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Volume 53, Number 12 · July 13, 2006
Review
The Case for Decency
By
John Gray
Political Ideas in the Romantic Age:
Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought
by
Isaiah Berlin,
edited by Henry Hardy, with an introduction by Joshua L. Cherniss
Princeton University Press,292 pp., $29.95
Unfinished Dialogue
by
Isaiah Berlin
and Beata Polanowska-Sygulska, with a foreword by Henry Hardy
Prometheus,
317 pp., $28.00
Russia, Poland and Marxism: Isaiah Berlin to
Andrzej Walicki, 1962–1996
in
Dialogue and Universalism, Vol. 15, No. 9–10, 2005.Warsaw
University Press, 196 pp., $5.00
1.
Western
political thinking between the end of the Second World War and the
collapse of communism was shaped by the experience of totalitarianism.
The rise of National Socialism and Stalinism produced a sense of the
fragility of liberal civilization that persisted after the Nazi regime
had been destroyed and Soviet power contained. The question that
troubled many was how liberal values could have collapsed so
precipitately and completely in much of Europe,
while Communist regimes that claimed to embody Enlightenment values
repressed freedom on an unprecedented scale. It was clear that if the
disasters of the twentieth century were not to be repeated, the
intellectual roots of totalitarianism had to be uncovered and
destroyed, even if this meant relinquishing some cherished Western
beliefs.
Among
those who took up this challenge Isaiah Berlin occupies a highly distinctive
place. On both the right and the left there have been many who have
dismissed Berlin as a thinker whose ideas are irretrievably dated, and
in recent years it has become fashionable to question the idea that the
twentieth century witnessed the rise of a new, totalitarian type of
dictatorship. For his part Berlin
never doubted the reality of totalitarianism. Given the background of
his life he could hardly have done so. Born in Riga
in 1909, Berlin
was part of the generation of European Jews that experienced the
twentieth century at its most destructive and horrific. When he was six
his family moved to Petrograd, where
in 1917 he witnessed the liberal revolution in February and the
Bolshevik seizure of power in November. In 1921 his family moved to England and he was educated at Oxford, where he
obtained his first academic post. Apart from his years abroad during
World War II he remained in Oxford
for the rest of his life.
In
1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet
Union, the Nazis murdered both his grandfathers and several
other family members. During World War II, Berlin
worked for the British government, first in New
York and Washington and
then for a time in Moscow.
When in Russia,
he came into contact with Anna Akhmatova and other members of the
Russian intelligentsia who lived in an environment where intellectual
and personal freedom had been almost wholly eclipsed. The events of
these years had a formative influence on the work in political theory
and the history of ideas he did after resuming his academic life in Oxford after the
war. In conversation Berlin
used to observe that in its mass murders the twentieth century was the
worst in history, and to an extent that has not been appreciated the
view of liberty and ethical pluralism that he developed in the 1950s
was an attempt to undermine the beliefs that helped engender the crimes
of totalitarianism.
Those
who argue that Berlin's
thought was shaped by the history of the last century are not mistaken,
but in dismissing it as dated they neglect the larger historical
perspectives that informed it and miss its continuing power. Berlin posed a
formidable challenge not only to totalitarian ideologies but also to
recent varieties of liberalism. At times Berlin seemed-- to use a
distinction he borrowed from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus to
interpret Tolstoy in a celebrated lecture-- more like the fox that knows
many things than the hedgehog that knows one big thing. Both as a
thinker and as a man Berlin
had many facets; he refused to tether himself to any simple formula for
dealing with human affairs. Yet if there is a single idea that links
together his surprisingly voluminous writings on Mill and Machiavelli,
Herder and de Maistre, Vico and Herzen and many lesser-known thinkers,
and which gives his defense of liberalism its distinctive character, it
is his thesis of the plurality of values.
