“Freedom and Its Betrayal” by Isaiah Berlin

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.”

“Russian Thinkers” by Isaiah Berlin

Berlin was one of the most meticulous thinkers of the twentieth century. He was liberal, moderate, and thorough, all while seeking the truth. He combed other thinkers’ writings and interpreted them with his best intentions. His own writings were erudite without being overly academic. Berlin brings that style to this collection of essays on some of the foremost thinkers of nineteenth century Russia. Russia was profoundly affected by the liberal movements of the early nineteenth century and the counter-revolution that came from the uprisings in western Europe in 1848. Although Russia’s radicals did not rise up themselves, Tsar Nicholas I’s subsequent crackdown on intellectualism, liberalism, and free thought had profound consequences on the development of the country. 

Berlin’s best known essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox”, is a rumination on Leo Tolstoy’s view of history. Berlin summarizes the Greek poet Archilochus, “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin supposes that Tolstoy’s quest in life was to discover that one all-encompassing purpose for being, but that Tolstoy was better being the fox, dissecting all the ills of his Russian contemporaries. Tolstoy often wrote about those “proklyatye voprosy” (those accursed questions)- the central and moral issues of the day, which every honest Russian was forced to grapple with and whose answers could only be found, according to Tolstoy, in history, not in science and reason. As Tolstoy wrote, “to write the genuine history of present-day Europe: there is an aim for the whole of one’s life.” Philosophy could only be understood through the prism of concrete, lived history. However, his meaning of history was not the kind we learn about in school. It was intensely personal. “History, as it is normally written, usually represents ‘political’- public- events as the most important, while spiritual- ‘inner’- events are largely forgotten; yet prima facie it is they- the ‘inner’ events- that are the most real, the most immediate experience of human beings; they, and only they, are what life, in the last analysis, is made of; hence the routine political historians are talking shallow nonsense.” Tolstoy objected to determinism, positivism, and scientism because he believed in the will of the spirit. “If we allow that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life [i.e. as a spontaneous activity involving consciousness of free will] is destroyed.” As such, he was vehemently opposed to the Whig theory of history, as well as the Great Man theory of history. “The higher soldiers or statesmen are in the pyramid of authority, the farther they must be from its base, which consists of those ordinary men and women whose lives are the actual stuff of history; and, consequently, the smaller the effect of the words and acts of such remote personages, despite all their theoretical authority, upon history.” Only looking back on public history, using hindsight, failing to see all the contingency, randomness, and luck involved, do these great men seem integral in shaping the course of events. Tolstoy, greatly influenced by Schopenhauer in his later life, believed, “that man suffers much because he seeks too much, [he] is foolishly ambitious and grotesquely overestimates his capacities.” Tolstoy also reacted “against liberal optimism concerning human goodness, human reason, and the value or inevitability of material progress…. Tolstoy rejected political reform because he believed ultimate regeneration could come only from within, and that the inner life was lived truly only in the untouched depths of the mass of the people…. Tolstoy, at least, does not go to the length of denying the efficacy of physics in its own sphere; but he thinks this sphere trivial in comparison with what is permanently out of reach of science- the social, moral, political, spiritual worlds, which cannot be sorted out and described and predicted by any science, because the proportion in them of ‘submerged’, uninspectable life is too high.” 

