The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  Indeed he was very different from Wilson. For they represent two contrasting types of statesman, in each of which occasionally men of compelling stature appear. The first kind of statesman is essentially a man of single principle and fanatical vision. Possessed by his own bright, coherent dream, he usually understands neither people nor events. He has no doubts or hesitations and by concentration of will-power, directness and strength he is able to ignore a great deal of what goes on outside him. This very blindness and stubborn self-absorption occasionally, in certain situations, enable him to bend events and men to his own fixed pattern. His strength lies in the fact that weak and vacillating human beings, themselves too insecure or incapable of deciding between alternatives, find relief and peace and strength in submitting to the leadership of a single leader of superhuman size, to whom all issues are clear, whose universe consists entirely of primary colours, mostly black and white, and who marches towards his goal looking neither to right nor to left, buoyed up by the violent vision within him. Such men differ widely in moral and intellectual quality, and, like forces of nature, do both good and harm in the world. To this type belong Garibaldi, Trotsky, Parnell, de Gaulle, perhaps Lenin too – the distinction I am drawing is not a moral one, not one of value but one of type. There are great benefactors, like Wilson, as well as fearful evil-doers, like Hitler, within this category.

  The other kind of effective statesman is a naturally political being, as the simple hero is often explicitly anti-political and comes to rescue men, at least ostensibly, from the subtleties and frauds of political life. Politicians of this second type possess antennae of the greatest possible delicacy, which convey to them, in ways difficult or impossible to analyse, the perpetually changing contours of events and feelings and human activities round them – they are gifted with a peculiar, political sense fed on a capacity to take in minute impressions, to integrate a vast multitude of small evanescent unseizable detail, such as artists possess in relation to their material. Statesmen of this type know what to do and when to do it, if they are to achieve their ends, which themselves are usually not born within some private world of inner thought, or introverted feeling, but are the crystallisation, the raising to great intensity and clarity, of what a large number of their fellow citizens are thinking and feeling in some dim, inarticulate, but nevertheless persistent fashion. In virtue of this capacity to judge their material, very much as a sculptor knows what can be moulded out of wood and what out of marble, and how and when, they resemble doctors who have a natural gift for curing, which does not directly depend upon that knowledge of scientific anatomy which can be learned only by observation or experiment, or from the experiences of others, though it could not exist without it. This instinctive, or at any rate incommunicable, knowledge of where to look for what one needs, the power of divining where the treasure lies, is something common to many types of genius, to scientists and mathematicians no less than to businessmen and administrators and politicians. Such men, when they are statesmen, are acutely aware of which way the thoughts and feelings of human beings are flowing, and where life presses on them most heavily, and they convey to these human beings a sense of understanding their inner needs, of responding to their own deepest impulses, above all of being alone capable of organising the world along lines which the masses are instinctively groping for. To this type of statesman belonged Bismarck and Abraham Lincoln, Lloyd George and Thomas Masaryk, perhaps to some extent Gladstone, and to a minor degree Walpole. Roosevelt was a magnificent virtuoso of this type, and he was the most benevolent as well as the greatest master of his craft in modern times. He really did desire a better life for mankind. The great majorities which he obtained in the elections in the United States during his four terms of office, despite mounting hostility by the press, and perpetual prophecies on their part that he had gone too far, and would fail to be re-elected, were ultimately due to an obscure feeling on the part of the majority of the citizens of the United States that he was on their side, that he wished them well, and that he would do something for them. And this feeling gradually spread over the entire civilised world. He became a legendary hero – they themselves did not know quite why – to the indigent and the oppressed, far beyond the confines of the English-speaking world.

