Isaiah Berlin, philosopher and historian of ideas: born Riga, Latvia 6
June 1909; Lecturer, New College, Oxford
1932-38, Fellow 1938- 50; Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford 1932-38, 1950-66,
1975-97; CBE 1946; Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, Oxford
University 1957- 67; FBA 1957; Kt 1957; Vice-President, British Academy
1959-61, President 1974-78; President of Wolfson College, Oxford 1966-75;
Professor of Humanities, City University of New York 1966-71; OM 1971; married
1956 Aline Halban (née de Gunzbourg; three stepsons); died Oxford 5
November 1997.
Isaiah Berlin was one of the
most remarkable men of his time, and one of the leading liberal thinkers of the
century. Philosopher, political theorist, historian of ideas; Russian,
Englishman, Jew; essayist, critic, teacher; he was a man of formidable
intellectual power with a rare gift for understanding a wide range of human
motives, hopes and fears, and a prodigiously energetic capacity for enjoyment -
of life, of people in all their variety, of their ideas and idiosyncrasies, of
literature, of music, of art.
His defence and refinement of
what he saw as the most essential conception of freedom has achieved classic
status, and the presence and character of this conception in the modern mind is
due in no small measure to him. He also identified and developed, with
considerable originality, a pluralist view of ultimate human ideals that
supports his liberal stance, and deserves to become just as deeply embedded in
our outlook.
In contrast to the great
majority of ideologies and creeds, he argued that not all values can be jointly
realised in one life, or in a single society or period of history, and that
many ideals cannot even be compared on a common scale; so that there can be no
single objective ranking of ends, no uniquely right set of principles by which
to live.
From this it follows not only
that people should be free (within the crucial but rather broad limits set by
the demands of sheer humanity), both individually and collectively, to adopt
their own guiding priorities and visions of life; but also, perhaps more
radically, that a perfect, frictionless society, as well as being impossible in
practice, is in principle incoherent as an ideal. Insights of this kind may
seem unstartling to some today, but this, Berlin maintained, is a more recent,
less widespread and less secure development than might be supposed; it is also
a beneficent one, and may be laid partly at his door.
Like other great men he was a
catalyst of excellence. Those who have had the good fortune to know him can
testify to the strikingly positive, enlarging, warming experience of being in
his company and listening to his irrepressible flow of captivating talk. He was
legendary as a talker both for his imitable rapid, syllable-swallowing diction
and for his inimitable range - he was astonishingly widely read in a number of
languages, he knew (and deeply influenced) a great many prominent men and women
in England and elsewhere, and he peppered his conversation and writings with a
bewildering cascade of names. (This was not name-dropping: the names were a
shorthand for their bearers’ ideas.)
Though he spent his whole
professional life, apart from his war service, as an Oxford academic, he did
not suffer from parochialism, and moved with equal ease in the many worlds he
inhabited, often simultaneously, surviving day after day, without flagging, a
punishing schedule of commitments and diversions. He lectured to learned and
distinguished audiences in many countries, talked to undergraduate societies
(not only in Oxford), colleges of education and sixth forms, and gave
generously of his time to the growing number of those who made demands on it:
former students with problems, scholars studying his work, strangers who sought
his advice or help in connection with projects of their own.
He was often heard on the
radio, especially the Third Programme, and gave numerous interviews,
particularly to foreign journalists. He positively relished what others would
have found intolerable pressures and, though he was perfectly serious when the
occasion demanded, brought a sometimes impish sense of fun to everything that
he undertook.
He was not, and would not have
wished to be, any kind of saint, but he had in abundance what he called in
others “moral charm”. This quality was particularly striking in his manner of
conversation, which could unsettle those new to it. He did not stick to the
point, but would sit back, look up, and follow his interest where it led,
happily digressing, digressing from digressions, and unceremoniously returning
to the topic of his own previous remarks, or changing the subject, apparently
oblivious of what his interlocutor may have been saying, even at some length,
in the interim.
This last idiosyncrasy might
have seemed impolite in other hands, but in him it was clearly unselfconscious,
and demonstrated his absorption in the issue before his mind, which he would
pursue almost playfully, often in odd directions. Although talking to him made
one’s mind race, it could be infuriating if one wanted to sort out some problem
and come to a clear conclusion, and he was not always an attentive listener -
sometimes because he had a shrewd idea of what one was going to say before one
had said it.
