Isaiah Berlin and The Enlightenment

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi
Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment

Isaiah Berlin and the

Enlightenment
edited by
Laurence Brockliss
and Ritchie Robertson
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© the several contributors 2016
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2016
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016942455
ISBN 978–0–19–878393–0
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Foreword
Hermione Lee, President of Wolfson College
The conference on Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment, on which this collection of
essays is based, took place at Wolfson College, in Oxford, from 20 to 22 March 2014,
with the support of Wolfson College, All Souls, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and
Jewish Studies, the Oxford Faculty of Modern Languages, and the Modern Humanities
Research Association. I was very glad to host the conference at the college which Isaiah
Berlin founded and where he was the first president, and which began its life as Wolfson
College fifty years ago, in 1966, dedicated to those principles of liberty, tolerance, pluralism,
and independence of mind in which Berlin so eloquently believed.
Since Berlin’s presidency, Wolfson College has maintained his legacy and posthumous
intellectual life through its involvement with the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust and through
its support of the work of Henry Hardy, Honorary Fellow of the College, in editing
Berlin’s books, essays, lectures, and (with Mark Pottle, Jennifer Holmes, Serena Moore,
and Nicholas Hall) his letters. The fourth and final volume of Berlin’s Letters, Affirming:
Letters 1975–1997, was published in 2015.
Berlin ‘belongs’ to a number of Oxford colleges—Corpus, All Souls, New—but his
creation of Wolfson as a new graduate college in the 1960s was a mark of his belief that
historical institutions need to continue to change, and to incorporate differences, con-
tradictions, and radical developments. The belief applies also to his intellectual work,
and is expressed in this volume’s acknowledgement in its Introduction, that ‘he would
have not have wanted his readings [of the Enlightenment] to be set in stone’. That the
essays from this conference make up a re-evaluation of Berlin as a historian of ideas
‘not intended as an act of piety or an attempt at rehabilitation’, but as a critique which
brings a wide variety of views to bear on his work, is as it should be.
The conference from which these essays arises was supported in part by the Oxford
Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson, a centre for the study of biography, autobiography,
letters, and other forms of life-writing. It’s apt, then, that so many of these essays deal with
the history of ideas and of differing approaches to the Enlightenment through individual
cases: Marx, Meinecke, Hume, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, Hamann, Kant, Mill,
Machiavelli, Vico, Herder, Hess, and Herzen. Berlin approached the Enlightenment as
‘the grounding of our belief in human individuality’, and his approach to history, ideas,
and philosophy was very often through the study of individuals. He was profoundly
suspicious of abstract principles and general theories, and of the sacrifice of the individ-
ual to ‘remote ends’. He rejoiced in the study of heroes, exceptional thinkers, and actors,
and in those influential personages who, as he said of Chaim Weizmann, ‘must perma-
nently transform one’s ideas of what human beings can be or do’. In his essay on Herder
vi foreword
(in Three Critics of the Enlightenment) he proposed that ‘all the works of men are above
all voices speaking . . . and that self-expression is part of the essence of human beings as
such’. This volume takes on, critically and analytically, Berlin’s ‘self-expression’ on
Enlightenment themes, and in doing so makes a significant new contribution to the
study both of Isaiah Berlin and of the Enlightenment.
Acknowledgements
This book is the outcome of a conference on ‘Isaiah Berlin’s Enlightenment’, organized

by Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson, and hosted by Wolfson College, Oxford,
from 20 to 22 March 2014. The conference was generously supported by Wolfson’s
Centre for Life-Writing, All Souls College, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish
Studies, the Oxford Faculty of Modern Languages, and the Modern Humanities
Research Association. The conference was first conceived at a meeting of the Besterman
Centre for the Enlightenment, now part of the Enlightenment research programme
within the Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities (TORCH).
We are particularly grateful to Hermione Lee, President of Wolfson, for her enthusiastic
support at every stage of this project, and to Henry Hardy, Isaiah Berlin’s devoted
editor, for his participation in the conference and his willing advice to the editors
and many contributors to this volume. At the conference Henry presented an
audio-recording of Isaiah Berlin’s contribution to the 1975 Wolfson College lectures
on ‘The Enlightenment and its Critics’. This was an absorbing and memorable expe-
rience for all who were fortunate enough to listen to it, and it is hoped that one day a
transcription of the lecture can be published.
Contents
List of Abbreviations xi
Notes on Contributors xiii
Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 1

Laurence Brockliss
Part I. An Idea in Context

1. Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, and the Enlightenment 21
David Leopold
2. Berlin’s Conception of the Enlightenment 35
Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson
3. Between Friedrich Meinecke and Ernst Cassirer: Isaiah Berlin’s
Bifurcated Enlightenment 51
Avi Lifschitz
Part II. Enlightenment Thinkers

4. Berlin and Hume 69
P. J. E. Kail
5. Berlin and Montesquieu 79
Karen O’Brien
6. Isaiah Berlin and the Origins of the ‘Totalitarian’ Rousseau 89
Christopher Brooke
7. Rococo Enlightenment? Berlin, Hamann, and Diderot 99
Marian Hobson
8. Sympathy and Empathy: Isaiah’s Dilemma, or How He Let the
Enlightenment Down 113
T. J. Reed
9. Isaiah Berlin, J. S. Mill, and Progress 121
Alan Ryan
Part III. Counter-Enlightenments?

10. Berlin, Machiavelli, and the Enlightenment 137
Ritchie Robertson
x contents
11. Berlin, Vico, and the Critique of Enlightenment 151

John Robertson
12. ‘Populism, Expressionism, Pluralism’—and God? Herder’s Cultural
Theory and Theology 164
Kevin Hilliard
13. Discovering Isaiah Berlin in Moses Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem176
Ken Koltun-Fromm
14. Isaiah Berlin and the Russian Intelligentsia 187
Derek Offord
Part IV. Berlin’s Legacy

15. Isaiah Berlin’s Neglect of Enlightenment Constitutionalism 205
Jeremy Waldron
16. Second Thoughts of a Biographer 220
Michael Ignatieff
Bibliography 229
Index 245
List of Abbreviations
AC Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry
Hardy, with an introduction by Roger Hausheer (London: Hogarth Press,
1979; repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
AE The Age of Enlightenment: The Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, selected with
introduction and commentary by Isaiah Berlin (New York: Mentor Books,
1956); reprinted with same pagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1979).
CIB Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Peter Halban,
1992).
CTH Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of
Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: John Murray, 1990).
FIB Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty, ed.
Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002).
IBAC Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration, ed. Edna Margalit and Avishai Margalit (London:
Hogarth Press, 1991).
IBCE Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment, ed. Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler,
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 93 (2003), part 5
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003).
KM Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (London: Thornton
Butterworth, 1939).
KM5 Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, 5th edition, ed. Henry Hardy, foreword by Alan
Ryan, afterword by Terrell Carver (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2013).
L Isaiah Berlin, Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002).
L I Isaiah Berlin, Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946, ed. Henry Hardy (London:
Chatto & Windus, 2004).
L II Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, ed. Henry Hardy and Jennifer
Holmes (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009).
L III Isaiah Berlin, Building: Letters 1960–1975, ed. Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle
(London: Chatto & Windus, 2013).
L IV Isaiah Berlin, Affirming: Letters 1975–1997, ed. Henry Hardy and Mark
Pottle (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015).
xii list of abbreviations
MH Isaiah Berlin, The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess (Cambridge: W. Heffer
& Sons, 1959).
PI Isaiah Berlin, Personal Impressions, 3rd edn, ed. Henry Hardy, with foreword
by Hermione Lee (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
PIRA Isaiah Berlin, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on
Modern Thought, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006).
POI Isaiah Berlin, The Power of Ideas, 2nd edn, ed. Henry Hardy, with foreword
by Avishai Margalit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
PSM Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, 2nd edn,
ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (London: Vintage, 2013).
RR Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto
& Windus, 1999).
RT Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (London:
Hogarth Press, 1978).
TCE Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, 2nd
edn, ed. Henry Hardy, foreword by Jonathan Israel (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2013).
VH Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London:
The Hogarth Press, 1976).
Notes on Contributors
Laurence Brockliss is Professor of Early Modern French History and Fellow of

Magdalen College, Oxford. His books include French Higher Education in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History (1987), Calvet’s Web:
Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France (2002),
Magdalen College: A History (2008), and The University of Oxford: A History (2016).
Christopher Brooke is a University Lecturer in Politics at Cambridge, a Fellow of
Homerton College, and author of Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought
from Lipsius to Rousseau (2012).
Kevin Hilliard is a University Lecturer in German at Oxford, a Fellow of St Peter’s
College, and author of Philosophy, Letters, and the Fine Arts in Klopstock’s Thought
(1987) and Freethinkers, Libertines and ‘Schwärmer’: Heterodoxy in German Literature,
1750–1800 (2011).
Marian Hobson is Professor Emerita of French at Queen Mary University of
London. Her books include The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-
Century France (1982), Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (1998), and Diderot and Rousseau:
Networks of Enlightenment, edited by Kate Tunstall and Caroline Warman (2011).
Michael Ignatieff is President and Rector of the Central European University in
Budapest and author of many books including A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary
in the Industrial Revolution 1750–1850 (1978), The Needs of Strangers (1984), Blood
and Belonging (1993), Isaiah Berlin: A Biography (1998), The Rights Revolution (2000),
Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (2001), The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age
of Terror (2004), and Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics (2013).
P. J. E. Kail is University Lecturer in the History of Modern Philosophy, a Fellow of St
Peter’s College, and author of Projection and Realism in Hume’s Philosophy (2007).
Ken Koltun-Fromm is Professor in the Department of Religion at Haverford
College, Pennsylvania, and author of several books including Moses Hess and Modern
Jewish Identity (2001), Abraham Geiger’s Liberal Judaism: Personal Meaning and
Religious Authority (2006), Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America (2010),
and Imagining Jewish Authenticity: Vision and Text in American Jewish Thought (2015).
David Leopold is an Associate Professor of Political Theory, a Fellow of Mansfield
College, Oxford, and author of The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern
Politics, and Human Flourishing (2007).
xiv Notes on Contributors
Avi Lifschitz is a Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at University College

London and author of Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the
Eighteenth Century (2012).
Karen O’Brien is Professor of English and Head of the Humanities Division at
Oxford. She has published Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from
Voltaire to Gibbon (1997) and Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century
Britain (2009).
Derek Offord is Emeritus Professor of Russian at the University of Bristol. His
books include Portraits of Early Russian Liberals: A Study of the Thought of T. N.
Granovsky, V. P. Botkin, P. V. Annenkov, A. V. Druzhinin and K. D. Kavelin (1985), The
Russian Revolutionary Movement in the 1880s (1986), Journey to a Graveyard:
Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing (2006), and (co-edited with
William J. Leatherbarrow) A History of Russian Thought (2010).
T. J. Reed is emeritus Taylor Professor of German at Oxford. His books include
Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition (1974, revised version 1996), The Classical Centre:
Goethe and Weimar 1775–1832 (1980), and Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown
Enlightenment (2015).
John Robertson is Professor of the History of Political Thought at Cambridge and a
Fellow of Clare College. His books include The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia
Issue (1985), The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (2005),
and The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction (2015).
Ritchie Robertson is Taylor Professor of German and a Fellow of the Queen’s
College, Oxford. His books include Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (1985), The
‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749–1939 (1999), Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope
to Heine (2009), and Goethe: A Very Short Introduction (2016).
Alan Ryan, formerly Warden of New College, Oxford, has taught the history of political
thought at Oxford, Princeton, and elsewhere. His books include The Philosophy of John
Stuart Mill (1970), On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the
Present (2012), and The Making of Modern Liberalism (2012). He edited The Idea of
Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin (1979).
Jeremy Waldron, formerly Chichele Professor of Social and Political Thought at
Oxford, is Professor in the School of Law at New York University and author of many
books including The Right to Private Property (1988), God, Locke and Equality (2002),
Torture, Terror and Trade-offs: Philosophy for the White House (2010), and The Harm in
Hate Speech (2012).
Introduction
Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment
Laurence Brockliss1
Has Isaiah Berlin any relevance today as a living political philosopher and historian of
ideas, or is he primarily a historical figure of the Cold War era whose oeuvre is a reflec-
tion of the challenges and problems of a past age? In the eyes of philosophers and intel-
lectual historians, the answer would seem to be largely the latter. Berlin in recent years
has been the focus of a number of important academic studies,2 and he is the subject of a
forthcoming Cambridge Companion, but his ideas seem to have a limited resonance
among modern philosophers. On the other hand, Berlin remains an enormously
respected thinker among the wider educated public. His works continue to sell well
around the world, the argument of his 1958 inaugural lecture ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’
has become an intellectual commonplace, and the warm reception of Henry Hardy’s
four volumes of collected letters demonstrates that he has a large and loyal following.3
The aim of the present collection of essays is to probe this paradox by focusing on
Berlin and his reputation as an interpreter of the Enlightenment and its critics, two
groups of political and social thinkers of the eighteenth and the first half of the nine-
teenth century who engaged his closest attention. By the end of the book, it will become
clear that Berlin’s commitment in the post-war era to building liberal ethical and polit-
ical thought through a constructive but critical engagement with past philosophers
1
In writing this chapter I am greatly indebted to the invaluable assistance as a reader and critic of my
co-editor, Ritchie Robertson.
2
E.g. John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (London: Harper Collins, 1995), reprinted as Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation
of his Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1998); Mark Lilla et al., The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (New York: New York
Review of Books, 2001); George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (Cambridge: Polity, 2004);
Neil Burtonwood, Cultural Diversity, Liberal Pluralism, and Schools: Isaiah Berlin and Education (London:
Routledge, 2006); Arie Dubnov, Isaiah Berlin. The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan 2012); Joshua Cherniss, A Mind and its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); David Bruce Baum and Robert Nichols (eds), Isaiah Berlin and the
Politics of Freedom: ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ Fifty Years Later (London: Routledge, 2015).
3
Details of all publications by Berlin mentioned here and in other chapters will be found in the
Bibliography. Berlin’s main works are cited as explained in the list of abbreviations.
2 Laurence Brockliss
was inevitably destined to fall foul of an ever-expanding academic world which

encouraged and valued disciplinary compartmentalization and painstaking research. It
will also be clear that Berlin’s work as a historian of ideas is of continuing value.
Whatever its deficiencies, his oeuvre stands as an important contribution to our under-
standing of the era of the Enlightenment. Since the Second World War, the West has
tended to see the legacy of the movement in black and white. As a philosophy of subver-
sion that liberated the individual from traditional constraints and prioritized fulfilment
in this life rather than the next, it has been considered as either a force for good or a
force for evil.4 Berlin’s approach was more nuanced. In his view, the novel emphasis that
the Enlightenment placed on the freedom of the individual was to be heartily welcomed,
and its leading lights were ‘liberators’ with whom he identified. But he also recognized
that the movement had a darker side: its supporters inevitably had to explore how far
individual liberty should be constrained in the name of the common good, which often
led to authoritarian conclusions. At the same time, Berlin’s concern for liberty placed
the Enlightenment debates over its limits at the centre of modern political thinking. As
he believed that there was a continual tendency for all states to restrict the freedom of
the individual in the name of the common good, the liberty that the Enlightenment
championed had to be continually defined, defended, and promoted in each generation
or it would atrophy. The Enlightenment was thus an ongoing and living movement.
When Isaiah Berlin went up to Corpus Christi College as an undergraduate in 1928,

Oxford University was still little changed from the late nineteenth century. Although it
was theoretically open to all, the vast majority of its junior and senior members were
male, public-school educated, Protestant, and Anglo-Saxon. Oxford remained an
undergraduate university dominated by the arts where few dons were committed to
research or interested in new intellectual developments on the Continent. It was a uni-
versity too with its own peculiar raison d’être which it shared with Cambridge. An
undergraduate, whatever the subject he read—and despite the existence of women’s
colleges, many people assumed that an undergraduate was normally male—was sup-
posed to emerge from Oxford a better and wiser man ready to take on the burdens of
imparting civilization and Christianity to benighted souls at home and abroad; an
Oxford education was a moral as well as an intellectual training.5 Between the wars,
4
The term ‘the Enlightenment’ is a historical construct. Eighteenth-century philosophers often talked
about themselves as being enlightened, and the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1784 set a famous essay ques-
tion for debate entitled ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’ But no one talked about ‘the’ Enlightenment until the late
nineteenth century, when German intellectuals began to use the term to group together thinkers in the
period before the French Revolution who sought to reconfigure the state so that it could be used as a vehi-
cle for moral and material improvement.
5
The seriousness with which the university was wedded to this mission had meant that new subjects
could only be introduced into the undergraduate curriculum if they could demonstrate their moral and
mental credentials. It was for this reason that courses in English and modern languages were built around
philology, which was thought to be sturdy and masculine, rather than literature, which was seen as soft and
feminine. Science courses on the other hand supposedly demonstrated the same commitment to Bildung
by eschewing any reference to the practical utility of their study: engineering for instance was only able to
continuity rather than change was the university’s hallmark. But beneath the surface,
the university was beginning to stir, to the dismay of many of the more contented
college fellows, and radical developments in the 1930s would lay the foundations
for the university’s intellectual pre-eminence in the years after 1945. Scientific and
medical research, greatly strengthened by an influx of Jewish refugees from Germany,
began to flourish as never before, while a number of precocious young arts dons began
to challenge the existing orthodoxies.
The discipline which was particularly affected was Classics, or Literae Humaniores
(Lit. Hum.) as it was known at Oxford, which was the flagship faculty not just in the
arts but in the university as a whole. As a four-year undergraduate course, Lit. Hum.
comprised the study of classical literature in the first two years, and ancient history and
philosophy in the latter two.6 Even more than any other faculty, its study was a course
in active citizenship.7 In the 1930s young Turks in the faculty began to challenge the
traditional paradigm. Maurice Bowra at Wadham, following in the footsteps of Walter
Pater in the late nineteenth century, set out to use classical literature to subvert rather
than sustain the status quo, and deliberately lured the most gifted undergraduates of
the day into his circle of sybaritic acolytes.8 More importantly, a band of young philos-
ophers, led by the Christ Church tutors Gilbert Ryle and Alfred (Freddie) Ayer, came
under the influence of the Viennese school of logical positivism and turned their back
on the great questions of human existence. Instead, they began to forge a new and more
restricted science of philosophy based on the analysis of language, which was heralded
in 1936 with the publication of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic.
The young Berlin was an immigrant and a Jewish outsider, as well as a brilliant
undergraduate reading first Lit. Hum. and then the new combined school of
Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE).9 Unsurprisingly, he was a member of
Bowra’s circle by the beginning of his fourth year. The great man, having learnt of his
existence, lured Berlin into his web by getting him to check a translation of a Russian
become an Oxford undergraduate course in 1909 when its promoters promised it would remain a theoretical
study. The claim that all undergraduate courses had the same underlying aim was made the more plausible
by the fact that Oxford was a collegiate university where the values of an Oxford education were also incul-
cated through common living and sport: Laurence Brockliss, The University of Oxford: A History (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016), esp. ch. 10, sect. A.
6
The first part of the course was examined in Moderations (or Mods) taken after five terms, the second
in Schools: the first was a more sophisticated version of a pass-qualifying exam where candidates might sit
for honours or a simple pass, the second equivalent to finals.
7
See Brockliss, University of Oxford, pp. 334–6 and 485–9; Peter Slee, ‘The Oxford Idea of a Liberal
Education: The Invention of Tradition and the Manufacture of Practice’, History of Universities, 7 (1988),
pp. 61–87; Heather Ellis, ‘Efficiency and Counter-Revolution: Connecting University and Civil Service
Reform in the 1850s’, History of Education, 42:1 (2013), pp. 23–44. Lit. Hum. remained the most prestigious
of Oxford undergraduate schools until 1945, even if its numbers dwindled.
8
Leslie Mitchell, Maurice Bowra: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); also Maurice Bowra,
Memories 1898–1939 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966).
9
Berlin took a first in Lit. Hum. Schools in 1931, then turned to PPE, where he gained a second first after only
a year's study. PPE was established in 1920. It was known as ‘Modern Greats’ in that it allowed undergraduates
to concentrate entirely on modern philosophers and contemporary economic and political systems. Traditional
‘Greats’ (i.e. Lit. Hum. Schools) did allow students to read Kant and Mill as well as Plato and Aristotle.
poem. Berlin’s introduction to Wittgenstein and the Viennese school came a few
months later when he listened to a paper on the Tractatus given by Ayer at Christ
Church. Both encounters were to prove formative moments of his life.10 Once elected
to a prize fellowship at All Souls in November 1932, he became one of the university’s
most prominent bowristas, while his rooms became the gathering point for Oxford’s
growing band of analytic philosophers.11 Berlin, however, always remained his own
man. As he later confessed, his friendship with Bowra gave him a new confidence to be
himself and in company to express his ideas, however controversial, openly. But he
never embraced the hedonistic lifestyle of Bowra’s coterie whose members deliberately
set out to shock, though in public he always asserted that Bowra was a force for good.
Nor did Berlin ultimately commit himself wholeheartedly to Oxford analytic
philosophy. He wrote and delivered a number of significant and original papers but he
was never fully engaged in creating the new school. Indeed, he spent his time as a prize
fellow writing a book on Marx for a series, the Home University Library, at the request
of H. A. L. Fisher, the Warden of New College. This in itself was a radical undertaking.
In the Oxford of the 1930s many middle-aged dons had broken with Christianity after
their experiences in the trenches, but there were few materialists and scarcely any who
thought Marx worthy of serious study.12 Berlin accepted the commission because he
recognized Marxism’s contemporary influence and importance and wanted to under-
stand why Marx had so many followers. As Michael Ignatieff also suggests, Berlin, like
many others, was intrigued by the industrial and cultural achievements of the Soviet
Union and felt a desire to ‘take the measure of the challenge that [Marxism] repre-
sented to his own inchoate liberal allegiances’.13 Nonetheless, writing a critical account
of a philosopher who claimed to know the end of human history and how it would be
achieved seems an inappropriate venture for someone at the cutting edge of Oxford
philosophy. Its completion demonstrated that Berlin was one analytic philosopher
who continued to take the big questions seriously.
The Second World War confirmed Berlin in his nascent belief that iconoclasm in
whatever form and however fruitful was insufficient to build a life or frame a philoso-
phy. The fate of European Jewry, the four years spent working for the British Foreign
Office in the much more egalitarian, liberal, and pluralistic United States, and his visit
to Moscow in 1945 convinced him that western democracy, for all its faults, was the
system of government best suited to humankind as it was. It alone could give individu-
als the space to practise their many beliefs and fulfil their myriad needs, and allow
philosophers like himself the freedom to develop the life of the mind. As a result, Berlin
returned to Oxford in 1946 determined to explore and promote the political and social
10
Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), pp. 50–1.
11
For Berlin’s account of the weekly discussions that began in his rooms in 1936–7, see ‘J. L. Austin and
the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy’, in PI 101–15.
12
Most anti-Christian sceptics were idealists, like the Magdalen tutor and Kantian Thomas Weldon,
who believed in the possibility of building the New Jerusalem using reason and good will. One of the few
ardent Marxists was his history colleague, the medievalist K. B. McFarlane.
13
Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, p. 70.
conditions in which the liberty of the individual could best be preserved and enhanced.
This was to be done principally, not by looking at liberty in the abstract, but by building
on his earlier analysis of Marx and critically elucidating the works of past philosophers,
poets, and novelists who had taken the individual and the liberty of the individual as
their theme. The approach was to be historical, but not historicist. Initially, Berlin
appears to have intended to concentrate on nineteenth-century Russia, an obvious
choice given his background and his enthusiasm for Pushkin, Turgenev, and Tolstoy.14
But at the beginning of the 1950s he turned his attention to the thinkers of the
Enlightenment and their opponents and thereafter immersed himself ever more
deeply in their writings. This was a natural decision in the light of his self-appointed
task. For most of the Christian era, philosophers had accepted the account of man and
his end that was given in Scripture as unimpeachably true. What they argued about
was how far this was consistent with the vision of man developed by the Greeks and
Romans, and to what extent it could be substantiated by reason or was a simple matter
of faith. It was only in the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement conventionally
associated with the eighteenth century but stretching both backwards and forwards in
time, that philosophers began to construct an independent science of s ociety and poli-
tics built on a purely secular account of human psychology. The Enlightenment was the
logical starting point for a philosopher devoted to charting the history of mankind’s
independent study of itself.
In the post-war era, Berlin was not the only historian of ideas giving the movement a
primary role in the making of the western world. The most important study of the
Enlightenment between the wars was written by Ernst Cassirer, a Hamburg professor
forced to flee Hitler’s Germany who eventually moved to the United States. His
Philosophie der Aufklärung, published in 1932 just before he left, offered a clear and
positive account of a movement whose intellectual origins he traced to Newtonian
science; he saw it as the beginning of the modern liberal age which, in the Germany of
1932, desperately needed defending against the forces of unreason and barbarism.
A decade later two other German philosophers, members of the Frankfurt School of
unorthodox Marxists, also in exile in the United States, took a diametrically opposite
view. According to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung, which first
appeared in 1944 and then in a revised edition three years later, the Enlightenment had
been an unmitigated disaster: its blind confidence that reason could ensure the
conquest of nature and the beneficent restructuring of society had paved the way for
twentieth-century totalitarianism.15 Cassirer’s position had a second airing in 1951
when his book was translated into English and published by Princeton, but the
14
Not all of the great Russian nineteenth-century novelists found favour with Berlin. In general, he
disliked Dostoevsky’s moral conservatism. On the other hand, he fully sympathized with the anti-utilitar-
ianism of Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov: see his letter to George Kennan, 13 Feb. 1951, on Karamazov’s
defence of the sanctity of human life, in L II 215.
15
Now available as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical
Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmidt Noerr, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
essimists responded immediately. In 1952 the ideas of Adorno and Horkheimer were
p
echoed in J. L. Talmon’s Totalitarian Democracy, published in London, which specifi-
cally blamed the philosophes for the excesses of the French Revolution.16 Thereafter the
pessimists seemed to make the running to such an extent that yet another, but younger,
German exile living in the United States, Peter Gay, decided to dedicate the first half of
his academic career to defending the Enlightenment’s liberal credentials.17 In 1959 he
began the campaign appropriately with a study of Voltaire’s politics which emphasized
the philosopher was no idle dreamer but deeply engaged with concrete issues. This was
followed five years later with a collection of essays on the philosophes called The Party
of Humanity, which made his allegiance clear in its title. This in turn formed a taster
and a prelude to his two-volume magisterial The Enlightenment: An Interpretation,
which appeared in 1966 and 1969.18
Like Cassirer, Gay, a professor of history at Columbia, saw the Enlightenment as an
unqualified good, accepting Kant’s belief that the movement signalled mankind’s
release from immaturity. What gave the book its strength was its attempt to place the
Enlightenment in its historical context. Whereas Cassirer had been content to look at
Enlightenment thinkers as discrete authors, feeding off one another while contribut-
ing to an emancipatory project, Gay placed them squarely in their contemporary
milieu and discussed them as part of a much larger and pan-European network of
writers and critics who targeted the abuses and absurdities of their own day. In his
view, what distinguished the Enlightenment philosophers from their peers, a Voltaire
from a Samuel Johnson, was their rejection of their Christian inheritance. They were
self-consciously modern pagans, building a new science of man on the same empirical
foundations that Newton had built the new science of multiple-force physics. As such,
however much they might differ in their conclusions, they formed a family whose cen-
tral location was Paris.19 Gay, too, was not content to describe the Enlightenment as a
movement of ideas. Enlightenment philosophers sought to change their own world
and were frequently close to political power. The Enlightenment, then, was not just the
harbinger of modern liberalism; it helped to bring the modern liberal world into being
through its influence on the founding fathers of the new United States. Cassirer’s book
16
Reprinted in 1961 and 1970. Talmon reactivated a debate which went back to Edmund Burke and the
French Catholic abbé Barruel in the 1790s. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s work would not appear in English
until 1979. Talmon was born in Poland.
17
Gay (1923–2015) had escaped with his family from Germany in 1939 to Cuba. From there he moved
to the United States, where he attended university. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the socialist philosopher
Eduard Bernstein, who in the 1890s proposed a major revision of Marxism, before turning his attention to
the Enlightenment in the early 1950s.
18
Gay believed that the Americans’ view of the Enlightenment was particularly formed by Carl Becker,
whose Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, which treated the philosophes as dreamers,
had been also published in 1932 by Yale. In 1956 Becker’s work was the subject of a symposium: Carl
Becker’s Heavenly City Revisited, ed. R. O. Rockwood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958). See in par-
ticular Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. vii.
19
Gay here distanced himself from the French historian Paul Hazard, who in La Pensée européenne au
XVIIIe siècle: de Montesquieu à Lessing (Paris: Boivin, 1946; English translation, London: Hollis & Carter,
1954) had subsumed within the Enlightenment critics of all kinds, even Augustinian Christians.
ended with Kant, whom he saw as the culmination of Enlightenment debate. Gay’s
ended with the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution.20
Gay’s account of the Enlightenment gave the liberal university elites of the Anglo-
American world a suitably flattering pedigree, and they immediately succumbed to its
charm. For the rest of the twentieth century, Gay was the first port of call for anglo-
phone students of the Enlightenment and his arguments were largely taken on trust.
Historians concentrated on probing more deeply the contextual side of his argument
rather than challenging his account of the Enlightenment as idea. Was his distinction
between the family of the philosophes and the more mainstream, largely Christian,
critics of the status quo as clear-cut as he had imagined? How far was this family a
self-conscious coterie or was its coherence and unity a construction of its enemies?
Was the movement Paris-centred or multi-centred, its practitioners stretching not just
across Europe but the globe? And most importantly, if the movement was an immedi-
ate and political force, how were Enlightenment thinkers accessed and absorbed, and
what was their contribution to other revolutions, especially the French? These ques-
tions were ardently and creatively pursued by a large number of Anglo-American
historians after 1970 but their work never seriously damaged Gay’s synthesis.21 The
leading exponent of the social turn in Enlightenment studies has been the Princeton
historian Robert Darnton, who has used his unrivalled knowledge of the French under-
ground book trade to argue that the influence of the great Enlightenment writers in
undermining the Ancien Régime was essentially indirect: the French bourgeoisie was
politicized not by Voltaire and Rousseau but by reading pornography and scurrilous
political satires written by second-rate thinkers who had absorbed the ideas of the great
minds and were jealous of their social success. But Darnton has never challenged Gay’s
narrative. His Enlightenment remains a Paris-based, liberal, and liberationist event.22
Gay’s argument, however, did not completely escape unscathed and by the end of
the twentieth century it was beginning to look tired. From the 1980s a growing num-
ber of historians of ideas had begun to challenge the idea that there was a single
Enlightenment. The critics might accept that the Enlightenment’s supporters shared a
20
Gay’s argument in the second volume of his study had been anticipated a few years earlier by the
Harvard professor of American history Bernard Bailyn. See Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American
Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).
21
The best introduction to the many-faceted developments in Enlightenment studies since the publica-
tion of Gay’s Enlightenment is Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Geneaology (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2010). See also Vincenzo Ferrone, The Enlightenment: History of an Idea, tr. Elisabetta
Tarantino (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
22
Darnton did his doctoral thesis at Oxford with the historian of the French Revolution Richard Cobb:
‘Trends in Radical Propaganda on the Eve of the French Revolution (1782–1788)’ (1964). His position is
most completely stated in his Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1995).
His earliest statement appeared shortly after the publication of Gay’s two volumes in Past and Present, 51
(1971), pp. 81–115. In the same year, he wrote a lengthy review of Gay’s work, which was hostile only inso-
far as he felt that the author had not successfully shown how the Enlightenment was taken up: ‘In Search
of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas’, Journal of Modern History, 43
(1971), pp. 11–62. His continuing support for Gay’s narrative was summarily stated in his ‘George
Washington’s False Teeth’, New York Review of Books, 27 March 1997, pp. 35–8.
common belief in the possibility of moral and material improvement, but they doubted
its deeper homogeneity. Some historians argued for the existence of a series of national
Enlightenments with their own intellectual antecedents, characteristics, and centres of
concern. Historians of the German Enlightenment in particular were alienated by
Gay’s thesis, which removed from the narrative all German thinkers before the mid
eighteenth century because they were influenced by Descartes, Leibniz, and the latter’s
disciple Christian Wolff, rather than by Newton.23 Other historians, unwilling to
accept that the movement was a clear-cut pagan event, began to identify a Socinian
and even a Catholic Enlightenment.24 Gay’s thesis also came under attack from femi-
nists and other groups dissatisfied with the late twentieth-century status quo. Whereas
Gay had seen it as a positive movement that laid the foundations for the post-war lib-
eral state, radicals saw it as an ideology that supported a particular form of liberalism
and individualism that only emancipated one part of the population. Enlightenment
thinkers took a limited interest in other races, women, the working-class, and sexual
minorities, and when they did take a stand, they usually supported mainstream opin-
ion. In consequence, Gay’s book, which had nothing to say about the limits of
Enlightenment thought, was celebrating a form of liberalism that was already being
superseded when it appeared. It was not a radical manifesto for the present but could
easily seem like a cosy account of the intellectual underpinnings of the best of all possi-
ble educated white male worlds.25
To save the Enlightenment’s radical and progressive credentials, Gay’s thesis had to
be reworked. This was finally done at the beginning of the present century in three
monumental studies by Jonathan Israel.26 Israel, an English historian now based at
23
The first hint of the reaction against Gay’s cosmopolitan Enlightenment in English appeared in Roy
Porter and Mikuláš Teich’s The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981) but the editors did not pursue the point with much rigour in their introduction. For a recent
English-language account of the German Enlightenment which maintains Gay’s emphasis on the liberal
significance of the movement while demonstrating how Gay has been superseded, see T. J. Reed, Light in
Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Other
historians continue to insist on the unity of the Enlightenment: see John Robertson, The Case for the
Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
24
E.g. John Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants,
Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). For a recent
refinement and critique of the Catholic Enlightenment, see Mark Curran, Atheism, Religion and
Enlightenment in Pre-Revolutionary France (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012), chs 7 and 8; see also
Ulrich L. Lehner and Michael Printy (eds), A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe (Leiden:
Brill, 2010).
25
The limits of the Enlightenment are summarized in Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995). Among critics, the French philosopher Michel Foucault went so far as
to see the liberal agenda of the philosophes as imposing a new form of control: in the name of humanity, the
supervised prison replaces the gallows and the structured hospital random but personal care at home,
while sex between men and women is liberated but all other forms of sex demonized.
26
Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1659–1750 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001); id., Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man,
1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and id., Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy,
Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Princeton, had already forged an impressive reputation as a historian of the early