  As I said before, he was, by some of his opponents, accused of betraying his class, and so he had. When a man who retains the manners, the style of life, the emotional texture and the charm of the old order of some free aristocratic upbringing revolts against his milieu and adopts the ideas and aspirations of the new, socially revolted class, and adopts them not out of expediency but out of genuine moral conviction, or from love of life, inability to remain on the side of what seems to him narrow, mean, restrictive – the result is fascinating and attractive. This is what makes the figures of such men as Condorcet or Charles James Fox, or some of the Russian, Italian and Polish revolutionaries in the nineteenth century, so attractive; for all we know this may have been the secret also of Moses or Pericles or Julius Caesar. It was this gentlemanly quality together with the fact that they felt him to be deeply committed to their side in the struggle and in favour of their way of life, as well as his open and fearless lack of neutrality in the war against the Nazis and the Fascists, that endeared him so deeply to the British people during the war years. I remember well how excited most people were in London, in November 1940, about the result of the Presidential election in the United States. In theory they should not have worried. Willkie, the Republican candidate, had expressed himself forcibly and sincerely as a supporter of the democracies. Yet it was absurd to say that the people of Britain were neutral in their feelings vis-à-vis the two candidates. They felt in their bones that Roosevelt was their lifelong friend, that he hated the Nazis as deeply as they did, that he wanted democracy and civilisation, in the sense in which they believed in it, to prevail, and that he knew what he wanted, and that his goal resembled their own ideals more than it did those of all his opponents. They felt that his heart was in the right place, and they did not, therefore, if they gave it a thought, care whether his political appointments were made under the influence of bosses or for personal reasons, or thoughtlessly; or whether his economic doctrines were heretical or whether he had a sufficiently scrupulous regard for the opinion of the Senate or the House of Representatives, or the prescriptions of the United States Constitution, or for the opinions of the Supreme Court. These matters were very remote from them. They knew that he would, to the extent of his enormous energy and ability, see them through. There is no such thing as long-lived mass hypnotism; the masses know what it is that they like, what genuinely appeals to them. What the Germans thought Hitler to be, Hitler, in fact, largely was, and what free men in Europe and in America and in Asia and in Africa and in Australia, and wherever else the rudiments of political thought stirred at all – what all these felt Roosevelt to be, he in fact was. He was the greatest leader of democracy, the greatest champion of social progress in the twentieth century.

  His enemies accused him of plotting to get America into the War. I do not wish to discuss this controversial issue, but it seems to me that the evidence for it is lacking. I think that when he promised to keep America at peace he meant to try as hard as he could to do so, compatibly with helping to promote the victory of the democracies. He must at one period have thought that he could win the War without entering it, and so, at the end of it, be in the unique position, hitherto achieved by no one, of being the arbiter of the world’s fate without needing to placate those bitter forces which involvement in a war inevitably brings about, and which are an obstacle to reason and humanity in the making of the peace. He no doubt too often trusted in his own magical power of improvisation. Doubtless he made many political mistakes, some of them difficult to remedy: some would say about Stalin and his intentions, and the nature of the Soviet State; others might justly point to his coolness to the Free French movement, his cavalier intentions with regard to the Supreme Court of Justice in the United Stat
es, his errors about a good many other issues. He irritated his staunchest supporters and faithful servants because he did not tell them what he was doing; his government was highly personal and it maddened tidy-minded officials and humiliated those who thought the policy should be conducted in consultation with and through them. He sometimes exasperated his allies, but when these last bethought them of who his ill-wishers were in the USA and in the world outside, and what their motives were, their respect, affection and loyalty tended to return. No man made more public enemies, yet no man had a right to take greater pride in the quality and the motives of some of those enemies. He could justly call himself the friend of the people, and although his opponents accused him of being a demagogue, this charge seems to me unjust. He did not sacrifice fundamental political principles to a desire to retain power; he did not whip up evil passions merely in order to avenge himself upon those whom he disliked or wished to crush, or because it was an atmosphere in which he found it convenient to operate; he saw to it that his administration was in the van of public opinion and drew it on instead of being dragged by it; he made the majority of his fellow citizens prouder to be Americans than they had been before. He raised their status in their own eyes – immensely in those of the rest of the world.

  It was an extraordinary transformation of an individual. Perhaps it was largely brought about by the collapse of his health in the early 1920s and his marvellous triumph over his disabilities. For he began life as a well-born, polite, not particularly gifted young man, something of a prig, liked but not greatly admired by his contemporaries at Groton and at Harvard, a competent Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the First World War; in short, he seemed embarked on the routine career of an American patrician with moderate political ambitions. His illness and the support and encouragement and political qualities of his wife – whose greatness of character and goodness of heart history will duly record – seemed to transform his public personality into that strong and beneficent champion who became the father of his people, in an altogether unique fashion. He did more than this: it is not too much to say that he altered the fundamental concept of government and its obligations to the governed. The Welfare State, so much denounced, has obviously come to stay: the direct moral responsibility for minimum standards of living and social services, which it took for granted, are today accepted almost without a murmur by the most conservative politicians in the Western democracies; the Republican Party victorious in 1952 made no effort to upset the basic principles – which seemed Utopian in the 1920s – of Roosevelt’s social legislation.

