Isaiah Berlin’s thought and its legacy: Critical reflections on a symposium

I

Having begun his career as an academic philosopher, preoccupied with questions of knowledge (and the logic of claims about knowledge), Berlin came – on his own account – to abandon philosophy for the history of ideas; and while he held the position of Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, it was as a historian of ideas that Berlin preferred to present himself. ⁴ Above all, Berlin was concerned with the contributions to subsequent thought of the thinkers of the Enlightenment, and their critics (or enemies); this central concern, and Berlin's provocative thoughts on it, are the subject of Bernard Yack's contribution to this issue. In contrast to other recent scholars, ⁵ Yack does not question the existence of a single ‘Enlightenment’, nor does he seek to downplay the opposition between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. But he thinks that Berlin mischaracterized both sides of this conflict. The philosophes should be seen as dedicated, not to monistic assumptions and utopian goals, but to practical reform on behalf of toleration and freedom of thought. Herder, in contrast, is significant for his rehabilitation of prejudice. ⁶ The exclusion of this point is a major weakness in Berlin's account of Herder's project and its significance – one which arises, Yack suggests, from Berlin's tendency to look at value pluralism from the perspective of an ‘observer’ or ‘consumer’, and not (as Herder did) from the perspective of the (culturally limited) ‘producers’. ⁷

Yack notes that in his account of the Enlightenment Berlin under-emphasizes the negative, practical motivations of the philosophes. Yack's own account tends to the opposite extreme, presenting the philosophes’ outlook as motivated primarily by an awareness of evils and a commitment to social reform, stressing their mission of disseminating practical knowledge – and underplaying the optimism and awe with which progressive thinkers of the 18th century regarded the development of modern science, and the fervour with which they sought to extend this progress to society. As Berlin insisted, this encouraged (even in those he himself identified as sceptics, such as Hume and Montesquieu) a ‘scientistic’ approach to social studies and problems. ⁸ This scientism was emphasized – and inherited – by the writer who did more than any other to shape the young Berlin's view of the Enlightenment, the Russian Marxist Plekhanov. ⁹ Berlin's perception of the Enlightenment was doubly shaped by Marxism: while his historical account closely echoed that of Plekhanov, the spectre of Bolshevik-Marxist thinking, with its Five-Year Plans and ‘engineers of human souls’, shaped his perception of the dangers of scientism applied to politics. ¹⁰

Accordingly, what seems to have first drawn Berlin to Herder was that thinker's contribution to ‘the counter-revolution against positivism and rationalism’, his contrast between ‘scientific rationalism’ and ‘the properties that create civilizations and make them intelligible’; ¹¹ while Berlin's post-war political concerns are reflected in the emphasis he places on Herder's hatred of mechanism and technocracy. ¹² More broadly, Berlin connected Herder's anti-scientism and distaste for uniformity to a larger intellectual aversion to generalization, a belief that (as Berlin expressed it in his own voice) ‘you can only tell what is what’ by ‘looking at the actual situation & … indicating the truth without fear of disloyalty to principles. Once principles are applied rigorously absurdities follow’: ‘attempts to erect turnstiles however enlightened end in dogmatism & denying the facts’. ¹³ This particularism (which contrasted with Berlin's own penchant for sweeping generalizations) was not only a matter of intellectual hygiene: it had moral and political implications. The uncritical, dogmatic imposition of ‘dead formulae’ on human life led to ‘nonsense in thought and monstrous behaviour in practice’ ¹⁴ Berlin saw the tendency to generalization as linked to impatience with difference and the untidy recalcitrance of human realities. Herder, Berlin wrote, was opposed to uniformity as ‘the enemy of life and freedom’, which ‘maims and kills’. ¹⁵ The tendency to reduce or ignore differences was, for Berlin, both sinister and false. ¹⁶