He had no taste for purely
verbal word-play, but his wit, in the wider sense, was matchless. He could be
bewilderingly quick on the uptake, and equally quick with an illuminating
response. He was refreshingly direct and, for a man of his generation,
unusually open: he made the obsessive circumspection of some parts of the
Oxford establishment seem mean and life-denying by comparison. Gossip and
anecdote abounded, but not malevolently: indeed, he was virtually incapable of
innuendo, and did not seek to score points. Even when he propounded an
unfavourable view of someone, it could seem more like a move in a game than a
damning judgement.
He loved ranking people, and
sorting them into types: most famously, hedgehogs and foxes - those in the grip
of a single, all- embracing vision as against those who are more receptive to
variousness. Indeed, his taste for light- hearted categorisation was an
informal manifestation of his ability to extract and display the essence of a
person or a difficult writer.
As a lecturer he had complete
command of his material, and was spellbinding to listen to (fortunately several
of his lectures were recorded, and can be heard at the National Sound Archive).
He was consciously but not self-consciously Jewish, and a lifelong Zionist: his
views counted for a good deal in Israel. He was a director of Covent Garden and
a devoted opera- goer; he was a trustee of the National Gallery. He did not
lack recognition - a knighthood, the OM, many honorary doctorates, the Mellon
Lectureship, the Presidency of the British Academy, the Jerusalem, Erasmus,
Agnelli and Lippincott Prizes - but always protested that he was being given
more than his due, that his achievements had been systematically overestimated.
He was larger than life, entirely sui generis, a phenomenon, irreplaceable.
Isaiah Berlin was born in 1909
to Russian-speaking Jewish parents in Riga, capital of Latvia. His father,
Mendel, owned a timber business (chiefly providing sleepers for the Russian
railways); he and his wife Marie were lively, cultured people, enthusiastically
interested in the arts. They bequeathed their enthusiasm in full measure to
their only surviving child, whose love of music in particular, especially but
by no means only opera, was a thread of deep and growing importance to him
which ran through his life from boyhood onwards.
In 1915 the German army was
closing on Riga, and the Berlins moved to Russia. They lived first in
Andreapol, then, from 1917, in Petrograd, where in that year Isaiah witnessed both
the Social-Democratic and the Bolshevik Revolutions. On one occasion he saw a
terrified, white-faced man being dragged and kicked through the streets by a
mob; this was a formative experience which left him with an ineradicable
loathing of any form of violence. In 1920 the Berlins returned to Latvia, under
a treaty with the Communists, and Mendel decided to move to England, where he
had friends and business connections.
Arriving in early 1921, they
lived first in Surbiton, then in London, in Kensington. After prep school
Isaiah went to St Paul’s and, without ever losing touch with his Russian or
Jewish identities, continued a thoroughgoing process of Anglicisation that
enabled him to become a prominent figure in the English culture of his day.
In 1928 he went up as a scholar
to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He took Firsts in Greats and PPE in 1931 and
1932. Thereafter he was interviewed (unsuccessfully) for the Manchester
Guardian and started to read for the Bar; but Richard Crossman, then a don at
New College, gave him his first post, as a lecturer in philosophy. Almost
immediately he was also elected to a fellowship at All Souls which ran
concurrently with his lectureship until 1938, when he became a Fellow of New
College. It was during this first spell at All Souls that he wrote his
brilliant biographical study of Marx (Karl Marx: his life and environment,
1939) for the Home University Library: ironically he was by no means the
editors’ first choice for the job.
During the early years of the
Second World War, Berlin continued to teach. Then, in 1941, he was sent to New
York by the Ministry of Information. In 1942 he was transferred to the Foreign
Office, which he served until 1946 (apart from a few months in Moscow) at the
British Embassy in Washington as head of a team charged with reporting the
changing political mood of the United States. The despatches sent to Whitehall
from Washington, not in his name but mostly drafted by him, attracted the
attention of Winston Churchill, and have long had a reputation for their
brilliance; a selection was published (as Washington Despatches 1941-1945,
edited by H.G. Nicholas) in 1981.
