This collection of Berlin’s essays contains an eclectic mix of character studies. What unites these intellectuals is a penchant for thought that was against the grain, thus the book’s title. Berlin’s first few essays coalesced around thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment, particularly Giambattista Vico, from Naples, and J. G. Hamann, from Germany. Vico’s “revolutionary move is to have denied the doctrine of a timeless natural law the truths of which could have been known in principle to any man, at any time, anywhere…. He preached the notion of the uniqueness of cultures…. For Vico, men ask different questions of the universe, and their answers are shaped accordingly: such questions, and the symbols or acts that express them, alter or become obsolete in the course of cultural development; to understand the answers one must understand the questions that preoccupy an age.” Vico was not a nationalist, or even a cultural relativist, but he was a pluralist. He felt that one must be able to, through imagination, put oneself in the shoes of the other to truly understand, if not accept, another’s society. For Vico, “there were three great doors that lead into the past: language; myths; and rites, that is, institutional behaviour.” He saw all myths as symbolizing moments in the history of social change. In Straussian fashion, myths could be interpreted and revealed as history, if one dug deep enough into their true esoteric meanings. Myths carried the past with them and taught men from where they actually came and how they had become what they had become- imbuing culture and society. Vico felt that knowledge develops through time, but that more recent knowledge is not, in any sense, necessarily better, but just more appropriate for the current circumstances. He had the “realization that ideas evolve, that knowledge is not a static network of eternal, universal, clear truths, either Platonic or Cartesian, but a social process, that this process is traceable through (indeed, is in a sense identical with) the evolution of symbols- words, gestures, pictures, and their altering patterns, functions, structures, and uses.” For Vico, society was cyclical. He feared all attempts at utopias, because any utopia was a static conception of the world. “The increase in humanity and knowledge (which means the peak of a cycle) is inevitably accompanied by a loss of primitive vigour, directness, imaginative force, beyond any made possible by the development of the critical intellect.”
Hamann was a Lutheran pietist and thus a strict anti-rationalist. He sought direct communion with God, the only thing that was real. “The universe for him, as for the older German mystical tradition, is itself a kind of language. Things and plants and animals are themselves symbols with which God communicates with his creatures…. [He] looked on the universe not as a structure that can be studied or described by whatever methods are most appropriate, but as a perpetual activity of the spirit and of nature.” But his God was not the systematic one of Aquinas. Furthermore, he despised deists even more than atheists for their mental contortions. He celebrated “the irregulars of life, the outsiders and vagabonds, outcasts and visionaries, whom he favours because they are closer to God than liberal theologians who seek to prove his existence by logical methods. ‘Whoever seeks to conceive God in the head’, wrote a German pietist thirty years earlier, ‘becomes an atheist’, and this is what Hamann himself believed. Religion was the direct experience of the presence of God, or it was nothing…. Hamann’s religion was that of the burning bush, not that of Thomist logic or ‘natural’ semi-Lutheran religion; it sprang from Dionysiac experience, not Apollonian contemplation.” Hamann looked to internalize the outside world. He took from David Hume the idea that all thought is predated by the senses. Hume would suggest, “it seems evident that men are carried, by a natural instinct or prepossession, to repose faith in their senses; and that, without any reasoning, or even almost before the use of reason, we always suppose an external universe.” Hume went on, “our own existence and the existence of all things outside us must be believed and cannot be demonstrated in any other fashion.” It was this distrust of a priori reasoning in Hume that Hamann would latch onto and twist into his own viewpoint. “Like William Blake, Hamann believed that truth is always particular, never general; genuine knowledge is direct, gained through some species of immediate acquaintance…. Only love- for a person or an object- can reveal the true nature of anything. It is not possible to love formulae, general propositions, laws, the abstractions of science, the vast system of concepts and categories- symbols too general to be close to reality- with which the French lumieres have blinded themselves to concrete reality, to the real experience which only direct acquaintance, especially by the senses, provides…. Hamann took little interest in theories or speculations about the external world; he cared only for the inner personal life of the individual, and therefore only for art, religious experience, the senses, personal relationships, which the analytic truths of scientific reason seemed to reduce to meaningless ciphers.” Hamann went against the tendencies of the day for bureaucratization, scientism, and positivism. For him “systems are mere prisons of spirit, and they lead not only to distortion in the sphere of knowledge, but to the erection of monstrous bureaucratic machines, built in accordance with the rules that ignore the teeming variety of the living world, the untidy and asymmetrical inner lives of men, and crush them into conformity for the sake of some ideological chimera…. The French philosophes and their English followers tell us that men seek only to obtain pleasure and avoid pain, but this is absurd. Men seek to live, create, love, hate, eat, drink, worship, sacrifice, understand, and they seek this because they cannot help it. Life is action. It is knowable only by those who look within themselves and perform ‘the descent to hell [Hollenfahrt] of self-knowledge.” For Hamann the only thing that was real was what the individual experienced. His was a sublime solipsism. “To Hamann and his followers all rules or precepts are deadly; they may be necessary for the conduct of day-to-day life, but nothing great was ever achieved by following them. English critics were right in supposing originality entailed breaking rules, that every creative act, every illuminating insight, is obtained by ignoring the rules of despotic legislators. Rules, he declared, are Vestal Virgins: unless they are violated there will be no issue…. For the truly ardent opponents of classicism, values are not found but made, not discovered but created; they are to be realised because they are mine, or ours.” Hamann despised the very pillars of the Enlightenment. “Man is not born to reason, but to eat and drink and procreate, to love and hate, agonise and sacrifice and worship. But they know nothing of this in Paris, where the monstrous cogito has obscured the sublime sum.”