Another important theme in both the thought of the Enlightenment, and Berlin's use of it, is that of progress, to which Yack devotes an illuminating discussion, arguing that the Enlightenment idea of progress was not based on monism because it is seen as movement away from evil, not towards perfection. This argument corrects and complicates Berlin's general portrayal of ‘utopianism’. Yet it does not demonstrate that philosophes such as Condorcet are immune to Berlin's pluralist critique. The belief that progress may be limitless, because there are no insurmountable limits to it, is one of the beliefs that Berlin's pluralism is meant to undermine: the incompatibility of values means that the sort of limitless progress envisioned by Condorcet is impossible, because a gain for one goal or good will come at the expense of another valid goal or genuine good. Yack is right that the broader ‘Enlightenment project’ of promoting human happiness (or lessening human misery) through the dissemination of knowledge is not necessarily undermined by a pluralist critique of monism. But if Berlin's pluralism is accepted, some of the confidence about that project must be tempered by the awareness of its limitations and costs. It is to the costs of progress – and to the dangers involved in a facile acceptance of these costs – that Herder and Berlin direct our attention.

II

While Berlin attracts interest as both practitioner and subject of historical study, his most influential intellectual legacy remains the arguments he has bequeathed to political theory. One reason for Berlin's staying power is that, while he could be strikingly aloof from the practice and empirical study of politics, his thought gives central place to essential features of political experience: conflict and difference. The conflicts between values and ideals of life, the diversity of and divergence among individuals, cultures and epochs, are the subjects of nearly everything Berlin wrote.

Michael Walzer's article, ‘Should we Reclaim Political Utopianism?’, is both a response to Berlin, and the latest of Walzer's searching contributions to thinking about political ethics and liberal democracy. Walzer defines liberalism as committed to limited government and the legal and political protection of civil liberties and rights, particularly the right of opposition. Liberalism thus accepts political conflict as a permanent feature of life. The hope of liberal theory is that those who are socialized by liberal institutions will come to accept a ‘you win some, you lose some’ attitude, so that liberalism will – by means of freedom, rather than constraint – largely remove ‘cruelty and repression’ from politics.

Many have doubted that things will work out so nicely. Walzer worries too. He fears that liberal politics will tend towards the anti-liberal vices of ‘authoritarianism and hierarchy’, because liberalism underestimates the love of power that motivates political rulers, and fosters authoritarianism; while it turns an indulgent eye on the selfishness and injustice of some, and the apathy or powerlessness of others, that produce hierarchies. To protect against these anti-liberal fruits of liberal complacence, liberal democracies need ‘insurgent’ movements. Berlin was therefore too quick to dismiss political utopianism, which is necessary to motivate such movements against liberalism's corruption.

Berlin did direct his political preachings against the absolutism of utopian aspirations, and on behalf of a politics and political temper of moderation – he adopted as his motto Talleyrand's injunction ‘Surtout, Messieurs, point de zèle’. ¹⁷ Yet his feelings were more ambivalent than Walzer allows. Berlin worried over the ‘dullness’ of calm liberal decency, ¹⁸ and in his portrait of Churchill produced a vivid, perceptive paean to the love of glory that is part of politics. ¹⁹ He also lamented the ‘collapse’ of the international left and the ‘world shift to the Right’. ²⁰ And his appreciation for at least some sorts of utopianism comes out in his writings on Zionism. Berlin noted that Zionism had seemed a heroic, sentimental gesture, divorced from real life – and that many Zionist leaders were utopians with little feeling for human realities. He nevertheless celebrated Zionist ‘utopianism’ for its defiance of ‘realist’ perceptions of what was possible and impossible, its vindication of human political agency against perceptions of historical inevitability. ²¹ Berlin also evinced sympathetic affection for the idealistic revolutionaries of the mid-19th century (as against the more ‘hard-headed’, anti-utopian Marx). ²²

Yet Berlin did take utopianism and monism as his primary targets in his political writings. One reason why he did so was that he seems to have been less confident about the decline of utopian impulses than Walzer suggests. His works recurrently stress how widespread and emotionally appealing monism and the aspiration to utopia have always been. ²³ While he thought the former untenable, this did not mean that he thought that it was on the wane: the mere fact that an outlook could be intellectually refuted did not mean that it would not still be defended: the ‘age-old dream’ of utopia ‘persists’ ‘side by side’ with the reality of ‘collisions of values’. ²⁴