Berlin has written most
engagingly about aspects of these years: in particular, his descriptions of his
meetings in Russia with Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova and other writers are
extremely moving. His encounter with Anna Akhmatova had an especially profound
effect on him; and the many passages about him in Akhmatova’s poems bear
witness to its fundamental significance for her. “He will not be a beloved
husband to me / But what we accomplish, he and I, / Will disturb the Twentieth
Century”: she was convinced that there was a direct link between Stalin’s
reaction to their meeting in 1945 and the beginning of the Cold War in 1946.
By the end of the war Berlin
had decided that he wanted to give up philosophy for the history of ideas, “a
field in which one could hope to know more at the end of one’s life than when
one had begun”. In 1950, with this in view, he returned to All Souls, where in
1957 he was elected to the Chichele chair of Social and Political Theory in
succession to G.D.H. Cole. His inaugural lecture, Two Concepts of Liberty, is
his best-known and most influential work, in which with great passion and
subtlety he stands up for “negative” liberty - freedom from obstruction by
others, freedom to follow one’s own choices - and shows how easily “positive”
liberty, the (desirable) freedom of self-mastery, is perverted into the “freedom”
to achieve “self-realisation” according to criteria laid down and often
forcibly imposed by self-appointed arbiters of the true ends of human life.
His account has remained an
indispensable reference-point for thought about freedom ever since, and
permeates all informed discussion of the subject; nevertheless, perhaps partly
because of the unassertive and deliberately unsystematic nature of his ideas,
and his rejection of panaceas of any kind, he did not (to his relief) in any
narrow sense acquire disciples or found a school of thought.
The year before his election to
the chair, abandoning his apparently settled bachelor existence, he had married
Aline Halban (daughter of the eminent European banker Pierre de Gunzbourg),
perfectly described by Lord Goodman as “a lady of grace and distinction”. In
his late forties he had found the partner who would be the linchpin of his life
from that time onwards; and, in his three stepsons (he had no children of his
own), a mutually devoted family. He always recommended marriage to others.
In 1966 Berlin became the first
President of the newly founded Oxford graduate college, Wolfson, relinquishing
his professorship the following year. Wolfson College, where he remained until
his “retirement” in 1975, came into existence in its present form and under its
present name (it began as Iffley College) only as a result of his efficacy as
fund-raiser and charismatic inspirer of new institutional forms, traditions and
loyalties. The generosity of the Wolfson and Ford Foundations in funding the
building and endowment of the college was in direct response to his personal
involvement.
Wolfson apart, Berlin’s chief
legacy to the future is what he wrote: a large, enormously varied uvre of
unmistakable style and penetration. In his own, reasonable, estimation his most
important work is represented by his exploration of four fields of enquiry:
liberalism; pluralism; 19th-century Russian thought; and the origins and
development of the Romantic movement. Under all these headings he shed much new
light, and the way he did so still retains the power to excite which it had
when his contributions were first made public.
For most of his life his
reputation as a writer lagged behind his actual output, much of which was in
the form of occasional essays (“I am like a taxi: I have to be hailed”), often
published obscurely. Comparatively little had appeared in book form -
principally Karl Marx, The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953, a long essay on Tolstoy’s
view of history) and the collection Four Essays on Liberty (1969), which
included his inaugural lecture. But then in 1976 came Vico and Herder, and
shortly thereafter four volumes of collected essays (1978-80).
These books gave the lie to a
remark made by his friend Maurice Bowra when Berlin was appointed to the Order
of Merit in 1971: “Though like Our Lord and Socrates he does not publish much,
he thinks and says a great deal and has had an enormous influence on our times.”
Other volumes followed in the 1990s, including two devoted to work he had left
unpublished when it was first written, and, in February this year, The Proper
Study of Mankind, a retrospective anthology of his best work.
By contrast with Bowra’s case,
a good deal of Berlin’s way of speaking is captured, happily, in his published
work, which is imbued with his personality and sets forth his cardinal
intellectual preoccupations with the greatest clarity and fecundity, if often
through the medium of his enquiries into the ideas of others.