  But Roosevelt’s greatest service to mankind (after ensuring the victory against the enemies of freedom) consists in the fact that he showed that it is possible to be politically effective and yet benevolent and human: that the fierce left-and right-wing propaganda of the 1930s, according to which the conquest and retention of political power is not compatible with human qualities, but necessarily demands from those who pursue it seriously the sacrifice of their lives upon the altar of some ruthless ideology, or the practice of despotism – this propaganda, which filled the art and talk of the day, was simply untrue. Roosevelt’s example strengthened democracy everywhere, that is to say the view that the promotion of social justice and individual liberty does not necessarily mean the end of all efficient government; that power and order are not identical with a strait-jacket of doctrine, whether economic or political; that it is possible to reconcile individual liberty – a loose texture of society – with the indispensable minimum of organising and authority; and in this belief lies what Roosevelt’s greatest predecessor once described as ‘the last best hope of earth’.1

  1 Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, 1 December 1862: p. 537 in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. R. P. Basler (New Brunswick, 1953), vol. 5.

  CONCISE BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ISAIAH BERLIN’S WRITINGS

  Henry Hardy

  Writings by Berlin

  With the exception of his biography of Marx, his anthology of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, and his study of J. G. Hamann, Isaiah Berlin’s published work has taken the form of essays, often originating in lectures, and often somewhat inaccessibly published in the first instance. Fortunately most of these essays have now been collected, in seven volumes published between 1969 and 1990. The titles of these collected essays are listed below, under the titles of the volumes they comprise; an asterisk indicates inclusion in the present volume.

  In chronological order of first publication, the books by Berlin that have so far appeared are these:

  Karl Marx: His Life and Environment first appeared in 1939 (London: Thornton Butterworth; Toronto: Nelson); further editions were published by Oxford University Press in 1948, 1963 and 1978, and the latest, fourth, edition was reissued, with a new introduction by Alan Ryan, by Fontana in London in 1995 (with a revised guide to further reading by Terrell Carver) and by Oxford University Press in New York in 1996.

  The Age of Enlightenment: The Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New York, 1956: New American Library; reissued by Oxford University Press in 1979), is a selection, with commentary, from these philosophers’ works.

  Four Essays on Liberty (London and New York, 1969: Oxford University Press):

  Introduction

  Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century

  * Historical Inevitability

  * Two Concepts of Liberty

  John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life

  Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London, 1976: Hogarth Press; New York, 1976: Viking):

  Introduction

  The Philosophical Ideas of Giambattista Vico

  * Herder and the Enlightenment

  Russian Thinkers (London, 1978: Hogarth Press; New York, 1978: Viking):

  Introduction by Aileen Kelly

  Russia and 1848

  * The Hedgehog and the Fox

  Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty

  A Remarkable Decade [1838–48]

  I The Birth of the Russian Intelligentsia

  II German Romanticism in Petersburg and Moscow

  III Vissarion Belinsky

  IV Alexander Herzen

  Russian Populism

  Tolstoy and Enlightenment

  Fathers and Children: Turgenev and the Liberal Predicament

  Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays (London, 1978: Hogarth Press; New York, 1979: Viking):

  Introduction by Bernard Williams

  The Purpose of Philosophy

  Verification

  Empirical Propositions and Hypothetical Statements

  Logical Translation

  Equality

  * The Concept of Scientific History

  * Does Political Theory Still Exist?

  * ‘From Hope and Fear Set Free’

  Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (London, 1979: Hogarth Press; New York, 1980: Viking):

  Introduction by Roger Hausheer

  * The Counter-Enlightenment

  * The Originality of Machiavelli

  * The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities

  Vico’s Concept of Knowledge

  Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment

  Montesquieu

  Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism

  [Hume and Hamann]

  * Herzen and his Memoirs

  The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess

  Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for Identity

  The ‘Naïveté’ of Verdi

  Georges Sorel

  * Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power

  Personal Impressions (London, 1980: Hogarth Press; New York, 1981: Viking):

  Introduction by Noel Annan

  * Winston Churchill in 1940

  Hubert Henderson at All Souls

  * President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

  Chaim Weizmann

  Richard Pares

  Felix Frankfurter at Oxford

  Aldous Hux
ley

  L. B. Namier

  Maurice Bowra

  J. L. Austin and the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy

  John Petrov Plamenatz

  Auberon Herbert

  Einstein and Israel

  * Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 19561

  The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (London, 1990: John Murray; New York, 1991: Knopf):

  * The Pursuit of the Ideal

  The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West

  Giambattista Vico and Cultural History

  Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought

  European Unity and its Vicissitudes

  Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism

  * The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will:

  The Revolt against the Myth of an Ideal World

  The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism

  The contents of the next two volumes were written during earlier decades, but (with one exception)2 had not previously been published:

  The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (London, 1993: John Murray; New York, 1994: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).