modern Netherlands. His first volume reflected his scholarly past in that he sought the
origins of the Enlightenment, not in Newton, but the Dutch philosopher Spinoza,
whose intellectual progenitor was Descartes, Newton’s philosophical enemy as an apri-
oristic systematizer rather than a cautious empiricist. As a result what now defined
membership of the Enlightenment was not the rejection of Christianity and the Bible
as the privileged word of God but the positive endorsement of Spinozan materialism.27
In the first book such materialists were everywhere, except perhaps Spain, and virtu-
ally anybody who raised a critical voice was placed in their camp. Membership of the
Enlightenment was no longer confined to a family, but was an expanding tribe for
whom Paris had no particular significance. In his second and third book, Israel gave
fewer hostages to fortune and accepted that the Spinozists were relatively thin on
the ground, but they continued to play a central role in his argument. Supporters of the
Enlightenment were now divided into two non-Christian groups: the deists and the
atheists. The former, philosophes such as Voltaire and Rousseau, were moderates who
had limited objections to the society of Ancien Régime Europe. The latter, particularly
the coterie around Helvétius, were radicals who anticipated the agenda of the modern
left through their views on democracy, republicanism, secularism, racial equality, and
female emancipation. As a result, the Enlightenment remained a movement with great
resonance for the present, pace its radical critics, provided it was no longer seen as a
unitary but as a fractured movement. Only the Spinozist materialists carried the flag
for modernity.28
The conception of the Enlightenment that Isaiah Berlin developed in the course of
the 1950s and 1960s was noticeably different from the one that Gay was constructing
over the same period. Like Gay, Berlin saw the Enlightenment as a progressive and
modernizing movement but his verdict was much less positive. While he was always
careful not to align himself with Talmon and other critics, he shared their belief that
the Enlightenment had a totalitarian edge.29 The philosophes were engaged in a project
to liberate human beings from the control of organized religion and build a new politi-
cal society where everyone would be happy and fulfilled. This was something Berlin
applauded. On the other hand, they saw human nature as no different from nature tout
27
Israel was not the first to highlight the role of the United Provinces at the turn of the eighteenth
c entury in the creation of the Enlightenment: see Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists,
Freemasons and Republicans (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981). When it was published, Jacob’s book received
mixed reviews: some thought Jacob was too quick to see freemasons as godless radicals.
28
Israel hammered home the point in a much shorter book published in 2010, which looked at the
political and social ideas of the French materialists in the decades before the Revolution: see A Revolution
of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton
29
Cf. Berlin’s letters to Herbert Elliston and Jacob Talmon, 30 Dec. 1952 (L II 349, 354–5). Berlin has left
no substantive comment on Gay’s work. Cassirer’s work, however, was known to him. He had had some
contact with Cassirer when the latter had temporarily found a billet at All Souls on coming out of Germany
in 1933. It is not known if he read his book at this juncture but he definitely knew the 1951 English version,
which he accused of naiveté: see chapter 3 in this volume.
court and subject to immutable laws which could be uncovered by the same scientific
methodology. Consequently, they had a one-dimensional view of human needs and
desires which encouraged many among them to follow Rousseau in envisaging a
frightening future where we would all be constrained for our own good to do what our
peers or the technocrats and visionaries deemed appropriate.
Berlin’s earlier work on Marx was crucial for his understanding of the Enlightenment.
From Marx he worked back to the progressive philosophes of mid eighteenth-century
Paris, admiring their commitment to liberty but repelled by what he c onsidered their
excessive tidy-mindedness, their view that humanity was essentially uniform and
could have all its problems resolved by the determined application of reason. This
over-confidence in reason had led, via Marxism, to the delusions of Communism,
which was in practice incompatible with any robust conception of liberty. So when
Berlin later wrote about the Enlightenment, the looming shadow of Communism
always qualified his professed admiration for the movement. His interpretation of the
Paris philosophes (whom Berlin tends to identify with the Enlightenment) also needs
to be seen against the background of the Cold War. Berlin was tracing the genealogy
both of the liberal values upheld by the West and of the illiberalism, however well-
intentioned in its origins, whose triumph he had witnessed in the Soviet Union. Part of
his achievement, as Stefan Collini has pointed out, was to give liberal values a ground-
ing in intellectual history and thus present them with much more depth and subtlety
than the more shrill and shallow spokespeople of the time. ‘During these years there
was no shortage of Cold War liberals in the West ready to denounce (certain kinds of)
oppressive political systems, but there were few, if any, who could make such a position
seem the natural outcome of a properly reflective, properly sensitive engagement with
the great minds of the Western intellectual tradition.’30
The project of forcing people to be happy was anathema to Berlin’s liberalism. In
Berlin’s eyes we all had our individual desires and goals and should be free to make a
mess of our lives as long as we did not harm other people. For this reason, he came
to feel increasing warmth for the under-studied contemporary opponents of the
Enlightenment, who emphasized that human beings were irrational, unpredictable,
and idiosyncratic, or that their common desires, to the extent they could be identified,
were the product of their historical context. These thinkers, whom he eventually
dubbed the Counter-Enlightenment, frequently had their totalitarian side as well: De
Maistre with his veneration of the executioner was an obvious monster. But for Berlin
the more moderate offered an extremely important corrective to the one-dimensional
view of humanity promoted by the philosophes. Their critique ensured that the think-
ers of the first half of the nineteenth century who, in his eyes, laid the foundations of
the modern liberal state of the West, such as Benjamin Constant and J. S. Mill, were
30
Stefan Collini, English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
p. 206.
much more alive to the nobility, sanctity, and perversity of the individual than their
predecessors.31
After 1970 Berlin’s account of the Enlightenment received limited attention from
historians of thought working on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was
Gay’s version that became canonic. There were several reasons for this. To begin with,
Berlin was deliberately present-orientated. The philosophes and their opponents were
the point of departure for our modern world with all its hopes and horrors. We needed
to know what they had to say to understand ourselves. Gay was just as committed (as
were Cassirer and Israel) but he was far less open about it and aimed to place the philos-
ophes and their programme in their historical context: he was an historian not a
polemicist. Berlin always viewed political and social thought of the eighteenth and the
first half of the nineteenth century in the light of his own liberal predispositions, in
particular his contrast between negative and positive liberty. His own concerns as a
political philosopher transparently affected how he approached individual thinkers
and coloured how he represented them.
More importantly, Berlin never produced a properly footnoted book-length study of
social and political thought across the long eighteenth century, though he contracted
to do so on several occasions. His only book-length publication which could be said to
constitute an overview was an anthology of Enlightenment thought, published in 1956.
And this seems nothing if not eccentric with its emphasis on a largely anglophone
Enlightenment, with copious extracts from Locke, Hume, and Berkeley but only a brief
extract from Voltaire and nothing by Lessing or Kant. What Berlin produced was a con-
stant stream of private letters, public lectures, radio broadcasts, and insightful essays
where his basic idea of the two Enlightenments was explored and refined through indi-
vidual cases. His work was highly approachable, his style urbane and engaging, but
there was nothing solid to stand beside Gay’s two-volume synthesis. Indeed, it was only
once Henry Hardy, in the mid-1970s, singlehandedly took upon himself the task of col-
lecting together Berlin’s oeuvre that his ideas became widely accessible to the public.32
Moreover, once they did so, they struck a younger generation of historians and literary
critics as already outdated. In the 1950s and 1960s the number of scholars working in
the field of Enlightenment thought, high or low, was relatively small. In the last three
decades of the twentieth century, research on the movement in Britain, Europe, and
North America exploded and Berlin’s simple distinction between the philosophes and
their opponents seemed trite and forced in the light of much more careful textual study.
Key members of his Enlightenment, such as Hume, could not be reduced to rationalist
31
The Swiss Constant who opposed Napoleon and strove to create a liberal France after the Restoration
was one of Berlin’s liberal heroes: see L II 353 (to Denis Paul, 30 Dec. 1952) and 644 (to Gladwyn Jebb,
1 Sept. 1958); L III 151 (to Steven Lukes, 4 Apr. 1963). Constant knew only too well through his troubled
relationship with Madame de Staël how difficult it was for human beings to know what they wanted. The
inconstancy of human beings is explored in his novel Adolphe (1816).
32
His Roots of Romanticism for instance first appeared in print after his death in 1999, but it had
begun life in 1965 as the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.
systematizers; while seminal figures of his Counter-Enlightenment, like Herder,

appeared mislabelled. Berlin’s tendency to associate the Enlightenment with France,
and the Counter-Enlightenment with Germany, seemed equally unhelpful. The reality,
be it in regard to individual authors or countries, was far more complex than Berlin
had believed.
It would be wrong, however, to dismiss Berlin’s contribution as outdated and
unworthy of consideration in the early twenty-first century. His insistence on seeing the
Enlightenment as a dialectical movement or a dialogue between two opposing sides
might appear perverse and empirically challengeable but the approach has been and
continues to be fruitful. On the one hand, it introduced Anglo-Americans to three lead-
ing philosophers of the eighteenth century who had been hitherto largely ignored: Vico,
Hamann, and Herder. On the other, it destabilized the comfortable division of European
thought in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century into two successive
ages: the age of Enlightenment and the age of Romanticism. Berlin’s belief that the
Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment were contemporaneous rather than suc-
cessive movements of thought may be open to question, but it forces us to think more
deeply about a traditional periodization, which still prevails. This periodization made
sense when the French Revolution was considered the break between Europe’s Ancien
Régime and the modern world. Today, when many historians think in terms of a long
eighteenth century which is only brought to an end as industrialization gathers pace on
the Continent about 1850, it makes sense to consider whether the history of thought
over the previous century and a half should also be seen as more of a unity.
This book begins from the assumption that a historian of ideas whose view of the
Enlightenment has served to focus attention on neglected thinkers and unsettle our
conception of its boundaries is deserving of attention, irrespective of his scholarly limi-
tations.33 Where, as with Berlin, the historian has also a large educated following—
indeed, one that seems to be growing thanks to the efforts of Henry Hardy—the need to
take his contribution seriously is all the greater. Far more people have learnt and will
learn about the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment from Berlin’s essays than
have dipped into or will ever open Gay and Israel. This does not mean that this book is
intended to as an act of piety or an attempt at rehabilitation. It aims rather to give both
Berlin’s fans and foes a deeper understanding of his work on eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century thought by placing it in the context both of present-day scholarship
and the author’s own intellectual and historical milieu. The book is an evaluation of Berlin,
not as a philosopher or defender of western liberalism, but as a historian of ideas.34
33
Berlin’s approach has not just encouraged interest in significant and original thinkers who doubted
the Enlightenment project. He has also more recently inspired studies of more mundane opponents.
Darrin McMahon has gone so far as to suggest these people actually helped to create the Enlightenment by
identifying their antagonist and thus conferring unity on it: see his Enemies of the Enlightenment: The
French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
34
There has only been one attempt hitherto to look at Berlin in this way: see Joseph Mali and Robert
Wokler (eds), Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003).
As the book’s title emphasizes, most of the contributors are interested in only one side of Berlin’s two
This book, then, is a critique not a panegyric, though the editors feel that Berlin
would appreciate its intention. Berlin’s own narrative of the Enlightenment was shaped
by his obsession with human freedom, the peculiar circumstances of his life, his intel-
lectual milieu and voracious reading of the disparate primary and secondary sources
he had to hand. As an enterprise, it was also initially a lonely venture, for few Oxford
philosophers or historians had been traditionally very interested in the history of ideas
beyond the Renaissance.35 Before the rise of the Nazis, the history of modern ideas had
been monopolized by German scholarship. Unsurprisingly, then, as the following
pages will show, Berlin’s reading of individual authors and his conception of the
movement as a whole often appear one-sided and unsophisticated to most modern
scholars. He was a lone soldier with a personal agenda: they are part of a vast army of
dix-huitièmistes with their own journals and foundations, anxious to grasp the text
‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’, and armed with a panoply of hermeneutic tools com-
pletely unknown to their predecessors. However, the criticisms levelled against his
work today would not have troubled Berlin. Believing as he did that all intellectual
enquiry was an ongoing and eternal debate that only dictators shut down, he would
not have wanted his readings to be set in stone. He would have seen modern scholar-
ship as his legacy and been particularly pleased that so much of it is related to Oxford
through the Voltaire Foundation.36 We believe that a book that treats Berlin’s
Enlightenment as a point of departure and his work as the beginning of a debate
would command his respect.37
This book is divided into four sections. The first, An Idea in Context, is a commen-
tary from different perspectives on Berlin’s conception of the two Enlightenments. The
second and third sections examine and critique Berlin’s account of individual authors
from Machiavelli to J. S. Mill, whom Berlin saw as important representatives of the two
movements. The individuals in question form a cross-section of thinkers in whom
Berlin took an interest. They include figures he studied in detail, philosophers he res-
cued from obscurity, and thinkers to whom he frequently referred but never analysed
Enlightenments. The essays show little appreciation that Berlin thought both Enlightenments gave birth to
the modern world and that both had their strengths and weaknesses; Berlin tends to be viewed as a
Counter-Enlightenment man drawn to outsiders and only comfortable within his tribe for all his
cosmopolitanism.
35
This reflected the bias of the undergraduate curriculum: courses in modern (!) history, modern lan-
guages, and English literature privileged the study of the Middle Ages. And politics in PPE before the
Second World War was largely taught by historians and linguists. The most important study of political
ideas to appear by an Oxford don in the first half of the twentieth century was R. W. Carlyle’s History of
Medieval Political Theory in the West, 6 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1903–36).
36
Founded in 1976 as a result of a bequest from the Genevan scholar Theodore Besterman. Besides
undertaking a new edition of the complete works of Voltaire, through the Studies and other initiatives it
provides a forum for current cross-disciplinary Enlightenment scholarship.
37
This is not to deny that in old age Berlin liked to present himself as a lone English wolf even when
there was a pack of hungry juniors nibbling at his heels: see L I 489 for a quotation from a radio interview
of 1979 where Berlin pretends the history of thought is still not widely pursued.
closely. They are all thinkers with whom Berlin expressed an affinity, if not absolutely.
The final section of the book explores Berlin’s legacy as a historian of ideas.
The opening essay of the first section by David Leopold documents Berlin’s initial
encounter with the Enlightenment in his intellectual biography of Marx, where the
movement was generally explored positively. This is followed by an essay by the two
editors which charts the development of Berlin’s mature view of the Enlightenment
and Counter-Enlightenment in the 1950s and 1960s and introduces the reader to its
quirks and limitations. The final essay of the section by Avi Lifschitz shows that Berlin’s
division of political and social thought into two hostile camps was not completely
his own invention. On the contrary, Berlin’s conception of the Enlightenment and
Counter-Enlightenment was anticipated in the work of the German historian of ideas
of the first half of the twentieth century, Friedrich Meinecke, who had already grasped
the importance of Vico as a critic of Descartes and his followers’ treatment of human
nature as timeless and human beings as rational.
The second section deals with philosophers that Berlin placed within his
Enlightenment. It begins with an essay by Peter Kail on Hume, where the author shows
that the Scottish philosopher had a much more relativist view of human nature than
Berlin had understood. As a result, Hume and Berlin had a lot in common and were
potential allies. The next essay, by Karen O’Brien, is devoted to Montesquieu, one of the
philosophes who, in Berlin’s eyes, escaped the straitjacket of Enlightenment monism to a
degree. As O’Brien shows, Berlin was attracted to Montesquieu as an Enlightenment
thinker who rejected utopianism: he appreciated that Montesquieu continued to recog-
nize an absolute standard value embodied in natural law, but he viewed the Frenchman
with approval as supposedly the one philosophe who understood that man’s desires and
goals were complex and varied and reflected their historical milieu. In contrast, the
third essay, by Christopher Brooke, looks at the one Enlightenment figure Berlin
claimed to be unable to situate: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. On the one hand, he accepted
that Rousseau was a genuine libertarian; on the other, he distrusted the Genevan’s view
of the general will.38 According to Brooke, Berlin’s reading of Rousseau was heavily
influenced by the earlier accounts given by Plekhanov, Irving Babbitt, and Talmon, plus
his own background in analytic philosophy which meant he had little time for philo-
sophical idealism. Berlin’s real difficulty with Rousseau, however, stemmed from the
fact he could not reconcile the rational and emotional elements in the philosophe’s
thought. The essay on Diderot and Hamann by Marian Hobson then takes us on to a
central Enlightenment figure whom Berlin all but ignored. For Hobson, in this essay,
Diderot represents the playful, sceptical, and instinctual side of the Enlightenment. By
showing how much Diderot and Hamann, an icon of Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment,
have in common, she illustrates particularly clearly why many modern-day literary crit-
ics as well as historians of ideas have difficulty in accepting Berlin’s monist conception of
38
Berlin commented on the difficulty with getting to grips with Rousseau in a number of letters: e.g.
letter to Jakob Huizinga, 21 Nov. 1972 (L III 511–13).
the philosophes. T. J. Reed’s essay on Kant introduces us to another figure whom Berlin
treated positively but dealt with sketchily. According to Reed, Berlin made little effort to
understand Kant and see that he was not a dreamy idealist. Even Kant’s phrase ‘the
crooked timber of humanity’ that Berlin adopted as his own was misunderstood: Kant
did not mean that mankind was unreformable, merely that it would be a slow process.
The final essay by Alan Ryan brings us back to a figure of the long Enlightenment with
whom Berlin could associate: J. S. Mill. Mill was definitely one of Berlin’s heroes, whose
objection to the desires of the individual being pushed to one side in the name of some
greater good was at the heart of Berlin’s own liberalism. There were areas, though, where
even Mill fell short as a liberal in Berlin’s eyes. Berlin had no sympathy with Mill’s sup-
port for British ownership of India on the grounds that the civilized had the right to
control and lay down the law to the barbarous.
The subject of the third section is a group of thinkers who were part of Berlin’s
Counter-Enlightenment. It starts with an essay by Ritchie Robertson on Machiavelli, a
thinker whom Berlin seems to place among the opponents of the philosophes avant la
lettre because of his insistence that Christian morality need not apply to the state and
hence his pluralism. However, as Robertson shows, Machiavelli had a complex rela-
tionship with Enlightenment thinkers. Some were appalled by his concept of raison
d’état, others thought it outdated, while others were attracted to his view of civic virtue.
In the second essay in the section, John Robertson looks at Vico, who was a key figure
in Berlin’s idea of there being two parallel Enlightenments. The author accuses Berlin
of neglecting the context in which Vico lived and wrote. In consequence, Berlin sees
him as an isolated precursor of the German Counter-Enlightenment, whereas in fact
Vico was a man of his time who engaged with his contemporaries, particularly the
natural law theorists. He was also much more interested in Scripture than Berlin
granted. Berlin’s tendency to treat his Counter-Enlightenment thinkers as secularists
and anti-Christian is also questioned in the essay by Kevin Hilliard on Herder. Berlin,
in Hilliard’s opinion, viewed Herder through his own liberal secular spectacles. But
Herder was a theologian and committed Christian who was not a pluralist but an
ecumenicist. Not that Berlin turned all the moderate members of his Counter-
Enlightenment into secularists. Ken Koltun-Fromm’s essay on Moses Hess, a little
known socialist thinker of the mid nineteenth century who returned to the Jewish
faith of his ancestors, reminds us that what Berlin found most sympathetic about the
Counter-Enlightenment at its best was its opposition to determinism and its appreci-
ation of the sanctity and potential of the individual. Hess for Berlin was everything that
Marx was not. It was for this, as Derek Offord shows in the final essay of the section, that
Berlin was so taken by the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, the group with whom
his post-war researches into the history of ideas began. In fact, as Offord demonstrates,
this was a very tendentious and one-sided reading. Not only did Berlin concentrate
on the westernizers and ignore the conservative and religious Slavophiles, but he
also downplayed the westernizers’ illiberalism. According to Offord, Herzen, Berlin’s
particular favourite, relied heavily on national stereotypes and even supported terror.
The final section of the book contains two essays which complement one another
and were written to be placed together. Jeremy Waldron explores what he considers a
central aspect of Enlightenment thought that Berlin ignored: constitutionalism.
Berlin, he maintains, took little interest in political and administrative structures,
though the success of the American Constitution of 1787, built on Enlightenment
ideas, was to demonstrate that structuring the state aright was the key to establishing a
successful and stable liberal polity. Michael Ignatieff, Berlin’s official biographer as well
as a political philosopher, defends Berlin’s neglect in this regard. Berlin took liberal
constitutionalism as a given. What interested him was the use and abuse of state power,
when the state, whatever its structure, set out to straighten ‘the crooked timber’ and
create a society of happy clones. This could happen in any political society, even a
modern liberal democracy, and Berlin saw it as his task as a historian of ideas to
alert modern readers to the intellectual origins of totalitarian utopianism, be it in the
Enlightenment or Counter-Enlightenment. Both essays form a fitting conclusion to
this investigation into the Enlightenment of Isaiah Berlin. Waldron, at a time when the
political systems of the West do not always seem to be functioning effectively as guar-
antors of negative liberty, reminds us that Berlin was a defender of the West in the Cold
War, whose examination of the Enlightenment today in the face of random terrorism
might have moved in a very different direction. Ignatieff ’s defence recalls us to the
continuing significance of Berlin’s two-edged approach to the Enlightenment, as both
the grounding of our belief in human individuality (irrespective of family, tribe, class,
and nation) and the starting point for our often well-meaning attempts to force people
to be free.
This book should be seen as a virtual space in which Berlin’s legacy as a historian of the
Enlightenment is scrutinized and assessed. Berlin would have liked this metaphor. The
spaces in which philosophical, political, and literary discussion might take place with-
out any constraint and where all the participants were equal and equally honest were
very important to him. In the course of his life, he found such spaces in many different
and often unlikely places: in the dining rooms of Washington society hostesses during
the war; in the Leningrad flat of the poet Anna Akhmatova in 1945;39 in the many
common rooms of American universities that he frequented in the post-war years. But
above all, Berlin found the space to live the active life of the mind in Oxford.
In a famous essay on Tolstoy, Berlin divided writers and thinkers into hedgehogs
and foxes. Hedgehogs had only one idea; foxes knew lots of things and were not doctri-
naire.40 Oxford in the 1930s was largely a society of hedgehogs. In its dominant ethos,
which emphasized the character-forming as much as the intellectual value of its
undergraduate education, it promoted, in Berlin’s terms, positive not negative liberty.
Described in detail in Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, ch. 5.