One of the most attractive characteristics
of his writing is that he is never merely the detached scholar, never forgetful
that the point of the enquiry, in the end, is to increase understanding and
moral insight. Since, as another friend, Noel Annan, has put it, “He will
always use two words where one will not do”, his message - a notion he would
have hated - is impossible to summarise without losing all of its
characteristic mode of expression. But its central content can be baldly
stated.
Berlin once described the main
burden of his work as “distrust of all claims to the possession of incorrigible
knowledge about issues of fact or principle in any sphere of human behaviour”.
His most fundamental conviction, which he applauded when he discerned it in the
writings of others, and adopted in an enriched form as his own, was that there
can never be any single, universal, final, complete, demonstrable answer to the
most ultimate moral question of all: How should men live? This he presents as a
denial of one of the oldest and most dominant assumptions of Western thought,
expressed in its most uncompromising form in the 18th century under the banner
of the French Enlightenment.
Contrary to the Enlightenment
vision of an eventual orderly and untroubled synthesis of all objectives and
aspirations, Berlin insisted that there exists an indefinite number of
competing and often irreconcilable ultimate values and ideals between which
each of us often has to make a choice - a choice which, precisely because it
cannot be given a conclusive rational justification, must not be forced on
others, however committed we may be to it ourselves. “Life may be seen through
many windows, none of them necessarily clear or opaque, less or more distorting
than any of the others.”
Each individual, each culture,
each nation, each historical period has its own goals and standards, and these
cannot be combined, practically or theoretically, into a single coherent
overarching system in which all ends are fully realised without loss,
compromise or clashes. The same tension exists within each individual
consciousness. More equality may mean less excellence, or less liberty; justice
may obstruct mercy; honesty may exclude kindness; self-knowledge may impair
creativity or happiness, efficiency inhibit spontaneity. But these are not
temporary local difficulties: they are general, indelible and sometimes tragic
features of the moral landscape; tragedy, indeed, far from being the result of
avoidable error, is an endemic feature of the human condition. Instead of a
splendid synthesis there must be a permanent, at times painful, piecemeal
process of untidy trade-offs and careful balancings of contradictory claims.
Intimately connected with this
pluralist thesis - sometimes mistaken for relativism, which he rejected, and
which is in fact quite distinct - is a belief in freedom from interference,
especially by those who think they know better, that they can choose for us in
a more enlightened way than we can choose for ourselves.
Berlin’s pluralism justifies
his deep-seated rejection of coercion and manipulation by authoritarians and
totalitarians of all kinds: Communists, Fascists, bureaucrats, missionaries,
terrorists, revolutionaries and all other despots, levellers, systematisers or purveyors
of “organised happiness”. Like one of his heroes, the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen,
many of whose characteristics he manifested himself, Berlin had a horror of the
sacrifices that have been exacted in the name of Utopian ideals due to be realised
at some unspecifiable point in the distant future: real people should not have
to suffer and die today for the sake of a chimera of eventual universal bliss.
Berlin always discussed these
ideas in terms of specific individuals, not in the abstract, remembering that
it is the impact of ideas on people’s lives that give them their point. Here he
was served by his unusual capacity for imaginative identification with people
whose visions of life varied greatly and were often distant from his own. This
enabled him to write rich and convincing accounts of a wide range of figures,
historical and contemporary: Belinsky, Hamann, Herder, Herzen, Machiavelli,
Maistre, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Vico; Churchill, Namier, Roosevelt, Weizmann; and
many others.
His descriptions of those with
whom he is in the closest sympathy often have a marked autobiographical
resonance: he said of others, with dazzling virtuosity, what he would not have
been willing to say of himself, what he probably did not believe of himself, though
his words sometimes fit him precisely. Had he been sufficiently interested in
his life and opinions for their own sakes, he would have been his own ideal
biographer; but he would also have been a different man.
Isaiah Berlin was often
described, especially in his old age, by means of superlatives: the world’s
greatest talker, the century’s most inspired reader, one of the finest minds of
our time - even, indeed, a genius. It may be too early to be sure about such
strong claims. But there is no doubt that he showed in more than one direction
the unexpectedly large possibilities open to us at the top end of the range of
human potential, and the power of the wisely directed intellect to illuminate,
without undue solemnity or needless obscurity, the ultimate moral questions
that face mankind.
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