I had no idea when I joined Oxford's Wolfson College as a graduate student in 1972 that I was about to discover my eventual occupation. The College's President was Isaiah Berlin. It was clear as soon as I met him (at a scholarship interview for which I arrived late after a car accident, and during which he repeatedly went to the window to see if a taxi had arrived to take him to a lunch appointment) that he was a remarkable man; but I had never read any of his work, and knew next to nothing about him.
I asked where I should start, and was rightly directed to Four Essays on Liberty, published three years earlier. I took it with me on a visit with friends to a remote Exmoor cottage during a University vacation, and was transfixed. Berlin liked to refer to the unmistakable sensation
' From 'Common Places' (1823): vol. 20, p. 122, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London and Toronto, 1930-4).
2 Issue dated 21 November 1997, p. 21. Berlin died on 5 November. The article is also available on line at http://berlin.wollfox.ac.uk/, under 'Writing about Berlin'. I have slightly adapted the extract used here.
of 'sailing in first-class waters', and this was the sensation I experienced. Quite apart from the persuasiveness of the propositions contained in the book, here was obviously a man of rare insight into human nature, a man plentifully endowed with that 'sense of reality' that he welcomed when he found it in others. There was room for disagreement on this or that point, but on the large issues one felt in safe hands.
The central plank in the book is Berlin's value pluralism, his belief that the values humans pursue are not only multiple but sometimes irreconcilable, and that this applies at the level of whole cultures - systems of value - as well as between the values of a particular culture or individual. It is an essential characteristic of the great monistic religions and political ideologies to claim that there is only one way to salvation, one right way to live, one true value-structure. This is the claim which, when it is given fanatical expression, leads to fundamentalism, persecution and intolerance. Pluralism is a prophylactic against such dangers. It is a source of liberalism and toleration - not just the unstable kind of toleration that waits for the mistaken to see the light, but the deep, lasting toleration that accepts and welcomes visions of life irretrievably different from those we ourselves live by.
Four Essays is full of other gold, including the devastating critique of historicism and determinism in 'Historical Inevitability', the famous discussion of 'positive' and 'negative' freedom in 'Two Concepts of Liberty', and the examination of the tensions in Mill's views in 'John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life'. It is one of the richest and most humane books I have ever read, and it has deservedly become a classic.
This said, it may seem lese-majeste to tamper with it now, but, as will soon become clear, the first stage of expansion was devoutly wished for by the author himself, and I see myself as taking the process further towards its logical conclusion.
I do not apologise for having put pluralism rather than liberalism centre stage in my comments on Four Essays, though others would invert this priority. Berlin's pluralism seems to me the deeper and more original thesis - which is not to deny the indispensability of his version of liberalism, or of the view of humanity that lies at its heart, a view in which freedom of choice among incommensurably multiple possibilities is central. Indeed pluralism and liberalism, the two leading components of Berlin's philosophical outlook (sometimes aptly called 'liberal pluralism'), are mutually interdependent and supportive,[1] and I have at times thought of giving this collection a title such as Freedom and Diversity, but the Occamist imperative, reinforced by the pragmatic desirability of echoing the well-known earlier title, won out.
FIVE ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
The time has come said Linnet to Stallworthy to talk about Berlin again.
Oxford University Press memo from Catherine Linnet, New York, to Jon Stallworthy, London, 21 June 1967
Berlin's oeuvre has been described by Ira Katznelson, somewhat sweepingly but quite understandably, as 'both correct and bold':1 the luminous, settled, assured qualities of Berlin's writing are widely recognised and appreciated. But there is a paradoxical relationship between these undoubted attributes and the tortuous and tortured route by which his publications came to take the form they do. The 'correctness' is not achieved at the first attempt, nor even at the nineteenth; and the boldness is not matched by an equivalent self-confidence. As Berlin wrote to Karl Popper in gratitude for his approval of Two Concepts of Liberty, 'I have little confidence in the validity of my own intellectual processes.'2 Although he commanded the stage, he trembled in the wings.
The genesis of Four Essays on Liberrf was just as chaotic and prolonged as that of the other compilation of his essays that Berlin published before I became his editor, namely Vico and Herder The Oxford University Press file on the book is a treasure-house of anecdote: frustration, misunderstanding, tergiversation, indeci- siveness, prevarication, unrealistic expectations abound. The whole
excellent Isaiah Berlin (London, 1995), who believes that Berlin's pluralism narrows the field for the justification of his liberalism: see Gray's chapter 6, 'Agonistic Liberalism'.
| 'Why is it so intuitively true that Berlin's work is both correct and bold?' he asks in 'Isaiah Berlin's Modernity': Arien Mack (ed.), Liberty and Pluralism [Social Research 66 No 4 (Winter 1999)], 1079-101, at 1079.
Letter of 16 March 1959.
Published by OUP in London and New York in 1969. Bibliographies often state, misleadingly, that the book was published in Oxford.
I offer a brief version of the saga of this later (1976) volume in Berlin's Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (London, 2000: Chatto and Windus; Princeton, 2000: Princeton University Press), pp. vii-viii.
proceedings, year after year, are accompanied by frantic reschedulings on the part of OUP, as well as complementary and conflicting discussions of other projects, which appear out of the fog and then recede. OUP become increasingly desperate as time slips by, and some of the wry internal memoranda make excellent reading. I say all this not to poke fun, though the file is undoubtedly fun to read, but because we learn much about Berlin the man by having the complex process of creation of his famous and important book - in his view, his most important book - laid bare in such comprehensive detail. I hope it is clear, too, from my opening remarks that the spirit in which I tell the story of the book's gradual emergence is one of affection rather than censure, for all that Berlin's conduct, benign but gloriously unprofessional,[2] caused justifiable exasperation on the part of his publisher. The path was stony, but the destination fully worth the journey, and not to be reached by a more direct route.
Here I can only skim off the cream of the story. The file opens in November 1953 with a letter from the New York office of Berlin's literary agent, then as now Curtis Brown, to Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, who had taken the lead in the commissioning of the book. At this point only the first two of the four essays had been written, though a book of essays 'on political topics' was already under discussion. 'I will try to obtain a list of essays from Mr Berlin as quickly as I can,' writes John Cushman of Curtis Brown. What would he have said, we may speculate, had he known that it would be sixteen years before the book finally appeared?