39
I. Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London: Weidenfeld &
40
Nicolson, 1953).
The university was not so closed that there was not room for foxes but they had to
fashion their own dens, as Berlin did in his All Souls rooms. Berlin returned after the
war, however, to an Oxford that was rapidly changing. It was no longer the culturally
homogeneous university of the past, as more and more outsiders—foreigners as well as
non-Anglicans—were appointed to permanent posts, the Jewish exiles leading the
charge.41 It was, moreover, no longer an arts university devoted to transforming callow
undergraduates into good citizens but an arts and science university with a growing
commitment to research.42 A new and fast-expanding generation of dons was impa-
tient with the old pieties and rejected the ethical agenda of their predecessors; an
Oxford education henceforth strove to liberate the undergraduate mind not corral it.
Oxford’s establishment embraced pluralism and now contained many spaces, not least
the lodgings of Warden Bowra at Wadham, where negative liberty could flourish.
Berlin’s life in post-war Oxford was busy, varied, and creative. In the twenty years
following the end of the war he was successfully a tutor and fellow in philosophy at
New College, a senior research fellow in the history of European thought at All Souls,
and Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory. In 1965 he vacated his chair and
became the first head of a new Oxford college, Wolfson, where he was the president
until 1975. Berlin’s different posts as a teacher and researcher provided him with a plat-
form from which to develop and expound his vision of the history of ideas, which as a
lecturer he did with aplomb to packed audiences. His later role as an administrator and
college head offered him the chance to create his own community of the mind, where
young and old, men and women, and artists and scientists could mix together on equal
terms in beautiful surroundings. It is fitting, then, that a book about Berlin’s contribu-
tion to the Enlightenment should have begun life as an interdisciplinary colloquium
hosted in the college that the philosopher himself had conceived as a forum for fruitful,
cooperative, and open-ended exchange.
Berlin, however, was much more than an Oxford don or a university academic.
Through his published essays , magazine articles, and public broadcasts he introduced
his liberal project and his Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment to an audience
of citizens who were encouraged to think for themselves about the relationship
between the individual and the state. The space that he ultimately made his own was
the space of the public intellectual. Because the freedom of the individual was so
important to him, he wanted everyone to be part of the conversation about its defence.
Universities were or should be privileged sites of intellectual discovery. But freedom
was not a bone to be picked over exclusively by the university philosopher or political
theorist. To quote Stefan Collini again: ‘What seems to me to have been the most con-
sistently admirable and distinctive thing about his writing has been its engaging and
resourceful campaign to prevent intellectuality from conquering and laying waste
41
For the different fortunes of the exiles who had found shelter in Oxford before and during the war, see
Sally Crawford and Katharina Ulmschneider (eds), Civilisation’s Ark: Oxford and Refugee Academics in the
Arts during WW II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
42
Brockliss, History of the University of Oxford, esp. pp. 762–5 (Tables 1–5).
lands that are properly the territory of emotional or aesthetic or other human needs.’43
This was a campaign with which his Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment
authors would have wholeheartedly agreed. They too wrote for a public and sought to
provoke thought. Berlin’s style, both speaking and writing, was idiosyncratic, but the
clarity and energy with which he expressed his argument kept his audience and read-
ers entranced. It is no wonder that people want to continue to be in touch with the
thoughts of a great communicator when they can no longer hear him speak, and why
Henry Hardy’s painstaking reconstruction and publication of Berlin’s surviving oeuvre
and letters has been so well received.
43
‘Liberal Mind: Isaiah Berlin’, in his English Pasts, pp. 195–209 (review of The Proper Study of Mankind).
PA RT I
An Idea in Context
1
Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx,
and the Enlightenment
David Leopold
Introduction
It is important to notice that part of my title is in italics.1 I am concerned here not with
the entirety of Berlin’s complex and lengthy engagement with Marx’s thought, but
rather with Berlin’s first book: Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (1939).2 Written at
an ambitiously early age—he was just thirty when it was published—it marked Berlin’s
first step into the history of ideas, the area of scholarship in which he would make his
greatest impact. This monograph gives us an important snapshot of Berlin’s early views
on a range of topics, including Marx and the Enlightenment, which he would continue
to pursue throughout his working life.
Karl Marx was commissioned in 1933 by H. A. L. Fisher, liberal grandee and Warden
of New College, Oxford. Berlin would later develop a humorous and self-deprecating
anecdote about just how many others had turned down the commission before he was
finally approached.3 That story takes a number of forms, with the list of preferred alter-
natives growing with the telling, but none of the versions survives historical scrutiny
intact. To kill the joke completely: it seems that Harold Laski, Frank Pakenham (later
Lord Longford), and Sidney and Beatrice Webb rejected initial approaches, and that
others—including A. L. Rowse and R. H. Tawney—were discussed by the series editors
and publisher but not approached.4 The brief that Berlin eventually inherited was
to write 50,000 words for a volume in the ‘Home University Library of Modern
1
I am grateful to Henry Hardy for advice of various kinds, and Lucinda Rumsey for comments on an
earlier draft.
2
References to Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (henceforth KM) are to first (London: Thornton
Butterworth, 1939) and fifth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013) editions, respectively, with page
numbers divided by a forward slash.
3
See e.g. CIB 10–11; Michael Ignatieff tape reported in L I 67–8; ‘Isaiah Berlin in Conversation with
Steven Lukes’, Salmagundi, 120 (1998), p. 70; and letter to Dennis Noël, 14 Oct. 1996, L IV 539.
4
See Joshua Cherniss’s research summarized at http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/information/a-z.html.
Henry Hardy drily reports: ‘When I mentioned these findings to Berlin, he was not terribly interested in
abandoning the version(s) of the story he had become used to.’
22 David Leopold
Knowledge’ published by Thornton Butterworth. The series had attracted some

distinguished authors, including Leonard Hobhouse, Maurice Bowra, and Gilbert
Murray, and its range of subjects was expansive; other titles included Belgium, The
Literature of Japan, and—this might be my favourite—Nerves.5
Berlin would later claim ‘I had never read a line of Marx, but I thought that Marx
was likely to be[come] more rather than less important’ in years to come.6 Berlin
worked for five years on the book; produced a long typescript of some 100,000 words,
and, after the complicated and stressful dance familiar to all authors and editors, got
away with submitting some 75,000 of them. I am concerned here mainly with the
published first edition, but both its forerunners and successors are of interest.
The Bodleian Library archives contain a manuscript, associated notes, a long typescript,
a shorter typescript (with many manuscript additions), and several (some much anno-
tated) proofs for Karl Marx. The manuscript is a wonderful mixture of a just-legible
hand, with a myriad of crossings-out (reflecting remorseless reformulation and reor-
ganization of ideas), on a variety of ink- and coffee-stained paper stock (including, at
one point, the reverse of a compliments slip from the Finchley Road branch of the
Westminster Bank). The ‘long typescript’ is especially interesting, revealing what
was cut to get within the (re)negotiated word limit and what additions were made.7
Much of the cutting of the long typescript is judicious—not least, removing some
repetition—and the resulting manuscript is perhaps improved as a result.8 The largest
single amputation was an unremarkable section on Capital intended for the begin-
ning of Chapter 10 (readers were still referred to Harold Laski’s ‘Home University’
volume on Communism for Marx’s specifically economic doctrines). Other omissions
are more regrettable, including interesting asides on Heine’s character and rejection
of Judaism, and some intelligent speculation about the possible influence of Max
Stirner on Nietzsche.
We also have the changes that Berlin made to the three later editions in his lifetime.9
The book was never out of print, and Berlin’s revisions largely maintained its historical
character.10 He removed ‘errors and obscurities’, polished and refined the prose, but left
substantive changes of interpretation to what he regarded as the necessary minimum.11
Two additions might be mentioned. In 1960 (a reprint of the second edition) and 1963
(the third edition), Berlin introduced the theme of alienation (much discussed in
recent scholarship) into the chapter on historical materialism, portraying Marx’s
5
See list in KM 257–60/. 6
‘Berlin in Conversation with Lukes’, p. 70.
7
A clean copy, helpfully collated with the first edition (by Simon Toubeau), is available in The Isaiah
Berlin Virtual Library (online). The Virtual Library also contains a note on ‘The evolution of the text of
Karl Marx’, and a very useful ‘Concordance’ (by Nick Hall) cross-referencing the five editions.
8
Berlin would later entertain this possibility; see letter to Henry Hardy, 13 November 1975, L IV 12.
9
See MSS Berlin 420–2. For discussion, see John Toews, ‘Berlin’s Marx: Enlightenment, Counter-
Enlightenment, and the Historical Construction of Cultural Identities’, IBCE 163–76.
10
The fifth edition, edited by Henry Hardy, happily identifies many references, corrects some remaining
(factual) errors, and acknowledges certain weaknesses in Berlin’s scholarly practice (for instance, his failure
to identify quotations constructed from multiple sources).
11
MSS Berlin 420 folio 57.
Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, and the Enlightenment 23
theory of history as a narrative of human self-realization.12 And, in 1978 (the fourth

edition), Berlin allowed the possibility of a less ‘rigorously deterministic interpretation’
of Marx’s theory, wherein freedom consists in mastering forces that had previously
controlled us; as distinct from the earlier account of Marxian freedom as simply the
perception of a fully determined necessity that continues as before (KM /130–2).
The Marx Book

Karl Marx is not, in my judgement, a great book; by which, to be precise, I mean
that it is not a great book about Marx. Berlin’s account of Marx’s intellectual devel-
opment, of his major theoretical views, and of his character, are all flawed in
non-trivial ways.
Consider the following three concerns about Berlin’s account of Marx’s intellectual
development. First, Berlin is too inclined to see Marx’s work as having a ‘massive
architectonic quality’, as being more systematic in both theoretical ambition and
realization than it actually is. (Berlin was perhaps too quick to accept its overwhelm-
ingly Hegelian character, and too sympathetic towards ‘orthodox’ readings of Marx’s
work inspired, in part, by Engels and Plekhanov.)13 Structurally, Berlin is, as a result,
insufficiently attentive to the changing, contradictory, and unfinished character
of Marx’s work. Substantively, Berlin consequently fails to appreciate the extent to
which Marx, at least in certain moods, shared what has been called Berlin’s own
‘empiricist resistance to the project of grand theory as such’.14 Second, having deter-
mined on Marx having a theoretical system, Berlin identifies that system as emerging
bizarrely early. In one implausible formulation, Marx’s ‘final’ intellectual transforma-
tion is said to have occurred before he left Paris in 1845 (KM 81/75). (The proportions
of the volume appear distorted by this emphasis on the earlier parts of Marx’s life;
halfway through the book Marx is still in his twenties.) And, third, Berlin is too keen
on the picture of Marx as an isolated German thinker wholly uninfluenced by the
thirty years he lived in London. ‘So far as his intellectual development was con-
cerned’, Berlin writes, ‘he might just as well have spent his exile on Madagascar.’15 It is
a brilliant quip but poor intellectual biography; the political, literary, and economic
dimensions of British culture all had a significant, albeit complex, impact on Marx’s
life and work.16
12
See e.g. KM /113–14; /117–21; /125–30; /132–4.
13
KM /146. See also Werner Blumenberg’s criticism reported in a letter to Nicholas Jacobs, 14 Apr.
1972, L III 485–6; and the self-criticism in ‘Preface’ to the fourth edition, KM /xxx.
14
G. A. Cohen, ‘Isaiah’s Marx, and Mine’, Finding Oneself in the Other (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2013), pp. 1–15 (p. 13).
15
KM 24/17. The following line was cut from the long typescript, but the thought remained: ‘His education
was fully completed before he arrived: life in England added nothing’. MSS Berlin 413 folio 28.
16
See David Leopold, ‘Karl Marx and British Socialism’, in W. J. Mander (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of
British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 402–22.
24 David Leopold
I would also raise three worries about Berlin’s account of Marx’s theoretical views.
First, Berlin implausibly maintains that Marx makes no moral complaints about
capitalism; or, in a characteristically qualified formulation, that his later work reveals
an ‘almost complete absence’ of moral argument or appeal to conscience or principle
(KM 16/8). Where modern commentators grapple with the apparent tension between
Marx’s critique of morality and his extensive use of moral criticism, Berlin largely
ignores the latter (the widespread talk of ‘theft’ and ‘robbery’ in Capital go unacknowl-
edged and unexplained). Second, implausibly convinced of Marx’s determinedly
necessitarian commitments, Berlin underestimates the role of human agency in the
theory of history; seemingly forgetting that, for Marx, humankind make their own
history, albeit not under conditions of their own choosing.17 Third, Berlin misrepre-
sents Marx’s political views in order to generate a convenient moral: the Bolsheviks are
said to have borrowed Marx’s early ‘Blanquist’ commitments, without noticing that
he had subsequently and wisely come to reject them (KM 165–6/174–5). It might be an
attractive lesson, but the complicated and inconvenient facts do not support the
Blanquist attribution to Marx.18
And, lastly, I venture three doubts about Berlin’s account of Marx’s character.
First, Berlin abandons balance in order to portray Marx as impossibly splenetic in
his relations with others. Indeed, Marx appears as an implausible psychological
combination of external apoplexy and internal serenity; exhibiting ‘an inner tran-
quillity’ alongside ‘his abnormal sensitiveness, his amour-propre, his vanity, his
aggressiveness and his arrogance’.19 Second, Berlin misrepresents Marx’s literary
tastes as ‘undistinguished and commonplace’ (KM 245/261). In fact, Marx was a
voracious and imaginative reader, and an intelligent and creative adaptor, of an unu-
sually wide range of European literature.20 Finally, by seeing him as lacking in moral
outrage Berlin threatens to make little sense of either Marx’s motivation or the life
that he led. This objection was pressed gently at the time by A. D. Lindsay—then
Master of Balliol College, Oxford—in a brief but interesting correspondence.21
Berlin was unmoved, but Lindsay’s point remains astute. Berlin is widely held to be a
master of Einfühlung, but in Karl Marx he failed to achieve that empathetic under-
standing of others different to ourselves, and perhaps, on this occasion, lacked the
sympathy needed to do so.
17
Alluding to a quotation that Berlin was familiar with. See Karl Marx, ‘Der 18. Brumaire des Louis
Bonaparte’, Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1985), Abteilung I, Band 11, p. 96; and Isaiah
Berlin, ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, CTH 67.
18
See Richard N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels: Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy,
1818–1850 (Pittsburgh, VA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), ch. 7; and Christine Lattek, Revolutionary
Refugees: German Socialism in Britain, 1840–1860 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), ch. 3.
19
KM 28/21 and 38/31. See also Cohen, ‘Isaiah’s Marx’, pp. 10–11.
20
See S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
21
See letter to A. D. Lindsay, 31 October 1939, L I 296–8. I am grateful to Helen Burton (Special
Collections, Keele) for supplying copies of the Lindsay side of the correspondence.
Contextualizing Retreats
These are not minor or peripheral failings, for all that they are only briefly sketched
here. Confronted by such complaints from Marx scholars and others, one might be
tempted by a contextualizing retreat.
First, one might be tempted to situate Berlin’s book as part of the 1930s reception of
Marx’s ideas in British, or anglophone, culture. In that spirit, we might locate the work
as part of a broader cultural phenomenon: namely, the more academic and middle-
class reception of Marx, a movement which began in the 1920s in Britain but really
gained momentum in the 1930s.22 The extent to which Berlin was swimming with the
wider contemporary intellectual current is not often fully appreciated. E. H. Carr,
A. D. Lindsay, Harold Laski, G. D. H. Cole, Sidney Hook, Raymond Postgate, John
MacMurray, and others had all published works about Marx ahead of Berlin.23 Or,
in the same contextualizing mood, we might pursue comparisons with particular
contemporary volumes. The influence of Carr’s biography Karl Marx: A Study in
Fanaticism (1934) looks especially interesting; not least, because it contains something
like the same character portrait of Marx as a psychologically unlikely combination of
external rancour and internal calm.24 Berlin moderated his praise for Carr’s volume
before publication, and would later concede that he had been ‘perhaps too deeply
influenced’ by Carr’s work (amongst others).25
A second contextualizing response might situate the book in the context of Berlin’s
own intellectual development. Joshua Cherniss, Arie Dubnov, and Michael Ignatieff
have all written accounts in something like this vein, confirming that there is much we
can learn from such an approach. So understood, we might see Karl Marx as the lad-
der—to allude to a contemporary letter to Stephen Spender—which enabled Berlin to
escape from the perceived ‘futility’ of certain wrangles in contemporary Oxford phi-
losophy into the somewhat different world of the history of ideas.26 Or, we might think
of the reading that Berlin did for this work as generating the storeroom of ‘intellectual
capital’ on which he was to depend for the rest of his life.27 He unearthed resources
which supplied both the subject matter (the Enlightenment and its critics, Russian
intellectuals, and his ‘hero’ Alexander Herzen) and themes (the importance of ideas,
the rejection of historical inevitability, the critique of utopianism, the character of
historicism, and so on) of much of his later work (CIB 13). In more psychologizing
22
See Ben Jackson, Equality and the British Left (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), ch. 4;
and Jamie Susskind, Karl Marx and British Intellectuals in the 1930s (Burford: Davenant Press, 2011).
23
Those others include F. R. Salter, H. W. B. Joseph, J. Middleton Murry, Maurice Dobb, John Strachey,
T. A. Jackson, and C. S. J. Sprigge.
24
See, for example, Edward Hallett Carr, Karl Marx: A Study in Fanaticism (London: J. M. Dent, 1934),
pp. 61–2.
25
KM /xxx. See also Berlin MSS 419 folio 127; and letter to Jennifer Williams c.30 Sept. 1936, L I
199–203. Carr subsequently described it as ‘a foolish book’ which he regretted attempting. See Jonathan
Haslam, The Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr, 1892–1982 (London: Verso, 2000), p. 53.
26
Letter to Stephen Spender, 5 Dec. 1932, L I 43.
27
Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), p. 71.
26 David Leopold
mode, we might also look for ways in which Berlin’s efforts with this first book
taught him about himself. Berlin regretted, in correspondence with Elizabeth
Bowen, that he seemed to share Marx’s distinctive combination of ‘insensitivity’
and a ‘thin skin’.28 Whilst his biographer portrays the lessons as more vocational,
Karl Marx taught Berlin that his talent was ‘for synthesis, not for scholarship; the
essay, not the monograph’, and that the audience he cared about ‘was the educated
middle classes, not the specialists’.29
I will not pursue either of these broad contextualizing strategies here. One worry is
that they risk suggesting that Berlin has nothing much to say about his ostensible sub-
ject matter; that the significance of the book lies elsewhere—in what it tells us about
anglophone Marx-reception or Berlin’s own intellectual development. In this latter
spirit, David Caute describes Karl Marx as ‘a book that would now be of only minor
intellectual interest . . . were it not the work of the young Isaiah Berlin’.30 I consider such
a verdict as too hasty. I have said that this is not a great book about Marx, and that its
interpretative flaws are many and non-trivial. Yet Berlin does have genuinely interest-
ing things to say about his subject matter, and happily these include his account of
Marx and Enlightenment ideas.
The Enlightenment
The word may only appear three times in the long typescript but the Enlightenment
still forms a central thread in the book. It is typically treated as synonymous with what
Berlin refers to as ‘the rationalist position’, or the views of ‘the French rationalists’
(e.g. KM 41/34, 32/25). David Hume and the role of empirical experience might get a
mention, but Berlin comes close to adopting what might now be seen as a somewhat
dated view of the Enlightenment as a single, somewhat cerebral, and overwhelmingly
French construction. Diderot, Condillac, and Helvétius are all name-checked, but if a
single individual could be said to have created this movement, we are told, it would
‘unquestionably’ be Voltaire (KM 46/39). Both the content of this early portrait of the
Enlightenment, and the role that it plays in this particular book, are of interest.
The account of the Enlightenment in Karl Marx has five main strands. First, this
intellectual movement is characterized by its boundless faith in the power of reason to
understand and change the world (see KM 42/35). Second, Enlightenment thinkers
are said to hold that human beings are ‘naturally good’, and that reason exists equally in
all (Condorcet is seemingly the paradigm proponent of this belief) (KM 42/35). Third,
these writers believe that social and political outcomes would reflect that natural
goodness were it not for the existence of artificial obstacles. These artificial obstacles,
28
See letter to Elizabeth Bowen, before 27 Sept. 1935, L I 134. Interestingly, Marx is used serially as a
comparison in Isaiah Berlin, ‘L. B. Namier’, PI 131, 135,145.
29
Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, p. 174.
30
David Caute, Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (New Haven, CT and
London: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 16.
the source of all oppression and suffering, are said to stem from ‘human ignorance’
(including the supernatural beliefs sometimes fostered by those opponents of progress—
priests, princes, and other privileged classes—who benefit from that ignorance) (KM
42/35). Fourth, they hold that solutions to all properly formulated social and political
questions can be identified by ‘reason’ and ‘experience’ (the same methods as had
proved so successful ‘in the hands of Kepler and Galileo’) (KM 42/35, 46/39). Those
solutions typically involved educational means, understood both narrowly, as in
schooling, and broadly, as in the manipulation of the social environment. And, fifth
and finally, that we are tending towards a rational society in which justice, equality, and
happiness will become universal possessions. Indeed, history consists of the progres-
sive removal of artificial obstacles, often by ‘enlightened and benevolent government’
seemingly well placed to expose and eradicate them (KM 42/35).
Commentators have wondered about Berlin’s sources here. Some, for example, have
looked for, but not found much evidence of, Ernst Cassirer’s influence.31 However,
I can offer no good reason to reject Berlin’s own later claim that ‘[e]verything I knew
about the Enlightenment came from Plekhanov’.32 That a Russian revolutionary should
be Berlin’s primary source might surprise some, but the attribution has textual sup-
port, and fits with his contemporary enthusiasm for the ‘most brilliant and many sided’
Plekhanov.33
The historical impact of Enlightenment ideas on European culture and society is
said to be considerable (‘hardly inferior’, in Berlin’s characteristic phrase, to that of the
Italian Renaissance) (KM 48/41), and long-lasting (indeed, its influence ‘continues
into the present day’) (KM 41/34). By the nineteenth century this Enlightenment faith
in the power of reason had became, in Berlin’s words, ‘the common inheritance of
democrats of all shades and hues’ (KM 48/41). In particular, all ‘socialists and liberals,
utilitarians and believers in natural rights’ shared the language and faith of the
Enlightenment, albeit perhaps with less confidence, less eloquence, and less naivety,
than its original devotees (KM 48/42).
The ‘Counter-Attack’
The Enlightenment also generated critics, and Berlin offers an account of the
‘counter-attack’—which would subsequently evolve into his concept of the ‘counter-
Enlightenment’—that developed ‘on German soil’ around the cusp of the eighteenth
31
Arie M. Dubnov, Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012), pp. 139–40.
32
Michael Ignatieff tape quoted Joshua L. Cherniss, A Mind and Its Time: The Development of Isaiah
Berlin’s Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 31 n. 154. See also ‘Berlin in
Conversation with Lukes’, p. 73.
33
KM 235/. See also Berlin, ‘The Father of Russian Marxism’, PI 126–33. For his account of the
Enlightenment, see G. Plekhanov, ‘The Development of the Monist View of History’, Selected Philosophical
Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing, 1976), vol. 1, ch. 1–3; and ‘Essays on the History of
Materialism’, Selected Philosophical Works, vol. 2, chs 1–2.
28 David Leopold
and nineteenth centuries (KM 48/42). Hegel plays an important role in that narrative,
forming part of ‘a bold alternative’ to Enlightenment ideas, which offered ‘a less
rationalistic view of nature and of the individual’, and functioned to check ‘the
advance of empiricism from the west’ (KM 48/42).
Berlin is critical of many aspects of Hegel’s thought. The latter’s specifically logical
doctrines and his account of the natural world are said to have been ‘barren’, and to
have had a ‘disastrous’ impact (KM 56/50). Berlin also distances himself from the
purportedly politically conservative, even reactionary, character of Hegel’s last years
(see KM 59/53, 65–6/58). However, Hegel’s ‘historicism of outlook’ is portrayed as
constituting a ‘revolution in thought’ which is broadly positive. It may have subse-
quently bred certain ‘irrational and dangerous myths’—treating the state or race, for
example, as ‘super-persons exercising influence’—but the impact of this historicist
outlook on the human sciences has, nonetheless, been ‘very fruitful’ (KM 56/50).
This ‘historicism of outlook’ rejected the Enlightenment extension of the empirical
methods of the natural sciences to the human sciences (KM 56/50). Mechanical mod-
els might enable you to control or predict the repetitive and non-dynamic behaviour of
natural objects. However, to explain is to provide grounds, and something more like
the notion of purposive activity is needed in order to grasp the meaning of human
history (KM 51–2/45–6). On Berlin’s reading of Hegel, the subject of this purposive
activity is variously ‘the Idea or Spirit’, whose development provides the unity of par-
ticular historical epochs, and the driving force and goal of the overall narrative
(KM 54/48). On this ‘historicist’ account, in order to understand a particular phenome-
non we need, first, to place it in its wider social and cultural context, and, then, to locate
that context in the wider developmental narrative in which it plays a constitutive role.
The organic development which constitutes and drives human history cannot, on
the Hegelian account, be hurried or deflected (KM 62/56). It unfolds at its own pace;
not as a smooth progression, but driven by discontinuities, by the crises and conflicts
of a process characterized as ‘dialectical’ (KM 58/52). Berlin develops a contrast
between what he thinks of as the Enlightenment approach to social change and what
I would call Hegelian theodicy. To treat all the ‘tragic waste and destruction’ of human
history as simple error, as artificial obstacles which are easily eradicated once knowledge
has been obtained, is, on Hegel’s account, profoundly mistaken. Wars and revolutions
and all the rest are rather to be understood as constituting part of the inner logic of
historical development; they are explained and even justified by the progressive reali-
zation and self-consciousness of spirit (KM 57–8/51). A parallel contrast applies to the
Enlightenment view of what Berlin refers to as ‘national, racial and social differences’;
for Hegel, these differences are not irrational or contingent errors, but rather reflect
‘some metaphysical necessity’, they are differences which are required for ‘the develop-
ment of the Idea’ (KM 59/53).
Before turning to Marx, I offer a sceptical note. Berlin is not wrong to think of Hegel
as responding to the Enlightenment, but other aspects of his account look more prob-
lematic. First, Hegel appears as if he were responding primarily to French rationalism,
whereas he is better understood as engaging with German incarnations of Enlightenment

thought (in the work of Wolff, Kant, Lessing, and others). Second, Hegel is sometimes
portrayed as part of a brute ‘counter-attack’, as if his work offered a simple alternative to
the Enlightenment, rather than something more like an internal critique. It seems odd
to oppose Hegel to the Enlightenment faith in reason, given his insistence that reason
creates and governs the world (creating it ex nihilo and governing it immanently).
Moreover, when Hegel does consider the conflict between reason and tradition, or
between universality and particularity, he always strives to transcend it (not to side
with one side against the other). And finally, Berlin underestimates the extent to which
Hegel thinks of his own work as presupposing the empirical writings of historians and
others, taking over many of their results and showing them to be requirements of rea-
son. The scale and importance of the resulting empirical strand in Hegel’s writings and
lectures should not be underestimated.
Marx and the Enlightenment

Berlin’s account of the relationship between Marx and the Enlightenment has two
distinct threads; call them the ‘conceptual’ and ‘biographical’, respectively. I start with
the conceptual thread, in which Berlin outlines some affinities and tensions between
Marx and Enlightenment thought.
Four main ‘elements’ of the Enlightenment picture are said to be ‘clearly apparent’ in
Marx’s work (KM 35/28). First, the rationalist threads in Marx’s thought include his
commitment to the power of reason to understand social phenomena; we are told that
Marx ‘believed in the complete intelligibility of the process of social evolution’
(KM 35/28). Second, Marx also shared the Enlightenment rejection of superstition
and supernatural explanations, and had a ‘passion for exposing irrationalism and
myths in every shape and guise’ (KM 63/56). Third, Marx remained, in Berlin’s
phrase, a ‘perfectibilian’; that is, he ‘believed that society is inevitably progressive, that
its movement from stage to stage is a forward movement, that each successive stage
represents development, is nearer the rational ideal than its precursors’.34 Fourth, and
finally, Marx’s hostility towards institutions and movements, founded ‘on some tradi-
tional or emotional basis’ (not least, nationalisms), led him to underestimate ‘their
actual influence’ (KM 178/189).
In addition, Berlin identifies four main contrasts between Marx and Enlightenment
ideas. First, he suggests that Marx ‘did not, indeed, believe in the power of rational
argument to influence action’ (KM 35/28). As formulated, that looks too strong; after
all, Marx spends thousands of pages trying to influence the behaviour of others by
rational argument. However, he does hold that there are objective as well as subjective
conditions for ideas being translated into successful action. And even where the objec-
tive conditions exist, Marx thinks that rational argument alone is not always effective
KM 35/. Later editions have stylistic changes. See KM /29.