Berlin was
never a very systematic thinker, and he nowhere stated his theory of
value pluralism in anything like complete or canonical form. Several
versions of it are presented in his writings; but common to them is a
consistent rejection of the idea-- which Berlin rightly viewed as being
fundamental in the Western intellectual tradition-- that all genuine
human values must be combinable in a harmonious whole. In this view
conflicts of values are symptoms of error that in principle can always
be resolved: if human values seem to come into conflict that is only
because our understanding of them is imperfect, or some of the
contending values are spurious; and where such conflicts appear there
is a single right answer that-- if only they can find it-- all reasonable
people are bound to accept. In opposition to this view Berlin
maintained that conflicts of values are real and inescapable, with some
of them having no satisfactory solution. He advanced this view not as a
form of skepticism but as a universal truth: conflicts of value go with
being human. Inklings of this pluralist viewpoint can be detected in
some of Berlin's
pre-war writings on analytical philosophy, but it was only after the
war that he stated it clearly and applied it to the pathologies of
twentieth-century politics.
Political
Ideas in the Romantic Age is the longest text Isaiah Berlin ever
produced. Written between 1950 and 1952, much revised, and then set
aside and seemingly forgotten, it is described by Henry Hardy-- the
dedicated editor and literary trustee who in thirty years of scholarly
labors has rescued so many of Berlin's surprisingly voluminous writings
from undeserved oblivion-- as the "Grundrisse, the ur-text or
'torso,' as Berlin called it, from which a great deal of his subsequent
work derived." Indispensable for anyone interested in the history of
ideas and the development of liberal thought, it contains most of the
central themes of Berlin's
work, together with some of its recurring ambiguities. In a
characteristic passage Berlin
attacks the Enlightenment belief that a condition of society is in
principle attainable in which all values that are truly important can
be fully realized. In a wide range of Enlightenment thinkers, he writes,
we
find the same common assumption: that the answers to all the great
questions must of necessity agree with one another; for they must
correspond with reality, and reality is a harmonious whole. If this
were not so, there is chaos at the heart of things: which is
unthinkable. Liberty, equality, property, knowledge, security,
practical wisdom, purity of character, sincerity, kindness, rational
self-love, all these ideals...cannot (if they are truly desirable)
conflict with one another; if they appear to do so it must be due to
some misunderstanding of their properties. No truly good thing can ever
be finally incompatible with any other; indeed they virtually entail
one another: men cannot be wise unless they are free, or free unless
they are just, happy and so forth.
Here
we conspicuously abandon the voice of experience-- which records very
obvious conflicts of ultimate ideals-- and encounter a doctrine that
stems from older theological roots-- from the belief that unless all the
positive virtues are harmonious with one another, or at least not
incompatible, the notion of the Perfect Entity-- whether it be called
nature or God or Ultimate Reality-- is not conceivable.
This
passage encapsulates Berlin's analysis of the intellectual roots of
some of the major political disasters of the twentieth century: the
role in the Enlightenment of a utopian ideal of social harmony; the
derivation of this ideal from older metaphysical and religious beliefs
that have a long history in Western thought; and the claim that in
refusing to accept the testimony of experience, with its message of
irresolvable conflict among human ideals, the Enlightenment propagated
a monistic philosophy that opened the way to new forms of tyranny. Berlin's
broad-brush picture leaves out Enlightenment thinkers such as David
Hume who emphasize the limited role of reason and understates the
extent to which Adam Smith and others acknowledged human
imperfectability. Even so Berlin
was right in thinking that a major strand of Enlightenment thinking
featured a belief in attainable harmony that had no basis in
experience. The belief that conflicts of values can be left behind in a
new type of society, to which many Enlightenment thinkers have
subscribed, is not a product of observation or scientific inquiry; it
is a relic of faith. These thinkers may have imagined that they
embodied the voice of reason, but they were in fact believers in an
idea of perfection inherited from religion.
