AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPENDICES All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament.
Berlin to Jean Floud, 5 July 1968
The Purpose Justifies the Ways
Berlin first came to England, as an immigrant, in early 1921, aged eleven, with virtually no English. This story (untitled in the manuscript), which, he told me, won 'a hamper of tuck' in a children's magazine competition, was written in February 1922, when he was twelve.1 As far as is known, it is his earliest surviving piece of writing, as well as his only story, and shows how far his
' The story is written on headed notepaper from the Royal Palace Hotel, Kensington, where the Berlins stayed while waiting to move to a new address; the sheets have been sewn together, presumably by Berlin's mother. At the top of the first page there is an inscription in another hand, apparently the author's own at a later date: '1. Berlin. February 1922. (author being 12I years of age)'. At the end of the manuscript appears the signature 'I Berlyn'. The Harmsworth weekly magazine The Boy's Herald ran a 'Tuck Hamper Competition' for 'storyettes' at the time, but Berlin is not listed among the prize-winners in early 1922, frustratingly. However, the 'storyettes' are merely humorous anecdotes of around a hundred words: perhaps Berlin was awarded an ex gratia hamper for an impressive contribution in the wrong genre.
English had developed after just a year, as well as his general precociousness.[8]
It is a fictional story about a real person, Moise Solomonovich Uritsky, Commissar for Internal Affairs in the Northern Region Commune of Soviet Russia, and Chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, who was in fact murdered by a Socialist Revolutionary named Leonid Kannegiesser on 31 August 1918. I chose Uritsky's 'motto' as the title because the story so clearly points forward to Berlin's repeated later insistence that present suffering cannot be justified as a route to some imaginary future state of bliss. In this sense the story is the first recorded step on his intellectual journey through life, a journey summarised in 'My Intellectual Path', written seventy-four years later.
Berlin always ascribed his lifelong horror of violence, especially when ideologically inspired, to an episode he witnessed at the age of seven during the February Revolution in Petrograd in 1917: while out walking he watched a policeman loyal to the Tsar, white- faced with terror, being dragged off by a lynch mob to his death. This story surely vividly reflects the power of this early experience, and reveals one of the deepest sources of his mature liberalism.
Letter to George Kennan
Berlin's papers include a mass of often detailed correspondence about the contents of Four Essays on Liberty, both before and after its constituent essays were collected in that volume. Much of this material will in due course be published in its proper chronological place among Berlin's other letters, but there is one letter in particular that stands out from the rest as a powerful statement of the personal vision that lies behind Berlin's work in this area. Berlin liked to allude[9] to a passage in Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy where Russell says that, if we are to understand a philosopher's views, we must 'apprehend their imaginative background':
Every philosopher, in addition to the formal system which he offers to the world, has another, much simpler, of which he may be quite unaware. If he is aware of it, he probably realises that it won't quite do; he therefore conceals it, and sets forth something more sophisticated, which he believes because it is like his crude system, but which he asks others to accept because he thinks he has made it such as cannot be disproved. The sophistication comes in by way of refutation of refutations, but this alone will never give a positive result: it shows, at best, that a theory may be true, not that it must be. The positive result, however little the philosopher may realise it, is due to his imaginative preconceptions, or what Santayana calls 'animal faith'.[10]
One might discuss the extent to which this picture fits Berlin's own case: for example, Berlin was certainly not unaware of his own 'imaginative preconceptions'. At all events, the letter to Kennan vividly expresses the character of one of the main rooms in Berlin's own 'inner citadel', to use his own metaphor.[11] For this reason I decided to include this letter here in advance of its publication as part of Berlin's correspondence. It was written in response to a warmly appreciative letter from George Kennan about 'Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century', and surely speaks for itself.
Notes on Prejudice
Another room in the citadel is brought to life equally vividly, if more briefly, in some hurried notes Berlin wrote for a friend (who prefers not to be identified) in i 98 1. His friend was due to give a lecture, and wrote to Berlin to ask for suggestions as to how he might treat his theme. Berlin had to go abroad early the day after he received the request, and wrote the notes quickly, in his own hand, without time for revision or expansion. The result is somewhat breathless and telegraphic, no doubt, but it conveys with great immediacy Berlin's opposition to intolerance and prejudice, especially fanatical monism, stereotypes and aggressive nationalism. It was to have appeared here for the first time, but it spoke so clearly to the events of i i September 2001 that I published it in the first issue of the New York Review of Books to appear thereafter.[12]
Berlin and his Critics
As Berlin indicates in 'Final Retrospect', the literature stimulated by the two central essays in Four Essays on Liberty has been large. Indeed, the rate of growth of the secondary literature has increased rather than diminishing as the years have passed. I have attempted to keep a tally of it on the official website of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust,1 and I hope this resource will continue to be updated. The publication of Liberty provides an opportunity to supplement this bare list with a brief critical vade-mecum that will assist readers to find their way through the growing volume of articles and books discussing Berlin's ideas: the main focus, given this book's rationale, is on the discussion of liberty. This guide - beyond the capability of a mere editor - has kindly been provided by Dr Ian Harris of Leicester University, himself the author of a valuable article on 'Two Concepts'.2