This is a collection of six sketches of intellectuals Berlin contends were enemies of liberal thought. All these men lived in the late 18th to early 19th centuries and were all opposed to the expanding sphere of freedoms of mankind. The first portrayal is of Helvetius. Berlin suggests “his lifelong aim was the search for a single principle which was to define the basis of morality and really answer the questions about how society should be founded and how man should live and where he should go and what he should do, with the same degree of scientific authority that Newton displayed in the realm of physics.” Helvetius’ answer was utilitarianism, which he founded years before Bentham. Helvetius suggests, “over thee I set pleasure and pain; the one and the other will watch over thy thoughts and acts, excite thy aversions, friendships, tender sentiments, joys, set on fire thy desires, fears, hopes, reveal to thee truths, plunge thee in error.” The pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain are the base motives on which all men act. These ends are given. The business of the philosopher is to figure out a system by which means this can be achieved most efficiently. Helvetius does not believe in automatic progress. Government is needed to steer the ship towards the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Government is an art- the art of pursuing happiness. Rationalism, materialism, and science are the tools the wise will use to steer the herd of mankind towards greater happiness. History is useless. All interest is practical interest. “To have a right which nobody may impinge upon, to have a right which nobody may trample, to have a right to do or be or have this or that, whether anybody likes it or not, is an obstacle to the transformation of society in the direction of the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Education and law can do anything. Man is infinitely malleable and flexible- a piece of clay that is to be moulded as the philosopher pleases. Value is objective and discoverable by observation and reason. In Helvetius’ system, all ultimate ends are compatible and will never clash. Individual choice for choice’s sake must be subsumed to the greater good for all.
Berlin’s next sketch is of Rousseau. Liberty, for him, is an absolute value. It is identical with what it means to be human itself. “If a man is not free, if a man is not responsible for what he does, if a man does not do what he does because he wants to do it, because this is his personal, human goal, because in this way he achieves something which he, and not somebody else, at this moment desires- if he does not do that, he is not a human being at all: for he has no accountability. The whole notion of moral responsibility, which for Rousseau is the essence of man almost more than his reason, depends upon the fact that a man can choose, choose between alternatives, choose between them freely, be uncoerced.” Like Kant, Rousseau views all men as ends in themselves, not means for other people’s purposes. Choosing the right path is not to follow some mechanical law. It is inherent in man. “The moral laws which man obeys are absolute, something from which man knows that he must not depart…. Laws are not conventions, are not utilitarian devices, but simply the drawing up in terms suitable to the particular time and place and people of regulations embodying sacred truths, sacred rules which are not man-made, but eternal, universal and absolute.” This is Rousseau’s conundrum. How can liberty and the law both be absolute? It is individual freedom versus society. Rousseau seeks “to find a form of association…. in which each, while uniting himself with all, yet may still obey only himself alone and remain as free as before.” He squares the paradox by saying that each man “in giving all, gives himself to nobody.” His premise, like most eighteenth century thinkers, is that nature is always in harmony. What one truly wants cannot be at odds with what another truly wants because the ultimate good must satisfy everyone’s rational demands. Thus his concept of the General Will. Rousseau states, “as long as several men in the assembly regard themselves as a single body they have a single will…. The constant willing of all the members of the State is the general will.” However, Rousseau was vehemently anti-cosmopolitan. He despised the arts and sciences, all refinement, the intellectual, the expert, and the specialist who put themselves over the heads of the masses. It was natural man who possessed instinctive wisdom. “The simple people of society possess a deeper sense of reality, a deeper virtue and a deeper understanding of moral values than professors in their universities, than the politicians of the cities, than other people who somehow become de-natureed, who have somehow cut themselves off from the inner stream which is at once the true life and the true morality and wisdom of men and societies.” He does make common cause with the outcasts, rebels, and artists who are unshackled from the chains of elite culture. Rousseau admits, “man is born free, and yet he is everywhere in chains.” He solves this puzzle by asking, “what if the chains are not imposed upon him? What if the chains are not something which he is bound as by some external force? What if the chains are something he chooses himself because such a choice is an expression of his nature, something he generates from within him as an inner ideal? If this is what he above all wants in the world, then the chains are no longer chains.” Control becomes ultimate freedom. “The State is you, and others like you, all seeking your common good.” The State gives man what he truly wants, even if he doesn’t know it and struggles violently against it.