In
one facet of his work, Berlin,
then, was a critic of the Enlightenment-- but not an enemy. He does not
belong among the thinkers of what he called the
Counter-Enlightenment-- thinkers such as J.G. Hamann and Joseph de
Maistre, who were virulently hostile to the Enlightenment's core
beliefs in freedom, equality, and the value of rational inquiry. Berlin shared
these Enlightenment beliefs; but he found in some of the most
influential Enlightenment thinkers a monism he viewed as dangerously
mistaken, and in this he was influenced by some of the Enlightenment's
Romantic critics. In a seminal essay he praised the Romantic movement
for having "permanently shaken the faith in universal, objective truth
in matters of conduct," and described the Enlightenment faith in future
harmony as "an ideal for which more human beings have, in our time,
sacrificed themselves and others than, perhaps, for any other cause in
human history."[1]
It
is a strong claim, and it is questionable whether it applies to all
forms of twentieth-century totalitarianism. It was not any faith in
human harmony that fueled Nazi ideology. Nevertheless, Berlin
highlights an aspect of twentieth-century history that is often
forgotten, or else stridently denied. The repression of liberty that
took place in the countries in which Communist regimes were established
cannot be adequately explained as a product of backwardness, or of
errors in the application of Marxian theory. It was the result of a
resolute attempt to realize an Enlightenment utopia-- a condition of
society in which no serious form of conflict any longer exists.[2]
While
Berlin's
analysis of the dangers of monism is acute and forceful, he never
developed a fully convincing account of value pluralism. He based his
version of pluralism on a view of human nature, which is set out in a
passage cited by Joshua Cherniss in his admirably lucid and
well-balanced introduction:
Man
is incapable of self-completion, and therefore never wholly
predictable; fallible, a complex combination of opposites, some
reconcilable, others incapable of being resolved or harmonised; unable
to cease from his search for truth, happiness, novelty, freedom, but
with no guarantee...of being able to attain them.
Berlin
presented this formulation as an account of the picture of human nature
held by John Stuart Mill, but as with many of his interpretations of
past thinkers it could just as well be a statement of his own view.
Like Mill, Berlin
was much influenced by the Romantic belief that humans do not owe their
values to God or Nature, but freely create them. Again like Mill he
rejected the ultra-Romantic notion that humans invent themselves out of
nothing and can be anything they choose to be. Berlin also rejected the postmodern
and relativist view that human values are highly elastic cultural
constructions. He insisted that basic human needs and potentialities do
not vary much across cultures and repeatedly affirmed the desirability
of something like a universal moral minimum. He was a convinced
exponent of universal human values, whose distinctive contribution was
to acknowledge that these values could be at odds with one another.
Unfortunately, he never spelled out which values are truly universal
and which culturally specific, and this leaves his account of value
pluralism and its relations with liberalism precarious and unstable.
It
is not always clear what Berlin
means by "values"-- are they fully fledged ideals of the good life, or
anything that can be judged desirable? Again, how are values defined
and distinguished from one another-- should we use the methods of
cultural anthropology to identify them, or employ some kind of
conceptual or linguistic analysis, as Berlin sometimes did? Yet again, how
do we know when we have reached a point at which conflicts of values
are irreconcilable? If we reasoned further, might we not increase our
understanding and resolve the conflict? Most seriously, it is unclear
whether negative liberty-- which he sees as the central value of
liberalism-- belongs in the category of values that are universally
human. For Berlin
negative liberty meant the ability to act, or to express thoughts,
without being interfered with by others and especially the state. After
all, as Berlin
himself often noted, the ancient Greeks lacked the notion of a sphere
of life that ought to be protected from political interference, and it
was only in modern times that an ideal of negative liberty was
formulated. If it is such a latecomer in the history of human values,
why should we value it so highly? How must we accord it such priority,
if-- as Berlin maintained-- it is only one value among many and often
clashes with others whose claims are no less valid?
2.
Berlin came to prominence as a political
theorist with his celebrated lecture "Two Concepts of Liberty," which
he delivered in 1958 after he took up the Chichele Chair of Social and
Political Theory at Oxford
in 1957. One of the many absorbingly interesting features of Political
Theory in the Romantic Age is that it shows that Berlin's
defense of negative liberty was closely linked with his attack on
monism. In a long chapter entitled "Two Concepts of Freedom: Romantic
and Liberal," Berlin
sets out his view that Western political theory contains two
conceptions of freedom, which are not different interpretations of a
single idea but opposed political ideals. The distinction between these
two conceptions is far from simple, but the core of Berlin's
argument is that whereas negative liberty refers to matters in which
individuals can act without interference from others, positive liberty
involves acting in accordance with reason. This might be the reason of
a collectivity, as in Rousseau's theory of the general will, or of each
individual, as Spinoza believed. Either way, it was assumed that only
one way of living could be fully rational.