While Tolstoy struggled with his role as part of the landed nobility in changing times, Alexander Herzen actually renounced his place in society- all in the name of liberalism. "Since the age of thirteen.... I have served one idea, marched under one banner- war against all imposed authority- against every kind of deprivation of freedom, in the name of the absolute independence of the individual. I would like to go on with my little guerrilla war- like a real Cossack- auf eigene Faust (on my own initiative)- as the Germans say.” The value of the individual was the single idea that he would propound again and again in his writings. Like Tolstoy, he was opposed to the positivism and scientism espoused by most liberals of his day. His own ethical and philosophical beliefs stated, “that nature obeys no plan, that history follows no libretto; that no single key, no formula, can, in principle, solve the problems of individuals or societies; that general solutions are not solutions, universal ends are never real ends, that every age has its own texture and its own questions, that short cuts and generalisations are no substitute for experience; that liberty- of actual individuals, in specific times and places- is an absolute value; that a minimum area of free action is a moral necessity for all men, not to be suppressed in the name of abstractions or general principles so freely bandied by the great thinkers of this or any age, such as eternal salvation, or history, or humanity, or progress, still less the State or the Church or the proletariat.” He was a socialist, but one who was uncomfortable with the collectivist schemes of either Bakunin (who was a friend) or Marx. Herzen was no friend of the people in the abstract. The masses “are indifferent to individual freedom, liberty of speech; the masses love authority. They are still blinded by the arrogant glitter of power; they are offended by those who stand alone. By equality they understand equality of oppression…. They want a social government to rule for their benefit, and not, like the present one against it. But to govern themselves doesn’t enter their heads.” Herzen also believed in the concrete wellbeing of individuals in the now, not in some far off distant utopia. “Do you truly want to condemn human beings alive today to the sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others some day to dance on…. or of wretched galley slaves who, up to their knees in mud, drag a barge…. with humble words ‘progress in the future’ upon its flag?” He also stated that man “wants to be neither a passive grave-digger of the past, nor the unconscious midwife of the future…. Why is belief in God [and] the Kingdom of Heaven silly, whereas belief in earthly Utopias is not silly?” Herzen, like Tolstoy, believed that true salvation for the individual was only possible by self-reflection. “If only people wanted…. instead of liberating humanity, to liberate themselves, they would do much for…. the liberation of man.” 

Perhaps no intellectual was more greatly admired by his liberal peers than Vissarion Belinsky. He did not come from aristocratic stock- the son of a poor naval doctor. As a writer he was a critic, a pamphleteer, and essayist, who did not leave a grand treatise to posterity. He died young, at the age of thirty-seven, but his memory would inspire his contemporaries well beyond his death. His moral weight and sense of purpose was so strong as to inspire a generation of radicals with his ideas. “All serious questions to Belinsky were always, in the end, moral questions: about what it is that is wholly valuable and worth pursuing for its own sake.” He came from a group of Russian writers who believed that their works had to have moral worth. They had to be expressions of professed ideals, not merely aesthetic fancy. Their words were their very essence of being. “Books and ideas to Belinsky were crucial events, matters of life and death, salvation and damnation, and he therefore reacted to them with the most devastating violence…. To the end of his days he believed that art- and in particular literature- gave the truth to those who sought it; that the purer the artistic impulse- the more purely artistic the work- the clearer and profounder the truth revealed; and he remained faithful to the romantic doctrine that the best and least alloyed art was necessarily the expression not merely of the individual artist but always of a milieu, a culture, a nation, whose voice, conscious and unconscious, that artist was, a function without which he became trivial and worthless, and in the context of which alone his own personality possessed any significance.” As with Tolstoy and Herzen, Belinsky was no fan of scientism and materialism. “Life on earth, material existence, above all politics, was repulsive but fortunately unimportant.” Like Herzen, he was also a socialist individualist and also against the mass-man. “Be social or die! That is my slogan. What is it to me that something universal lives, so long as the individual suffers, that genius on earth should live in heaven, while the common herd rolls in the mud?” Like Bakunin, he was no fan of religion and particularly the Orthodox Church. “In the words God and religion I see only black darkness, chains and the knout.” Belinsky sought only one thing in his life- personal truth- and he struggled and died in his quest for it. 

Ivan Turgenev is perhaps the most ambivalent of the Russian intellectuals. He thought of himself as a liberal and even firmly tried to ingratiate himself with the younger radicals and anarchists of his day. But they found his novels reactionary, while the reactionaries found them too liberal. He was a friend of Belinsky and lived his life trying to emulate the ideals and search for truth that his friend embodied. However, his opinions on art and literature were that they should not serve as beacons of morality in the way Belinsky professed. Berlin opines that Turgenev, “loved every manifestation of art and beauty as deeply as anyone has ever done. The conscious use of art for ends extraneous to itself, ideological, didactic, or utilitarian, and especially as a deliberate weapon in the class war, as demanded by the radicals of the 1860s, was detestable to him.” Henry James would say of him, “he felt and understood the opposite sides of life.” Berlin summarizes the conflicted soul that grounded away at Turgenev, “all his life he wished to march with the progressives, with the party of liberty and protest. But, in the end, he could not bring himself to accept their brutal contempt for art, civilized behaviour, for everything that he held dear in European culture. He hated their dogmatism, their arrogance, their destructiveness, their appalling ignorance of life.” Turgenev himself states of his moral compass, “I am, and have always been, a “gradualist”, an old-fashioned liberal in the English dynastic sense, a man expecting reform only from above. I oppose revolution in principle.” At the same time he felt, “it was always better to be with the persecuted than with the persecutors.” His guiding principle was that “one must open men’s eyes, not tear them out.”

