibid., §§ 6, 163.

  34 De l’esprit des lois, book 11, chapter 3: p. 205 in Oeuvres complètes de Montesquieu, ed. A. Masson (Paris, 1950–5), vol. 1 A.

  35 Appeal from the Old to the New Whigs (1791): pp. 93–4 in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (World's Classics edition), vol. 5 (London, 1907).

  36 On this Bentham seems to me to have said the last word: ‘The liberty of doing evil, is it not liberty? If it is not liberty, what is it then? … Do we not say that liberty should be taken away from fools, and wicked persons, because they abuse it?’ The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh, 1843), vol. 1, p. 301. Compare with this the view of the Jacobins in the same period, discus
sed by Crane Brinton in ‘Political Ideas in the Jacobin Clubs’, Political Science Quarterly 43 (1928), 249–64, esp. p. 257: ‘no man is free in doing evil. To prevent him is to free him.’ This view is echoed in almost identical terms by British Idealists at the end of the following century.

  37 Social Contract, book 1, chapter 6: p. 361 in Oeuvres complètes (op. cit., p. 195 above, note 2), vol. 3.

  38 op. cit. (p. 16 above, note 1), vol. 6, p. 316, line 2.

  39 op. cit. (p. 219 above, note 3), ibid.: ‘every law is contrary to liberty’.

  40 Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Sämmtliche Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte (Berlin, 1845–6), vol. 7, p. 576.

  41 ibid., p. 574.

  42 ibid., p. 578.

  43 ibid., p. 576.

  44 ibid., pp. 578, 580.

  45 ‘To compel men to adopt the right form of government, to impose Right on them by force, is not only the right, but the sacred duty of every man who has both the insight and the power to do so.’ ibid., vol. 4, p. 436.

  46 See Plan des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société (1822): p. 53 in Auguste Comte, Appendice général du système de politique positive (Paris, 1854), published as part of vol. 4 of Système de politique positive (Paris, 1851–4). [Mill quotes this passage in Auguste Comte and Positivism: pp. 301–2 in his Collected Works (op. cit., p. 199 above, note 1), vol. 10. H.H.]