Berlin rejected
this assumption. Unlike many liberal thinkers today, Berlin did not
view the value of negative freedom as coming from its contribution to
personal autonomy, an ideal he viewed with suspicion.[3]
In Berlin's
view autonomy is only one human ideal among many and cannot be allowed
to crowd out others to which many people are reasonably attached. A
liberal society will surely contain people who cherish personal
autonomy, understood as a condition in which their lives are governed
by principles and goals which they have subjected to rational scrutiny;
but it will have room for others-- Romantic believers in personal
spontaneity and followers of traditional religious practices, for
example-- who do not accept any such ideal. For Berlin
the value of negative liberty
is not that it promotes the best or most rational way of living--
autonomous or otherwise. Rather, it enables many different ideals to
flourish. It may sometimes be right to limit negative liberty in order
to promote other ideals and values; but we should understand what we
are doing. Liberty
is one thing, the good life another.
In
many of his writings Berlin
tried to argue that a liberal ideal of freedom can be defended as a
response to the truth of value pluralism, and he has been followed in
this effort by a number of recent writers.[4]
The fact remains that the two views point in unmistakably different
directions. Berlin's
pluralism expressed a kind of Romantic universalism in which the
diversity of cultures was celebrated as something intrinsically
valuable instead of being seen-- as in the Enlightenment-- as a stage on
the way to a single, all-embracing civilization. While this is a view
that affirms universal values it does not support the universal claims
of liberal societies. We may be able to reach agreement on universal
values-- a list of goods that are necessary to the well-being of all
human beings and evils that obstruct any worthwhile human life, for
example; but such a list does not provide a universal morality-- a
set of principles that guides us in settling conflicts among these
values. Even if negative liberty were agreed to be a universal value it
would come into conflict with other values that are also humanly
universal. The claims of liberty may clash with those of security and
equality; they can also compete with values of community and social
cohesion. When this occurs, pluralism gives no reason for according
freedom-- negative or positive-- any overall priority. Pluralism of the
kind Berlin
defended so eloquently is more potently subversive than he imagined, or
wished. It undermines all universal moralities, including liberal
moralities.
It
may be that the true upshot of Berlin's pluralism is not liberalism
but instead an ideal of basic decency. He always affirmed the necessity
of a moral minimum in human affairs, and emphasized that upholding it
should take precedence over remote and nebulous ideals. It is true that
he gives no clear guidance to the content of such a minimum. When he
talked of a "common moral horizon" that applied to all of humankind, he
often seemed to mean only that people with very different values can
understand one another; but mutual intelligibility between divergent
moral outlooks is not the same thing as having common values or
agreeing on what should count as minimal moral decency. Still, Berlin could
reasonably argue that some practices are so inimical to any human life
worth living that their eradication should take priority over other
goals. Slavery, genocide, religious and political persecution, and
torture are plausible examples of such practices, and are recognized as
such in the international treaties that were agreed on after the Second
World War. More generally, any practice that requires inflicting the
universal evil of humiliation can reasonably be judged as indecent. A
decent society may not protect the full panoply of liberal freedoms,
but from a pluralist perspective it could be more humanly desirable
than a predominantly liberal society in which some of the requirements
of minimal decency are violated.[5]
An
ideal of basic decency of this sort may seem a modest outcome of Berlin's
thought, but when applied to politics at the start of the twenty-first
century it has a sharp critical edge. There is today a school of "hard"
or "muscular" liberals, often allied with neoconservatives, who seek to
promote democratic revolution in countries around the world by means
that include military force. Some have been willing to accept the
relaxation of the prohibition of torture that-- despite the resistance of
officials in many branches of American government-- has been allowed
during the Bush administration. These "hard liberals" like to see
themselves as defenders of Enlightenment values; but they represent
another version of the utopian strand in Enlightenment thinking whose
disastrous influence on twentieth-century politics Berlin illuminated. Neoconservatives
have been ready to use force on a large scale, and in some cases to
condone torture, as means of promoting an ideal of global democracy. It
is more than doubtful that democracy can be promoted in this way; but
in any case democracy is not liberty, whether negative or positive, nor
is it peace or the cessation of terrorism. These are distinct goods,
and nothing ensures that in achieving one the others will also be
achieved; indeed as one is realized others may become more distant. To
think that all of these values can be realized together is a fantasy,
which like the utopias of the last century can only end in debacle.