Berlin’s study of Machiavelli attempts to square pagan and Christian moral systems and thus make sense of Machiavelli’s own morality. It is a political morality, at odds with the individual ethics of man. Machiavelli “is indeed rejecting Christian ethics, but in favor of another system, another moral universe- the world of Pericles or of Scipio, or even of the Duke of Valentino, a society geared to ends just as ultimate as the Christian faith, a society in which men fight and are ready to die for (public) ends which they pursue for their own sakes. They are choosing not a realm of means (called politics) as opposed to a realm of ends (called morals), but opt for a rival (Roman or classical) morality, an alternative realm of ends. In other words the conflict is between two moralities, Christian and pagan (or, as some wish to call it, aesthetic), not between autonomous realms of morals and politics.” This is a revolutionary proposition- that Machiavelli did not just employ different means in his political calculations, but that, in fact, his morality was based on an entirely different, and older, conception of the ultimate good. “When Machiavelli said (in a letter to Francesco Vettori) that he loved his native city more than his own soul, he revealed his basic moral beliefs…. Machiavelli’s values, I should like to repeat,, are not instrumental but moral and ultimate, and he calls for great sacrifices in their name. For them he rejects the rival scale- the Christian principles of ozio and meekness- not, indeed, as being defective in itself, but as inapplicable to the conditions of real life; and real life for him means not merely (as is sometimes alleged) life as it was lived around him in Italy- the crimes, hypocrisies, brutalities, follies of Florence, Rome, Venice, Milan. This is not the touchstone of reality. His purpose is not to leave unchanged or to reproduce this kind of life, but to lift it to a new plane, to rescue Italy from squalor and slavery, to restore her to health and sanity. The moral ideal for which he thinks no sacrifice too great- the welfare of the patria- is for him the highest form of social existence attainable by man; but attainable, not unattainable; not a world outside the limits of human capacity, given human beings as we know them, that is, creatures compounded out of those emotional, intellectual and physical properties of which history and observation provide examples. He asks for men improved but not transfigured, not superhuman; not for a world of ideal beings unknown on this earth…. If you object to the political methods recommended because they seem to you morally detestable, if you refuse to embark upon them because they are, to use Ritter’s word, erschreckend, too frightening, Machiavelli has no answer, no argument. In that case you are perfectly entitled to lead a morally good life, be a private citizen (or a monk), seek some corner of your own. But in that event you must not make yourself responsible for the lives of others or expect good fortune; in a material sense you must expect to be ignored or destroyed. In other words, you can opt out of the public world, but in that case he has nothing to say to you, for it is to the public world and to the men in it that he addresses himself.” It is to the State that all must be subservient. “The great originality and the tragic implications of Machiavelli’s theses seem to me to reside in their relation to a Christian civilization. It was all very well to live by the light of pagan ideals in pagan times; but to preach paganism more than a thousand years after the triumph of Christianity was to do so after the loss of innocence- and to be forcing men to make a conscious choice. The choice is painful because it is a choice between two entire worlds. Men have lived in both, and fought and died to preserve them against each other. Machiavelli has opted for one of them, and he is prepared to commit crimes for its sake. In killing, deceiving, betraying, Machiavelli’s princes and republicans are doing evil things, not condonable in terms of common morality. It is Machiavelli’s great merit that he does not deny this. Marsilio, Hobbes, Spinoza, and, in their own fashion, Hegel and Marx, did try to deny it…. Machiavelli is not a defender of any such abstract theory. It does not occur to him to employ such casuistry. He is transparently honest and clear. In choosing the life of a statesman, or even the life of a citizen with enough civic sense to want his State to be as successful and as splendid as possible, you commit yourself to rejection of Christian behaviour. It