Another element in Berlin's case against utopianism, which converges with Walzer's argument, was his (sometimes ambiguous) acceptance of politics. As already noted, central to Berlin's political thought is an insistence that conflict based on normative disagreements is ineradicable, and that therefore both political theory and political contestation are inescapable (contra those who would replace political theory with value-free social science, and politics with scientific administration). ²⁵ Yet Berlin also evinced a protective aversion to the unruliness of politics. Politics, Berlin accepted, is about passionate disagreement and practical conflict; where these are lacking, technocratic tyranny threatens. But for this very reason it is important to maintain an area of (negative) freedom where individuals can evade the demands, disruptions and dangers of politics. ²⁶

Berlin's ambivalence about politics finds its mirror in the utopians he criticized. Genuine utopians ultimately want to abolish politics, because they wish to overcome conflict; they embrace politics as a means for achieving an ultimately anti-political goal. ²⁷ The longing for a ‘final solution’, the desire to overcome disagreement and disorder once and for all, was one of the central features that Berlin identified and attacked in ‘utopianism’. He wanted political conflicts to be tempered, limited, kept at bay; but he would also agree with Walzer that liberalism needs to be ‘asserted and then reasserted against powerful enemies’.

Berlin's anti-utopianism, then, seems more nuanced, and better able to deal with political realities, than Walzer suggests. On the other hand, Walzer's own position involves a problem (which he readily acknowledges). Insurgent movements are just as prone to the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ as stable liberal political systems – and an ideologically self-righteous oligarchy poses special dangers. We should hope that insurgent movements arise, and root for their success – but for their limited success. A ‘central problem of liberal politics’, as Walzer says, is how to resist the corruption of liberal democracy by the aggrandizement of the rich and powerful, without falling prey to the dangers of political extremism.

Walzer's discussion of this central problem of liberal politics emphasizes institutions and political culture. Another way of responding to this problem (which is very much in the spirit of Walzer's work, but which he does not pursue here) is the articulation of a liberal political ethic. Berlin helps us to think about what such an ethic would involve, particularly with his account of Herzen, a ‘revolutionary without fanaticism’ – and without ruthlessness. ²⁸ Although Herzen longed passionately for reform, he did not (at least on Berlin's account) long for the finality and perfection, or suffer from the moral denial or blindness, which Berlin associates with utopianism. Most importantly, Berlin's Herzen was guided by awareness of the immediate, particular experiences of actual individuals, rather than by visions of future flourishing. This way of thinking about politics – as well as the quality of his personal temperament – saved Herzen from the ruthlessness of his fellow revolutionaries.

Berlin tied utopian aspirations to a politics of extremism and an ethic of ruthlessness by claiming that, if it is believed possible to achieve ‘a final solution to all human ills’, which will make all or most human beings virtuous and happy, ‘then surely no price is too heavy to pay for it; no amount of oppression, cruelty, repression, coercion will be too great’. ²⁹ But there is a difference – which Berlin elides here – between holding that it is possible finally to remedy human ills (utopianism), and the idea that no price, no amount of cruelty and suffering, is too great. Berlin was right to stress that the former can certainly serve as a motivation to, or increase the plausibility of the latter; but it does not entail it. It is difficult, but one can be ‘a revolutionary without fanaticism’, an idealist without extremism. On the other hand, liberalism cannot embrace an insurgent movement, however needed, which has not learned to eschew ruthlessness and fanaticism. It would seem that Berlin's argument is both compatible with, and offers guidance in pursuing, Walzer's project to appreciate and foster, in those situations where they prove necessary, decent and democratic insurgent movements. The disagreement between them, on this point at least, seems more apparent than real. ³⁰