3.
Berlin's
thought is a call to realism and humility, which asks us to accept our
inability to create a harmonious future. During the cold war there were
some who found this message dispiriting and unheroic. In countries
behind the Iron Curtain Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek were read more
widely than Berlin,
and George Orwell was read more widely than anyone else, and it may be
the relative simplicity of their moral vision that accounted for the
popularity of these writers. In comparison with Hayek and Popper, Berlin seemed
to leave too many moral issues negotiable, while his account of the
intellectual origins of totalitarianism lacked the immediacy of
Orwell's dark fables. Yet this view of Berlin
was by no means universal in the Communist world, and particularly in Poland
he found sympathetic readers.
One
such reader was Beata Polanowska-Sygulska, a young political theorist
and intellectual historian who wrote to Berlin
in 1983 (when Poland
was just emerging from a period of martial law) and maintained an
active correspondence with him until a few months before he died in
November 1997. Unfinished Dialogue is a record of this
exchange, containing not only Berlin's
letters but also interviews he gave to Polish periodicals, transcripts
of recorded conversations, and a number of articles by Polanowska-
Sygulska in which she compares Berlin's view of freedom with that
of other liberal thinkers and examines its contested relations with
value pluralism.
The
resulting collection is of great value in preserving a record of Berlin's unique
style of conversation—at once irrepressibly gossipy and richly learned,
unfailingly generous and yet revealing an underlying steel when
confronted with anything that smacked of moral insincerity or woolly
thinking. As he put it in a characteristic remark:
I
am optimistic enough to believe that there are certain basic human
needs, wishes, values, and all I ask is for the breakdown of prison
houses, if need be by decisive action, and for enough opportunity to be
given for at any rate some of the central values to realise themselves
at some but not too much cost to other ones. It's a very dreary piece
of advice.... But I cannot help thinking that if idle bloodshed is to
be avoided, my dull solution is valid.
The
book is no less valuable in bringing out what it was in Berlin's thought that had appeal in the harsh
environment of Poland
at that time. Unlike the liberal philosophies based on rights that have
been dominant over the past generation, Berlin understood that vital human
freedoms do not form a harmonious system; they can conflict with one
another and when they do we must choose between them. At the same time
he knew that there are situations in which freedom of any kind is lost.
The evil of totalitarianism is not only that it fails to protect
specific liberties but that it extinguishes the very possibility of
freedom. It was his grasp of this truth that made Berlin's
thought an inspiration to Polanowska-Sygulska and others in Poland.
The
exchanges between Berlin and the
distinguished Polish scholar Andrzej Walicki reveal another side of Berlin's
pluralism. More than any other intellectual historian Walicki has
worked to retrieve nineteenth-century Russian liberal thought from
neglect, and many of the letters to him from Berlin that are reproduced
in Dialogue and Universalism show Berlin's sympathy for this
project. Walicki contributes a long prefatory essay, "Isaiah Berlin as I Knew Him," which contains some of
the most perceptive and intriguing observations on Berlin I have seen. He suggests that
Berlin's
way of thinking renewed the Russian liberalism of Ivan Turgenev's time,
which feared a threat to freedom not only from authoritarian rule but
also from revolutionary radicalism. The freedom that Russian liberals
such as Turgenev and Alexander Herzen feared was in danger was above
all spiritual freedom, which they saw as being threatened by any regime
or movement that tried to apply a doctrine of historical necessity.