may be that Christians are right about well-being of the individual soul, taken outside the social and political context. But the well-being of the State is not the same as the well-being of the individual- they ‘are governed in a different way’. You will have made your choice: the only crimes are weakness, cowardice, stupidity, which may cause you to draw back in midstream and fail…. If morals relate to human conduct, and men are by nature social, Christian morality cannot be a guide for normal social existence. It remained for someone to state this. Machiavelli did so.” Machiavelli subverts the idea of universal truth and natural law. “If what Machiavelli believed is true, this undermines one major assumption of Western thought: namely somewhere in the past or the future, in this world or the next, in the Church or the laboratory, in the speculations of metaphysicians or the findings of the social scientist, or in the uncorrupted heart of the simple good man, there is to be found the final solution to how men should live. If this is false (and if more than one equally valid answer to the question can be returned, then it is false), the idea of the sole true, objective, universal human ideal crumbles. The very search for it becomes not merely Utopian in practice, but conceptually incoherent…. If there is only one solution to the puzzle, then the only problems are, firstly, how to find it, then how to realise it, and finally how to convert others to the solution by persuasion or force. But if this is not so (Machiavelli contrasts two ways of life, but there could be, and, save for fanatical monists, there obviously are, more than two), then the path is open to empiricism, pluralism, toleration, compromise. Toleration is historically the product of the realisation of the irreconcilability of equally dogmatic faiths, and the practical improbability of complete victory of one over the other. Those who wished to survive realised that they had to tolerate error. They gradually came to see the merits in diversity, and so became sceptical about definitive solutions in human affairs.”
Berlin’s essay on Montesquieu stressed his cultural pluralism and respect for organic growth in societies. Montesquieu’s central unifying thesis was that “men are governed by many things: climate, religion, law, the maxims of government, the examples of past things, customs, manners; and from the combination of such influences a general spirit is produced.” Montesquieu felt that man is by nature social and so society should evolve naturally due to the inclinations of man. “Each State or human community has its own separate, individual, unique path of proper development, created in the first place by material causes, and the business of statesmen is to understand what this constitution is, and therefore what specific rules will alone preserve and strengthen it.” Societies strive for different things. Their values are unique and not compatible. There is no one right way to live. Montesquieu’s “particular achievement was to demonstrate the impossibility of universal solutions, to explain that what was good for some people in some situations was not necessarily equally good for others in different conditions, because of differences not only of means, but also of ends.” For Montesquieu, the pace of progress needed to be halted. “Montesquieu cannot forget that simplicity, energy, speed are the attributes of despotism, and go ill with individual liberty, which needs a looser social texture, a slower tempo. If one should destroy, one should at least hesitate, feel qualms…. He hates and fears all despots, even the most rational and enlightened, for he distrusts all central authority, all the great managers of society, all those who confidently and tidily arrange the destinies of others…. He believes passionately in the necessity for a minimum area of personal liberty for every citizen, whatever he may choose to do with it…. For it is more important that people should be free to err than that they be coerced into holding correct opinions.” Montesquieu believed in helping the lives of actual individuals, not just the abstraction called humanity. “It is against the ‘terrible simplifiers’ of this type, whose intellectual lucidity and moral purity of heart seemed to make them all the readier to sacrifice mankind again and again in the name of vast abstractions upon altars served by imaginary sciences of human behaviour, that Montesquieu’s cautious empiricism, his distrust of laws of universal application, and his acute sense of the limits of human powers, stand up so well.”