34
30 David Leopold
given the power of vested interests and ‘ideology’. Second, Marx is described as
breaking with the Enlightenment view that humankind is ‘fundamentally generous
and just’ (KM 128/138). The extent to which this is, or is not, the case, depends on the
wider social, and especially economic, environment in which humankind is circum-
stanced (KM 128/138). Third, social transformation, for Marx, cannot occur, as the
‘Encyclopedists’ would have us believe, ‘overnight’.35 He recognized that the past was a
weightier obstacle than often imagined, and that generations would be needed before
its baggage could be overcome. Fourth, and finally, Marx denied the smoothly pro-
gressing account of human history, emphasizing rather its ‘contradictory character’.36
Capitalism, we might say, increases the social suffering of humankind, as well as
bringing us closer to the possibility of overcoming that suffering.
In addition to this conceptual thread, Berlin offers a biographical account. He iden-
tifies the source(s) of Marx’s early exposure to Enlightenment ideas, and assesses their
impact on his intellectual development.
In the literature, Marx’s father-in-law is often treated as the central early conduit for
Enlightenment ideas, but Berlin makes little of that connection. Eduard Gans and
Ludwig Feuerbach are mentioned as possibilities, but again with little enthusiasm.
Instead, it is Marx’s father—Heinrich (originally Herschel) Marx—who is identified as
the earliest and strongest Enlightenment influence. We are told that Marx’s father was
variously: a ‘disciple of Leibnitz and Voltaire, Lessing and Kant’; a believer along ‘with
Condorcet’ that human beings are ‘both good and rational’ by nature; and as quietly
convinced that, as ‘unnatural obstacles’ were removed, a more rational and dignified
mode of life was being progressively realized in the world.37
Berlin emphasizes the positive impact of Enlightenment ideas on Marx’s intellectual
development. In particular, this Enlightenment influence is said to account for the
realistic and concrete quality of his thought, giving Marx an early taste for both ‘lucid
argument’ and ‘an empirical approach’ (KM 36/29). In this context, Berlin emphasizes
the empirical strand in Enlightenment rationalism, apparent in its rejection both of
innate knowledge and the validity of certain appeals to authority. This account of
Enlightenment influence is important, not least because these characteristics are at the
heart of Berlin’s praise for Marx’s achievement.
Talk of praise might surprise some readers. Perhaps because of Berlin’s subsequent
intellectual evolution, and a widespread conflation of Marx with Marxism, Karl Marx
is often assumed to be far more hostile towards its subject than it actually is.38 Arie
35
KM 86/. Later editions have ‘more extreme among the Encyclopedists’. This is one of several passages
where the holder of the relevant views is not initially obvious. Henry Hardy records an endearing anecdote
(from Mary Fisher) concerning Isaiah’s parents. Shortly after publication, Mendel read the book aloud
to Marie, who would frequently interrupt to ask ‘is that Marx or is it Shaya [a diminutive for Isaiah—DL]’,
to be reassured, ‘No no—that is only Marx: it is not Shaya.’ KM /xi.
36
KM /28. See also, for example, KM 215/228.
37
KM 35/26–7. Note the intermingling of French and German authors here.
38
As noted by Terrell Carver, ‘Berlin’s Karl Marx’, in George Crowder and Henry Hardy (eds), The One
and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin (New York: Prometheus Books, 2007), pp. 31–2. See also letter to Mark
Dubnov, for instance, maintains that ‘[i]t was obvious that the author . . . strongly
believed that Marx’s ideas should be entirely dismissed’.39 Yet such an unqualified and
negative verdict is hard to square with Berlin’s extensive praise for Marx’s achievement.
A few examples will suffice. Berlin tells us that ‘[t]he true father of modern economic
history, and, indeed, of modern sociology, in so far as any one man may claim that title,
is Karl Marx’ (KM 138/147). In Capital, Marx demonstrates ‘a new and revolutionary
method of historical writing and political interpretation’, which constituted ‘the most
formidable, sustained, and elaborate indictment ever delivered against an entire social
order’ (KM 27/20). His use of ‘blue books and official reports’, in particular, is said to
have ‘revolutionised’ the ‘technique of social research’ (KM 219/233). In addition,
Marx’s class analysis is described as ‘a remarkably original classification for its time’.40
And he is acclaimed as an acute political observer, whose journalism could be ‘sharp,
lucid, realistic, astonishingly modern in tone’.41 More generally, Berlin notes that mod-
ern readers are liable to underestimate Marx’s achievement precisely because his ideas
look so familiar; Marx’s economic and sociological insights have become part of ‘the
permanent background of civilised thought’ and consequently can easily go unno-
ticed.42 That complex impact is presented as contradicting a Marxian claim about the
importance of ideas, but that so much of what Marx argued for is nowadays taken for
granted, Berlin writes, is ‘a mark of genius’, and there is no doubt that Marx was ‘richly
endowed’ with genius (KM 138/148).
As well as being directly responsible for many of the positive threads that Berlin
identifies in Marx’s work, this early Enlightenment influence also plays a valuable
prophylactic role. It helped Marx to ‘preserve a measure of critical independence’
in the face of philosophical fashion.43 More precisely, this early Enlightenment
influence explains the relatively minor impact, on Marx’s work, of the metaphysical
systems (of Hegel and Fichte) that Berlin associates with German Romanticism.
Hegel, of course, remains a huge influence, but that early Enlightenment formation
gave Marx enough intellectual independence to save him from the ‘total surrender’
to the ‘fascination’ of Hegelianism, a fascination which ‘undid so many of his con-
temporaries’ (KM 36/29). In particular, Marx did not share what Berlin calls Hegel’s
‘reckless and contemptuous attitude’ towards scientific research, and he (that is,
Marx) strove ‘to follow the direction indicated by the empirical sciences, and to
incorporate their general results’ (KM 137/146). Indeed, even where the structure of
Marx’s thought is said to be Hegelian, plenty of non-Hegelian content shines through
(see KM 63/56, 136–7/146).
Lilla, 13 Dec. 1993, L IV 474. On distinguishing Marx and Marxism, see Duncan Kelly, ‘The Political
Thought of Isaiah Berlin’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 4/1 (2002), 25–48.
39
Dubnov, Isaiah Berlin, p. 132. My emphasis.
40
KM 215/. Later editions add ‘fruitful’ to ‘original’. See KM /228.
41
KM 24/. Later editions add ‘mordant’. KM /18.
42
KM 138/148. See also KM 249/265–6.
43
KM /29. First edition omits the elucidating ‘critical’, KM 36/.
32 David Leopold
Again (as with the discussion of Hegel), a sceptical note seems merited. Berlin is
surely right, not only to identify a realistic, lucid, and empirical, strand in Marx’s work,
but also to see its early appearance as part of the explanation of the young Marx’s resist-
ance to Hegel’s metaphysics.44 However, Berlin’s enthusiasm for the narrative about
French Enlightenment and Teutonic counter-attack remains problematic.
The suggestion that Marx’s father was the early conduit for this Enlightenment
influence is attractive. Not least, it avoids the offensive implication that enlightenment,
more generally, could only have come from outside the family, typically in the form of
his Gentile father-in-law. However, there is little hard evidence to support the sugges-
tion. Berlin is at his ventriloquizing best in turning Heinrich into the Enlightenment
personified, but the ‘probably’s that pepper his prose at this point implicitly acknow-
ledge the speculative character of the reconstruction.45 This is not to deny that Heinrich
had an intellectual influence on his son, just to resist this attempt to cast him as the
leading Enlightenment source in the absence of more concrete evidence of Heinrich’s
actual views (evidence, to be clear, that we do not really have).
More importantly, we might doubt that the relevant characteristics—Marx’s real-
ism, lucidity, and enthusiasm for empirical enquiry—reflect much direct influence of
French Enlightenment thought. We now know rather a lot about the young Marx’s
intellectual formation; due, in part, to the survival of ‘excerpt-notebooks’ which reveal
much of what he read, and the extent of his engagement with it.46 And these materials,
whilst conveying no extensive contact with Voltaire, Condorcet, and the rest, do raise
other possibilities. First, they raise the possibility that we don’t need sources which are
very closely identified as Enlightenment ones because the relevant characteristics
might be found elsewhere, for instance, in the writings of the contemporary British
and French authors that Marx was reading in the early 1840s (Tocqueville, say, or
Thomas Hamilton).47 Second, they raise the possibility that, if you were still deter-
mined on the Enlightenment being the answer, you might do better to emphasize
Scottish and German over French varieties. The young Marx variously read and made
excerpts from Kantian philosophy (courtesy of Karl Rosenkrantz), from Hume’s writ-
ings on human nature (collected in a German edition), and Smith’s Wealth of Nations
(in French translation).48 Berlin would later allow that ‘English’ (in reality, mainly
Scottish) political economy might have reinforced Marx’s enthusiasm for ‘such natu-
ralistic explanations as could be supported by the evidence of critical observation’
44
On Marx’s critique of Hegel’s metaphysics, see David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy,
Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 46–56.
45
For example, ‘he probably’, KM 32/25; and, for variation, ‘it is not improbable’, KM 34/26. On Berlin’s
ventriloquizing, see Stefan Collini, English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), p. 197.
46
Sources known but (effectively) not available to Marx scholars in the 1930s.
47
See Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1976), Abteilung I, Band 2, p. 146; and Marx/
Engels Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1976), Abteilung IV, Band 2, pp. 266–75.
48
See Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1976), Abteilung IV, Band 1, pp. 213–33, and
277–92. And Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung IV, Band 2, pp. 332–87.
(KM 87/81). However, given the timing, we might prefer to treat such writings as
the source rather than the reinforcement. Indeed, both these (Scottish and German)
alternatives have solid, rather than speculative, connections to Marx’s early intellectual
formation.
Concluding Remarks
My portrayal of Berlin’s understanding of Marx and the Enlightenment might surprise
some readers. It is interestingly unlike what we might call the ‘received’ account of these
matters, an account which involves a more hostile portrait of both the Enlightenment
and Marx’s relation to it.49
On this received account, Berlin advances three claims about Marx and his relation
to the Enlightenment: first, that Marx was an archetypal Enlightenment figure; second,
that the Enlightenment character of Marx’s thought was not in its favour, since it was
the source of certain significant flaws in his doctrines; and third, that the most important
of these doctrinal flaws was Marx’s denial of the truth of ‘value pluralism’ in its
Berlinian form; namely that (for complex conceptual and empirical reasons which we
need not dwell on here) it is not possible fully to combine all values (either in thought
or reality).50 To put matters dramatically—and allowing the additional Berlinian
assumption that authoritarianism is linked with the denial of value pluralism—Marx
is offered up as confirmation of the tendency of Enlightenment monism to slide into
political despotism.
I have reservations about the accuracy of the received account (of the Enlightenment
and Marx’s relation to it), and about the unqualified attribution of that received
account to Berlin. However, here I insist only that, if these are Berlin’s views, then
he came to them somewhat later in his intellectual evolution than the period under
consideration. Certainly, none of the three claims of the received account are much
evident in the first edition of Karl Marx. First, Marx is not portrayed as an archetypal
Enlightenment thinker in this book. Rather, despite signs of its influence in his work
(his view that social phenomena are open to explanation; his rejection of irrationalism;
and so on), Marx breaks with Enlightenment thought (in his scepticism about the abil-
ity of reason alone to change the world; in his denial of the natural goodness of human-
kind; and in his appreciation of the weight of the past and the complexity of historical
progress). Second, the Enlightenment influence on Marx’s thought is often identified
as positive. In later writings, Berlin’s portrayal of the Enlightenment can look too dark,
but here it also generates a culture of unsentimental ‘humanism’, in which intellectual
‘courage’ and ‘disinterestedness’ are viewed as virtues (KM 48/41). The Enlightenment,
49
The ‘received’ account is a composite drawn from the literature. See, for example, George Crowder,
Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), pp. 115 and 129; and John Gray, Isaiah
Berlin (London: Harper Collins, 1995), pp. 75 and 94–5.
50
On Marx and value pluralism, see Cohen, ‘Isaiah’s Marx’, p. 12.
34 David Leopold
we are told, helps explain what is best in Marx’s work: namely, its realism, clarity, and
empirical insight (all part of his ‘genius’). And the Enlightenment is said to have inocu-
lated Marx against the contagious fascination of Hegelian metaphysics, saving him
from the ignominious historical fate of ending up a minor left-Hegelian (like Bruno
Bauer or Arnold Ruge). And third, whatever the doctrinal and other flaws in Marx’s
work, Berlin does not, at this time, clearly identify Marx as rejecting the truth of value
pluralism. (Rather it is Marx’s supposedly deterministic account of history, underesti-
mation of nationalism, and, above all, denial of the importance of ideas which draw
Berlin’s critical ire.) Nor, on reflection, should this really surprise, since Berlin’s own
account of value pluralism remained underdeveloped at this time. This is not, of
course, to say that there is no adumbration whatsoever of these ideas here, but Berlin
had not yet clearly formulated the sin of rejecting the truth of value pluralism, let alone
decided who was guilty of it.51
I conclude with historical and evaluative lessons to be drawn from this engagement
with Berlin’s Karl Marx. The historical lesson might look obvious, but, if so, note that
this does not prevent it from being widely ignored in the literature. In brief, it is a mis-
take to assume that Berlin in the 1930s held the same views as he did, say, in the 1950s
and 1960s. The war, and then the Cold War, might well mark significant shifts both in
Berlin’s ideas and in the emphasis that he felt it appropriate to give them. The evaluative
lesson is a little less general, but still important. This may not be a great book about
Marx; Berlin’s account of Marx’s intellectual development, theoretical views, and char-
acter look to be flawed in a variety of non-trivial ways. However, there remains much
of interest in the volume, and its account of Marx does not deserve contextualizing
erasure. Not least, Berlin’s early understanding of Marx’s relation to the Enlightenment
strikes me as more complex, more plausible, and more interesting than the received
account would allow. The Enlightenment looks less dark, and Marx’s relation to it is
both more positive and more nuanced. The Enlightenment here narrowly maintains its
claim to being one of the better and more hopeful episodes in human history, and Marx
stands in a complex relation of affinity with, and rejection of, its central components.
Indeed, its impact on him is largely beneficial. The Enlightenment not only inoculated
Marx against certain Hegelian excesses, but also provided the source of much of what is
judged best in his writings—their realism, clarity, and empirical insight.
51
Indeed, some identify Marx as a possible source of elements of Berlin’s idea of value pluralism.
Crowder notes that Marxian ‘dialectical’ progressions often pit good against good; and Cherniss observes
(following Stuart Hampshire) that Marx’s account of social conflict suggests conflicts between values. See
Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, pp. 23–4; and Cherniss, A Mind and its Time, pp. 51–2.
2
Berlin’s Conception of the
Enlightenment
Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson
The Genesis of an Idea

In the 1930s, as a research fellow at All Souls, Berlin belonged to a group of young
Turks at Oxford led by J. L. Austin, A. J. Ayer, and Gilbert Ryle who under the influence
of Wittgenstein turned their back on traditional philosophy and threw their creative
energies into building a new, more limited science based on the analysis of language.
Although the appearance in 1939 of his study of Marx suggested that Berlin also had a
more than passing interest in the history of ideas, there was no sign at the outbreak of
the Second World War that he was about to desert his philosophical last. He had
become a fellow and tutor in philosophy at New College in 1938 and was already gain-
ing a reputation as a teacher (L I 290–1). It must have been assumed in Oxford that
when he finally returned there, after a war spent in the Washington embassy, he would
take up where he had left off and continue to fight the good fight on behalf of linguistic
philosophy. However, this was not to be. Berlin never completely abandoned his
earlier allegiance. He remained close to his old philosophical friends, fretted when
Austin’s and Ryle’s development of ordinary-language philosophy led them to break
with Ayer as well as with logical positivism,1 and mourned their deaths.2 He also
remained steadfast in his commitment to his friends’ belief that the great philosophical
questions that had consumed the minds of past generations of philosophers and still
agitated many of his contemporaries were insoluble. But this was as far as it went. The
Berlin who returned to Oxford in 1946 as a tutor in philosophy had fallen out of love
with the subject and had decided to become a historian of thought.
1
Ayer left Oxford for a chair in London in 1946. He returned as Wykeham Professor of Logic in 1959.
His election was opposed on the electoral board by Ryle and Austin but Berlin was pleased: see L II 675 and
678–80 (letters to Morton White, 6 Feb. 1959, and Arthur Schlesinger, 4 Mar. 1959).
2
Berlin was moved by Austin’s death at an early age: 718, 720–1 (to Morton White, 27 Jan. and 12 Feb.
1960). For their closeness in the 1930s, see his ‘J. L. Austin and the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy’,
PI 101–15.
36 Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson
Recalling the change of heart more than thirty years later in a radio interview, Berlin
claimed that the epiphany had occurred in 1944 on a long flight from Canada to
Britain, where he had spent many hours thinking over his future.
I came to the conclusion that what I really wanted was to know more at the end of my life than
I knew at the beginning: that philosophy was a most marvellous subject which taxed the intel-
ligence of man to its highest degree, in which human genius had shown some of its most
important aspects, but it was not for me.
Essentially, he told his interviewer, he had discovered that analytic philosophy did
not engage him sufficiently. Studying what people in the past had had to say about
ethics and political and social organization, on the other hand, though never pro-
viding an answer to the meaning of life, generated an intellectual excitement ‘which
I think is necessary for the purpose for pursuing an abstract subject for a length of
years’ (L I 488–9).
Back in Oxford, Berlin threw himself into his new-found enthusiasm. While pains-
takingly fulfilling his duties as a tutor and lecturer in philosophy—he was giving
between fifteen and eighteen tutorials a week—he also began to read widely in the
history of modern thought. At this stage, his interest in the Enlightenment, long
or short, was still perfunctory. Although he had agreed to write a book on Berkeley
(which never appeared), his principal study, according to the report he presented to
his faculty in December 1948 on his teaching and research activities, was the social,
political, and scientific thought of Germany and France in the first half of the nineteenth
century. In addition, he was working on the development of Russian revolutionary
thought in the second half of the century, prior to giving a series of lectures in the
Russian Research Centre at Harvard the following year (L II 61–4). Six months later,
however, Berlin’s thoughts had begun to turn towards the philosophes, and he no
longer looked on them so kindly as he had in his book on Marx. In the summer of
1949, before returning to Britain, he gave a lecture at Mount Holyoke College on
‘Democracy, Communism and the Individual’. Communism, he told his audience,
stemmed from the eighteenth-century belief, epitomized by Rousseau, that there was
only one right way of living.3
From 1950 Berlin was released from the burden of tutorial teaching. He was given a
senior research fellowship at All Souls in the fields of Russian social and intellectual
history and European political thought, and was free to become a historian of thought
in earnest. Over the next two years Berlin studied the long eighteenth century in detail
as he set himself the task of identifying and critiquing the different strands of political
thought which had contributed to the creation of the world of the Cold War with its two
mutually exclusive blocs. The fruits of his reading were delivered as a series of lectures
on ‘Political Ideas in the Romantic Age’, given at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in
the spring of 1952. On his return, the series was reprised as talks on the BBC Third
3
Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), p. 192.
Berlin’s Conception of the Enlightenment 37
Programme under the more ominous title ‘Freedom and its Betrayal’.4 In the lectures,
Berlin identified two dominant strands of political and social thought straddling
the period, which sought to build a new science of man resting on either scientific
methodology or Cartesian logic rather than on Christian tradition. The first, which he
associated with the French Encyclopedists and their utilitarian successors on both
sides of the Channel, cared little for the freedom of the individual and sought to create
a political society which maximized the security and happiness of the majority as effi-
ciently as possible. The second, which stemmed from Kant, was a reaction against this
and placed a premium on individual freedom and choice and objected to humans
being treated like sheep to be herded into conformity. Both strands, particularly the
first, produced thinkers of genius who perversely emancipated men from the chains of
the Ancien Régime only to manacle them again more firmly by identifying an ideal
political society in which they were to be corralled. So too did a third unrelated,
non-traditionalist strand, given a voice by Herder and Burke, which rejected the main-
stream’s attempt to establish a rational and timeless science of man and maintained
that values were subjective human creations.5 In Berlin’s view it was the anti-libertarians
of all three groups who had laid the foundations for twentieth-century fascism and
communism, and they were the focus of his attention in both sets of lectures. Six in
particular were judged worthy of detailed analysis: Helvétius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel,
Saint-Simon, and Joseph de Maistre.
Although they all discussed the problem of human liberty, and all, except perhaps Maistre,
claimed that they were in favour of it—indeed some of them passionately pleaded for it and
regarded themselves as the champions of what they called true liberty, as opposed to various
specious or imperfect brands of it—yet it is a peculiar fact that in the end their doctrines are
inimical to what is normally meant, at any rate, by individual liberty, or political liberty. This is
the liberty which was preached by the great English and French liberal thinkers, for exam-
ple; . . . liberty in the sense in which the substance of it was what John Stuart Mill said that it was,
namely the right freely to shape one’s life as one wishes, the production of circumstances in
which men can develop their natures as variously and richly, and, if need be, as eccentrically, as
possible. The only barrier to this is formed by the need to protect other men in respect of the
same rights. (FIB 5)
In Britain, where the radio talks reached a wide audience, Berlin’s account of the
development of modern political thought divided opinion. On the left, he was seen
as an apologist for America. On the right, he was seen as reinforcing the attack on the
philosophes in J. L. Talmon’s recently published The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy;
the talks were even accorded a laudatory leader in The Times.6 In private Berlin was not
4
See PIRA, which contains heavily revised drafts of four of the lectures given at Bryn Mawr; and FIB,
an imperfect transcript of the BBC lectures. Berlin intended to turn the Bryn Mawr lectures into a book but
abandoned the attempt in 1956. A recording of his lecture on Rousseau survives: FIB ix–xvi. A synopsis of
the Bryn Mawr lectures was provided for the College’s weekly College News: see PIRA 266–8.
5
PIRA, prologue.
6
‘The Fate of Liberty’, The Times, 6 Dec. 1952, p. 7. For Berlin and Talmon, see pp. 94–9 below.
amused. In letters to friends over the following years, he made it quite clear that there
were many French and British proponents of the liberal secular state in the period he
had surveyed who were also ‘the true friends’ of freedom. Condorcet, Paine, Godwin,
Constant, Tocqueville, and not just J. S. Mill were all on the side of the angels. Condorcet
in particular was ‘the father of all liberalism and all radicalism in Europe’; the
Frenchman’s ideas moved him ‘to tears’.7 In public, however, Berlin did little to correct
the impression, and in May 1953 he further raised the hackles of the left by giving a
lecture at the London School of Economics on ‘History as an Alibi’, again reprised as a
radio talk, where he attacked the doctrine of historical inevitability as anti-empirical
and stressed that humans had choice and were free to make their own futures. As the
lecture was the first in a new annual series set up to honour the memory of Auguste
Comte, the father of sociology and a utopian par excellence, its argument was deliber-
ately provocative.8
In the early 1950s Berlin ceased to be a philosopher and became a public intellectual.
He had turned himself into a historian of thought but his research was present-orientated.
Living in a world divided between two antithetical secular belief systems, one he
admired and one he was appalled by, he took the conscious decision not merely to
understand the origins of the different ideologies that underpinned the world in the
second half of the twentieth century but to bring to the public’s attention their strengths
and weaknesses. This did not mean that he thought that Western political and social
institutions were, philosophically speaking, right. Political and cultural beliefs were
not logical systems but more like works of art.9 Nor could he only engage with ideas he
found sympathetic: all attempts by human beings to make sense of their condition
were intrinsically fascinating. But Berlin’s study of the history of European political
thought was thereafter always to have a keen polemical edge: he had taken up the
sword in defence of man’s right to live and think as he pleased provided others were not
heavily inconvenienced.
In the second half of the 1950s Berlin’s account of the origins of modern thought
also became more schematic. His lectures at Bryn Mawr concentrated on the years
1760 to 1830 and on an array of secular thinkers with different agendas. There was no
attempt to subsume them under a particular intellectual movement or movements.
They were all broadly considered part of the Romantic age which covered the years before
and after the French Revolution. He had still not yet provided his own definition of the
7
L II 353 (to Denis Paul, 30 Dec. 1952); II 472 (to Alan Pryce-Jones, 20 Jan. 1955); II 644 (to Gladwyn
Jebb, 1 Sept. 1958).
8
Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, pp. 205–6. The lecture was published in 1954. It would eventually become the
essay on ‘Historical Inevitability’ in Berlin’s Four Essays on Liberty (1969). Its argument would be attacked
by E. H. Carr in the 1961 Trevelyan lectures, which became the basis for Carr’s What Is History? (1961). In
1953 Berlin also ran a seminar at Oxford with Stuart Hampshire on ‘Moral Presuppositions of Liberalism’
where they looked at Condorcet, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Herzen, Moore, and Keynes: L II 364n. In the pub-
lished version of the lecture, Condorcet was not presented as a role model: as a utopian theorist, he was
treated kindly but was not placed on the side of the angels.
9
L II 422 (to Noel Annan, 13 Jan. 1954).
Enlightenment.10 When he did so in his introduction to his 1956 anthology, The Age of
Enlightenment, he reduced the movement to the British empiricists and their French
followers who under the influence of Newtonian science saw the mind and its basic
contents as a box of simple ideas engendered by sense experience which became bound
together by laws akin to Newtonian gravitation. A proper understanding of the mind
and its operations was seen as the key to securing human happiness. Once that was
known, so too were man’s real wishes, and appropriate economic, social, and political
institutions could be devised in which they might be best satisfied. To Berlin, the
endeavour was doomed to failure, as was the contemporary attempt by German phi-
losophers to build a science of man on geometrical reasoning. The great philosophical
problems could not be solved empirically or deductively, as Kant was the first to realize.
Nonetheless, Berlin applauded the effort. Their ideas were less ‘sinister and oppressive’
than those of their nineteenth-century anti-rationalist opponents.
The intellectual power, honesty, lucidity, courage and disinterested love of truth of the most
gifted thinkers of the eighteenth century remain to this day without parallel. Their age is one of
the best and most hopeful episodes in the life of man.11
Over the next ten years, Berlin’s view of the Enlightenment became less positive. In his
1952 Bryn Mawr lectures he had distinguished the rationalist mainstream from its
anti-rationalist opponents, and the latter had been given little attention. By the early
1960s, he was much better informed about their ideas, and one of their early repre-
sentatives, Vico, had become a firm favourite.12 He had also begun to see that Kant’s
rationalist German disciples had much more in common with the anti-rationalists
than with the Newtonian empiricists. In his 1965 Mellon lectures in Washington, he
parcelled both groups together under the heading of Romanticism and implied that
they rather than the empiricists were the founders of his own conception of negative
liberty.13 The Enlightenment was now seen as part of the Western tradition, going back
to the Greeks, which taught that the nature and purpose of man was knowable and
unchanging in time and that over the horizon (either in this world or the next) there
was a utopia where human beings would be perfected. All that distinguished the
Enlightenment from the Christian scholastics was the technique deployed for under-
standing men and their needs.14 The Romantics, on the other hand—Hamann,15
Herder, and their successors, for most part Germans, who questioned the unity of
10
In the revised text of the Bryn Mawr lectures he uses the terms ‘Encyclopédists’ and ‘philosophes’
from time to time and on a number of occasions the terms ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘enlightenment’ but hardly
ever ‘The Enlightenment’.
11
AE 29. The book contains substantial extracts from the works of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and
short extracts from Reid, Condillac, Voltaire, and La Mettrie. There are also short extracts from Hamann
and Lichtenberg as early representatives of the attack on the idea of the mind as a machine.
12
See Berlin, ‘The Philosophical Ideas of Giambattista Vico’ (1960), reprinted in VH.
13
Fully articulated in his inaugural lecture as the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory in
1958. Published in Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (1969), and L 166–217.
14
RR 21–4. Berlin recognized that Enlightenment writers were often at odds with one another.
15
Hamann by 1965 had become a figure of great interest for Berlin: see his The Magus of the North:
J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism, ed. Henry Hardy (London: John Murray, 1993).
human nature, studied man in time, and emphasized the peculiarity of the individual—
were the real revolutionaries who broke with two thousand years of philosophical
enquiry and had a profound effect on modern thought. The world was never the same
again.16 Berlin recognized that some Romantics were destructive, dangerous, and
proto-totalitarian (Fichte continued to be an object of suspicion) and that most wanted
to put Humpty Dumpty together again having pulled the rug from under Western
philosophy, but at the end of the day we owed them a tremendous debt.
The result of romanticism, then, is liberalism, toleration, decency and the appreciation of the
imperfections of life; some degree of rational self-understanding. This was very far from the
intentions of the romantics. But at the same time—and to this extent the romantic doctrine is
true—they are the persons who most strongly emphasised the unpredictability of all human
activities. They were hoist with their own petard. Aiming at one thing, they produced, fortu-
nately for us all, almost the exact opposite.17
By 1965 Berlin’s view of the Enlightenment and its opponents was virtually complete. Only
one ingredient still remained to be added. In the introduction to the Mellon lectures, he
accepted that Romanticism was highly difficult to pin down as a movement. Arthur
Lovejoy, whom he acknowledged as one of the greatest historians of ideas who had ever
lived, had ‘approached a condition nearing despair’ in trying to reduce it to a coherent
movement. Berlin, however, believed he was made of sterner stuff and set out to do his best
‘to explain what in my view the romantic movement fundamentally came to’ (RR 18–20).18
His reduction of Romanticism to a philosophical movement, however significant, can
have won him few friends among literary scholars. It was perhaps for this reason that
within a few years he had dropped the term in favour of another, already current to a slight
extent, the ‘Counter-Enlightenment’, which he used in print for the first time in 1973 and
quickly made his own.19 Only then was his idea of two parallel Enlightenments represent-
ing two distinctive ways of understanding human nature fully developed. Although
already anticipated in the Bryn Mawr lectures of 1952, it had taken twenty years to gestate.
Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment

To understand what Berlin meant by the Counter-Enlightenment, we need to retrace
the route by which he formed his concept of the Enlightenment. It was a somewhat
curious route, which permanently marked his understanding of the concept. In 1933
he agreed to write a small book on Marx for the Home University Library. To get to
16
Berlin had first adumbrated this idea in a lecture at Yale in 1962: ‘Three Turning-Points in the History
of Political Thought’. He appears to have reached this position by 1958: see L II 623 (letter to Morton White,
21 Apr. 1958). Kant in 1965 was seen as a liminal figure. He was ‘still a child of eighteenth-century enlight-
enment’ because he believed in the potential of all human beings to think in the same way but he broke
with the Enlightenment’s view of nature as a benevolent model (RR 76–8).
17
RR 147. The lectures were also broadcast on the Third Programme in Aug. and Sept. 1966.
18
RR 18–20.
19
Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip J. Wiener, 2nd edn (New York: Scribner’s, 1973); AC, 2nd
edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. xxv, n. 1.
know Marx’s forerunners, he began reading the French Encyclopaedists, beginning

in the 1750s: ‘That gave me a great taste: I thought they were wonderful . . . So I read
Helvétius and Holbach and Diderot and Rousseau and everybody.’ He then gave
lectures on ‘these French Encyclopaedists’, and got an audience, though nobody
else in Oxford was interested in them.20 Thus the Encyclopaedists are seen in the
light of Marx.
As a link between Marx and the Encyclopaedists, Berlin drew on the work of the
early Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918), which has been called ‘a deci-
sive influence on Karl Marx, and on Berlin’s intellectual development generally’.21
Plekhanov is best known for The Development of the Monist View of History (1895),
a defence of materialism which traces it back to the materialism of Helvétius, Holbach,
and other figures of the French Enlightenment who ascribed all knowledge ultimately
to sense perception. Plekhanov attributes to them the belief that people’s ideas and
feelings are all products of the environment as it modifies their sensations, and that the
recipe for social harmony is thus the following: ‘co-ordinate the interests of the indi-
vidual man with the interests of all society—and virtue will appear of her own accord,
just as a stone falls to the earth of its own accord when it loses any support’.22 The
Encyclopaedists, however, failed to resolve the contradiction between their historical
determinism and their belief in the power of opinion; the resolution would come later
from dialectical materialism.
Berlin’s liking for Plekhanov is clear from a broadcast, ‘The Father of Russian
Marxism’, that he gave in 1956. Here Berlin credits Plekhanov with an exceptional
understanding and appreciation of ‘the writers of the Enlightenment’:
The devoted efforts of the French philosophes to reduce all problems to scientific terms; their
belief in reason, observation, experiment; their clear formulation of central principles and
application of them to concrete historical situations; their war against clericalism, obscurant-
ism and irrationalism; their search for the truth, sometimes narrow and pedestrian but always
fearless, confident and fanatically honest; the lucid and often beautiful prose in which the best
French intellectuals expressed themselves—all this he admired and delighted in.23
Just who is meant by ‘the writers of the Enlightenment’, however, remains unclear.
Plekhanov names ‘Holbach, Helvetius [sic] and their supporters’.24 Berlin’s broadcast
on Plekhanov does not mention any philosophes by name, but Holbach and Helvétius
generally feature when he gives a checklist of Enlightenment writers. So these two
stand for the philosophes in general, and the French Encyclopaedists stand for the
Enlightenment as a whole.
20
Recorded interview with Michael Ignatieff, quoted in L I 68.
21
Joshua L. Cherniss, A Mind and its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 30–2.
22
G. V. Plekhanov, In Defence of Materialism: The Development of the Monist View of History, tr. Andrew
Rothstein (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1947), p. 30.
23
Berlin, ‘The Father of Russian Marxism’, in POI 126–33 (pp. 129–30).
24
Plekhanov, In Defence of Materialism, p. 129.
Plekhanov’s influence helps to explain the disproportionate weight Berlin always

assigns to Helvétius and Holbach, who are nowadays considered relatively minor
figures, important in their time but far more limited than Diderot, Rousseau, or
Voltaire. They figure, appropriately, in his introduction to The Age of Enlightenment:
Helvétius appears alongside Condillac and La Mettrie among the ‘French disciples of
Locke and Hume’; Holbach is included among ‘the great popularizers of the age’ along-
side Voltaire, Diderot, and Condorcet.25 Berlin was clearly aware that Holbach and
Helvétius were minor figures. In 1993 he affirmed to Mark Lilla that he was ‘a genuine
disciple’ of the Enlightenment, who ‘would vote with even Helvétius and Holbach
against Hamann if it came to that’.26 But the effect of Berlin’s lists of Enlighteners is to
level down, to reduce Voltaire and Diderot implicitly to the stature of their unoriginal
associates. The greater philosophes are sold short. When he reviewed Ernst Cassirer’s
The Philosophy of the Enlightenment in 1953, Berlin complained of its inadequate treat-
ment of Diderot: ‘no one who reads this volume could be expected to know that
Diderot was a man of genius whose obiter dicta and casual pieces on subjects as dispa-
rate as biology, economics, psychology, literature and art criticism, sociology, etc.,
possess a combination of wit, originality, imagination, sharpness, depth and prophetic
quality to be found in no other thinker’.27 But no one would know that from reading
Berlin, either.
So there is something oddly amiss in Berlin’s accounts of the philosophes. Although
he knows better, he implies that they are all shallow materialists and naïve believers
in progress. In his famous essay of 1973, ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, he gives a
relatively sympathetic sketch of the philosophes which stresses the limitations of their
thought. These thinkers, Berlin explains, believed ‘that human nature was fundamentally
the same in all times and places; that local and historical variations were unimportant
compared with the constant central core in terms of which human beings could be
defined as a species, like animals, or plants, or minerals’; and that, given this basic sim-
ilarity among human beings, all must have the same conception of the good—‘that
there were universal human goals’.28 Further, they believed that superstition and igno-
rance could be replaced by ‘a logically connected structure of laws and generalisations
susceptible of demonstration and verification’, and that the methods of Newtonian
physics ‘could be applied with equal success to the fields of ethics, politics and human
relationships in general’ (AC 1). Later these doctrines are summed up as ‘rationalism
and scientism’ (AC 9). It becomes clear that the philosophes, though full of zeal for
the well-being of humanity, sought to benefit their fellow humans by working towards
a single, uniform society based on a philosophy which should capture all truth in a
25
‘Introduction’, AE 11–29 (pp. 19–20). This anthology was first published in 1956.
26
Letter to Mark Lilla, 13 Dec. 1993, in L IV 474.
27
Review of Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, tr. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P.
Pettegrove, English Historical Review, 68 (1953), 617–19.
28
AC 1. For a defence of ‘universal human goals’—a concept which follows from that of humanity—see
Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (London: Verso, 1983).
single, logical, coherent system. For this uniformitarianism, Berlin often uses the term
‘monism’ or ‘monistic pattern’, which he may also owe to Plekhanov. Plekhanov’s trea-
tise quoted above originally bore the main title A Contribution to the Question of
the Development of the Monistic View of History, since a prominent use of the word
‘materialism’ would have aroused the suspicions of the Tsarist censors.29
Late in life Berlin admitted that this account had a polemical bias: ‘The positive ele-
ment, and the rich variety and undogmatic humanism, of much of the Enlightenment
is, for obviously polemical reasons, not allowed enough by me; and perhaps the picture
of the Enlightenment is too much of an Aunt Sally. And I do not deny that it is the rec-
tilinear, emotionally blind, unimaginative, rationalist dogmatism—what Hayek called
“scientism” . . . —that I think has caused havoc.’30 Thus the philosophes are used to typify
a much wider group of thinkers who believe in the uniformity of human nature and
who want to bring about a social and philosophical utopia in which one size will fit
all and the diverse values over which people fight can all be reconciled in a single
universal principle. Similarly, in ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’, James Mill is
presented as an Enlightenment rationalist, heir to Helvétius and Bentham, whereas
his son embodies the appreciation of diversity, the tolerance for ultimately insoluble
differences, that Berlin ascribes to the ‘creators of humanism’ from Erasmus and
Spinoza down to Lessing and Diderot.31 For the impossibility of fitting all humanity
into the same mould, Berlin was famously in the habit of quoting Kant’s sentence:
‘out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made’.32 He seems
to have acquired the sentence not directly from Kant’s essay ‘Idea for a Universal
History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784), but at second hand from a lecture by
R. G. Collingwood.33
Berlin’s polemical intentions skew not only his portrayal of the philosophes, but his
picture of the entire Enlightenment. That is partly because his understanding of the
Enlightenment, as usual in his time, was much narrower than the view current nowa-
days. It hardly extends beyond the French writers grouped around the Encylopédie. By
present-day standards, this is an astonishingly limited conception. Where are the
Germans? One might at least have expected some reference to Lessing and Kant.
Where are the Neapolitan economists led by Antonio Genovesi? Above all, where is
the Scottish Enlightenment? Research in recent decades has made David Hume, Adam
Smith, Adam Ferguson, and William Robertson central figures of the Enlightenment,
29
See Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, tr. P. S. Falla, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1978), vol. 2, p. 336. For Berlin’s use of ‘monistic’ and ‘monism’, see e.g. AC 68; ‘My Intellectual Path’ in POI.
30
Letter to Michael Moran, 29 Sept. 1981, in L IV 168.
31
Berlin, ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’, in L 218–51 (pp. 234, 243).
32
First quoted in a letter to Elizabeth Bowen, 30 Nov. 1933, in L I 72.
33
See Henry Hardy, ‘Preface’, in CTH xi. Kant’s words are: ‘aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der
Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden’: ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte
in weltbürgerlicher Absicht’, in Immanuel Kant, Werke, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, 6 vols (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1958), pp. 33–50 (p. 41); translated as ‘Nothing straight can be con-
structed from such warped wood as that which man is made of ’, Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss,
tr. H. B. Nisbet, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 46.
not least because of the international diffusion of their work.34 Apart from the extracts
included in his 1956 anthology, England is also absent from Berlin’s purview, though
in 1985 John Pocock would argue for an English ‘Arminian Enlightenment’ whose
major figures included Edward Gibbon.35 Berlin’s Enlightenment is not just geograph-
ically limited: it is carried on by philosophers and polemicists, and, apart from
Montesquieu, has no truck with sociology or philosophical history. This bias again
reflects understandings current in Berlin’s day, and perhaps also his lack of interest in
historiography (though his writings on Marx and Vico, like his famous essay ‘Historical
Inevitability’, certainly show his interest in the philosophy of history).
As Berlin shrinks the Enlightenment, reducing it in practice to the French
Encyclopaedists, he expands their antagonist, the Counter-Enlightenment. This term
is still current, though it is often used with different emphases. It applies aptly to the
reaction against the Enlightenment typified by Novalis, who called for the restoration
of medieval Christendom, and Joseph de Maistre, for whom the Enlightenment, in its
foolish optimism, denied the doctrine of original sin and the destructive instincts
which are basic to human nature. This reaction was itself based on a polemically
simplified and distorted view of the Enlightenment which associated it with extreme
rationalism, materialism, and atheism. Such a view already existed in conservative and
clerical circles by the mid-eighteenth century; it seemed to receive powerful confirmation
when the French Revolution degenerated into the Reign of Terror.36
Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment is rather different. It is the antithesis to the rational,
uniform, progressive outlook he attributes to the philosophes. By contrast, the Counter-
Enlightenment, represented by Vico, Hamann, Herder, and numerous others, valued
the individual over the species, feeling over knowledge, passion over reason. Vico’s
cyclical theory of history was incompatible with any belief in linear progress. Hamann
was convinced that ‘all truth is particular, never general’ (Berlin doesn’t point out that
this is itself offered as a general truth);37 and Herder, fiercely opposing claims for the
supreme value of polished French civilization, asserted the distinct and incommensu-
rable value of every culture. Their ideas were taken up by the young rebels of the Sturm
und Drang, including Schiller; by Goethe; by the Romantics, who wanted to experience
nature, not analyse it; and, in a sinister but fascinating way, by the post-Revolution
reactionary de Maistre.38
34
See the pioneering essay by Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, first published in 1967,
now available in his History and the Enlightenment, ed. John Robertson (New Haven, CT and London: Yale
University Press, 2010), pp. 17–33.
35
J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England’, in L’età
dei lumi: studi storici sul settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi, 2 vols (Naples: Iovene, 1985), vol. 1,
pp. 523–61.
36
See Darrin M. McMahon, ‘The Real Counter-Enlightenment: The Case of France’, in IBCE 91–104;
expanded in McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making
of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested:
Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006),
pp. 38–40.
37
AC 7. 38 AC 21.
Thanks to this contrast, we can see that Berlin’s account of the philosophes has a
nuance that distinguishes it from the standard description: it is inflected by the views
of their antagonists. There are several echoes of Herder’s rhapsodic Auch eine
Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Another Philosophy of Human History,
1774), in which Herder denounces the idea of progress towards a clearly defined
goal, deplores the overweening vanity and excessive influence of French philosophes,
rejoices in the cultural diversity about which travel reports inform us, and advocates
empathy rather than philosophical analysis. One passage in particular seems to have
struck Berlin. Herder says that to understand such terms as ‘Phoenician activity, Greek
love of freedom, Roman strength’, you must not rest content with the word but feel
your way into the culture it characterizes:
The whole nature of the soul, which dominates everything, which shapes all other desires and
faculties in its own image and colours even the most trivial actions—to feel this, do not answer
merely with the word, but go into the age, the region, the whole history, feel your way into
everything—only now are you on the way to understanding the word.39
Evidently with this passage in mind, Berlin credits Herder with the concept of
Einfühlung, though in fact Herder does not use this noun but only the verb sich hinein-
fühlen, translated above as ‘feel your way in’. Here, and still more in Vico and Herder
(1976), Berlin treats his Counter-Enlightenment thinkers as anticipating the distinc-
tion between the humanities, which are known from within, and the sciences, which
are known externally, made a century later by Wilhelm Dilthey.40 This anachronism
makes the philosophes, by contrast, look like unfeeling observers of a lifeless nature—a
description that might fit Helvétius and Holbach, but certainly not the Diderot of
Le Rêve de d’Alembert.
One can also challenge Berlin’s account of the Counter-Enlightenment on historical
grounds. It rests on a particular construction of history, originating in late nine-
teenth-century Germany, which has been examined by Robert Norton and is further
explored by Avi Lifschitz in this volume.41 Herder is now seen as a figure deeply
indebted to the Enlightenment and its generous cosmopolitan spirit (though it must
be said in Berlin’s favour that he always avoids the trap of calling Herder an early
German nationalist).42
Berlin is clearly fascinated by his Counter-Enlightenment. He credits it with an
appreciation of the individual, and a valuation of empathy, which by implication
39
Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, ed. Günter Arnold and others, 10 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher
Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2000), vol. 4, p. 33. My translation. Emphasis in original.
40
See Robert Wokler, ‘Isaiah Berlin’s Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment’, in his Rousseau, the
Age of Enlightenment, and their Legacies, ed. Bryan Garsten (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2012), pp. 244–59 (p. 246). This essay first appeared in IBCE 13–31.
41
Robert E. Norton, ‘The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 68 (2007),
635–58.
42
Robert E. Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1991).
anticipate the liberal values he famously defended. The Enlightenment, on the other
hand, becomes the archetype of all utopian schemes that seek to benefit humanity by
turning it into a homogeneous body governed according to pure reason. We can recog-
nize here the future ‘Palace of Crystal’ against which Dostoevsky’s Underground Man
protests in the words: ‘Of course it is quite impossible (here I am speaking myself) to
guarantee that it won’t be terribly boring then (because what can one do if everything
has been plotted out and tabulated?) but on the other hand everything will be emi-
nently sensible.’43 And we can recognize also the antithesis in Thomas Mann’s The
Magic Mountain between Settembrini, the Enlightenment proponent of a future
utopia free from suffering, where everyone will speak Esperanto, and his Counter-
Enlightenment opponent Naphta, the Jesuit and communist, whose doctrines strongly
resemble those of de Maistre. This is not to suggest that Berlin was following Thomas
Mann (who is mentioned only briefly and negatively in Berlin’s published letters),44
although Mann does use the term Gegenaufklärung (Counter-Enlightenment), per-
haps borrowing it from Nietzsche, and applying it to the anti-intellectualism of the
German right in the 1920s.45 Rather, Berlin’s conceptions of the Enlightenment and
Counter-Enlightenment were shaped by a characteristically twentieth-century oppo-
sition between utopianism and primitivism of which Mann gives a particularly rich
fictional articulation. They are not only historical constructions, therefore: in their
antithetical character there is also an element of myth-making.
Although Berlin sometimes uses the Enlightenment as a mere foil for the more
intriguing Counter-Enlightenment, that is only one side of his view of the Enlightenment.
It is clear that, as Roger Hausheer says, ‘he saw himself as one of its proponents and
continuators’.46 He affirmed his standpoint with exceptional clarity in one of the
conversations he held with Ramin Jahanbegloo in 1988:
Fundamentally, I am a liberal rationalist. The values of the Enlightenment, what people like
Voltaire, Helvétius, Holbach, Condorcet preached are deeply sympathetic to me. Maybe they
were too narrow, and often wrong about the facts of human experience, but these people were
great liberators. They liberated people from horrors, obscurantism, fanaticism, monstrous
views. They were against cruelty, they were against oppression, they fought the good fight
against superstition and ignorance and against a great many things which ruined people’s lives.
So I am on their side. But they are dogmatic and too simplistic. I am interested in the views of
the opposition because I think that understanding it can sharpen one’s own vision, clever and
gifted enemies often pinpoint fallacies or shallow analyses in the thought of the Enlightenment.
43
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground; The Double, tr. Jessie Coulson (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1972), p. 33.
44
See the letter to Lidiya Chukovskaya, 25 July 1973, in L III 542, where Mann is said to ‘weigh down
the spirit’.
45
Thomas Mann, ‘Die Bäume im Garten’ (1930), in his Gesammelte Werke, 13 vols (Frankfurt a.M.:
Fischer, 1974), vol. 11, p. 866. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari,
8 divisions (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1968–), division IV, vol. 2, p. 478. The Nietzsche reference is
provided by Wokler, ‘Isaiah Berlin’s Enlightenment’, p. 355.
46
Roger Hausheer, ‘Enlightening the Enlightenment’, in IBCE 33–49 (p. 33).
I am more interested in critical attacks which lead to knowledge than simply in repeating and
defending the commonplaces of and about the Enlightenment.47
Here Berlin acknowledges the struggle against ignorance and needless fear, and in
favour of human dignity, which we see, for example, in Voltaire’s espousal of the cause
of Jean Calas, and which Auden celebrates in his poem ‘Voltaire at Ferney’. But we rec-
ognize the same surprisingly limited cast of characters as in his other references to the
Enlightenment. No Lessing, no Hume, no Gibbon, no Adam Smith, no Jefferson or
Franklin. Even Diderot goes unmentioned. The philosophes have their hearts in the
right place; but they are not very interesting. Berlin does not want to spend his time
repeating moral truisms. So he never writes at length about the philosophes directly.
We may doubt, however, whether the reason Berlin gave Jahanbegloo for exploring
the Counter-Enlightenment—that gifted enemies can reveal shortcomings in one’s
own thought—was the whole truth. It was surely not just prudence and self-defence
that induced him to spend so much time with Vico, Hamann, Herder, and de Maistre.
There must also have been a strong impulse to look over the edge, to explore the dark
side, to glimpse the forbidden and unspeakable. This brings to mind the chapter in
The Magic Mountain entitled ‘Snow’, where Hans Castorp deliberately escapes from
the tutelage of his enlightened mentor Settembrini and sets off into the unknown to
experience visions of extreme good and evil. In de Maistre and his other Counter-
Enlighteners Berlin looked for unwelcome but often exciting truths about human
nature which would not fit the mathematically neat constructions of his philosophes. It
is a pity, and surprising, that he never wrote about Nietzsche.
Enlightenment as Conversation
By the time Berlin had stabilized his account of the origins of modern political and
social thought, he was no longer a full-time historian of ideas. In 1957 he had become
Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, a chair that allowed him to continue
as a fellow of All Souls. Eight years later he resigned the post and moved on to pastures
new. In the early 1960s many Oxford lecturers, especially in the sciences, had no col-
lege attachment, and in 1965 the university decided to address the problem by finding
a home for them in two new graduate colleges—St Cross and Iffley. Berlin was offered
and accepted the presidency of Iffley and at once set about raising funds to construct a
lavish new building on a greenfield site. Quickly renamed Wolfson, after one of the
major donors, the new college initially opened its doors in an old house on the Banbury
Road. The new building took time to plan and construct, and Berlin was not able to
move the college to its present location at the end of Linton Road until 1974.48
CIB 70. Cf. AE 29, and the letter to Stepan Volk, 4 July 1962, in L III 102.
47
Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, ch. 17. The Ford Foundation committed 4.5 million dollars and the Wolfson
48
Foundation £ 1.5 million.

Many of Berlin’s colleagues could not understand his decision. He was at the height
of his powers and it seemed foolhardy to resign his chair, abandon All Souls, and
take on the burdens of the headship of a fledgling institution. For Berlin, however,
it was an opportunity to make the word flesh. The Enlightenment and Counter-
Enlightenment were more than intellectual movements of the past that underpinned
the ideas of the modern world and helped to explain in its division into two blocs.
Their debate over the nature and purpose of humanity was an ongoing one that ana-
lytic philosophy could never silence. The Counter-Enlightenment had changed the
context of the debate for ever but there was still plenty to argue about. What was needed
was an arena as secure as possible from external influences and demands where indi-
viduals could air their views on equal terms and without risk. Berlin in the course of his
life found a safe space in the most unlikely and unexpected places. Nothing touched
him more than the all-night discussion he held with the ageing and lonely Anna
Akhmatova in her Leningrad flat in 1945.49 But, like Michael Oakeshott, he recognized
there was only one institution in the modern world specifically set up for ‘adventures
in human self-understanding’: the university.50
All universities, however, were not alike and some fostered ‘the art of conversation’
more than others. Immediately after the war, Berlin was drawn to the academic world
of the United States and its students.
I like their naïve ardour, and their fanatical desire to discover the answer at all costs; they go
on questioning people day and night until some conclusion is reached, God is proved or dis-
proved, war is shown to be inevitable or a mere conspiracy, learning is shown to be the sole
good or else destructive of all spontaneous impulses which make life delightful at all.51
However, Berlin’s second visit to Harvard in autumn 1951, prior to lecturing at Bryn
Mawr, proved a disappointment and he claimed to have left the country with relief.
I feel sympathetic to Americans as to boys of 17: but their ailments & their remedies seem
equally crude & childish to me: I could not live there. In Paris in 4 days I had an acuter sense of
humanity than in America in 7 months (America has libraries with books I need & pays for my
subsistence and pleasures. C’est tout).52
Thereafter, though Berlin made frequent trips to the United States and claimed that
it was the one place he could find fellow historians of ideas, he only felt really at home
in Oxford and All Souls. Not even Israel, where he found some Israelis living a life
‘more satisfactory than that lived by anyone else that I have seen’, tempted him to move
away.53 Oxford gave him the solitude he needed to work and his college the company
49
Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, ch. 11.
50
Michael Oakeshott, ‘A Place of Learning’, in The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on
Education (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 15.
51
L II 160 (to Alice James, 31 Dec. 1949); also L II 162 (letter to Richard Schwartz, 31 Dec. 1949). See
also his ‘The Intellectual Life of American Universities’, Time and Tide, 12, 19, and 26 Nov. 1949, repub-
lished in L II 748–60.
52
L II 299 (to Vera Weizmann, 10 Apr. 1952). 53 L II 635–6 (to Johanna Lambert, 20 May 1958).
and conversation he throve on. But even Oxford was not perfect a location in which to
debate the meaning of life. Berlin liked the monastic, isolationist atmosphere of All
Souls, which allowed the world to be kept at bay and public events to be ignored.54 But
he soon realized that the college, which had no students and was chiefly populated
with historians and lawyers, was just a little too detached and narrow and might
quickly lose its academic reputation. As early as November 1952 he wrote a letter to
Warden John Sparrow calling for the creation of new research fellowships for outsiders.55
Ten years later, when the young Turks in the college proposed admitting women,
Berlin’s feelings were mixed—he had no objection to the measure as such, but disliked
the thought of the wives of fellows in constant attendance at dinner.56 In 1964, on the
other hand, he was thoroughly on the side of the fauves against the troglodytes when
All Souls finally voted on spending some of its vast wealth on welcoming external
scholars. Indeed, he wanted to go further and open the college up to graduate students.
He even imagined amalgamating the college with St Antony’s, Oxford’s second grad-
uate college founded in 1950, which specialized in international relations. St Antony’s
and Nuffield, Oxford’s first graduate college, were blazing a trail. ‘With much more
limited resources than ours’, they ‘have always made a much bigger impact and
done more for the university, and probably for learning’. The way forward was for All
Souls to ‘go into partnership with a smaller firm which is livelier, and take them over,
as it were’.57
As none of these grandiose plans came to fruition—Warden Sparrow opposed all
but the most minimal changes—Berlin’s long romance with All Souls began to sour.58
It is no wonder he jumped at the chance to become the president of a new college
which he could turn into a more fitting arena for the life of the mind.59 Wolfson under
Berlin became everything All Souls was not. The majority of fellows were scientists, a
group Berlin had never met as a body before and now found neither ‘narrow’ nor
‘dull’ nor otherworldly.60 It was a large graduate college, not a fellows’ social club, and
its students came from all round the world. It admitted both men and women. And it
became a college where the usual divisions between senior and junior members were
eroded. There was no senior common room or high table: everyone mingled together
and the president from the beginning thought that the graduates should sit on college
committees.61
54
L II 163 (to Marion Frankfurter, 5 Jan. 1950). 55 L II 333 (to Sparrow, 26 Nov. 1952).
56
L III 80–1 (to Charles Taylor, 23 Feb. 1962). 57 L III 194 (to Harry Fisher, 30 Dec. 1964).
58
L III 187–90 (to Sparrow, 14 Mar. 1964, expressing disillusionment and sorrow at his rift with the
warden). By 1964 All Souls was under pressure from the university to reform. The Franks Commission,
which reported in 1966 on what needed to be done to stifle government criticism of Oxford’s elitism, was
particularly keen that the college should spend more on fostering research: University of Oxford, Report of
Commission of Enquiry (2 vols; Oxford, 1966), vol. 1, pp. 145–51.
59
He was also allowed to hold a visiting professorship at the City University of New York and given one
term off in six.
60
L III 266–7 (to McGeorge Bundy, 7 Mar. 1966).
61
L III 365 (to McGeorge Bundy, 25 Nov. 1968).
It was not unknown for Berlin to assert from time to time that in deciding to become
a historian of ideas he had turned his back on real thought. What he did was enjoyable
and interesting but sheer escapism, evidence he was no thinker and not the genuine
article.
It is a fearful thing to be aware that one is really not much & not mind much either—& care for
nothing but human beings and personal relationships—not like Bloomsbury which somehow
reduced even that to a doctrine—but in some untidy, ephemeral, casual way: and feel no shame
about not having contributed one immortal brick to some eternal structure of the human
spirit. Lack of ambition? Fecklessness? Frivolity? Perhaps. But I am such.62
Berlin’s many admirers will feel that this verdict on his scholarship was too harsh.
Others may accuse him of false modesty. None will deny that when he put down the
presidency of Wolfson in March 1975, shortly after the college had taken up residence
in its new buildings, he left behind a truly tangible achievement, a solid work of
creation whose value could not be gainsaid. The brand new buildings were a fitting
location for a new type of college. Thanks to his fundraising talents, Berlin’s legacy
was more than a new college ethos. It was an academic idyll, a rus in urbe. Located in
well-designed and costly buildings on the banks of the Cherwell in North Oxford,
away from the bustle and pollution of the city centre, Wolfson swiftly became an
established physical landmark, where a community of scholars, separated from both
town and gown but always open to the outside world, could converse to their heart’s
content undisturbed.63
62
L III 396 (to Jean Floud, 26 July 1969).
63
Berlin took a close interest in the design of the building, the work of the architects Powell and Moya:
e.g. L III. 339–40 (letter to the architects, 21 Sept. 1967).
3
Between Friedrich Meinecke and
Ernst Cassirer
Isaiah Berlin’s Bifurcated Enlightenment
Avi Lifschitz
Since the turn of the millennium Isaiah Berlin’s construction of the Counter-
Enlightenment has attracted much scholarly attention, giving rise to controversies
over the historical significance and philosophical aims of what Berlin depicted as
a coherent, mostly German movement.1 Berlin drew a sharp contrast between the
Counter-Enlightenment, championing relativism and the incommensurability of
values, and a Franco-British Enlightenment allegedly besotted with the sovereignty
of reason and its ability to provide unitary answers to all significant questions. The
focus of these recent debates on the opposition to the Enlightenment may be attributed
to the title of Berlin’s renowned essay of 1973, ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, and to the
links he made between his own arguments for value pluralism and the figures he
described as enemies of the Enlightenment (especially Vico and Herder). Additionally,
some of Berlin’s posthumously published collections of essays, The Roots of Romanticism
and Freedom and its Betrayal, deal with Romanticism and its sources, which Berlin
traced back to the Counter-Enlightenment. When he dedicated independent essays to
authors widely regarded as Enlightenment thinkers, such as Hume or Montesquieu, it
1
I am grateful to Henry Hardy for his expert guidance through Berlin’s unpublished papers and correspond-
ence, and to Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson for the opportunity to reflect in detail on Isaiah
Berlin’s Enlightenment. Helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper were provided by Joseph Mali,
John Robertson, and audiences at Wolfson College, Oxford (March 2014) and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu
Berlin (April 2015).
1
See especially IBCE; Robert E. Norton, ‘The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment’ and Steven Lestition,
‘Countering, Transposing, or Negating the Enlightenment? A Response to Robert Norton’, Journal of the
History of Ideas, 68 (2007), 635–81; Norton, ‘Isaiah Berlin’s “Expressionism”, or: “Ha! Du bist das
Blökende!” ’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 69 (2008), 229–47; Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment
Tradition, trans. David Maisel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 372–421; Joseph Mali,
‘The Invention of the Counter-Enlightenment: The Case for the Defense’, in Asaph Ben-Tov, Yaacov
Deutsch, and Tamar Herzig (eds), Knowledge and Religion in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Honor of
Michael Heyd (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 205–28.
52 Avi Lifschitz
was mostly in order to stress elements in their works that could be later appropriated
by the Counter-Enlightenment rather than to outline an intellectual overview of the
Enlightenment itself.2
However, the description of a coherent Counter-Enlightenment necessitated the
erection of an intellectual straw man termed ‘Enlightenment’, and this construct
remained largely intact throughout Berlin’s career. As T. J. Reed argues in this volume,
while Berlin professed his general adherence to Enlightenment values, he was usually
reluctant to engage closely with its ideas.3 In this essay I shall reconstruct the contours
of Berlin’s concept of the Enlightenment rather than its rival—even if this recon-
struction has to rely, at times, on distinctions made in Berlin’s works on the Counter-
Enlightenment. I would also suggest a hitherto largely neglected source for this
distinction: Friedrich Meinecke’s two-volume work of 1936 on the origins of German
historicism, published in English in 1972 with a preface by Berlin. Whereas Meinecke’s
book has been curiously absent from most recent discussions of Berlin’s Counter-
Enlightenment, I shall argue for its significance in the formation of his portrayal
of eighteenth-century Europe as sharply divided between two intellectual factions.
Linking unpublished letters and notes by Berlin to his more familiar overviews of
the Enlightenment and its critics, this essay also compares Berlin’s affirmative use
of Meinecke’s work to his critique of Ernst Cassirer’s approach to the Enlightenment. It
is by situating Berlin’s Enlightenment next to its portrayals by these German contem-
poraries that the underlying structure of Berlin’s account may come into sharper relief.
Enlightenment and its ‘Other’