The Russian thinkers of the nineteenth century interacted with their western European cohorts even though their own ideas lagged somewhat behind. They could not rouse the masses and, for the most part, did not even try. Belinsky opined, “the people feel the need of potatoes, but none whatever of a constitution- that is desired only be educated townspeople who are quite powerless.” They believed in progress, but not in the name of some distant abstraction. These intellectuals believed of their fellows, “men are not simple enough, human lives and relationships too complex for standard formulae and neat solutions, and attempts to adapt individuals and fit them into a rational schema, conceived in terms of a theoretical ideal, be the motives for doing it ever so lofty, always lead in the end to a terrible maiming of human beings.” Given the revolutions which were to occur in twentieth century Russia, this was perhaps a modest and prescient admission.

“The Crooked Timber of Humanity” by Isaiah Berlin

In this collection of essays, Berlin ruminates on culture, politics, history, and philosophy with his usual style, which is academic without being overly didactic. He maintains he is a pluralist, not a cultural relativist- a theme he propounds on throughout his writings. “Values may easily clash within the breast of a single individual; and it does not follow that, if they do, some must be true and others false.” Therefore, he offers up that any humane political philosophy should be moderate, have a presumption towards the utilitarian, possess humility, and avoid the extremes of suffering. Berlin ridicules all forms of utopia as static models with no need for novelty and change (by definition) and, therefore, insufficient. He claims that if it is deemed that there is only one correct answer, then all other answers must necessarily be incorrect. “This is not accepted by those who declare that men’s temperaments, gifts, outlooks, wishes permanently differ one from another, that uniformity kills, that men can live full lives only in societies with an open texture, in which variety is not merely tolerated but is approved and encouraged; that the richest development of human potentialities can occur only in societies in which there is a wide spectrum of opinions- the freedom for what J.S. Mill called ‘experiments in living’- in which there is liberty of thought and of expression, views and opinions clash with each other, societies in which friction and even conflict are permitted, albeit with rules to control them and prevent destruction and violence; that subjection to a single ideology, no matter how reasonable and imaginative, robs men of freedom and vitality.” These disagreements arise when talking not just about means, but also about ultimate ends “for variety entails the possibility of the conflict of values, of some irreducible incompatibility between the ideals, or, indeed, the immediate aims, of fully realised, equally virtuous men.” 

His essay on Giambattista Vico contrasts what he sees as Vico’s pluralism with relativism, which does not seek to understand and comprehend the other. Pluralism does see multiple cultures, each with their own visions and scales of values, but bounded by the commonality that makes us all human. Vico sought to ‘enter into’ or ‘descend into’ the minds of others to understand them based on their own unique historical milieu. Vico points out that “Homeric men are ‘boorish, crude, harsh, wild, proud, difficult, and obstinate in their resolves.’ Achilles is cruel, violent, vindictive, concerned only with his own feelings; yet he is depicted as a blameless warrior, the ideal hero of the Homeric world. The values of that world have passed away.” Homeric men were not worse men, just of another time. Ultimately, what Vico rejected was any sort of “possibility of establishing the final truth in all the provinces of human thought by application of the laws of the natural sciences.” For Vico, culture, history, and human development all had to be accounted for to understand, if not accept, a plurality of morals, all equally human. “Each phase is incommensurable with the others, since each lives by its own light and can be understood only in its own terms, even though these terms form a single intelligible process, which is not wholly, or, perhaps, even largely, intelligible to us.” Berlin contrasts this with relativism. “Relativism is something different: I take it to mean a doctrine according to which the judgement of a man or a group, since it is the expression or statement of a taste, or emotional attitude or outlook, is simply what it is, with no objective correlate which determines its truth or falsehood…. Relativism, in its modern form, tends to spring from the view that men’s outlooks are unavoidably determined by forces of which they are often unaware- Schopenhauer’s irrational cosmic force; Marx’s class-bound morality; Freud’s unconscious drives; the social anthropologists’ panorama of the irreconcilable variety of customs and beliefs conditioned by circumstances largely uncontrolled by men.” In contrast, Vico argues, “we are urged to look upon life as affording a plurality of values, equally genuine, equally ultimate, above all equally objective; incapable, therefore, of being ordered in a timeless hierarchy, or judged in terms of some one absolute standard.” Berlin threads the needle between utopia and relativism, but also confirms that “to understand is not to accept…. One can reject a culture because one finds it morally or aesthetically repellent, but, on this view, only if one can understand how and why it could nevertheless, be acceptable to a recognisably human society.” 