One of Berlin’s favorite 19th century Russian thinkers was Alexander Herzen. Herzen “saw himself as an expert ‘unmasker’ of appearances and conventions, and dramatised himself as a devastating discoverer of their social and moral core.” Throughout his writings, whether autobiography or journalism, Herzen “always dealt with the same central theme: the oppression of the individual; the humiliation and degradation of men by political and personal tyranny; the yoke of social custom, the dark ignorance, and savage, arbitrary misgovernment which maimed and destroyed human beings.” Like Montesquieu, he despised abstractions. Herzen felt “a deep distrust…. of all general formulae as such, of the programmes and battle-cries of all the political parties, of the great, official historical goals- progress, liberty, equality, national unity, historic rights, human solidarity- principles and slogans in the name of which men had been, and doubtless would soon again be, violated and slaughtered, and their forms of life condemned and destroyed…. Herzen saw danger in the great magnificent abstractions the mere sound of which precipitated men into violent and meaningless slaughter- new idols, it seemed to him, on whose altars human blood was to be shed tomorrow as irrationally and uselessly as the blood of the victims of yesterday or the day before, sacrificed in honour of older divinities- Church or monarchy or the feudal order or the sacred customs of the tribe, that were now discredited as obstacles to the progress of mankind.” While an aristocrat, Herzen felt a natural inclination towards the serfs and the plebeian class. He was a man of culture, who still saw the bones that helped erect its scaffolding. “The old world was crumbling visibly, and it deserved to fall. It would be destroyed by its victims- the slaves who cared nothing for the art and the science of their masters; and indeed, Herzen asks, why should they care? Was it not erected on their suffering and degradation?… Sometimes he believes in the need for a great, cleansing revolutionary storm, even were it to take the form of a barbarian invasion likely to destroy all the values that he himself holds dear. At other times he reproaches his old friend Bakunin, who joined him in London after escaping from his Russian prisons, for wanting to make the revolution too soon; for not understanding that dwellings for free men cannot be constructed out of the stones of a prison.” Herzen was the reluctant revolutionary. His ambivalence was suggested in his temperament. “History has her own tempo.” Again, like Montesquieu, he believed in man as an individual. “He believed that the ultimate goal of life was life itself; that the day and the hour were ends in themselves, not a means to another day or another experience.”
Moses Hess was a complicated man. An international socialist who went on to “invent” Zionism, all the while never discarding his revolutionary socialism. Marx ridiculed his simplicity, while he admired his honesty and purity. Hess “wished only to serve mankind, help the destitute, liberate the oppressed, and, above all, not make money, since this appeared to him bourgeois egotism in its most repulsive form.” He was inspired by Babeuf and actually helped to convert both Bakunin and Marx to socialism. “Communism for Hess was the sole form of social altruism realisable in the historical conditions of the age.” He broke off from Marx’s historical dialectic and inevitability of history. Furthermore, “Hess did not accept the Marxist doctrine of the unreality of nationalism as a basic factor in history.” He felt cosmopolitism was unnatural and that there were historical differences which separated cultures. That is how he slipped so easily first back into Judaism, eventually becoming the founder of proto-Zionism. “One thought which I believed I had extinguished for ever within my breast is again vividly present to me: the thought of my nationality, inseparable from the heritage of my fathers and from the Holy Land- the eternal city, the birthplace of the belief in the divine unity of life and in the future brotherhood of all men.” He was the first to realize the futility of assimilation in Germany. “Neither reform, nor baptism, neither education nor emancipation, will completely open before the Jews of Germany the doors of social life…. What the Germans hate is not so much the Jewish religion or Jewish names as the Jewish noses.” Like Montesquieu and Herzen, Hess was not fond of abstract concepts, no matter how tempting. “He believed deeply in the faithful preservation of historical tradition. He spoke about this in language scarcely less fervent, but a good deal less biased and irrational, than Burke or Fichte. He did so not because he feared change- he was after all a radical and revolutionary- but because through his most extreme and radical beliefs there persists a conviction that there is never any duty to maim or impoverish oneself for the sake of an abstract ideal.”
Berlin’s essay on Disraeli and Marx makes a strange pairing. Berlin’s focus is on how both came to terms with their Jewish heritage, though both were baptized in their youths. While Disraeli was to embrace his heritage with comic zeal, Marx was to suppress and shun his ancestry. Disraeli was a complicated man. He was born into fairly good society, but, because of his heritage, was always an outsider. “Disraeli was always drawn to the non-rational sides of life…. Disraeli was hopelessly fascinated by the aristocracy as a class and a principle…. He despised equality, mediocrity, and the common man…. He was a Romantic in a deeper sense, in that he believed that the true forces that governed the loves of individuals and societies were not intelligible to analytical reasons, not codifiable by any kind of systematic, scientific investigation, but were unique, mysterious, dark and impalpable, beyond the reach of reason.” Berlin suggests that to get at Disraeli’s views of life it is imperative to study his novels. “A man may not be sincere in his political speeches or his letters, but his works of art are himself and tell one where his true values lie…. Disraeli’s novels afford all the evidence needed to show that his faith in aristocracy, in race, in genius, his hatred of industrial exploitation, his belief in blood and soil (before these words had become degraded by the use of them by insane German nationalists), his adoring devotion to history, the land, the continuity that breeds distinction, to ancient institutions- however irrational, fanciful, reactionary all this may have been- were, at any rate, genuine.” Marx’s distinction as the archetype of the self-hating Jew was also, unfortunately, genuine. In his role leading the socialist movement he sought to distance himself from Jewish businessmen and their bourgeois class with vigor. Marx would write, “money is the zealous God of Israel, before whom no other god may be.” And later in an article printed in the New-York Daily Tribune, “we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every Pope by a Jesuit.” In private he was even more cutting, referring to his rival Lassalle in a letter written to Engels as “the Jewish nigger.” Berlin supposes a lot of Marx’s distancing himself from his Jewish origins was his attempt to disregard all forms of distinct ethnicity, culture, and nationality. “Marx all his life systematically underestimated nationalism as an independent force- an illusion which led his followers in the twentieth century to a faulty analysis of Fascism and National Socialism.”