Against the many Russian thinkers influenced by Hegel who believed that
history was governed by universal laws to which one could only submit,
Turgenev upheld the freedom of different societies to pursue different
paths of development and of individuals to pursue, even in opposition
to powerful historical forces, their own goals and values. Here
Turgenev endorsed the celebrated dictum of Alexander Herzen, with whom
he disagreed on many other matters: that history has no libretto. Human
history is a realm of contingency and unpredictability, in which each
generation faces conflicts that have no ideal solution. In the view of
such Russian liberals the belief in a universal pattern of development
with which every society must conform was not only a delusion; it was
also a recipe for tyranny. Sacrificing present liberty for the sake of
an imaginary future harmony was fanatical folly.
Much
of Berlin's
postwar work was an attack on ideas of historical inevitability that
echoed these Russian liberal thinkers. As Walicki puts it, Berlin
"transplanted that specifically Russian understanding of liberalism
onto British soil." He did so not only because he was deeply attracted
by it but also as a "chosen stance." Walicki suggests that Berlin's
"Russianness" was a "conscious construct," and there is an element of
truth in this. By identifying himself with Russian thought,
particularly with the work of Herzen, Berlin was able to achieve a distance from the
kind of philosophy that was prevalent in Oxford and much of the
English-speaking world. In postwar analytical philosophy clarity was
valued more than anything else. Intellectual respectability demanded a
certain laborious dullness, and the notion that philosophy could
express a vision of human life was anathema. As a result philosophy was
often a display of technical virtuosity, and had nothing much to say
about the great conflicts of the time. By speaking in the voice of the
Russian thinkers he retrieved from neglect, Berlin was able to present a
distinctive vision of human life and use it to interpret some of the
defining experiences of the twentieth century.
Berlin often told the story of how talking with
the British logician Henry M. Sheffer in Washington persuaded him that
philosophy is not a progressive discipline in which knowledge could be
accumulated. After spending a night in the darkness of an unpressurized
bomber flying back to Britain, unable to sleep
because of the need to take in oxygen regularly from a pipe, he decided
to give up philosophy for the study of the history of ideas. It is a
persuasive tale but it can hardly be the whole truth. In one of the
conversations recorded in Unfinished Dialogue, where he retells
the story, he remarks: "Before the war I was an ordinary Oxford
philosopher." By switching disciplines he was able to throw off the
constraints that went with that role. Yet he did not give up
philosophy, but went on to practice it in another way.
Among
the writers Berlin
most admired was the Russian Jewish religious philosopher Lev Shestov.
In a series of provocative and moving books and essays Shestov mocked
the idea of unity that guided philosophers from Socrates onward. "The
idea of total unity," he wrote, "is an absolutely false idea."[6]
In Shestov's view Western philosophy was captivated by an idea of
rational necessity that undermined human liberty. At the same time it
had distorted the biblical message-- the message of Genesis and the book
of Job, which was one of freedom from universal laws. Berlin was not
a religious believer, and did not follow Shestov in his radical
rejection of reason as a guide to life. But he was at one with him in
refusing any belief in ultimate harmony. The belief in unity that has
fueled so many utopian dreams is an effort to reconcile the
irreconcilable that ends in repression. Berlin suggests we renounce this
venerable faith, and learn how to live with intractable conflict.
Notes
[1]
"The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will," in The Proper Study of
Mankind, edited by Henry Hardy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998),
p. 580.
[2]
Berlin
examines the roots of utopianism in "The Decline of Utopian Ideas in
the West," in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the
History of Ideas (Knopf, 1991), pp. 20–48.
[3]
For Berlin's
criticism of ideas of autonomy, see his "From Hope and Fear Set Free,"
in The Proper Study of Mankind, pp. 91–118.
[4]
William A. Galston has written an elegant and resourceful pluralist
defense of liberalism in Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of
Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (Cambridge
University Press, 2002). A survey of the literature on the issue is
given in George Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism
(Continuum, 2002).
[5]
Avishai Margalit presents a powerful defense of the idea of a decent
society as one that seeks to eradicate practices that involve the
humiliation of any of its members in his book The Decent Society,
translated by Naomi Goldblum (Harvard University Press, 1996).
[6]
Lev Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem
(Simon and Schuster, 1968), p. 431.
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