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The first page of the typescript of 'Political Ideas m the Romantic Age'
BERLIN AND HIS CRITICS
Ian Harris
The essays collected in Liberty are mostly attempts to develop the general position that Isaiah Berlin had adopted by the late 1940s and early 1950s. That position had three aspects. It applied Berlin's philosophical views to the intellectual history of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it attributed to that history practical consequences for the middle years of the twentieth century; and it responded to those consequences by outlining a liberal political theory.
Berlin's view of knowledge suggested that experience alters conceptual frameworks. Thus, for instance, since political theories address the experience of an epoch, and experience varies over time, such theories cannot cumulate progressively in the manner attributed to the natural sciences. The distinction this suggests took two, not unfamiliar, forms. One distinguished types of knowledge: between the natural sciences and the humanities. The other was an ontological distinction between their respective subject-matters, with on one side the notions that the facts of nature were consistent with one another and admitted of deterministic explanations, and on the other side that the features of a distinctively human life, including values, were inconsistent with each other and the products of free choice.
Berlin complemented these, neo-Kantian, views with a trajectory of intellectual history, seen in its most complete form in a typescript as yet unpublished, prepared initially at the beginning of the 1950s, 'Political Ideas in the Romantic Age'.1 He identified
1 For details of this typescript see Berlin's Freedom and its Betrayaclass="underline" Six Enemies of Human Liberty (London, 2002: Chatto and Windus; Princeton, 2002: Princeton University Press), pp. xii-xiii, xv. (Subsequent page references are by number alone.) Freedom and its Betrayal is a reworking and selective expansion of some of the material from 'Political Ideas in the Romantic Age', broadcast as a
Kant as the inventor of the distinction between the realm of value and the facts of nature. Before Kant, it was understood that mankind belonged to a realm of fact, that facts were consistent with each other, and that all values, including moral values, were in some sense natural. These presuppositions issued during the (French) Enlightenment in the view that human conduct was determined, could be seen in a way analogous to that in which we view physical nature, and was properly a subject of modification in order to conform with nature rightly understood. If Rousseau translated such views into a political idiom, Kant, by rejecting them, gave a cue to such movements as romanticism and nationalism. These emphasised instead humanity's capacity to determine its own conduct, its capacity for invention, and its ability to multiply values.
This interpretation illuminated The Age of Enlightenment, evaluated Three Critics of the Enlightenment,2 and fertilised The Roots of Romanticism? but Berlin also found difficulties in the romantic legacy as much as in the 'scientific' one: he linked Maistre with the origins of Fascism and implied that the legacy of Marxism was more ambiguous than was made plain in Berlin's 1939 intellectual biography of its founder. Though the romantic legacy emphasised freedom, it might involve also a personification that located agency with groups, and subordinated individuals and minorities to their will; and whereas enlightened thought implied determinism, it might also include toleration and reason. Berlin's intellectual history suggested a need to clarify and to criticise traditions, as well as to express them, a general procedure not dissimilar from that of his contemporary Michael Oakeshott in The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism4 and On Human Conduct. 5 The two men differed (as in other particulars) in that Berlin's preoccupations in the 1940s and 1950s had a more obviously practical reference than Oakeshott's after the Cambridge Journal?
series of lectures in 1952. See in particular Berlin's treatment of Kant, 57-62.
' New York, 1956: New American Library.
1 London, 2000: Pimlico; Princeton, 2000: Princeton University Press.
London, 1999: Chatto and Windus; Princeton, 1999: Princeton University Press.
New Haven, 1996: Yale University Press.
Oxford, 1975: Clarendon Press.
Edited by Oakeshott from 1948 to 1954.
These preoccupations found expression from 1947 partly in Berlin's broadcasts, lectures and writings about Russia, which suggested that the pre-1917 intelligentsia contained a great many elements that did not point to Soviet destinations, besides a few that did.1 Berlin also began to work out a liberal alternative to totalitarianism. This was a more common project than the Russian one. F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom,[138] Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies,[139] J. L. Talmon's Origins of Totalitarian Democrat and George Sabine's 'The Two Democratic Traditions'[140] all in their different ways suggested or implied that there should be spheres within which the individual should be free from social and political interference, and constructed genealogies for totalitarianism, whilst the notion that the domestic function of the State is not to pattern the whole of society, but instead to provide a basic structure of order consistent with many different types of life and thought, is found, along with associated motifs, in many later works. Berlin's account, however, was worked out in his own manner.
Berlin's earliest surviving piece of writing, reprinted here, is the story 'The Purpose Justifies the Ways'. Whilst we certainly would do badly to read conceptual opinions into the mind of this twelve- year-old author, the piece reveals the disposition which found expression in Berlin's mature work. The tale shows how the lives situated within an area of negative freedom ('a cosy little home') are first threatened and then destroyed by the crude consequential- ism of Berlin's Commissar Uritsky, and by the belief this implied in his own intellectual sufficiency (not to mention his extreme personal nastiness). Though the tale is also about how Peter Ivanov revenged himself against Uritsky, this act vindicated a way of life against oppression. Berlin's own 'inner citadel'[141] developed conceptual protection against the same threat. He became preoccupied by the contrast between a settled, civilised life and its disturbance by the intrusive claims of intellectual monopolists. This was elaborated in many versions, of which perhaps the least formal, and certainly one of the most passionate, is his claim in 'Notes on Prejudice' (included here) that 'the belief that there is one & only one true answer to the central questions which have agonized mankind . . . was responsible for . . . oceans of blood: but no Kingdom of Love sprang from it'.1 The main essays in this volume show Berlin identifying conceptual intruders, demarcating the civil area into which they should not venture, and sketching a view of reality and knowledge that indicated just how mistaken their claims were.