Another common thread between Berlin's thought, and Walzer's response to it, is the way in which the sort of political theory practised by both is deeply context-relevant. Berlin, as Walzer notes, counselled ‘learn[ing] from our disasters’. Walzer proposes, also using the resources of political and intellectual history, to learn from our (partial) successes. In adopting these different perspectives, Berlin was looking largely at Russian, and more broadly European, politics; Walzer explicitly addresses the experience of ‘Western liberal democracies’ – experiences that are very different from those of Russia, or mid-20th-century Europe. This raises the question of how broadly applicable the arguments of each writer are. If different times and places call for different responses and have need of different lessons, how much can be said, on a general level, based on the lessons of history? (Berlin seems to acknowledge this when he sagely notes that ‘in resisting great present evils, it is as well not to be blinded to the possible danger of the total triumph of any one principle’, including one's own. ³¹ )

At the same time, the difference here cannot be reduced to matters of personal circumstance. There is a recurrent, perhaps permanent, divergence between the sort of cautious reformism favoured by Berlin, and the chastened but hopeful radicalism expounded by Walzer. If the juxtaposition of the two reveals some blind spots of cautious liberalism, it also raises the question of how necessary – and how dangerous – radical hope is. It may well be both vitally necessary, and potentially rather dangerous – which is why we need both visions.

III

Like Walzer, Janos Kis agrees with many of the general goals of Berlin's political thought, but seeks to redress its tendency to foster a less affirmatively democratic liberalism. In ‘Berlin's Two Concepts of Positive Liberty’, Kis applies careful conceptual analysis to Berlin's dichotomy between negative and positive liberty – and particularly his convoluted characterization of the latter. While much has been written on this subject, it has rarely received treatment as sophisticated and sympathetic as that offered by Kis here.

Freedom was a value with which Berlin's work was explicitly concerned from more or less the beginning: one of his first surviving writings is an essay on ‘Freedom’ written as an 18-year-old schoolboy in 1928, and his earliest writings on politics give central weight to the idea of freedom – and the dangers to it. ³² Yet, as Kis shows, the account of liberty that Berlin developed was marked by ‘genuine and deep’ tensions. Part of the problem, Kis points out, is that ‘Two Concepts’ is about much more than concepts of liberty. The account of ‘positive liberty’ is concerned with the consequences of the conjunction of a conception of liberty with particular theories of the self (as divided between a rational ‘true’ and a muddled and divided empirical self), of society (as an organic whole), and of the nature and relationship of human values (monism). Berlin saw all of these as playing a role in the development of the idea of ‘positive liberty’ that he depicted, and he rejected all of them. But it is not clear that, if one accepts Berlin's critiques of monism, organicism and the hierarchical self, rejection of the positive concept of liberty follows – and not only because, as Kis charges, Berlin's account oscillates between two distinct conceptions of positive liberty.

Beyond his careful dissection of the logical cogency of Berlin's account, Kis's discussion makes important substantive points about two issues central to the argument of ‘Two Concepts’: the relationship between individual liberty and collective self-rule; and Berlin's value pluralism. Regarding the former, Kis argues that Berlin was wrong to see a conflict between democracy and individual (negative) liberty. Despite his appreciation of the claims of both collective self-rule and individual liberty, Berlin saw the two values as separate and unconnected, and potentially conflicting. For Kis, if we understand collective self-rule properly, we will recognize that it requires respect for the rights of the individuals who are partners in self-government. ³³

This is an attractive argument, but some Berlinian doubts remain. First, while the conflict may not, as Kis says, exist at the theoretical level, a practical conflict may persist, and it seems to be with this that Berlin was concerned: following through with commitment to collective self-government (or to an understanding of liberty as being realized in the instantiation of collective self-government) may lead one to neglect individual liberty. On the other hand, thinking of collective self-government primarily or solely in terms of the realization of the priority-bearing value of individual rights neglects other claims on behalf of self-government. In this connection, it is notable that Kis deals with one form of the idea of self-government addressed by Berlin – democracy – but not another – national self-determination. ³⁴