Isaiah Berlin’s first sustained attempt to provide a general outline of eighteenth-century
philosophy occurred long before the publication of his renowned account, in the early
1970s, of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. In his first book, a biography of
Karl Marx (1939), Berlin outlined the intellectual background of Marx’s thought as a
combination of a scientifically based theory of society, which he ascribed to the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and a more teleological, Hegelian view of histori-
cal development. In this early work the main thrust of eighteenth-century thought, or
‘semi-empirical rationalism’, as Berlin called it, was ‘boundless faith in the power of
reason to explain and improve the world, all previous failure to do so being explained
as ultimately caused by ignorance of the laws which regulate the behaviour of nature,
animate and inanimate’.4 The later monist view of reason—Berlin’s claim that for
Enlightenment thinkers there was only one sort of reason (a phenomenon, capacity, or
measure), which they allegedly applied to all human communities in all periods—was
2
See, for example, ‘Montesquieu’ and ‘Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism’, in AC 130–61
and 162–87.
3
See CIB 70–1. Cf. Berlin’s exchange with Mark Lilla, TCE 493–511.
4
Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, 5th edn, ed. Henry Hardy, foreword by Alan Ryan, afterword by Terrell
Carver (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 35. Henceforth KM.
Isaiah Berlin’s Bifurcated Enlightenment 53
already present in his biography of Marx. Here the young Berlin argued that for
eighteenth-century thinkers, ‘since reason can never be opposed to reason, all private
and public conflict is ultimately due to some irrational element’ that had to be removed.
The quasi-eschatological conclusion of this world view was clearly drawn: ‘Once this
has been achieved, the path is clear to the millennium’ (KM 37). Materialism was
presented as a mainstream Enlightenment belief, La Mettrie providing only an extreme
example of this allegedly typical current of eighteenth-century thought. The determin-
ism inherent in a materialistic view of nature and man was a problem, but according to
Berlin, the radical intellectuals of the nineteenth century took from their Enlightenment
predecessors the confident belief in ‘the immense power of rational education to res-
cue the masses of mankind from their present miseries, to institute a juster and more
scientific distribution of the world’s goods, and so to lead humanity to the limits of
attainable happiness’ (KM 39). The genealogy was clear as well: Voltaire, Hume, and
Rousseau directly moulded ‘the climate of opinion which formed the character of the
revolutionaries of 1789’—a generation characterized by ‘its absolute moral and intel-
lectual integrity, securely founded upon the belief that the truth must ultimately
prevail because it is the truth’ (KM 39).
Modern democrats as well as nineteenth-century radicals were heirs to this legacy—
but not without the intervention of a movement of ideas opposed to the Enlightenment.
As David Leopold points out in this volume, the major figure here was Hegel and
especially his philosophy of history, influenced by ‘the Romantic philosophy of Kant’s
successors’, which had been forged into ‘an almost official German faith’ in the wake of
Napoleon’s defeat and the emergence of German thinkers from a period of wounded
intellectual pride. It is significant to note that, already in this early work, Berlin bundled
Immanuel Kant together with the Romantic movement while denying Germany any
sort of Enlightenment movement comparable to France’s. Kant’s dogmatic slumbers,
sharply interrupted by David Hume, represented the general torpor of eighteenth-
century intellectual life in Germany. It was only around the revolutionary wars that
German authors arose from an inertia stretching from the mid-seventeenth century to
around 1800: ‘Germany, spiritually and materially crippled by the Thirty Years’ War,
was, at the end of a long and sterile period, beginning to produce once more, towards
the end of the eighteenth century, an indigenous culture of its own’ (KM 42). French
influence was limited mostly to Rousseau’s passionate cultural critique. Berlin portrayed
Hegel as leading the opposition to the Enlightenment in modifying the ‘peculiar leg-
acy of German historicism’, which insisted on examining phenomena in their fullest
historical contexts against past background and as anticipating the future. Extending
the idea of the uniqueness of individual character to entire historical periods, Berlin’s
Hegel opposed an empirical view of smooth progress by insisting on the necessity of
struggle and wasteful destruction in the course of history (KM 46–55). Marx was, for
Isaiah Berlin, very much a product of Enlightenment empiricism clad in Hegelian
forms and theses (KM 56). Berlin’s view of the Enlightenment proved durable: in
different formulations throughout his career it would be presented as a concoction
54 Avi Lifschitz
where a large dose of British and French empiricism (Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Condorcet)
was mixed with a dose of naïve French and German rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz).
The opposing force, however, significantly changed its configuration: if in the Marx
biography it was a nineteenth-century movement centred on Hegel and variously
influenced by Kant and the Romantics, later it would be relocated within the eight-
eenth century. Berlin’s encounter with Meinecke’s thesis on the origins of historicism,
I suggest below, may have been a major reason for this temporal shift.
Another major exposition of Berlin’s conceptualization of the Enlightenment can
be found in the introduction to an anthology he edited in 1956, entitled The Age of
Enlightenment: The Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. Berlin chose all the texts and
provided commentaries; his selection attests to his views on the age. More than eighty
pages were dedicated to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding; almost a
hundred to Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature; Berkeley received some forty-five pages,
while all other authors had to do with no more than five pages, where commentary was
often longer than the original text. Smith, Burke, Gibbon, Diderot, Montesquieu, and
Rousseau were all conspicuously absent; Voltaire was represented by a single short
paragraph on Locke from the Philosophical Letters, and Condillac by one page from his
Treatise on Sensations. On the German front, the picture was even more peculiar: not
a word by Leibniz, Wolff, Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Kant. The anthology ended
with Hamann and Lichtenberg, the only representatives of the eighteenth century in
Germany, who were sharply set aside from the rest of the collection. Hamann, not-
withstanding his admiration for Hume and acquaintance with Kant and Herder, was
introduced—like Vico later—as ‘a solitary, isolated thinker’ resisting ‘the very power-
ful stream of eighteenth-century scientific enlightenment’ (AE 272, 275). Lichtenberg
was likewise presented as an original thinker whose work ‘set up trains of thought very
unlike the normal sensible sentiments of the eighteenth century’.5
Berlin’s introduction is focused on the unfortunate mistake of the Enlightenment as
he saw it: the wish to apply to human affairs the methods of both the formal-deductive
sciences and the inductive-experimental ones. According to Berlin, the laws of mind
and society had to approximate those of nature, so that ‘to every genuine question
there were many false answers and only one true one; once discovered it was final—it
remained forever true; all that was needed was a reliable method of discovery’ (AE 16).
Berlin’s Enlightenment began in the seventeenth century with the great enthusiasm for
reason in Descartes’s and Newton’s works—and it did not undergo significant change
for more than a century: ‘This epistemological bias characterized European philosophy
from Descartes’s formulation of his method of doubt until well into the nineteenth
century.’ Only Kant put an end, Berlin argued in 1956, to the rather naïve belief that
5
AE 276. In a note of Dec. 1978 to a new edition of the anthology, Berlin sought to explain Kant’s exclu-
sion. Though he belonged to the Enlightenment, Berlin argued, the central strands in Kant’s thought
entered the Counter-Enlightenment; Kant would therefore be more appropriately included in the following
volume of the series—an anthology of nineteenth-century philosophy. (Berlin, ‘Author’s Note’, The Age of
Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), unpaginated.)
‘Men were objects in nature no less than trees and stones; their interaction could be
studied as that of atoms or plants’ (AE 27). There were ‘dissidents’ who did not agree
with this atomistic picture; Berlin conceded that organic notions could be found in
Diderot, Maupertuis, and Bordeu, while Johnson and Burke, Hamann and Herder, and
to some degree even Montesquieu and Hume were not atomists. Yet on the whole,
‘these remained isolated doubts’ (AE 28). Here too, before Kant there was no great dif-
ference between—on the one hand—Locke, Hume, and the French empiricists, and—on
the other—the rationalist followers of Leibniz and Wolff (AE 28). The introduction did
end with a brief albeit powerful tribute to the Enlightenment: ‘The intellectual power,
honesty, lucidity, courage and disinterested love of the truth of the most gifted thinkers
of the eighteenth century remain to this day without parallel. Their age is one of the
best and most hopeful episodes in the life of mankind.’ Yet this compliment was
preceded by a different conclusion, much more in line with the tone of the whole essay.
According to Berlin, the Enlightenment may have been useful in countering preju-
dices and superstitions; ‘But the central dream, the demonstration that everything in
the world moved my mechanical means, that all evils could be cured by appropriate
technological steps, that there could exist engineers of human souls and of human
bodies, proved delusive’ (AE 29). Much of the intellectual courage of eighteenth-
century thinkers was therefore misplaced; an implicit yet strong link was made in the
anthology between what Berlin regarded as eighteenth-century scientistic naivety and
twentieth-century political delusions.6
The dating back of the opposition to Enlightenment ideas is signalled most clearly
in ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, which also opens Berlin’s 1979 collection of essays
Against the Current. In its first sentence Berlin declared that ‘Opposition to the cen-
tral ideas of the French Enlightenment, and of its allies and disciples in other
European countries, is as old as the movement itself ’ (AC 1). It actually extended as
far back as the ancient Greek sophists, who insisted on the relativity of human cus-
toms against the generalizing thrust of Platonic philosophy, and was further heralded
by such early modern sceptics as Charron and Montaigne. In this article Berlin
demonstrated his awareness of greater nuances in eighteenth-century thought than
he had hitherto acknowledged. Shaftesbury and Vico, as well as Edward Young,
Edmund Burke, and even Rousseau, Hume, and Montesquieu, were all credited
with contributions to the relativizing trend that would flourish as the Counter-
Enlightenment. Herder was even allowed to have had a ‘genuine affinity’ with the
‘wayward and imaginative’ Diderot.7 Kant contributed significantly to the Counter-
Enlightenment by initiating ‘a cult of moral autonomy’ (AC 15). Yet despite these
occasional qualifications, all such authors were interpreted as aberrations from and
6
On Berlin’s place within the postwar philosophical critique of Enlightenment, see John Robertson’s
essay in this volume; and his The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015), pp. 122–4.
7
For Vico: AC 4–6; on the impact of Shaftesbury, Young, Burke, and Rousseau on Hamann: AC 9; and
on Herder and Diderot: AC 12.
56 Avi Lifschitz
exceptions to Berlin’s outline of the Enlightenment, which—despite the temporal

displacement of the Counter-Enlightenment—remained largely unmodified. Hume,
Kant, and virtually every French author (before Bonald and de Maistre) were allegedly
taking part in one and the same endeavour, ‘the rational and experimental method
which Descartes and Galileo had inaugurated, and which for all their doubts and
qualifications even such sharp deviationists as Montesquieu, or Hume and Rousseau
and Kant, fully and firmly accepted’.8 Herder, however, was excluded from this camp
and squarely located within the opposition due to his early writings, ‘in spite of the
fact that in later life he attempted to construct a theory of history in which the whole
of mankind, in a somewhat vague fashion, is represented as developing towards a
common Humanität which embraces all men and all the arts’ (AC 12). Such deviations
as there were did not matter: rationalists and empiricists, Leibnizians and Lockeans,
Shaftesbury and Kant, Montesquieu and Diderot, were once again engaged in a single
project—and here Berlin significantly resorted five times to the term ‘natural law’ as
transcending any exceptions within the Enlightenment.
Nevertheless, despite profound differences of outlook, there was a wide area of agreement
about fundamental points: the reality of natural law (no longer formulated in the language of
orthodox Catholic or Protestant doctrine), of eternal principles by following which alone men
could become wise, happy, virtuous, and free. One set of universal and unalterable principles
governed the world for theists, deists and atheists, for optimists and pessimists, puritans,
primitivists and believers in progress and the richest fruits of science and culture; these laws
governed inanimate and animate nature, facts and events, means and ends, private life and
public, all societies, epochs and civilisations; it was solely by departing from them that men fell
into crime, vice, misery. (AC 3)
It is important to remind ourselves of Berlin’s construction of the Enlightenment as

a courageous if deterministic and ultra-rationalist movement and his frequent
exclusion from it of anything that exuded originality of thought, moral autonomy, and
pluralism. Research over the last thirty years has exposed the multifaceted character or
the unity in diversity of the Enlightenment.9 It is now clear that many of the elements
8
AC 19. This attitude may also be attested in one of the collections of Berlin’s unpublished notes
on the Enlightenment. Berlin made there a general comment on eighteenth-century thought at the end of
his notes on Helvétius: ‘Enlightenment entails headmasters. 18th century progressives do not really
believe in either liberty, fraternity or equality. They are anti-democratic. Only tepidly pro-republican’
(Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Berlin 611, folio 198). Helvétius was criticized by contemporaries
such as Diderot, but Berlin chose here to generalize a trait of the Enlightenment from a particularly
radical thinker, while treating alternative French voices as ‘deviationists’ (in the 1973 essay on the
Counter-Enlightenment).
9
Among many other relevant titles, see Peter H. Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of
Historicism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975); J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion,
6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2015); Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment:
Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Istvan Hont, Jealousy of
Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2005); David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2008). See also my own argument that the linguistic embeddedness and historical situatedness of all
ascribed by Berlin to the Counter-Enlightenment were, in fact, part and parcel of

Enlightenment thought in different locations—and that a central current in the
Enlightenment was from the outset anti-Cartesian. Leibniz and Vico criticized
Cartesian epistemology early in the eighteenth century, and this critique was carried
on throughout the century and across Europe. It is difficult today to ignore general
patterns in Vico and Herder and their views on shared values across different peri-
ods—or, likewise, to discount discussions of particularity and untranslatability in
Montesquieu and Condillac. The diversity of the Enlightenment cannot be reflected
by a simple seventeenth-century attempt to apply the methods of mathematics and
physics to all human affairs. Yet the point here is not to fault Berlin for failing to take
into account recent research, much of which has been published after his death; it is
rather to emphasize the tenacity of his early view of the Enlightenment. Berlin’s
understanding of the Enlightenment as a monist, anti-pluralist movement proved
remarkably resistant even to his own increasing awareness of exceptions to this portrait
in the essay on the Counter-Enlightenment and to correctives issued by colleagues
such as Peter Gay.10
Meinecke’s Historismus and Berlin’s Enlightenment

The enduring force of this particular construction of the Enlightenment may be traced
back to Berlin’s profound and longstanding admiration for Friedrich Meinecke’s work.
Indeed, most of the points made in Berlin’s earlier works on the Enlightenment—but
especially in the 1973 essay comparing it to its enemies—were distilled in his foreword
to the single-volume English edition of Meinecke’s Die Entstehung des Historismus
(originally published in 1936 in German in two volumes). In his preface to the English
translation, Berlin presented Meinecke’s work on German historicism almost as an
autobiography, for he saw the author as ‘the last great representative of this tradition’.11
Besides the preface to Meinecke’s Historism, the extent of Berlin’s appreciation of
Meinecke cannot be fully estimated on the basis of his published work. In various art-
icles and chapters, Berlin referred repeatedly to two main issues or metaphors. One is
Meinecke’s observation in Die Idee der Staatsräson that Machiavelli had thrust a sword
(sometimes replaced by a dagger) in the body politic of the West by highlighting
the chasm between political and individual morality (AC 39). The other reference is
to Meinecke’s view of Voltaire as ‘the banker of the Enlightenment’—an author who
forms of life were a common Enlightenment theme—in Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates
of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
10
See Berlin’s response to Gay’s point that Enlightenment thinkers were not a ‘monolithic group’ at a
lecture of 11 February 1975 at Wolfson College, Oxford: Berlin, ‘Some Opponents of the Enlightenment’,
in Henry Hardy (ed.), The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library, at <http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/nachlass/
opponents.pdf>, pp. 1–5 (accessed 26 Oct. 2015). Gay had delivered on 28 January 1975 a lecture (as part
of the same series at Wolfson) under the telling title ‘The Enlightenment as Counter-Enlightenment’.
11
Berlin, ‘Foreword’, in Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans. by
J. E. Anderson, revised by H. D. Schmidt (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. x and xvi.
58 Avi Lifschitz
assesses the value of all past phenomena according to his own currency and exchange
rates.12 These sparse references may explain why Meinecke did not attract much schol-
arly attention in recent debates over the Counter-Enlightenment.13 In his article ‘The
Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment’ (2007), for example, Robert Norton argues that
Berlin took at face value the scholarship of a group of German authors, writing in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who described the emergence of a
so-called German Movement (Deutsche Bewegung). This was a late eighteenth-century
movement of ideas allegedly opposed to a simplistic and over-rationalist French
Enlightenment. Meinecke is not mentioned in Norton’s article, yet I would suggest that
it is through him that Berlin was exposed to the main arguments of the Deutsche
Bewegung and came to pit a simplistic Franco-British Enlightenment against what he
regarded as its sharp criticism in Germany.
Berlin’s unpublished correspondence reveals that that he was instrumental in
exposing anglophone audiences to Meinecke’s book on the origins of historicism,
which he had held in great esteem at least since the 1950s. In 1958, two years after
editing the Enlightenment anthology, Berlin exhorted publishers to embark on the
project of issuing English editions of Meinecke’s major works beyond Die Idee der
Staatsräson (1924), which had been published as Machiavellism in 1957. In a letter of
9 May 1958 to Stephen Toulmin in Leeds, Berlin provided recommendations for books
on the history of ideas for an unspecified ‘Routledge project’:
If you want to spread your net a little wider I should warmly recommend the magnificent
works of Meinecke—he is the only historian in Europe in the last fifty years worth reading—
only one of his books has been translated into English—under the title of Machiavellianism—
but both the book on historicism and the one on the emergence of a national State are
masterpieces and it is a great shame they are not translated. Decent histories of ideas are as you
well know very rare birds, and though I tremble to say it perhaps something on Hegel would
not be out of place now.14
When Berlin was consulted in 1962 by Hans Kohn about a series entitled Milestones
of Thought, he was once again confident: ‘I’m sure that what is really needed is
12
AC 90; Berlin, ‘Two Notions of the History of Culture: The German versus the French Tradition’, first
of three Gauss Seminars delivered at Princeton in 1973, accessible at Hardy (ed.), Berlin Virtual Library:
<http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/nachlass/origins1.pdf> (accessed 17 Oct. 2015).
13
Norton refers to three main potential sources of this notion: Wilhelm Dilthey’s inaugural lecture in
Basel (1867), ‘Die dichterische und philosophische Bewegung in Deutschland 1770–1800’; an essay by
Dilthey’s student Hermann Nohl, ‘Die Deutsche Bewegung und die idealistischen Systeme’ (1911); and
Rudolf Unger’s book of the same year, Hamann und die Aufklärung (Norton, ‘Myth’, pp. 652–6). In Mali and
Wokler’s volume, Meinecke is mentioned only by Roger Hausheer—albeit generally as an heir of the
Counter-Enlightenment rather than a direct influence on Berlin (IBCE 38, 41, 47). In a similar manner Zeev
Sternhell provides an overview of Meinecke’s Historism as itself a continuation of the Counter-Enlightenment
legacy; structural similarities are mostly limited to Berlin’s essay on Machiavelli (Anti-Enlightenment
Tradition, pp. 103–17; 407–8).
14
Berlin to Stephen Toulmin, 9 May 1958, transcribed from Berlin’s Dictabelt recording (held in the
British Library, ref. C1226/63, playback copy F4211). Copyright: The Trustees of the Isaiah Berlin Literary
Trust, 2016.
translations of the major German works—for example, the whole untranslated corpus
of Meinecke.’15
This degree of admiration and enthusiasm is reflected in the preface to the eventual
translation of Meinecke’s work on historicism. Meinecke’s impressive and undeniable
achievements as a historian need not be diminished by a sober acknowledgement of
his more compromised engagements during—and views on—the Kaiserreich, the
Weimar Republic (which he accepted in a lukewarm fashion as a Vernunftrepublikaner),
and the Third Reich. After the Second World War, in his analysis of the rise and down-
fall of the Nazi regime, Meinecke presented it as a ‘Satanic’ hijacking of the proper
German spirit. In The German Catastrophe (Die deutsche Katastrophe, originally pub-
lished in 1946), one of Meinecke’s suggestions for German regeneration was a return to
religion—which would involve ‘not merely tolerance but respect for all the churches,
creeds, sects, and religious movements which have a share in the common religious
heritage of the Christian Occident’. In the same chapter, he referred to ‘our common
oppression under the heathenism of the Third Reich’—but this point concerned, again,
only Protestants and Catholics.16 The striking absence here of any mention of the Jews
and their fate under Nazism was preceded by making them co-responsible for the
virulence of German anti-Semitism. Part of the success of Hitler’s populism was
explained by reference to Jewish demeanour: ‘The Jews, who were inclined to enjoy
indiscreetly the favorable economic situation now smiling upon them, had since their
full emancipation aroused resentment of various sorts. They contributed much to
that gradual depreciation and discrediting of the liberal world of ideas that set in after
the end of the nineteenth century.’ It was therefore the Jews’ ‘negative and disintegrating
influence’ that made fellow Germans ignore their positive achievements, according
to Meinecke.17
In his preface to Historism, Berlin was willing to condone and discount such views.
For him, Meinecke’s nationalism was tempered by the fact that he was ‘not prepared for
inhumanity’.18 The final judgement in 1972 remained unwaveringly positive:
Meinecke was an unswervingly honest man, and although the prejudices of his time and class
shine through, his unerring—sometimes painful—consciousness of where the true moral centre
of gravity of a given social or moral situation lies, seldom fails him. This together with his pro-
digious learning and feeling for the complex web of ideas, movements, institutions, events and
personalities of the principal actors makes his account of the rise of German historical thought
a still unsuperseded classic.19
Indeed, Berlin introduced Meinecke to his English readers as carrying forth the task of
the Counter-Enlightenment in his ‘unsuperseded classic’ of 1936. According to Berlin,
15
Berlin to Hans Kohn, 11 Oct. 1962, in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Berlin 262, fols 56–7. Copyright:
The Trustees of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust, 2016.
16
Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections, trans. Sidney B. Fay
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1963), pp. 114, 113.
17
Meinecke, The German Catastrophe, 15.
18
Berlin, ‘Foreword’, p. xv. 19 Ibid.
60 Avi Lifschitz
‘Meinecke is intensely anxious not to fall into the errors he castigates in the hated
Natural Law, mechanistic, all-levelling, eighteenth-century Encyclopaedist tradition.’20
The main idea of Meinecke’s protagonists, according to Berlin’s preface, was the
insight that each human group possessed ‘its own individual laws of growth, its own
unique “organic” character’. In short, as Berlin summarized Meinecke, the values of
some human groups were incommensurable with those of other societies or periods,
and were therefore the only basis for their explanation and justification.21 The concept
of natural law—which could mean many different things in the eighteenth century
itself—was employed by Berlin in the preface to Historism in a sense similar to
Meinecke’s, as a marker of everything German thinkers transcended in their attention
to the particularity and autonomy of historical phenomena and individuals. As
Meinecke emphasized in his own ‘Preliminary Remarks’, ‘the essence of historism is
the substitution of individualizing observation for a generalizing view of human forces
in history’—it discovered a new feeling for the individual. Though anticipated by vari-
ous thinkers across Europe, it was essentially a German movement.22 The notion of
natural law in Meinecke’s Historism permeated different historical periods from
ancient Greece to the eighteenth century and even the present—again, in a manner
identical to its usage by Berlin in the Counter-Enlightenment essay (which appeared
only a year after his preface to Historism).
In particular, it was the prevailing concept of natural law, handed down from antiquity, which
confirmed this belief in the stability of human nature and above all of human reason.
Accordingly, it was held that the pronouncements of reason, though they could certainly be
obscured by passions and by ignorance, did nevertheless, wherever they could free themselves
from these hindrances, speak with the same voice and utter the same timeless and absolutely
valid truths, which were in harmony with those prevailing in the universe as a whole.23
Long before Berlin, Meinecke stressed a Franco-German divide extending from the
late seventeenth century to the nineteenth. Here too was the confident identification of
French eighteenth-century thought with Descartes, largely ignoring the widespread
dissatisfaction with his physics and epistemology (especially from the 1740s onwards).
Meinecke argued that the new self-conscious subject of Descartes—and of ‘the subse-
quent French working under his influence’—was ‘not yet the individual subject in all
its manifold historical forms, but a generalized subject, the abstract man of Natural
Law. And the universal laws discovered in him therefore only served at first to confirm
the upholders of Natural Law in their dogmatic certainty that it held the key to under-
standing human affairs.’24 Even the subsequent empirical stress on the senses and the
observation of concrete human facts did not help the lamentably naïve Enlightenment
authors. Initially, Meinecke claimed, the Cartesian belief in innate ideas revealed by
reason went into the melting-pot, replaced by the desire to study human phenomena
20
Berlin, ‘Foreword’, p. xii. 21 Ibid., p. xi.
22
Meinecke, ‘Preliminary Remarks’, in Historism, p. lv.
23
Meinecke, Historism, p. lvi. 24 Ibid., p. 3.
in an ‘unprejudiced way’. This trend led to a greater appreciation of the passions and
the irrational, but unfortunately it also turned the human mind into a tabula rasa. The
mind, therefore, lost its activity and spontaneity. The Anglo-French Enlightenment,
according to Meinecke, remained ‘in bondage to a mechanical causality, which now
proceeded to transfer its triumphant advance from the field of the natural sciences to
that of the humanities’. Eighteenth-century naturalism was, for him, only a version
of the old natural law, which in its turn was ‘really nothing but the law of reason and a
belief in reason’.25
The principal ideas underlying Berlin’s portraits of the Enlightenment, especially
from 1956 onwards, are all manifest in Meinecke’s account. Particularly apparent is the
somewhat cavalier fusion of rationalism with empiricism into the same phenomenon
because philosophers in both camps appealed to reason (albeit in very different
senses). Another striking similarity is the recurring reference made by Meinecke and
Berlin to natural law as a constant intellectual firmament, virtually unchanged since
antiquity yet under different guises, which was decisively rejected only by Herder and
his companions. Both authors saw all references to natural law in the Enlightenment as
mere reincarnations of earlier versions of absolute truths (including Stoic cosmic laws
and Thomist divine jurisprudence). Finally, Berlin’s shifting of the opposition to the
Enlightenment from nineteenth-century Hegelian philosophy to the eighteenth cen-
tury itself—so evident in the 1973 essay on the Counter-Enlightenment—is one of
Meinecke’s main points: Meinecke’s proto-historicist protagonists and their forerun-
ners were coeval with the Enlightenment. According to Meinecke, the first critics of
the Enlightenment were Shaftesbury, Leibniz, and Vico, who were all born between
1646 and 1671 and died between 1713 and 1744. In Historism, this outlook and the
accompanying periodization were heavily emphasized:
But it is a remarkable fact that it was just at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
when the great movement of Enlightenment, starting in England, was about to pursue its victo-
rious advance, that there grew up simultaneously in England and Germany, and soon afterwards
in Italy, new movements of thought, containing the potentiality to transcend this Enlightenment,
whether represented by the English empiricists or by the French rationalists.26
This passage makes it clear that the story related in Meinecke’s book is about two parallel
movements within the eighteenth century. This was an account of a struggle between
the empiricists and rationalists west of the Rhine, on the one hand, and, on the other, the
profound German authors east of the river who perceived the living forces and unique
individuality encapsulated in each human being and every human community.27 The
25
Ibid., p. 4. 26 Ibid., p. 5.
27
In the introduction to the second part of his study, Meinecke separated such German authors as
Winckelmann, Kant, Lessing, Neologist theologians and the historians of the Göttingen School, from both
the foreign Enlightenment and the first proto-historicist thinkers (Möser, Herder, Goethe). Meinecke
made great efforts to exclude from the latter group two thinkers in particular: Lessing (among whose works
Meinecke analysed only Nathan the Wise and The Education of Mankind) and Winckelmann. The latter,
like Lessing, was relegated to the camp of Germans who were still weighed down by perfectionism. Yet
62 Avi Lifschitz
general lack of scholarly attention to the structural similarities between Meinecke’s