Berlin’s longest essay is on Joseph de Maistre, who Berlin argues, far from being a conservative, actually presaged and exemplified 20th century fascism. Maistre lived through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era as a Savoyard aristocrat and diplomat. He famously argued for the trinity of classicism, monarchy, and the Church, which he further boiled down into two- “Throne and Altar”. Emile Faguet characterized him thus, “‘his Christianity is terror, passive obedience, and the religion of the State’; his faith is ‘a slightly touched-up paganism’. He is a Roman of the fifth century, baptised but Roman; or alternatively a ‘Praetorian of the vatican’.” Needless to say, he was an enemy of the Enlightenment and all abstract thought. He despised a priori reasoning, appealing, instead, to actual lived man and historical fact. “Maistre, at any rate in the works of his maturity, is consumed by the sense of original sin, the wickedness and worthlessness of the self-destructive stupidity of men left to themselves. Again and again he dwells on the fact that suffering alone can keep human beings free from all falling into the bottomless abyss of anarchy and the destruction of all values. On one side ignorance, willfulness, idiocy; on the other, as the remedy, blood, pain, punishment…. Whatever is rational collapses because it is rational, man-made: only the irrational can last. Rational criticism will erode whatever is susceptible to it: only what is insulated against it, by being inherently mysterious and inexplicable, can survive. What man makes, man will mar: only the superhuman endures.” But man is free. Alone amongst all creatures, he struggles for knowledge, expression, and, finally, salvation. “Religion is superior to reason not because it returns more convincing answers than reason, but because it returns no answer at all. It does not persuade or argue, it commands.” As for monarchy, Maistre “prized loyalty above all virtues; the less worthy the embodiment of the legitimate royal power, the greater obedience was due to it, so that the principle of unquestioning obedience owed by the subject to his sovereign might shine forth the more clearly.” Institutions “are strong and durable to the extent that they are conceived of as divine…. Sovereignty must be indivisible, for if it is distributed there is no centre of authority, and all things fall to pieces.” Maistre viewed power above all else. It was his unquestioning loyalty to this power in which Maistre presaged the fascist monstrosities to come. 