When he comes to Berlin's value pluralism, Kis finds ‘deep inconsistencies’. If negative and positive liberty are genuine, independent, potentially conflicting values, according to Berlin's pluralism there is no way of evaluating the value of one with reference to that of the other, and no common perspective from which to evaluate both – and hence, no way to deliberate rationally between their competing claims. Kis notes that this may be taken to point to a ‘decisionistic’ conclusion: one must simply choose, arbitrarily, between the two values, and there is no reason not to give one's full allegiance to one at the expense of the other. Berlin rejected such an approach, advocating instead ‘striking compromises [between values] with which people can live’. ³⁵ But there is no necessary connection between pluralism and toleration. ³⁶

Yet necessary connections are not the only sort of connection that may exist between a theory of values and political behaviour, or indeed normative political argument. There are also questions of motivational connections, of psychological (or, as Kis says, ‘elective’) affinities. Recognition of the validity of a variety of forms of human life – added to the awareness, following from this, that there is no rational basis for imposing a single way of life or conception of the good life on all human beings – need not compel one to adopt toleration; but it will tend to encourage it. It is far easier to act intolerantly and ruthlessly when one believes one's opponents to be evil or wrong; by reminding us that those with whom we disagree are often neither, but are rather committed to genuine values, pluralism undermines a propensity towards zealotry and encourages an ethos of tolerance. And while monism needn't promote intolerance, it can sustain a view of oneself as having a monopoly on righteousness, which pluralism cannot; and this sense of having a monopoly on righteousness is a major source of political intolerance. ³⁷ And while it is true, as Kis points out, that acceptance of pluralism need not entail commitment to finding compromises between conflicting values, it does give us good reason to search for such compromises, and not to deny that compromise is necessary (because one value simply has priority) or desirable (because there are no genuine claims on us made by either or both values, which demand that we strive to respect both as much as possible).

Even if my claims are true, they do not affect Kis's charge that Berlin's pluralism cannot identify which potential compromise between competing values we should adopt (or which value we should prefer, in a given case). Kis here underscores, without directly articulating, an important implication of Berlin's thought: a scepticism about the ability of philosophy to prescribe solutions to practical ethical problems by identifying one correct line of action among possible alternatives. Finding an ‘acceptable compromise’ may simply not be a task best carried out at the level of moral philosophy; or it may be that the best that philosophy can do is to clarify what is at stake in the choice between alternative courses, and point to the advantages and disadvantages of each.

The inability to reveal what choice we should make in a given clash between values, then, need not be a problem for Berlin's pluralism on its own terms. It may indeed be a virtue, in pointing to the limits of philosophy’s ability to determine practical choices. Yet it does seem to be a problem for Berlin's contention, in ‘Two Concepts’, that negative liberty should enjoy preference over (even genuine) positive liberty: for how can a theory based on pluralism purport to give us a reason to (presumptively) prefer one value over another, if both are genuine values? ³⁸ Here Berlin's position is vulnerable, though perhaps not as vulnerable as Kis suggests. Part of Berlin's problem, on Kis's analysis, is the tension between his conception of negative liberty as involving a ‘minimum area’, and the idea of negative liberty as something of which one can have less or more. Here Kis does seem to me to be finding contradiction where there is none. Berlin, as Kis notes, tended towards spatial metaphors in characterizing negative liberty. The number of ‘doors open’ to one (that is, the number of choices one can make without interference) may be more or less numerous, the space around one (that is, the field of choices one can make protected from interference) may be more or less extensive – this is what is meant by saying that negative liberty is something of which there can be more or less. Berlin's argument is that, given a certain conception of human nature and the nature of values, there is a ‘minimum’ space or extent of negative liberty which must be preserved, or else misery and dehumanization will follow. On the other hand, beyond this space, trade-offs may occur. We may have more or less negative liberty; but if we lose too much negative liberty – or if we lose our negative liberty in particularly vital matters – our basic moral interests as human beings will be significantly damaged.

The idea of giving priority to the preservation of a minimum area of negative liberty over the maximization of other values points to a way of thinking about compromises between values more generally. Up to a point, various values may be amenable to compromise or ‘trade-offs’. But at some point, sacrifices of certain values will come to threaten our notions of what human beings fundamentally require to live truly human lives. At that point, such sacrifices are no longer acceptable, because they undermine our ability to live, or to treat others, in a fully human way.