Berlin next tackles Fichte. Berlin begins by discussing the British and French concept of negative liberty: non-interference in the affairs of others. He contrasts this with the German idea of freedom, which espoused “freedom from the iron necessities of the universe- not so much wicked or foolish persons, or social mismanagement, as from the rigorous laws of the external world.” Because of the backwards conditions of the German States at the time, citizens were deprived of many basics common in western Europe. The German masses reacted to this with a kind of Stoicism. “If I cannot get what I want, then perhaps by depriving myself of the want itself I shall make my life happier. Evidently I shall not be made happy by pining to get what powerful persons or adverse circumstances will not let me have. But perhaps by killing within myself the desire for these things I shall achieve that calm and that serenity which is as good a substitute for owning the things which I want.” The true Self cannot rely on external conditions. The true Self is only the inner Self. “The true ideal is to obey the laws of morality.” Again, it is the Kantian notion that all other humans are ends in themselves and not means in my life. Their ends are as sacred as my own. Morals are not things that can be discovered, or which are true or false, but are commands to be followed. “My duty can be only that which I can wholly control, not the achievement, but the attempt.” The most important things in the world are integrity and dedication. The ideal is what is worth fighting for. It is a Romantic notion. Man exists to serve fellow man. Fichte states, “man becomes man only among other men…. Man is destined to live in society; he must do so; he is not a complete human being, he contradicts his own nature, if he lives in isolation.” The nation is the organic whole. The greatest agent of this force is the divine leader or conqueror who molds the nation as the sculptor moulds clay. “Individual freedom, which in Kant has a sacred value, has for Fichte become a choice made by something superpersonal. It chooses me, I do not choose it, and acquiescence is a privilege, a duty, a self-lifting, a kind of self-transcendent rising to a higher level. Freedom, and morality generally, is self-submission to the superself- the dynamic cosmos.” Fichte’s freedom has become “the notion of freedom as the removal of obstacles to yourself.” It is a positive freedom, not a negative liberty.
Berlin next sketches a portrait of Hegel. For Hegel, “the universe was really the self-development of the world spirit. A world spirit is something like an individual spirit, except that it embraces and is identical with the whole universe. If you can imagine the universe as a kind of animate entity possessing a soul in roughly the same sense as, but no doubt grander than, that in which individuals possess souls, intentions, purposes, wills, then you can ask ‘Why do things happen as they do?’” And for Hegel, “history is solely an account of the experiences of human beings. Tables and chairs have no history because they have no experience. History is the story of human creation, human imagination, human wills and intentions, feelings, purposes, everything which human beings do and feel, rather than what is done to them. Human history is something we create by feeling, by thinking, by being active in some fashion, and therefore, by creating it, we are able to understand it, which is why the understanding of history is an ‘inside’ view, whereas our understanding of tables and chairs is an ‘outside’ view.” Furthermore, for Hegel, “the dialectic…. really makes sense only in terms of thought or artistic creation; and he applies it to the universe because he thinks that in the universe is a kind of act of thought, or a kind of act of self-creation; self-creation, for there exists nothing else.” Ideas are first created through thesis, then antithesis, in which conflicting ideas collide with the initial ones, and finally synthesis, in which all the ideas are fused, retaining elements of each. This clash of ideas is what generates progress. Furthermore, these ideas are not just in the brains of individuals, but are embedded in institutions such as religion, constitutions, and even migrations and revolutions. This process is not smooth, but moves in fits and starts. Conflict is necessary for growth. Without friction there is no progress. The process is inevitable. It cannot happen otherwise than as it does. Each step is a “rational successor” to the previous one. Every earlier stage “does not make sense” unless the later step is there to complete it. “But when you discover why everything is as it is- must be so- in the very act of understanding this you will lose the desire for it to be otherwise.” You become one with nature when you understand this ‘inside’ view, her purpose and her intentions. “Liberty is the recognition of necessity…. The world as whole is totally free, and we are free to the extent to which we identify ourselves with the rational principles of the world.” History is made by the few who are the highest rational creatures, but not necessarily by their own conscious desires. Hegel’s “world historical” is that which is objective, demonstratively rational, the powerful, the decisive, the concrete. “What seems abominable in one generation seems virtuous in the next.” Among all worldly patterns, the State is supreme. It is humanity at its most self-conscious and orderly. Whoever resists the State is bound to be destroyed. Hegel brought light to the fact that institutions matter more than persons, his invention of the history of thought was sublime, and his recognition of the dark forces and impersonal urges that move mankind was prescient. “The semi-conscious strivings of reason seeking to realise its being” were what created history, more than any individual king or soldier.