historicism and Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment may be attributed to the spiralling num-
ber of meanings historicism itself acquired; by the mid-twentieth century, historicism
or ‘the historical school’ had come to represent mainly the academic historians of
nineteenth-century Germany, from Ranke to Meinecke himself. Yet Meinecke’s account
of the emergence of historicism dealt with two contemporary Enlightenments, or rather—
in Isaiah Berlin’s own terminology—an Enlightenment and a Counter-Enlightenment
existing at one and the same time but separated by clear national boundaries.
Cassirer as a Counter-Example
In 1958, as mentioned above, Berlin wrote to Stephen Toulmin that ‘decent histories of
ideas’ were ‘very rare birds’. This observation made Meinecke’s Historism, in Berlin’s eyes,
a unique work against the background of anything else written on the Enlightenment
in the preceding decades. Despite his dense and at times opaque style, Meinecke’s
chapters, according to Berlin, ‘demand a good deal more of the reader than the sweep-
ing generalisations of bolder and often more superficial historians of ideas’—those
who, unlike Meinecke himself, did ‘fall into the errors he castigates in the hated Natural
Law’.28 In his foreword to Historism, Berlin did not explicitly name these superficial or
undemanding historians of ideas. However, given the qualities he prized and praised
so profusely in Meinecke’s account of the eighteenth century, there seems to be a clear
candidate for this undesirable position: a historian of ideas who did not split the
Enlightenment into two opposing camps but tried to find common intellectual
denominators across trends and national cultures, while paying less attention than
Meinecke to the concrete moorings of eighteenth-century authors. At the opposite
pole to Meinecke and his protagonists stood Ernst Cassirer and his attempt to salvage a
cross-European, common intellectual ferment under the title of Enlightenment.
Berlin met Cassirer in 1933, when the latter delivered a series of lectures on the
philosophy of law at All Souls College, Oxford, as an academic refugee (before moving
to the University of Gothenburg in Sweden in 1935). In 1933 Berlin described Cassirer
in a letter to Adam von Trott as a ‘lucid, interesting, and learned’ lecturer, although he
did not resist the temptation of poking fun at the German outsider who was apparently
baffled by Oxford’s complexities.29 Yet it is not too clear whether at this point Berlin
unlike Lessing, Winckelmann’s work was credited with being ‘an outcome of the new German spirit in
concert with the reaction already under way against the prevailing Romano-French normative outlook’
(Meinecke, Historism, p. 247).
28
Berlin, ‘Foreword’, p. xii.
29
Berlin to Adam von Trott, 26 October 1933, in L I 62. In the following month Berlin wrote to Diana
Hubback: ‘I can’t refrain from telling you how puzzled I was 10 minutes ago when, in the middle of this
letter, Prof. Ernst Cassirer called to ask if his Seminar was to take place at Christmas. Before that I hope
I said politely: he looked at me as tho’ I was quite mad. Christmas turned out to be Christchurch which you
guessed already.’ (Berlin to Hubback, 30 Oct. 1933, in L I 64. On Cassirer’s accent, L I 91.)
had read Cassirer’s book on the Enlightenment, published in Germany in the previous
year (1932). By 1951—when Cassirer’s book first appeared in English—Berlin had
already formed his views on the intellectual outlook of the eighteenth century,
probably after his engagement with Meinecke’s thesis.
Berlin’s review of Cassirer’s The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, published in 1953,
is arguably one his most scathing published pieces. Employing almost the same vocab-
ulary he would use twenty years later to praise Meinecke, Berlin referred in 1953 to
‘demanding’ and ‘undemanding’ histories of ideas:
Cassirer wishes to convey a general atmosphere and outlook, and does so, in language which is
clear, elegant, readable, above all agreeable, and intellectually not at all demanding; but the
clarity is not that of dry light, but of water.30
The review remained on a general level, criticizing Cassirer’s methodology and alleged
naivety in his attempt to present an all-encompassing analysis of different ideas and
movements across Europe under the aegis of Enlightenment. Berlin did not expose his
readers to Cassirer’s actual arguments and particular points. Unlike Meinecke and
Berlin, for example, Cassirer emphasized Diderot’s organic physics and his interest
(alongside Maupertuis) in Leibniz’s dynamics;31 he reconstructed a new Enlightenment
concept mediating between the general and the particular (‘The new whole is organic,
not mechanical’);32 and argued that Helvétius did not represent the Enlightenment, as
had often been argued—for he was frequently criticized by contemporaries such as
Diderot and Turgot.33 Crucially, Cassirer fully integrated Leibniz, Kant, and German
aesthetics into the Enlightenment, demonstrating their impact in France and England
rather than setting off one culture against another. This integrative overview was ena-
bled by Cassirer’s account of the new meaning of reason in the eighteenth century; in
The Philosophy of the Enlightenment it was far from a dead abstraction, blind to any
particularity. In terms that are reminiscent of Lessing and Kant, Cassirer sharply
distinguished between the seventeenth-century use of ‘reason’ and what the
Enlightenment understood by it:
Reason is now looked upon rather as an acquisition than as a heritage. It is not the treasury of
the mind in which the truth like a minted coin lies stored; it is rather the original intellectual
force which guides the discovery and determination of truth. This determination is the seed and
the indispensable presupposition of all real certainty. The whole eighteenth century u
nderstands
30
Berlin, review of The Philosophy of the Enlightenment by Ernst Cassirer, English Historical Review, 68
(1953), 617–19 (p. 618). Berlin’s assessment was much more critical of Cassirer than Meinecke’s own
review of the original German edition. Despite understandable disagreements on the Enlightenment’s
sense of history and concerning Rousseau, Meinecke called Cassirer’s ‘excellent’ book a ‘masterpiece’
(Historische Zeitschrift, 149 (1934), 582–6).
31
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 34–5.
32
Ibid., p. 31.
33
Ibid., p. 27.
64 Avi Lifschitz
reason in this sense; not as a sound body of knowledge, principles, and truths, but as a kind of
energy, a force which is fully comprehensible only in its agency and effects.34
Cassirer’s understanding of reason as a force or an energy rather than a body of principles

and truths—‘a concept of agency, not of being’35—was a far cry from Berlin’s and
Meinecke’s view. It may be that Cassirer’s thrust here was excessively generalizing, allow-
ing him to link too many diverse phenomena and authors through his concept of reason.
Yet the attention to philosophical detail and Cassirer’s customary exclusion of local
contexts had a clear socio-political background, which Berlin did not mention to his
readers in 1953. To argue openly and decisively for the significance of the Enlightenment
in Germany of 1932, against the rising tide of Lebensphilosophie and chauvinist particu-
larism, was a bold move. Cassirer did not try to conceal his motives: one of his explicit
objectives was to silence the Romantic slogan of a ‘shallow Enlightenment’.36 But there
was more to the book’s aims in the twilight of the Weimar Republic:
No account of the history of philosophy can be oriented to history alone. The consideration of the
philosophic past must always be accompanied by philosophical reorientation and self-criticism.
More than ever before, it seems to me, the time is again ripe for applying such self-criticism to the
present age, for holding up to it that bright clear mirror fashioned by the Enlightenment. Much
that seems to us today the result of ‘progress’ will to be sure lose its luster when seen in this mir-
ror; and much that we boast of will look strange and distorted in this perspective. But we should
be guilty of hasty judgment and dangerous self-deception if we were simply to ascribe these
distortions to opaque spots in the mirror, rather than to look elsewhere for their source.37
One of Cassirer’s means of persuasion was his insistence on the ‘Germanness’ of the
Enlightenment, or on the centrality of German thinkers within the cross-European
movement—as opposed to the Romantic view of the Enlightenment as a foreign affair,
resisted and countered in the German mind. He had already made this point, some-
what tortuously, in a putative history of republicanism which he delivered as a lecture
on Constitution Day in 1928. In that lecture, Cassirer cast Leibniz as the unlikely orig-
inator of the idea of a republican constitution that found its way to British America and
France before returning to Germany to receive its ultimate manifestation in Kant’s
oeuvre. The point was that the republican idea was no external intruder in German
intellectual history. Cassirer wished to counter contemporary views of much liberal
and constitutional thought as ‘un-German’ by suggesting that republicanism grew
(also) on German ground and flourished in German idealist philosophy. As such, it
could be reclaimed as a genuine element of the local cultural legacy; Cassirer was no
mere Vernunftrepublikaner.38
34
Ibid., p. 13.
35
Ibid., p. 14.
36
Ibid., p. xi.
37
Ibid.
38
Cassirer, ‘Die Idee der republikanischen Verfassung. Rede zur Verfassungsfeier am 11. August 1928’
(1929), in Cassirer, Aufsätze und kleine Schriften (1927–1931), ed. Tobias Berben, vol. 17 of Gesammelte
Werke—Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Birgit Recki (Hamburg: Meiner, 2004), pp. 291–398.
His efforts were diametrically opposed to Meinecke’s and Berlin’s emphasis on an

essentially German movement (proto-historicism or Counter-Enlightenment) con-
fronting a Franco-British Enlightenment. Berlin argued in his preface to Historism
that Meinecke’s protagonists were ‘acutely conscious of their own German roots in
the Reformation, in Pietism and the visionary movements that preceded it, in the
localized, provincial, tradition-bound social, political, and religious life of German
cities and principalities’; above all, they were ‘acutely aware of the differences between
their world and the universalism and scientific rationalism deeply embedded in the
outlook of the civilisations west of the Rhine’.39 Adhering to Meinecke’s interpretation
of the eighteenth century, Berlin was troubled by Cassirer’s attempt to present the
Enlightenment as a general European phenomenon despite differences of shade and
colour among particular thinkers and between national cultures (which were indeed
acknowledged by Cassirer). In his review of The Philosophy of the Enlightenment,
Berlin spoke of Cassirer’s ‘even and gentle evening light’ that makes all shapes ‘slightly
hazy and melt into each other too easily’.40
The reviewer clearly longed here for a philosophical drama, for two opposing
factions—the Enlightenment and its other, or the advocates of what he and Meinecke
called natural law engaging battle against proto-Romantics, pre-historicists, or Counter-
Enlightenment thinkers. Cassirer struck his reviewer as someone writing with a
‘
special sensibility to concealed connections and affinities, for transitions and cross
currents’, but also with ‘a rooted distaste for sharp delineation and the drawing of firm
distinctions between ideas or thinkers’. While conceding that a cross-European inter-
pretation of the Enlightenment might avoid ‘the sins of exaggerated contrasts’, Berlin
pronounced that ‘like all efforts at conciliation, it can only be achieved at some sacrifice
of the critical faculty’. Readers wishing to know more about the sharp conflicts of
the eighteenth century had to turn elsewhere; the review was concluded by a call for
‘a more ice-cutting account of this crucial period in western thought’.41 Berlin’s own
account of the age was, of course, much more ice-cutting. His essays on eighteenth-
century thought orchestrated a dazzling scene of colliding theories and clashing ideas.
Even if numerous exceptions had to be made, as in the 1956 anthology or the 1973
essay, the overall picture did not change. For Berlin outlined nothing less than a revo-
lution of the mind, in a similar manner to the author he deemed ‘the only historian in
Europe in the last fifty years worth reading’.
Though born in 1909, Isaiah Berlin was a child of the nineteenth century. He
cherished its great literature, admired its music, and loved the dramatic scene of its
ideas: Marxists pitted against liberals, socialists and utilitarians versus conservatives,
and utopian revolutionaries opposed to careful realists. The twentieth century, most
of which he personally witnessed, offered no less a spectacle of ideas at war. The
Enlightenment—and especially its alleged rival, the Counter-Enlightenment—provided
39
Berlin, ‘Foreword’, p. x. 40 Berlin, review of Cassirer, pp. 618–19.
41
Ibid., p. 619.
66 Avi Lifschitz
him with ammunition for his own struggle against totalitarianism in the name of value
pluralism. Yet as demonstrated by situating his Enlightenment next to Meinecke’s and
against Cassirer’s, Berlin tended to view the eighteenth century through Romantically
tinged spectacles. These spectacles made him project onto the Enlightenment later
ideological contrasts, dividing it dichotomously into conflicting and barely commensu-
rable factions. Eighteenth-century intellectual life merits a more nuanced examination
today—without ignoring differences or sacrificing the critical faculty.
Pa rt I I
Enlightenment Thinkers
4
Berlin and Hume
P. J. E. Kail
The task of discussing Berlin and Hume within the compass of a single essay is not
unlike that set in Monty Python’s All-England Summarize Proust competition,
wherein contestants are given 15 seconds to sum up À la Recherche du temps perdu. The
quite extraordinary brilliance and extent of learning of both figures is formidable
enough, even if one were to treat of each singularly and, for the present author, the
formidableness of the comparative task is compounded by the fact that he can only
pretend to have anything approaching significant knowledge of one of them. We then
have to add that our understanding of any great figure goes hand in hand with a volu-
minous body of secondary literature, a mixed but inescapable blessing for a number of
obvious reasons.
Within the Berlin literature there are references to Berlin’s admiration for, and
intellectual debt to, Hume. Stuart Hampshire writes that in ‘all Berlin’s thinking
and writing one is aware of the ample, generous, humorous and seductive figure of
David Hume smiling in the background’,1 and Richard Wollheim writes that ‘the histo-
rian and connoisseur of German romanticism, the re-discoverer for our age of Vico
and Herder, is a Humean. Whenever we are in doubt in reading Berlin’s work, whenever
chance associations lead us to impose a Hegelian reading upon his words, a formula
that leads us back to his meaning is, Substitute a Humean interpretation.’2 Others,
notably John Gray, are more hesitant to call Berlin a Humean. In what follows I shall
try to show that Gray’s hesitation is misplaced when a more nuanced view of Hume’s
philosophy is taken into account.
I
I shall begin with some remarks of a more general character. Even someone as extraor-
dinary as Berlin can pen falsehoods, and there is no doubt that he penned a few about
Hume. It would, however, be unedifying to wield the tutor’s red pen and mark up every
1
Stuart Hampshire, ‘Nationalism’, IBAC 127–34 (p. 139).
2
Richard Wollheim, ‘The Idea of a Common Human Nature’, IBAC 64–79 (p. 78).
70 P. J. E. Kail
error,3 but there is one thing I cannot let pass. Berlin claims, in The Age of Enlightenment,
that ‘Hume’s philosophical writings need very little interpretation. He is, with the pos-
sible exception of Berkeley, the clearest philosophical writer in an age of exceptional
clarity’ (AE 163). Sadly, this is very far from the truth. More than one hundred years ago
L. A. Selby-Bigge began his introduction to his edition of Hume’s Enquiries by stating
that Hume’s
philosophic writings are to be read with great caution. His pages, especially those of the
Treatise, are so full of matter, he says so many different things in so many different ways and
different connexions, and with so much indifference to what he has said before, that it is very
hard to say positively that he taught, or did not teach, this or that particular doctrine . . . This
makes it easy to find all philosophies in Hume, or, by setting up one statement against another,
none at all.4
One symptom of this, admittedly slightly exaggerated, observation is that scholars of

Hume divide not merely on detail but on the overall orientation and conclusion of
his work. Most famously, scholars disagree over whether his conclusions are entirely
negative and sceptical or whether his theory of human nature is the primary concern
and scepticism an ancillary to this constructive project. And this is not the only major
divide.
It is not therefore correct to say that Hume’s writings are clear if by that it is meant
that their philosophical meaning is transparent. There is, however, a feature of Hume’s
writings that can make it seem as if his meaning is relatively transparent. His prose is
such a thing of beauty that it draws in the reader with an artful easiness, one which
speaks with such an intimacy that one can feel as if Hume is speaking to one personally.
It is rare that philosophical writings evoke such personality, and this imitation of inti-
macy, if I may put it that way, perhaps explains why so many commentators are jealous
of their Hume and are left wondering whether the dissenting party is reading the same
author. So when Stuart Hampshire writes that in ‘in all Berlin’s thinking and writing
one is aware of the ample, generous, humorous and seductive figure of David Hume
smiling in the background’ (IBAC 81), he is rightly picking up on the humane image of
David Hume which comes through his writings rather than what some might prefer to
call his strict philosophical doctrine. After all Berlin was a man for whom individuality
is of first importance and Hume’s writings convey that of a human individual rather
than a dispassionate logician.
This is not to deny that there are relatively uncontroversial aspects of Hume’s philoso-
phy and that these evidently make their way into Berlin’s thinking. Hume’s empiricism
and its allied scepticism about a priori methods in philosophy are obvious features of
3
Oddly enough, Berlin makes a rather basic mistake in his chronology, claiming that Hume’s doctrine
of the association of ideas derives from Hartley, but Hartley didn’t publish his Observations until ten years
after the publication of Hume’s Treatise. See AE 173.
4
From ‘Editor’s Introduction’ in David Hume: Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and
Principles of Morals, 3rd edn, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. vii.
Berlin and Hume 71
Berlin’s thought, as too is Hume’s rejection of a teleological conception of history.

But what of Hume as an ‘Enlightenment’ as opposed to a ‘Counter-Enlightenment’
figure? Which one is he? The answer isn’t clear for a number of reasons. One reason
is the fact that Berlin is often interested in how Hume is appropriated by other
thinkers, some of whom are paradigmatic Counter-Enlightenment figures. So, for
example, Berlin shows in The Magus of the North how Johann Georg Hamann
exploited Hume’s scepticism to try to show that the Enlightenment is self-refuting.
Indeed, Hume’s work was exploited on the continent during the eighteenth century
in support of irrationalists and fideists.5 A second reason for difficulty is that it is far
from clear whether Hume is committed to three principles which Berlin6 identifies
as distinctive of the Enlightenment as opposed to the ‘Counter-Enlightenment’,
namely that (1) all genuine questions can be answered, (2) that our methods allow
that all the answers are in principle knowable, and (3) that all answers are compati-
ble. Now, Hume’s scepticism, at least on certain readings, seems to present a barrier
to both (1) and (2). Hume thinks that our limited cognitive faculties render it
impossible for us to grasp the nature of the powers that underlie the manifest regu-
larities in nature.
These ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and
enquiry . . . The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a
little longer.7
This aspect of Hume’s philosophy I shall not discuss here, though it is interesting to
note that Richard Wollheim draws upon such passages in order to show just how
congenial Hume’s philosophy is for Berlin.8 Wollheim’s remarks occur at the end of a
discussion of the idea of a fixed human nature, and this idea relates to (3), the claim
that all answers are compatible. A particular way in which to reject (3) is to reject the
idea of a fixed nature to human beings, a rejection that goes hand in hand with a plural-
ism about forms of moral identity. Such pluralism is at odds with (3) since it holds that
no single answer to moral problems and related institutions has to be available and,
stronger, the answers to questions raised in different communities may in fact be
incompatible ones. It is this feature of Berlin’s own view that John Gray claims drives a
wedge between Berlin and Hume. Hume’s conception of human nature, according to
Gray, is one of its having a fixed character that is incompatible with the pluralism
Berlin champions. It is this topic to which we now turn, and by way of what might seem
an unexpected route.
5
See e.g. Laurence Bongie, ‘Hume and Skepticism in Late Eighteenth-Century France’, in Johan van der
Zande and Richard Popkin (eds), The Skeptical Tradition around 1800 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), pp. 15–29
and D. Hanson, Fideism and Hume’s Philosophy (New York: Peter Lang, 1993).
6
For a useful discussion, see Robert Wokler, ‘Isaiah Berlin’s Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment’,
IBCE 13–32.
7
Hume: Enquiries, pp. 30–1.
8
Richard Wollheim, ‘The Idea of a Common Human Nature’, IBAC 78–9.
72 P. J. E. Kail
II
In typically hyperbolic manner, Friedrich Nietzsche complains of the ‘family failing of
philosophers’, namely that all philosophers ‘have the common failing of starting out
from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of
him. They involuntarily think of “man” as an aeterna veritas, as something that remains
constant in the midst of flux, as a sure measure of things’ (HAH 1:2).9 Nietzsche rejects
this assumption and thinks we should approach the study of humanity not through
analysis but what he calls a ‘chemistry of the moral, religious and aesthetic conceptions
and sensations, likewise of all the agitations we experience within ourselves in cultural
and social intercourse’ (HAH 1:1). The notion of ‘chemistry’ is apt in the sense that
Nietzsche holds that cultural and history shape human beings in such a way that its
products are properly conceived as compounds rather than mixtures: there are genu-
inely new phenomena that emerge that are not reducible to their constituent elements.
‘Chemistry’—or to use Nietzsche’s later term, ‘genealogy’—is necessary because various
human phenomena cannot be reduced to cultural and historical invariants or under-
stood without essential reference to culture or history.
I begin with Nietzsche because he may seem the chief apostle of the thesis that there
is no fixed human nature, and, indeed, claims like the one above have influenced gen-
erations of thinkers who hold that this thesis. But what is seldom noted is that in the
midst of making these claims Nietzsche tells us that ‘everything essential in the devel-
opment of mankind took place in primeval times, long before the four thousand years
we more or less know about; during these years mankind may well have not altered
very much’ (HAH 1:2, emphasis in original). This claim is important with respect to
Nietzsche’s explanatory aspirations: one thing he wants to do is understand just how
the ‘higher’ emerges from the ‘lower’. How, that is, distinctly human phenomena can
be intelligibly understood in terms of their emergence from other natural phenomena,
and to that end he assumes certain natural facts or general principles about the human
creature which feature as ingredients in such explanations.
So there are some fixed principles for Nietzsche behind all the variegation. Turning
back more than one hundred years and to a chilly Scotland, Hume’s ‘science of human
nature’ introduces a set of general principles which he thinks can explain distinctly
human phenomena, couched in a vocabulary of impressions, ideas, sentiments, and
the association of ideas. Now, I have argued elsewhere,10 these materials constitute a
baseline of the ‘natural’ because such materials were thought sufficient to explain
exhaustively the mental life and behaviour of beasts. Part of Hume’s naturalizing
project is to deny that the differences between us and the beasts mark a significant
9
Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, tr. Reginald Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986). Hereafter HAH.
10
‘The Sceptical Beast of the Beastly Sceptic’, in Constantine Sandis and Mark J. Cain (eds), Human
Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 219–31.
Berlin and Hume 73
difference in kind. But if these are the fixed principles, then in what sense, if any, does
this make for a fixed human nature?
There is no metaphysical necessity to the principles producing what they do. The
most fundamental cognitive processes and beliefs, such as the causal inferences dis-
tinctive of reason or the belief of an external world, emerge as a matter of contingency
but carry with them a deep indispensability. They are expressions of the fundamental
elements of nature without which ‘human nature must immediately perish and go to
ruin’.11 The contingencies of our most basic nature and pre-civilized environment also
make for Hume a near universal practical necessity that is reflected in the social world.
Of all the animals, with which this globe is peopled, there is none towards whom nature seems,
at first sight, to have exercis’d more cruelty than towards man, in the numberless wants and
necessities, with which she has loaded him, and in the slender means, which she affords to the
relieving of these necessities.12
Hume then explains how co-operative behaviour and a respect for property and the
institution of promises emerge in the face of the situation and by appeal to a motiva-
tional psychology Hume thinks it plausible to attribute to such early creatures. Such
practices he calls the ‘artificial virtues’, though, he notes, ‘where an invention is obvious
and absolutely necessary, it may as properly be said to be natural as any thing that pro-
ceeds immediately from original principles, without the intervention of thought or
reflection’.13
Now, Hume’s account here is culturally thin, and deliberately so. He is prescinding
from anything remotely peculiar in human culture and explaining a basic practice. The
fact of social co-operation as a universal feature of human nature does not mean it
cannot be overlaid by a great deal of cultural and historical specificity which may, in
the end, lead to pluralism. Hume here is concerned with a very early stage of human
development and concerned with explaining patterns of human behaviour. How
humanity can be shaped subsequently by society is something that the account of
social co-operation in the Treatise leaves open. But even at this relatively culture-free
stage Hume finds a certain plasticity in human nature. Crucial to Hume’s story is that
the practice emerges through self-interest, and it may seem that he is offering another
variant on the ‘selfish’ theories associated with Hobbes and Mandeville. Hume, on this
view, is offering an artful recapitulation of the central claim that seemingly co-operative
behaviour is the expression of rational self-interest.14 But this reading fails to take into
account the change in the moral psychology of agents that the established conventions
bring about. Whilst it is quite clear that Hume appeals to self-interest in the estab-
lishment of the customs of co-operation, it is quite another thing to say that what
11
A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1978), p. 225.
12
Treatise, p. 484. 13 Ibid.
14
For a recent statement of this view, see Annette Baier, The Cautious Jealous Virtue (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2010).
74 P. J. E. Kail
motivates respect for the conventions needs to be the same self-interest that led to their
establishment. Sympathy with public interest changes the direction of our pre-social
moral sentiments, and so we come to view such practices with moral respect rather
than simply seeing them as serving self-interest, and these newly directed sentiments
take on such ‘firmness and solidity, that they may fall little short of those principles
which are the most essential to our natures, and the deeply radicated in our internal
constitution’.15
This change in our psychology is one instance of Hume’s claim that regarding human
nature ‘changeableness is essential to it’16 and that conventions, necessary for human
life, are nevertheless sometimes ‘contrary to the common principles of human nature,
which accommodate themselves to circumstances, and have no stated invariable
method of operation’.17 This brings us to John Gray’s resistance to the idea that Berlin’s
views can be seen as Humean. Gray notes that Berlin is often compared to Hume, and
that Hume is one of Berlin’s ‘patron saints’.18 But he sees a sharp difference between the
two on the relation between human nature and history. Hume’s account of human
nature as historically invariant, according to Gray, differs fundamentally from Berlin’s
historicist conception, which holds that
human identities, the diverse natures formed for itself by an inventive species, are historical
creations, webs spun across the generations. [This is not] a naturalist conception of human
nature, akin to that of Hume, say, inasmuch as it conceives of human identities as diverse forms
of self-creation and self-transformation of the species and not as mere variations on a constant
nature.19
Unlike Gray, I see no sharp difference between Berlin and Hume. Hume himself says
that humanity is an ‘inventive species’,20 one of changeable nature. The differences
between Berlin and Hume are ones of degree and emphasis, perhaps owing to different
focuses of interest. Hume’s interest in the explanatory project of a science of human
nature means he focuses on commonalities first and variation secondarily, whereas
Berlin’s focus on the problem of liberty and pluralism puts variety and difference first.
Before we come to look at how Humean human nature can accommodate plural moral
natures, two further things need to be discussed briefly.
First, Gray is keen to emphasize the notions of ‘choice’ and ‘self-creation’ in the
constitution of identities. Thus he writes that the ‘deepest divergence of Berlin from
Hume . . . comes in the self-transformative power Berlin attributes to human choice
making, in which he is one with Romantic voluntarism’.21 If such a claim is given its full
metaphysical head, then this is indeed a central difference, crediting Berlin with
something like a transcendent and utterly spontaneous agent. But Gray denies that
15
Treatise, p. 504. For an excellent account of this change in our nature, see Rachel Cohon, Hume’s
Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
16
Ibid., p. 204. 17 Ibid., pp. 532–3.
18
John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (London: Harper Collins, 1995), p. 9. 19 Gray, Isaiah Berlin, p. 74.
20
Treatise, p. 484. 21 Gray, Isaiah Berlin, p. 96.
Berlin and Hume 75
Berlin holds this impossible metaphysical commitment by noting at the end of the
sentence just quoted that Berlin holds the view ‘with decisive reservations’. A footnote
reveals that such a commitment is not a metaphysical one. Gray gives little content to
what the positive view is supposed to be and so one is left in the dark whether this really
marks any genuine difference.
Second, Gray might be forgiven for thinking that Hume is committed to the idea
that human nature is historically invariant. For a number of texts do suggest what
Collingwood claimed of Hume, namely that for him ‘history never repeated itself, but
human nature remained eternally unaltered’.22 Hume is prevented from ‘scientific
history by a substantialistic view of human nature which was really inconsistent with
his philosophical principles’.23 Hume writes, for example, that ‘[m]ankind are so much
the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in
this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of
human nature.’24 But notice here that the talk is of universal principles, and though
these principles are ‘so much the same’ this fact doesn’t foreclose on a diversity of their
expression. Their assumption serves as a methodological heuristic in understanding
past diversity.25
[By] means of this guide [the assumption of common principles], we mount up to the knowl-
edge of men’s inclinations and motives, from their actions, expressions, and even gestures and
again, descend to the interpretation of their actions from our knowledge of their motives and
inclinations. The general observations, treasured up by a course of experience, give us the clue
of human nature, and teach us to unravel all its intricacies.26
The heuristic affords an understanding of ‘manners of men different in different ages

and countries’ and how custom and education ‘mould the human mind from its
infancy, and form it into a fixed and established character’.
The idea that the human mind can be moulded by social environments gives the lie
to the supposedly inflexible fixed human nature. Culture and society change human
beings and determine the ‘humours and turn of thinking’ that constitute ‘the character
of a nation’.27 Elsewhere, Hume refers to such determinants as ‘moral causes’, which he
defines as ‘those circumstances which are fitted to work on the mind as motives or
reasons and which render a particular set of manners habitual to us’ and include ‘the
nature of the government, [and] the revolutions of public affairs’.28 Even some practice
as specific as professions can affect the nature of the human being so that a social
environment can fix ‘the character of different professions, and alters even that disposition,
22
R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 82.
23
Collingwood, The Idea of History, p. 76. 24 Hume: Enquiries, p. 93.
25
For two useful discussions of this point see Spencer Wertz, ‘Hume, History, and Human Nature’,
Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (1975), 481–96 and Alix Cohen, ‘In Defence of Hume’s Historical Method’,
British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 13 (1995), 489–502.
26
Hume: Enquiries, p. 84. 27 Treatise, p. 316.
28
‘Of National Characters’, in Essays: Moral, Literary and Political, ed. Eugene Miller (Indianapolis, IN:
Liberty Fund, 1985), p. 198.
76 P. J. E. Kail
which the particular members receive from the hand of nature’.29 The Treatise makes a
similar point in connection with the stations of life and more generally:
The skin, pores, muscles, and nerves of a day-labourer are different from those of a man of
quality: So are his sentiments, actions and manners. The different stations of life influence
the whole fabric, external and internal; and these different stations arise necessarily, because
uniformly, from the necessary and uniform principles of human nature . . . There is a general
course of nature in human actions, as well as in the operations of the sun and climate. There
are also characters peculiar to different nations and particular persons, as well as common
to mankind.30
III
Hume then holds that there are common principles of human nature, but there is a
great deal of variation depending on the particular social environment in which
human beings find themselves. It would, I think, be tendentious to call this, as Gray
does, ‘mere variation’, partly because there is nothing that prevents a great deal of dif-
ference in human character owing to moral causes. However, Gray might be resistant
on two other grounds. The first is that despite the appearance of pluralism that Hume’s
theory affords, other aspects of Hume’s theory push towards a reduction of values that
makes any such pluralism superficial. The second is that even if there were pluralism,
its causes have no relation to ‘self-creation’ or ‘self-transformation’ and it is this that is
distinctive of humanity and partially explains and legitimates pluralism.
Let us begin with the first objection. At first sight, Hume’s disjunctive account of the
virtues expressed in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals may seem rather
reductive. Virtues comprise those qualities that are either agreeable or useful to their
possessors or useful or agreeable to others. There is therefore no genuine pluralism for
Hume: all moral questions can be solved by appeal to these universal standards.
However, the notions of ‘agreeable’ and ‘useful’ are less statements of the substance of
the good and more about its form, a form that can vary considerably. The way in which
Hume treats the notions shows just how context-dependent and culturally specific
they are. To see this, note first that virtues are dispositional properties, but have many
different bearers. Military valour and benevolence are very different but each bear the
disposition to be useful to others, and wit and sexual attractiveness are again different
from each other but share the disposition to be agreeable. So Hume recognizes many
different bearers of the useful and the agreeable. He also recognizes cultural and his-
torical variation. One cause of variation is simply mistaken judgement about the utility
of a practice like tyrannicide. It was thought to be a useful practice, but it turns out not
to be so. However, the more significant determinant of variation has to do with the fact
that ‘agreeability’ and ‘utility’ have no content unless embedded in particular social
‘Of National Characters’, p. 198.