This approach, however, does not resolve the question of what to do if cases arise where it appears that one must choose between maintaining a ‘minimum’ level of either one essential value, or another. Emergency situations in which security and personal liberties make competing claims ³⁹ – one of the most urgent, and difficult, issues for normative political theorists today – may be one such case; and Kis's discussion of it is sensitive and wise. Kis's argument – that it may in certain drastic emergency cases be permissible to violate individual rights, but that this is very different from saying that under emergency conditions one can redraw the boundaries of the right itself – is also very much along the lines of Berlin's claim that, in conflicts of values, where one value or moral interest is sacrificed to another, there occurs a real loss, and that we should acknowledge this, rather than insisting that the permissibility of over-riding one of the values means that no damage to moral interests in fact occurred. ⁴⁰

This view is not necessitated by any sort of pluralism; it is the conclusion of Berlin's pluralism – a pluralism which is modulated by an insistence on respect for other persons, their moral interests and their moral values. This commitment, which we might call Berlin's ‘humanism’, was independent of Berlin's pluralism; it was neither supported nor undermined by it, but in combination with pluralism provided the rationale for Berlin's political and ethical outlook.

IV

The importance of this ‘humanism’ to Berlin’s outlook and work is stressed by Alan Ryan – who also urges a way of approaching Berlin’s work very different from that adopted by Kis. In his ‘personal impression’ of Berlin – which includes one of the better brief overviews of Berlin's life and career ⁴¹ – Ryan raises and addresses the question of whether Berlin really is best thought of as a political theorist; and, if so, what was the nature of his work in political theory. Ryan points, rightly, to the distance between Berlin's way of doing political theory, and the more systematic, analytic, widely emulated approach of his friend John Rawls. ⁴² This was not just a matter of Berlin failing to meet the standards of argumentative rigour that have come to be expected by political philosophers writing in Rawls’s wake. Nor is it merely that Berlin refrained from advancing a comprehensive, programmatic account of either an ideal society or a set of principles by which to evaluate the institutions and practices of existing societies. In addition, Ryan suggests, Berlin was not really concerned with the entire project of justification, which is central to Rawls’s approach. He was, however, concerned with evaluation, of a partly moral, partly aesthetic, sort: with the ‘attractiveness and repulsiveness of social and political ideas’ – and, we may add, of different visions of life, types of character, and ways of being. This may make his work seem irrelevant, or at least lightweight, to political theorists formed in the Rawlsian mold. Yet (as Ryan fair-mindedly suggests) there are merits to the Berlinian conception of political theory. For one thing, Berlin did not fall into the philosopher’s tendency of over-estimating the power of theory to identify principles of justice acceptable to all reasonable people. And he recognized – if only implicitly – the potential of theories that well-meaningly insist on public justification to swamp individuality. Beyond this, Berlin’s work draws the attention of political theorists to the role of individual sensibility, personality, and immediate experience, as against general principles, decision-procedures, and so on. In focusing on the style and ethos, as opposed to the principles and institutions, of liberalism, Berlin’s work usefully supplements much recent normative political theory; if it lacks some of that body of work’s virtues, it also makes up for some of its omissions.

Ryan also stresses that Berlin's writings on the ‘history of ideas’ similarly depart from the canons and goals of intellectual history, and seek instead an ‘internal’, empathetic understanding, a psychological reconstruction, of the outlook and experience of past thinkers. As Ryan notes, such an ‘internalist’ approach was meant as an alternative, and rebuke, to ‘scientistic’ approaches to human experience. Ryan does not go quite so far as to draw an explicit connection here between Berlin's intellectual approach and his moral commitments, both of which can be viewed as involving a struggle against different sorts of dehumanization – whether the brutal dehumanization of totalitarian practice, or the much subtler dehumanization of a ‘scientistic’ approach to understanding human problems.