Berlin concludes this collection of essays by circling back again to the theme of pluralism in political philosophy. He asserts that it is a modern Romantic concept, not shared by Christians, Jews, Muslims, Platonists, or even Stoics. “The notion that the truth is not necessarily one, that values are many, that they may conflict, that there is something sublime in dying for one’s own vision of the truth even though it may be condemned by the rest of the world- that, I think, would before the eighteenth century have seemed to be a very eccentric position.” There are choices between final ends- justice and mercy, order and liberty- and these value judgements are ultimate, not incidental. “Man is independent and is free, that is to say, that the essence of man is not consciousness, nor the invention of tools, but the power of choice…. The glory and dignity of man consist in the fact that it is he who chooses, and is not chosen for, that he can be his own master (even if at times this fills him with fear and a sense of solitude).” As Kant professed, without freedom there is no morality. The Romantics were devoted to following their own Will, their unique calling, no matter the consequences or their resulting impressions upon society. “The Romantic outlook condemns success as such as both vulgar and immoral; for it is built, as often as not, on a betrayal of one’s ideals, on a contemptible arrangement with the enemy. A correspondingly high value is placed upon defiance for its own sake, idealism, sincerity, purity of motive, resistance in the face of all odds, noble failure, which are contrasted with realism, worldly wisdom, calculation, and their rewards- popularity, success, power, happiness, peace bought at morally too high a price…. For the disciples of the new philosophy suffering was nobler than pleasure, failure was preferable to worldly success, which had about it something squalid and opportunist, and could surely be bought only at the cost of betraying one’s integrity, independence, the inner light, the ideal vision within.” As Fichte stated, “I do not accept what nature offers because I must, I believe it because I will.” Pluralism cannot only descend into relativism, but it can also be perverted into nationalism. It is a slippery slope from pride in diversity to the thought that one particular culture is better- the one best way amongst many. The German Romantics and Idealists such as Lenz, Schiller, Herder, Fichte, and Holderlin straddled that line. “This is the beginning of nationalism, and even more of populism. Herder upholds the value of variety of spontaneity, of the different, idiosyncratic paths pursued by peoples, each with its own style, ways of feeling and expression, and denounces the measuring of everything by the same timeless standards…. Human customs, activities, forms of life, art, ideas, were (and must be) of value to men not in terms of timeless criteria, applicable to all men and societies, irrespective of time and place, as the French lumieres taught, but because they were their own, expressions of their local, regional, national life, and spoke to them as they could speak to no other human group. This is why men withered in exile.” Herder believed in a rich variety of life and a diversity of national forms, none superior to another. Berlin was a true political moderate, who proudly tried to thread the needle between delicate concepts without compromise or wishy-washiness. His truths were not always simple, but they were profound. Pluralism and negative liberty, in which man was given space to fulfill his own wishes, were his ideals. His idea that final ends sometimes cannot be reconciled, but that each are equally valid was anathema to Christians and Marxists alike. Berlin gave place to science and reason, but also knew that man was a creature of his unique culture and history. Berlin believed that all of this was part and parcel of man and, in the end, had to be reconciled within him and within the society in which he happened to live.

"Against the Current" by Isaiah Berlin

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.

“The Roots of Romanticism” by Isaiah Berlin

In this short collection of essays Berlin ponders the precursors to Romanticism, its ideals, and its lasting influence. He starts by admitting that any all-encompassing idea of Romanticism is hard to pin down. Many historians agree that it “was a passionate protest against universality of any kind.” Berlin goes on, “the values to which they attached the highest importance were such values as integrity, sincerity, readiness to sacrifice one’s life to some inner light, dedication to some ideal for which it is worth sacrificing all that one is, for which it is worth both living and dying. You would have found that they were not primarily interested in knowledge, or in the advance of science, not interested in political power, not interested in happiness, not interested, above all, in adjustment to life, in finding your place in society, in living at peace with your government, even in loyalty to your king, or to your republic. You would have found that common sense, moderation, was very far  from their thoughts. You would have found that they believed in the necessity of fighting for your beliefs to the last breath of your body, and you would have found that they believed that minorities were more holy than majorities, that failure was nobler than success, which had something shoddy and something vulgar about it. The very notion of idealism, not in a philosophical sense, but in the ordinary sense in which we use it, that is to say the state of mind of a man prepared to sacrifice a great deal for principles or some conviction, who is prepared not to sell out, who is prepared to go to the stake for something which he believes, because he believes it- this attitude was relatively new. What people admired was wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability and readiness to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no matter what it was.” That was the worldview that most readily encompassed Romanticism. The Romantics cared more about the motives of an act than its consequences. The movement was anti-Enlightenment in the sense that Romantics did not think that all virtue was encapsulated in knowledge. It was a movement opposed to compromise of all kinds, but most importantly compromising the ideals within yourself. All virtues were not compatible. There were opposing ultimate values in the world, each equally valuable, which could not be reconciled. This was true as much for aesthetics as for morality. There was no universal pattern or platonic ideal. “The notion that the purpose of art is to give pleasure to a large number of persons, or even to a small number of trained cognoscenti, is not valid. The purpose of art is to produce beauty, and if the artist alone perceives that his object is beautiful, that is a sufficient end in life.” 