Berlin next tackles Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon is intriguing among these character studies because he is the only one, as far as I know, who actually thought he was the great new Messiah come to save the earth. His thoughts also predated much of Marxist theory. He was the father of the technological interpretation of history. He was the first to define class in its modern sense, as economic social entities. He was among the first historians to draw in economic factors in shaping history at all. He was among the first, and certainly the most well known, to come up with a planned society- “a kind of rational organization of industry and of commerce, in favour of applying science for the benefit of society.” He disdained democracy. He favored government by elites “who understand the technological needs and the technological possibilities of their time.” He also believed in a double morality- a kind of quasi-Straussian interpretation of a moral code. “What the enlightened elite must do is to practice one morality themselves and feed their flock of human subjects with another.” He was the first to see the need of a secular religion- that the masses would not be moved by reason alone and must be inspired by something higher, more noble and sublime. He saw clearly “the incompatibility between the view that wise men ought to direct society and the view that people ought to govern themselves.” Therefore, he disdained self-government. He was a materialist. For Saint-Simon, ideas were born of their time and all inventions from weapons, to mathematics, to poetry could only come as a response to the general conditions of their age. It is the milieu of the age, more than technological know-how, that creates. “Everything must be judged in its context.” Progress was not automatic, but was moved along by great men. “The progressive society is that which provides the maximum means of satisfying the greatest number of needs of the human beings who compose it.” Unlike the utilitarians, these needs need not be ultimate happiness. Civilization oscillated from “organic periods when humanity is unified, when it develops harmoniously, when the people who are in charge of it on the whole foster progress [and] critical periods when these arrangements are becoming obsolescent, when the institutions themselves become obstacles to progress, when human beings feel that what they want is different from that which they are getting, when there is a new spirit which is about to sunder the old bottles in which it is still imprisoned.” There are no absolute principles. Everything is unstable and evolving. The modern age must be dominated by scientists, industrialists, and bankers because these men can unite mankind. They have the knowledge and know the current needs of humanity. “The people cannot be expected to face the truth at once, but must be gradually educated.”
Berlin’s final biographical sketch is of Joseph de Maistre. He was a Savoyard aristocrat who was turned by the French Revolution from a mild reformer into a rabid reactionary. He despised Voltaire. Emile Faguet has characterized him as “a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of Pope, King and Hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest, and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner…. His Christianity is terror, passive obedience, and the religion of the State.” Berlin agrees with that assessment and continues, “he preached the sacredness of the past, the virtue, and the necessity, indeed, of complete subjection, because of the incurably bad and corrupt nature of man. In place of science he preached the primacy of instinct, superstition, prejudice. In place of optimism, pessimism. In place of eternal harmony and eternal peace, the necessity- for him the divine necessity- of conflict, of suffering, of bloodshed, of war.” For Maistre, life itself is a battle. “Reason is simply a feeble faculty in men for the purpose, now and then, of fitting means to ends…. Nothing can stand perpetually but what something other than reason builds up, for what reason builds up, reason will pull down.” As for self-government, Maistre opines, “the principle of the sovereignty of the people is so dangerous that, even if it were true, it would be necessary to conceal it.” He felt that power lies in the ancient institutions organically formed, not intentionally designed. “The throne is more important than its occupant.” Absolutism is necessary precisely because it is so terrifying. “He fears and detests science, precisely because it pours too much light, and so dissolves the mystery, the darkness, which alone resists sceptical enquiry.” Reason and science provide men with false hopes. “At the end of positivist, optimistic periods of human construction, in which men rise up and say they are about to cure all the world’s ills by some economic or social solution, which then does not work, there is always a penchant for reaction on the part of ordinary people, satiated by so much false optimism, so much pragmatism, so much positive idealism, which become discredited by the sheer pricking of the bubble, by the fact that all the slogans turn out to be meaningless and weak when the wolf really comes to the door.”
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