This approach had its problems. Berlin’s tendency to relate to the thinkers he studied as if they were individuals he had come to know sometimes gave him the sense that he understood that thinker as a person – and to resolve interpretive problems based on that sense of the sort of person a past thinker was. The results were not always happy – as when Berlin’s personal dislike for Rousseau led him to a one-sided (though not wholly unperceptive) account of that complicated thinker; his strong sense of Marx’s personality similarly led him to some questionable conclusions ⁴³ (even if his 1939 biography of Marx is hardly the anti-Marxist polemic that some expect it to be before reading it). On the other hand, as Ryan notes, the benefits of this approach are considerable: it makes for lively, imagination-expanding evocations and explications of past eras and their problems, past minds and their predicaments.

In making these points, it is significant that Ryan turns not to Berlin’s writings on the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, on positive and negative liberty, on Machiavelli, Marx, Mill and Maistre, but to his heartfelt explorations of Russian thinkers – above all, Alexander Herzen. Russian sources played a crucial role in forming Berlin's political-ethical imagination; and Berlin's defence of a conventionally ‘British’ political ethos of moderation and tolerance derived its peculiar tonality and urgency from the utterly different conditions of Russian political life, and the distinctive ethos of the radical Russian intelligentsia. ⁴⁴ This ethos revealed, with particular sharpness, the dangers and plausibility of an extremist approach to politics – but also the virtues of a certain sort of political idealism. Furthermore, in the Russian intelligentsia's model of ‘integrity’, ‘total commitment’ and social responsibility – its passionate rejection of attempts to divorce theory from practice, politics from morality, personal character from public stances – Berlin found a model for his own conviction that politics and morality were inseparable, as well as a rationale for his tendency to approach questions of political action in relation to personal experience, outlook and temperament. At the same time, the dangers of such a model of complete commitment informed Berlin's articulation of a liberal ethos that taught the virtues of both commitment and detachment; and in Herzen, a passionate political moralist without fanaticism, he found a near-ideal mixture of humanitarian political commitment and cultivated scepticism and irony.

The works of Herzen and other Russian thinkers and writers also allowed Berlin to explore one of the major concerns of his own thought: the ethical demands and dangers of political commitment. More specifically, Berlin was concerned with the conflict between the demands of political engagement and other ethical ideals; ⁴⁵ and with the relationship between the embrace and pursuit of political and social ideals and general moral principles, and the practical choices involved in pursuing those ideals and answering the demands of those theories – with, that is, the problem of the relationship of ends and means. ⁴⁶ These themes are central to Berlin's discussions of Herzen, and his masterful long essay on Turgenev (to which Ryan gives somewhat short shrift).

Ryan shrewdly notes the tension, or equivocation, in Berlin's mind between a scepticism regarding philosophy's capacity to establish any truths about political and moral matters; and his passionate adherence to this conviction that individuals are ends in themselves, and that it is a crime and a horror to make people serve ends that they have not chosen for themselves, whether through violence or manipulation. As Ryan also reports, it is significant that in repeatedly attacking the tendency to regard and use human beings as means towards some larger design or goal, Berlin drew on Herzen’s passionate polemics against political utopianism, rather than on Kant’s severe (and, as Berlin acknowledged, epochal – but obscure) positing of an absolute moral duty to treat humanity as an end in itself, and not a means. It was not just Kant’s rationalism and denial of moral pluralism that made him a difficult (though powerful) figure for Berlin, but his related tendency to abstract from actual, flesh-and-blood persons – to regard ‘humanity’, rather than individual human beings, as that which was most sacred and morally demanding. And, where Kant identified freedom with moral autonomy – the giving to oneself, and obedience to, a moral law – Berlin, following his beloved Russian thinkers, preferred to celebrate a ‘free human personality’ developing in unpredictable, multiform ways. ⁴⁷