Montesquieu, with his cultural pluralism, and Hume, by placing belief before reason, started to poke holes in the Enlightenment edifice, despite being solid sons of that movement. The Pietists that rebelled against Frederick the Great’s German reforms tried to smash the very ground that the Enlightenment rested upon. “General propositions were baskets of an extremely crude kind…. What they left out, of necessity, because they were general, was that which was unique, that which was particular, that which was the specific property of this particular man, or this particular thing. And that alone was of interest…. What men wanted was for all their faculties to lay in the richest and most violent possible fashion. What men wanted was to create, what men wanted was to make, and if this making led to clashes, if it led to wars, if it led to struggles, then this was part of the human lot…. Creation was a most ineffable, indescribable, unanalysable personal act, by which a human being laid his stamp on nature, allowed his will to soar, spoke his word, uttered that which was within him and which would not brook any kind of obstacle…. For them a work of art is the expression of somebody, it is always a voice speaking. A work of art is the voice of one man addressing himself to other men.” That was the essence of Pietist philosophy as espoused by Lutheran Germans like Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder “disliked every form of violence, coercion and the swallowing of one culture by another, because he wants everything to be what it is as much as it possibly can…. He is the originator of all those antiquarians who want natives to remain as native as possible, who like arts and crafts, who detest standardization- everyone who likes the quaint, people who wish to preserve the most exquisite forms of old provincialism without impingement on it of some hideous metropolitan uniformity…. If variety and difference are not merely a fact of the world but a splendid fact, which is what he thought it to be, arguing for the variety of the imagination of the creator and the splendour of human creative powers, and the infinite possibilities still before mankind, and the unfulfillability of human ambitions, and the general excitement of living in a world in which nothing can ever be fully exhausted- if that is the image, then the notion of a final answer to the question of how to live becomes absolutely meaningless…. That is to say, he is one of the fathers of the movement whose characteristic attributes include the denial of unity, the denial of harmony, the denial of the compatibility of ideals, whether in the sphere of action or in the sphere of thought.”

It is ironic that Kant is considered a progenitor of the Romantic movement, as he despised Romanticism. “He detested every form of extravagance, fantasy, what he called Schwarmerei (fanatical gush), any form of exaggeration, mysticism, vagueness, confusion.” He was firmly in the camp of science and reason, as espoused by the Enlightenment ideals. However, Kant also firmly stood for human freedom. He believed that morality was impossible without freedom of choice. “Man is man, for Kant, only because he chooses.” This is what distinguishes man from mere objects and beasts. “The will is that which enables men to choose either good or evil, either right or wrong. There is no merit in choosing what is right unless it is possible to choose what is wrong…. Kant supposed the whole notion of moral merit, the whole notion of moral desert, the whole notion which is entailed by the fact that we praise and we blame, that we consider that human beings are to be congratulated or condemned for acting in this or that way, presupposes the fact that they are able to freely choose.” This is Kant’s first categorical imperative. “Any kind of use of other people for purposes which are not these other people’s, but one’s own, seems to him to be a form of degradation imposed by one man on another, some form of hideous maiming of other people, of removal from them of that which distinguishes them as men, namely their self-determining liberty.” That is Kant’s second categorical imperative. “A value is made a value- at least a duty, a goal transcending desire and inclination, is so made- by human choice and not by some intrinsic quality in itself, out there. Values are not stars in some moral heaven, they are internal, they are what human beings freely choose to live for, to fight for, to die for. That is Kant’s fundamental sermon.” And that is the essence of what the Romantics took from Kant’s philosophy. Either there is human agency in the world or you are a slave with no free will, compelled by causes and powers beyond your control. “If man is part of nature, then he is determined, and morality is a hideous illusion…. When he is at his freest, when he is at his most human, when he rises to his noblest heights, then he dominates nature, that is to say he moulds her, he breaks her, he imposes his personality upon her, he does that which he chooses.” All authority, whether it be nature, or government, or parents, or traditions cannot be accepted simply because it is authority. That kind of simplicity and abrogation of responsibility revolted Kant. His morality was firmly anti-authoritarian. Friedrich Schiller and Johann Gottlieb Fichte would take Kant’s inclinations and run with them. In their stories, heroic men “die uselessly because they belong to a society which is incapable of making use of them; they are superfluous persons; they are superfluous because their morality, which is a morality superior, we are meant to understand, to that of society around them, has no opportunity of asserting itself against the fearful opposition offered by the philistines, the slaves, the heteronomous creatures of the society in which they live.” Fichte admitted, “at the mere mention of the name “freedom” my heart opens and flowers, while at the word “necessity” it contracts painfully.” Later, he continues, “we do not act because we know, we know because we are called upon to act…. I do not accept what nature offers because I must, I believe it because I will…. I am not determined by ends, ends are determined by me.” The dramatist Ernst Raupach sums up the milieu of this German school, “to be free is nothing, to become free is very heaven.”