Georges Sorel is the last biographical sketch in this collection. He is a complicated figure because he is so hard to pin down. “He did not claim to be consistent. ‘I write from day to day.’” However, Berlin suggests that the one unifying theme of Sorel’s thoughts was that the pinnacle of man was as active producer, not consumer. “Sorel was dominated by one idee maitresse: that man is a creator, fulfilled only when he creates, and not when he passively receives or drifts unresisting with the current. His mind is not a mechanism or organism responsive to stimuli, analysable, describable, and predictable by sciences of man. He is, for Sorel, in the first place, a producer who expresses himself in and through his work, an innovator whose activity alters the material provided by nature, material that he seeks to mould in accordance with an inwardly conceived, spontaneously generated, image or pattern. The productive activity itself brings this pattern to birth and alters it…. To act and not be acted upon, to choose and not be chosen for, to impose form on the chaos that we find in the world of nature and the world of thought- that is the end of both art and science and belongs to the essence of man as such.” Sorel was opposed to the themes of his age. He despised commercialization and the bourgeois lifestyle. But his disgust with rationality goes back further. “Athens created immortal masterpieces until Socrates came, and spun theories, and played a nefarious part in the disintegration of that closely knit, once heroic, community by sowing doubt and undermining established values which spring from the profoundest and most life-enhancing instincts of men.” Man’s vices are decadence, insolence, indolence, and lack of honor, combined with the ease in which he is led astray by the “despotism of fanatical theorists…. who [are] ready to butcher the present to create the happiness of the future on its bones.” There was always tension in Sorel’s thoughts. Although he prized creativity and production, he felt “to regard technical progress as identical with, or even a guarantee of, cultural progress, is moral blindness.” He feared all stasis. He encouraged conflict and even violence. He deplored the revolutionary who was coopted by parliamentary compromises. “The representative of the working class, Sorel observed, becomes an excellent bourgeois very easily.” Even worse for him than the politicians were the academics. He felt that “the fierce envy of the impoverished intellectual who would like to see the rich merchant guillotined, is a vicious feeling that is not in the least socialist.” It almost seemed Sorel wanted to keep the proletariat down because it was they that were the testament to the vigor of society. They were the wellspring from which the creative juices sprung. But Sorel did not wish to tame them. He was “a man who wished to preserve the enemy in being lest the swords of his own side rusted in their scabbards.” He felt “reason was a feeble instrument compared with the power of the irrational and unconscious in the life of both individuals and societies.” Sorel believed in the role of national myths to motivate, to direct energies, and to compel action. “Barbarism did not frighten him.”
Berlin ends this collection with an essay about how nationalism as a phenomenon was not predicted as the prime motivating force of the twentieth century by any of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth. “What these views had in common was the belief that nationalism was the ephemeral product of frustration of human craving for self-determination.” It was thought that, after decolonization, the breaking up of empires, and the institution of self-rule, the nation, as opposed to the State, would cease to be a relevant concept. Berlin defines the term. “By nationalism I mean something more definite, ideologically important and dangerous: namely the conviction, in the first place, that men belong to a particular human group, and that the way of life of the group differs from that of others; that the characters of individuals who compose the group are shaped by, and cannot be understood apart from, that of the group, defined in terms of common territory, customs, laws, memories, beliefs, language, artistic and religious expression, social institutions, ways of life, to which some add heredity, kinship, racial characteristics; and that it is these factors which shape human beings, their purposes and their values. Secondly, that the pattern of life of a society is similar to that of a biological organism; that what this organism needs for its proper development, which those most sensitive to its nature articulate in words or images or other forms of human expression, constitutes its common goals; that these goals are supreme.” Nationalism presupposes that the only important unit of distinction is the nation and that the individual, the family, and the tribe are all subordinate to the will and goals of the nation at large. Furthermore, the goals of one nation are always diametrically opposed to the goals of other nations. There is no universal truth, only conflict.