In his resistance to over-analysing Berlin, Ryan, it seems to me, overlooks a further way in which Berlin's approach of evoking individual personalities may contribute to liberal political theory. Berlin's writings suggest that liberals must be concerned with questions of moral character and development, but resistant to programmes of moral indoctrination. One response to this potential impasse is to embrace Tolstoy’s conviction that true education – Bildung, the development of free, self-directing individuals – could be brought about only through ‘precept … the example of our own lives’. Thus, against attempts to mold character and impose belief by force, Tolstoy favored a pedagogic mode of exemplification. ⁴⁸ But such exemplification, for a pluralist, cannot consist in holding up a single type of life or character as ideal. Rather, the pluralist will seek to illuminate the virtues of a variety of different, not always mutually reconcilable characters and lives. At the same time, Berlin’s own intellectual personality as revealed in these works is itself exemplary in modelling a generosity of approach – an openness and receptivity to the ideas of others – that, if cultivated, may allow us to be more sensitive, less blind, to the rich variety of human character and achievement, and less likely to be intolerant and stifling/constricting in our judgements and treatment of others. Berlin’s work may thus contribute to the same cause championed by Mill a century earlier – albeit in a very different way.

V

While approaching Berlin through different authors' discussions of distinct themes in his work is illuminating, it runs the risk of failing to capture the elusive, unsystematic, but recalcitrant unity that marks his work. To capture this, it is helpful to return directly to an example of Berlin's own writings. Berlin's views on the nature of values, and the hallmarks of his moral vision more generally, are revealed particularly clearly in a lecture delivered almost exactly 50 years before the conference at which the papers presented here were given. ⁴⁹ Although not one of his most-cited works, ‘European Unity and Its Vicissitudes’ encapsulates both Berlin's account of the trajectory of modern European thought, and the core commitments that motivated both his historical narratives and his political arguments.

‘European Unity’ reflects Berlin's attempts to strike a balance between Romanticism and liberal universalism, a celebration of human creativity and freedom, and assertion of the moral limits on what human beings may do to one another. Berlin acknowledged, and indeed emphasized, the contribution of Romantic subjectivism to the catastrophic advance of political irrationalism and aestheticism. But he also distinguished, and celebrated, another face of Romanticism – what he called ‘Romantic humanism’. This held that ‘the essence of man is not consciousness, nor the invention of tools, but the power of choice’, and that

The glory and dignity of man consists in the fact that it is he who chooses, and is not chosen for, that he can be his own master … that he is not compelled to purchase security and tranquility at the price of letting himself be fitted into a neat pigeon-hole in a totalitarian structure which contrives to rob him of responsibility, freedom and respect both for himself and others. ⁵⁰

Despite Berlin’s apparent regard for the ‘Romantic’ view that ‘the maker of values is man’, ⁵³ ‘European Unity’ does not present an argument for subjectivism. Berlin insisted ‘that there does exist a scale of values by which the majority of mankind … in fact live’, because this scale of values constitutes ‘the essential nature of man’. ⁵⁴ This basic human nature includes the freedom to choose, and thus to change and to be different from others. At the same time, the fact of individual variety should reinforce, rather than undermine, our recognition of fundamental human moral equality – the concept of humanity itself. It is when we regard others as unequal, as less than fully human, as not making claims on us as equal members of the human race, that the horrible crimes of totalitarianism – Communist or fascist – follow. For Berlin, pluralism, far from undermining this idea of common humanity and thus of moral equality, reinforced it: for pluralism, the theory of values and the understanding of human experience it involves, allows us to recognize how individuals who adhere to different values and ways of life can nevertheless be equally rational, equally human and make equal claims to respect and recognition.

Berlin's appeal was ultimately not to philosophical sources, but to ‘the great and widespread sense of horror’ caused by totalitarian savagery: ‘because these rules were flouted, we have been forced to become conscious of them’. ⁵⁵ Yet if these thoughts grew out of particular experiences of totalitarianism and political terror – the ‘degradation of human personality that we have witnessed in our time’ ⁵⁶ – they have nevertheless lost none of their force or, alas, relevance. More than a hundred years after his birth, despite the vicissitudes of history and the limitations of his work, Isaiah Berlin's thought speaks to us in important ways – as demonstrated by the excellent and thoughtful studies inspired by his work presented here.