The Romantics embraced the idea that life is in the action- that it is the striving and yearning which makes the man. “For these Romantics, to live is to do something, to do is to express your nature. To express your nature is to express your relation to the universe. Your relation to the universe is inexpressible, but you must nevertheless express it.” It is in the doing that we live our lives. “There must be a field for action. The potential is more real than the actual. What is made is dead. Once you have constructed a work of art, abandon it, because once it is constructed it is there, it is done for, it is last year’s calendar. What is made, what has been constructed, what has been already understood must be abandoned. Glimpses, fragments, intimations, mystical illumination- that is the only way to seize reality.” Berlin sums up the ethos of the Romantics in two features. “These two elements- the free untrammeled will and the denial of the fact that there is a nature of things, the attempt to blow up and explode the very notion of a stable structure of anything- are the deepest and in a sense the most insane elements in this extremely valuable and important movement…. Those are the fundamental bases of Romanticism: will, the fact that there is no structure to things, that you can mould things as you will- they come into being only as a result of your moulding activity- and therefore opposition to any view which tried to represent reality as having some kind of form which could be studied, written down, learnt, communicated to others, and in other respects treated in a scientific manner.” The Romantics were opposed to any inclination of natural laws, as all law was a human construct. Politics and economics were not unalterable, just as poverty and squalor were not a given. Chateaubriand describes the Romantic ideal, “the Ancients scarcely knew this secret anxiety, the bitterness of strangled passions, all fermenting together. A large political life, games in the gymnasium or on the field of Mars, the business of the Forum- public business- filled their time and left no place for the ennui of the heart.” Byron was perhaps the epitome of the Romantic. “Byron’s chief emphasis is upon the indomitable will, and the whole philosophy of voluntarism, the whole philosophy of the view that there is a world which must be subdued and subjugated by superior persons, takes his rise from him.” This insatiable desire was also expressed by Schopenhauer and Wagner. It was expressed in the idea of irreconcilable ultimate values and unattainable ends. It was expressed in the ideal of the noble savage. It was equally expressed in the ideal of the superior man stuck amongst mere mortals who make up society. “This is the typical note of the outcast, the exile, the superman, the man who cannot put up with the existing world because his soul is too large to contain it, because he has ideals which presuppose the necessity for perpetual fervent movement forward, movement which is constantly confined by the stupidity and the unimaginativeness and flatness of the existing world…. The fact that he is sincere, that he’s prepared to lay down his life for the nonsense in which he believes, is a morally noble fact. Anyone who is sufficiently a man of integrity, anyone who is prepared to sacrifice himself upon any altar, no matter what, has a moral personality worthy of respect, no matter how detestable or how false the ideals to which he bows his knee.” This notion of idealism was invented by the Romantics. “What Romanticism did was to undermine the notion that in matters of value, politics, morals, aesthetics there are such things as objective criteria which operate between human beings…. The notion that there are many values, and that they are incompatible; the whole notion of plurality, of inexhaustibility, of the imperfection of all human answers and arrangements; the notion that no single answer which claims to be perfect and true, whether in art or in life, can in principle be perfect or true- all this we owe to the Romantics.”