29
Treatise, pp. 402–3.
30
Berlin and Hume 77
environment. The expressions ‘is useful to’ and ‘is agreeable to’ cannot be parsed
independently of the human circumstance. So, for example, in ‘ancient times, bodily
strength and dexterity . . . was . . . more esteemed now than at present’ because of its
‘greater use and importance in war’, but its utility reduces considerably in peaceful
societies.31 Sometimes ‘magnanimity, greatness of mind, disdain of slavery, inflexible
rigour and integrity may better suit the circumstance of one age than another’.32 And,
to use my favourite illustration of the point, a
degree of luxury may be ruinous and pernicious in a native of Switzerland, which only fosters
the arts, and encourages industry in a Frenchman or Englishman. We are not, therefore to
expect, either the same sentiments, or the same laws in Berne, which prevail in London
or Paris.33
Culture and circumstance then determine what constitutes the useful and agreeable
rather than there being context-free accounts of the useful and agreeable upon which
humans can converge. True, Hume thinks that such a convergence is possible, but
there is nothing to suggest that it is inevitable. This is compatible with thinking that the
disjunction provides grounds of criticism, and that some forms of life are for Hume
illegitimate. The kinds of severe asceticism associated with what Hume calls the
‘monkish virtues’ and ‘artificial lives’ where religious and philosophical systems lead to
fetishistic behaviours expresses a ‘contempt for this life’.34 Outside of what Hume thinks
to be a false metaphysical system, the behaviours not merely fail to fall under the useful
and the agreeable but become unintelligible: ‘no one can answer what will please or
displease them’. Perhaps in the end Gray will baulk at the extent to which Hume’s dis-
junction of the useful and the agreeable allows for the commensurability for different
evaluative practices. But incommensurability of value is not a straightforward conse-
quence of the claim that human nature is historicist. Perhaps the difference between
Berlin and Hume comes down to one of pessimism or optimism, with the latter holding
that the variation in humanity in the end will not be so great as to rule out the possibility
of reconciliation. But it is not clear to me that this difference expresses a more fundamental
difference concerning the fixity or otherwise of human nature.
Let us now turn to the second way in which Gray might resist my bringing Hume
closer to his understanding of Berlin. Gray’s Berlin holds that human beings are
inherently unfinished and incomplete, as essentially self-transforming and only partly deter-
minate . . . It is also a view of man in which the idea of a common or constant human nature has
little place, one in which the capacity of man as a supremely inventive species to fashion for its
self a plurality of divergent natures is central.35
I noted above that Berlin (nor Gray, come to that) doesn’t place any invidious metaphysical
construction on this idea, but one thought might be that the notation of choice is what
31
Hume: Enquiries, p. 245.
32
Ibid., p. 335. 33 Ibid., p. 335.
34
Ibid., p. 343. 35 Isaiah Berlin, pp. 9–10.
78 P. J. E. Kail
underwrites the pluralism and is central to it. Perhaps this marks a difference between
Hume and Gray’s Berlin, where choice for Berlin plays a greater value-constituting role
than it does for Hume. But if Gray is right about Berlin, the value of choice stems from
the fact that it permits a pluralist variegation of human moral identities. If so, there is
little or nothing in the Humean picture that prevents a metaphysically palatable con-
ception of variegated self-creation. Famously, in Book I of the Treatise, Hume rejects
the idea of a substantial self, instead substituting a notion of the self as a bundle of per-
ceptions. Here the term ‘self ’ is treated as a synonym for mind, and its supposed unity.
In Book II, ‘Of the passions’, Hume is concerned with the self qua moral self and allows
a more generous conception of the features which enter into our idea of it, and in
particular the enduring character traits that constitute the virtues. This is not an aban-
donment of the metaphysics of the bundle theory but instead a richer and essentially
evaluative self-conception which lends an ideal unity or self-constitution. This idea
has at its centre pride and humility, passions that render salient to the bundle that
which has evaluative significance. This makes the moral self heavily dependent on the
social world and its evaluative atmosphere, which is communicated via sympathy.
Our reputation, our character, our name are considerations of vast weight and importance;
and even the other causes of pride; virtue, beauty and riches; have little influence, when not
seconded by the opinions and sentiments of others.36
Whilst there is no emphasis on choice here—so that there is no self ‘doing’ the creating—
there is nevertheless the creation of a self through the interplay of the human and the
social. Perhaps Gray would find this a too passive a conception of self-creation. But
given the variation in the circumstance of value and the social nature of the self, I think
it is recognizable underpinning for ‘self-creation’.
I have argued that Hume’s conception of human nature is far more flexible than
Gray, and many others, suppose. Hume can accommodate a pluralism of moral com-
munities that Gray seems to suppose he cannot, and has a conception of the self where
moral identities themselves are sensitive to cultural and historical variation. Berlin’s
‘patron saint’ could easily be Gray’s as well.
36
Treatise, p. 316.
5
Berlin and Montesquieu
Karen O’Brien
In October 1955 Isaiah Berlin read a lecture to the British Academy on the topic of
‘Montesquieu’. The essay was published in the Proceedings, and reprinted much later in
Against the Current (1979), a landmark collection that featured his major statement on
the Counter-Enlightenment as well as essays on Machiavelli, Vico, and Hume. Little
noticed in Berlin criticism, the Montesquieu essay is an impressive example of Berlin’s
rhetorical method of intellectual rehabilitation, and provides valuable insight into his
early reappraisal of the Enlightenment and its enemies. Rhetorical method and intellec-
tual genealogies are audible in this piece, as elsewhere in Berlin’s work, in simultaneous
development; he gives his audience a vivid dramatization of this chapter in the history
of ideas. The essay warrants close analysis both as a fine specimen of Berlin’s animated,
through selective, practice of historical salvaging, and as a way-point on his journey
towards a more nuanced and paradoxical account of the Enlightenment. That account
was never, ultimately, synthetic. Yet, across multiple sites of essays such as this, he
projected on to the great intellectual debates of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries a degree of complexity that ultimately eroded any clear sense of the duality of
Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. Berlin does not provide anything resem-
bling an accurate or rounded account of Montesquieu’s thought, but he does give a
practical demonstration of how the brilliance of Montesquieu’s work actuates, and
should continue to actuate, a continuous re-engagement with the Enlightenment by all
those concerned with the ancestors of the liberal, pluralist Western state.
At the time of the British Academy lecture, Montesquieu had a well-established rep-
utation in England as the formative influence behind early nineteenth-century French
liberal thought, American constitutionalism, American Federalist and Anti-Federalist
debates about the stability of enlarged republics, and the Scottish Enlightenment reap-
praisal of commerce.1 Early to mid twentieth-century histories of the Enlightenment
gave less prominence to Montesquieu than to Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, and to
some extent his work fell between the cracks of celebratory academic revivals of
1
See Ursula Haskins Gonthier, Montesquieu and England: Enlightened Exchanges, 1689–1755 (London:
Pickering and Chatto, 2010).
80 Karen O’Brien
Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and secularism (such as Peter Gay’s) and critiques

of its utopian faith in reason (such as those by Carl Becker, Horkheimer, and Adorno).
Early in the century, Montesquieu had been the subject of studies by Gustave Lanson
and Joseph Dedieu and was the starting point of Paul Hazard’s La Pensée européenne
au XVIIIe siècle de Montesquieu à Lessing (1946). Relatively little space was accorded
to him, however, in Ernst Cassirer’s Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (1932). Cassirer
gave a brief overview of Montesquieu as the founder of a new method of social sci-
ence based on ideal types, or ‘pre-formed’ forms of government, and discussed how
he attempted ‘to establish by these concepts, beyond any such empirical generality, a
universality of meaning which is expressed in the individual forms of government’.2
In other words, and consistent with his view of the Enlightenment as a project of medi-
ation from the particular to the general through the exercise of active reasoning,
Cassirer emphasized Montesquieu’s philosophical extrapolation of a formal schema
from social and historical variables. Berlin was critical of Cassirer’s book in his review
of 1953, although he adhered to its wider view of Montesquieu as an Enlightenment
originator of tolerant liberalism. He was also influenced, as Avi Lifschitz’s essay
shows, by another major overview of the Enlightenment from the same era, Friedrich
Meinecke’s Die Entstehung des Historismus (1936). Meinecke documented the rise—
within the Enlightenment and beyond in German nineteenth-century writing—of a
particularizing, historicizing strain of thought that broke decisively with older tradi-
tions of natural law and rationalism. Meinecke discussed Montesquieu but found him
difficult to evaluate. He characterized him as a morally normative thinker, wedded to
mechanistic notions of causality, who nevertheless had a particularizing feel for differ-
ence and diversity in society and history. In moments of pragmatic lucidity, Meinecke
conceded, Montesquieu was one who felt that ‘making a general custom out of all
particular customs would be a rash thing to do’.3
Berlin may have been struck by Meinecke’s ambivalent positioning of Montesquieu
within the trajectory of German Romantic historicism, though not sufficiently struck
to include Montesquieu’s works in his somewhat cursory anthology The Age of
Enlightenment: The Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, published in 1956. Berlin’s exten-
sive ruminations on the Enlightenment, after his return to Oxford in 1946, were clearly
shaped by Meinecke’s feat of selective recuperation, and by his interest in a ‘long
Enlightenment’ that had beneficial outputs for the kind of historicist liberalism of
which he approved. In addition to drawing upon both Cassirer and Meinecke, he
started to reprise self-consciously a nineteenth-century French tradition, from Guizot
and Michelet, of dividing the Enlightenment into its moderate and extreme philosophe
components. His unpublished 1952 lectures at Bryn Mawr College on ‘Political Ideas
2
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 211–12.
3
Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans. J. E. Anderson, revised
H. D. Schmidt (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 141.
Berlin and Montesquieu 81
in the Romantic Age’ inaugurated what was to be an intensive series of reflections, in

the coming years, on the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, and the
differing conceptions of freedom and values these movements entertained. Here he
identified many positive qualities in Enlightenment writers, but also started to interro-
gate the Enlightenment assumption that conflicting views about values or freedom
might somehow be resolved by the re-education of humanity.4 Montesquieu could not
be counted among the class of Enlightenment re-educators; indeed, he argued that
good law-making and statecraft must begin with an acceptance of the near impossibil-
ity of comprehensive social re-education. Berlin’s reading of Montesquieu may have
sharpened his emerging insight that ambitious projects for social re-education are
dangerous, that only liberal, democratic polities can peacefully house inherent con-
flicts in human values, and that values are relative to the cultures and polities that
engender them. Montesquieu offered a vision of statecraft as the art of acknowledging
and holding together in equilibrium the conflicting force fields in social and political
life. Yet (a downside for Berlin) Montesquieu also maintained that laws and justice
are not simply the containers or the outputs of that high-pressure equilibrium, but
ultimately bear a relationship to natural law.
Montesquieu’s very contradictoriness made him an attractive vehicle for Berlin
to think through the ambivalent legacy of the Enlightenment, and in the 1955 essay
we witness him clearing ground, lining up the admirable and less admirable parties
in the historical debate, and establishing his own personal allegiances. As Ken
Koltun-Fromm’s essay in this volume makes clear, Berlin was a master of verbal per-
formance, and he possessed a generous, highly engaging public voice. Through careful
forensic organization of his talks, he would sometimes enact the role of a prosecutor of
his subject, sometimes the role of a defender, gradually bringing his audience round to
his point of view. His performances were usually verbally dictated and then set down
in writing: they thus maintained the air of sequentially thought-through, self-aware, and
ultimately self-reflexive responses to the promptings of an initial topic.5 What the
Montesquieu essay shows us is Berlin’s conception of doing the history of ideas as a
kind of active practice and exploration through rhetorical performance within the
concentrated generic space of the essay. This encompasses the idea of the ‘essai’ in the
French sense: an attempt, or an experiment on a historical subject by means of mim-
icry, sometimes by arraignment, and sometimes by re-posing the writer’s questions or
speculating what the writer might say were he there in a trans-historical tutorial and
could therefore be asked to defend what he has said.
The essay on Montesquieu is a feat of historical recuperation, a subtle rewriting of
the history of the Enlightenment, emphasizing its most palatable elements, and also, in
Berlin’s own terms, ‘an act of intellectual self-extension’. In the essay, we observe Berlin’s
subtly manipulative, labile style, his capacity for ventriloquism, his ‘genius for transposing
4
See Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), pp. 201–2.
5
On the development of Berlin’s style, see Ignatieff, Berlin, p. 195.
82 Karen O’Brien
himself into antithetical minds’, his reluctance to reveal, until very near the end of his
essays, his own authoritative voice.6 We nevertheless also see the way that he would
back-load quotations, as confirming his own insights, rather than, as is the more usual
intellectual-historical method, to initiate hypothesis, argument, and confirmation.
Quotations from Montesquieu confirm Berlin’s own insights rather than prompting
them. Berlin insinuates his argument by means of long, enumerative, often paratacti-
cal sentences, whose force is distributed across the sentence rather than towards a final
cadence. He seeks to capture the complexity and contradictoriness of Montesquieu’s
thought, and he marshals this thought in a very conspicuous present tense, converging
upon an ingratiating, yet emphatic, first person plural towards the end. We thus move
through the essay towards a final identification between Berlin and Montesquieu him-
self. Since Berlin believes that Montesquieu has not been sufficiently recognized as an
important thinker, his strategy is to perform a rehabilitation of Montesquieu, from an
opening accusation of obsolescence to an assertion of the relevance of Montesquieu as
a thinker inseparable from the urgency and persuasiveness of Berlin’s own emerging
vision of politics, liberty, and culture.
The essay therefore begins with an obituary:
Jeremy Bentham, in one of the lyrical moments which are more frequent in his writings than
is commonly supposed, writing half a century after the death of Montesquieu, exclaimed:
‘Locke—dry, cold, languid, wearisome, will live for ever. Montesquieu—rapid, brilliant, glorious,
enchanting, will not outlive his century’. (AC 130)
As well as his characteristic, mischievous mode of beginning with a provocation, there

is a subtle assertion of authority; he is telling us that he knows more of Bentham than
we probably do because he has spotted that Bentham occasionally lapsed into ‘lyrical
moments’. Berlin goes on to observe that Bentham’s mode of assessment here is, in a
brilliant phrase, ‘characteristically quantitative’ (AC 130). He then explains how, in the
nineteenth century, Montesquieu endured the enormous condescension of posterity:
either his ideas were so thoroughly absorbed into the mainstream of nineteenth-century
liberalism that it appeared at the time that he had nothing new to add, or—and here
Berlin momentarily adopts that condescending perspective—‘time had made patent
his errors’ (AC 131). Berlin then addresses the question of Montesquieu’s sociology,
explains how it was loftily dismissed by Buckle, Comte, Durkheim, and Spencer, and
then adds by way of ironic revelation that they too are ‘half forgotten now’ (AC 132).
Just after this sentence comes a sudden and dramatic turn. Berlin asserts ‘on the contrary,
I should like to argue that Montesquieu’s views have far more relevance to our own
situation than those of his nineteenth-century successors. It is their views rather than
his that seem obsolete in the bleak light of today’ (AC 132). He positions Durkheim
and the others in a modern, post-war bleakness, and sets about rearranging the intel-
lectual genealogies of the twentieth century.
6
Ignatieff, Berlin, p. 224.
In the second section of the essay, Berlin asks to ‘begin with some well-known facts’,
namely those of Montesquieu’s life and the equally incontrovertible, monumental fact
of his discovery, as Berlin puts it, of the intelligibility of human diversity, individually
and in aggregate across cultures and histories according to some fundamental
explanatory laws (AC 132). This was Montesquieu’s great insight. Where most of his
Enlightenment contemporaries saw only blind chance and irrational forces at work in
history, Montesquieu saw an underlying unity. Vico, at least, had ‘found a thread in this
seeming labyrinth’, and Berlin therefore speculates as to what Montesquieu might have
thought of Vico had he known he existed; in him he might have found a mind that
‘could organise the scattered data by means of the new principles which he had brought
to light’ (AC 134). But Berlin’s social instincts quickly recall the social gulf between the
distinguished Président à Mortier and the nobody Vico: ‘he was an obscure, pover-
ty-ridden, Neapolitan recluse, and no one in France read him, or paid the slightest
attention to him’ (AC 134).
Berlin goes on to talk about Montesquieu’s discovery of the detectable, regular
structures underlying society, laws, and politics, along with Montesquieu’s dislike of
injustice, cruelty, and intolerance. He highlights the sceptical tenor of his thought
amid an Enlightenment current running into wild optimism. This optimism he char-
acteristically presents as a cluster of radical, and radically naïve, ideas: the philosophes
believed that they were living on the threshold of a new age, within sight of the ideal ending.
The enemy was still strong but the advance of science would inevitably render him progres-
sively more ridiculous and impotent. Nothing could in the end stand in the path of scientific
knowledge, and knowledge alone could make men happy, virtuous, wise and free. This victori-
ous gospel travelled far beyond the confines of the French salons. It found a responsive echo in
almost every country in Europe – and even in Russia. (AC 136)
The reflexive reference to Russia introduces a wry touch at the end. Berlin’s prose
captures the insistence and comic over-self-confidence of the philosophes, and their
conviction that there is only one path to social emancipation and to progress. Montesquieu
is exempt from this group of philosophes who would force people to be free, prescribe a
single goal for society, and predict a single end for history.
In the next section Berlin presents Montesquieu as the father of a more empirical,
moderate strand of the Enlightenment that resisted misguided attempts to derive an
ideal social system from human nature. Where others had found De l’esprit des lois
at times incoherent and illegible, Berlin applauds its shapelessness and its morass
of concrete detail. Montesquieu sees some human commonalities in terms of men’s
instinct for self-preservation, for pleasure, and for their general self-interest, but
asserts that these flower differently within different social organisms. These organisms
Montesquieu classifies according to the outer form of political organization (despot-
isms, monarchies, and republics), and to their inner structure or dynamic (respectively
fear, honour, and virtue). Montesquieu does consider that societies have goals in the
Aristotelian sense, but these are shaped by climate, by political structures, by customs
84 Karen O’Brien
and traditions, and can be redirected. On account of this difference of goals as well as
situations, means, and conditions there can be no universal solution for all societies
and no hierarchy of societies. Montesquieu’s political relativism, however, has no taint
of moral subjectivism: ‘He did not, like Hume, say that only that was good or right
which men approved, for he did not pay much attention to sentiment. Moral and polit-
ical values for him revealed themselves in behaviour rather than in articulated thought
or feeling; if they fitted the circumstances—if they suited the instincts of a given soci-
ety, and were not self-destructive—they were not to be criticised’ (AC 144). There is, in
other words, a level of acceptance of the cohesion of social organisms and the inherent
wisdom (perhaps, ‘embedded’ rationality) in the way such organisms instinctively
behave that obviates the need to appeal to the uniformity of human sentiment. Insofar
as the moral and political values revealed in social behaviour are values at all, Berlin
discreetly endorses Montesquieu’s vision of a world where different values may be dif-
ferently embodied in many polities. Even so, Montesquieu’s pluralism is mainly at the
aggregate, global level rather than within societies themselves, and where it is internal
to societies it may be the result of accident or compromise:
Where no notion of objective ends exists, subjectivism, which is its correlative, means little.
Nor is this attitude sceptical or morally indifferent; and if it be said that it belongs to a man not
principally interested in moral problems, or to one who does not probe too deeply into the
goals and principles for which men are prepared to give their lives, there is little that can be said
in reply. (AC 145)
Montesquieu, as Berlin’s breezy summary implies, is morally laissez-faire on points where

Berlin is more inclined to a moralizing flourish; and here we have in one extended
sentence a juxtaposition between the French writer’s well-bred, libertin aversion to
moral probing and the Russian intellectual’s self-consciously post-war seriousness.
Value pluralism is not, Berlin explains, the same as cultural or political relativism
because the latter does not address principled disagreement when it is internal to
polities: ‘It does not seem to have occurred to him . . . that two equally rational human
beings . . . could quarrel about ends, and dismiss each other’s moral notions as objectively
and demonstrably false or wicked’ (AC 144).
Further testing of Montesquieu is therefore needed, and Berlin does so by sliding in
and out of the perspectives of his detractors. He arraigns him at the court of the philos-
ophes for his failure to subscribe to the idea of human perfectibility. Other accusations
follow: ‘there is still a graver charge against him: that he is not a wholehearted determinist’,
for which Montesquieu is then arraigned in the court of nineteenth-century sociology:
‘Montesquieu’s lapses from the strict determinism were noted, with some distress, by
Durkheim, when, as a young man, he began to investigate Montesquieu’s claims to be
the forerunner, if not the pioneer, of sociology’ (AC 150). Berlin nicely catches the hubris
of youthful disapprobation here, and cheerfully convicts Montesquieu of perpetrating
episodic and unsystematic sociology (‘It is to the eternal credit of Montesquieu that he
committed this very crime’). He then turns his focus upon Montesquieu’s concept of
liberty, which is not, for the Frenchman, limited to doing whatever one might wish, but
rather being able to do what one ought to will, without being coerced. For Montesquieu’s
famous definition to make any sense, there must be a relationship between freedom
and justice, and it is on this topic of justice that Berlin finds, at last, a contradictory
metaphysician in Montesquieu: one who slides into the old European habit of referring
notions of justice to the transcendent, external, standard. If this is a rusty old meta-
physical trap for Montesquieu, Berlin asks, why did he fall into it? His explanation is
that Montesquieu had a peculiar horror of despotism. Without that horror, there
would have been no secure basis in Montesquieu’s multi-polar politics for a normative
critique of violent and coercive regimes. Justice can never be, in the Hobbesian sense,
that which the ruler wills, nor simply that which the laws dictate. For most readers of
Montesquieu, this critique of despotism is an obvious and persistent, rather than an
adventitious, feature of the whole of De l’esprit des lois as well as the Lettres persanes. Yet
Berlin comes very late in his exegesis to the question of despotism, and underestimates
the ways in which Montesquieu positions this form of government as his negative
point of reference.
Undeterred by what he acknowledges to be Montesquieu’s normative conception of
natural law and justice, particularly as they are violated by despotic regimes, Berlin
returns triumphantly to his great virtues as a thinker:
He was one of the few thinkers of his age who had grasped one of the central characteristics of
the moral history of mankind, that the ends pursued by men are many and various and often
incompatible with one another, that this leads to unavoidable collisions between civilisations,
to differences between the ideals of the same community at different times, and of different
communities at the same time, and to conflicts within communities, classes, groups and within
the individual consciousness. Furthermore, he perceived that, given the vast variety of situations,
and the extreme complexity and intricacy of individual cases, no single moral system, let alone
a single moral or political goal, could provide the universal solution to all human problems,
everywhere, at all times. (AC 158)
The first sentence here epitomizes Berlin’s style. It is enormously complex, very well
orchestrated syntactically, distributed in terms of the kind of weight that he gives to the
different components, but nevertheless balanced and intelligible as a whole. As befits a
sentence concerned with the ‘central characteristics of the moral history of mankind’, it
is at once assertive and indeterminate. Berlin does not end with the tempting finality of
the chiasmus (‘same community at different times/different communities at the same
time’), but extends the line and his thinking out beyond synchronic and diachronic
conceptions of ‘community’ to the individual consciousness. The pluralism of ends,
ideals, and values, for which Berlin makes Montesquieu an advocate on his own behalf,
is manifest in communities but ultimately originates in man’s divided inner self. Berlin’s
stylistic choreography enacts Montesquieu’s own feat of regulated open-endedness.
Berlin admires his ability to contain a complex account of environmental, social, and
moral differences within a coherent framework—a framework that is not so unitary or
86 Karen O’Brien
so obviously didactic that it breaches a notion of the complexity of history and of politics
themselves. Montesquieu is commended for being—unusually among Enlightenment
thinkers—a principled opponent of universal solutions. Montesquieu’s belief in ‘objec-
tive truth’ can thus be set aside in favour of his pluralism, in which he believed ‘more
deeply’ (AC 159). Giving a brief overview of the horrors of the French Revolution and
other nineteenth-century upheavals, Berlin then claims him for the ranks of those who
stand in opposition to the ‘terrible simplifiers’ of history, Hitler and Lenin silently but
unmistakably among them. As the essay closes, Berlin’s first person plural merges his
own perspective with that of Montesquieu: ‘all we can do is to try to frustrate as few
human beings as possible, whatever their purposes’ (AC 160). It is unclear who that
‘we’ is supposed to be, but it clearly encompasses, Berlin, Montesquieu, and other like-
minded people in the present time. By way of restoring a degree of objectivity to his
assessment of Montesquieu, Berlin enlists, at the very end, an oppositional voice, that
of the jurist Maxime Le Roy, who claimed Montesquieu would have left nothing
behind, had it not been for his doctrine of the separation of powers. ‘Not much more,
perhaps,’ Berlin rejoins in one final sentence, ‘than a dry sense of historical reality, as
concrete as Burke’s and free from his violent prejudices and romantic distortions; and
an understanding of what men, or, at any rate, human societies live by, unparalleled
since Aristotle’ (AC 161).
The case is carried for the importance and the contemporary relevance of what
Montesquieu had to say. Through this rhetorical act of recovery and partial assimila-
tion, Berlin is able to work through his own emerging ideas about cultural pluralism
and the genealogies of the Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment, and Romanticism.
Undoubtedly, this comes at the price of a highly selective and somewhat distorted
account of Montesquieu himself. He unambiguously positions Montesquieu as a
liberal before liberalism, and in this he anticipates one of the most influential twentieth-
century reinterpretations, Thomas Pangle’s Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism in
1973, which argued that there is a hidden design within De l’esprit des lois that framed a
critique of republicanism and instantiated a modern kind of liberalism. Montesquieu’s
liberalism is not rights-based, and does not conceive of citizenship in abstract terms,
but imagines the citizen or subject as highly embodied, and highly diversified by gen-
der, climate, race, and other external physical factors. In the context of republican
thought, it is also clear that Berlin agrees with Montesquieu that participation in a
republican polity may be the expression of the power of the citizen, but that ability to
participate is not the same thing as liberty.7 Liberty, for Montesquieu, is something that
gains room within the fabric of social complexity. It can belong to women as well as
men, paradoxically more so in monarchies where men have less formal political power
than in republics.8 Its preconditions are multifaceted and its essence is the ability to
follow one’s customs, traditions, beliefs, and inclinations under conditions where the
7
See Céline Spector, Montesquieu: liberté, droit et histoire (Paris: Michalon, 2010), p. 170.
8
See Mona Ozouf, Les mots des femmes: essai sur la singularité française (Paris: Fayard, 1995).
state does not compel people to act or choose against their own grain. This has obvious
resonance for Berlin, particularly for the ways in which Montesquieu’s pluralism
shaped his liberalism. He sees Montesquieu as creating a space for negative liberty
without any claim that liberty actually confers virtue or superiority, and without any
grading of political societies or entities. Montesquieu was less guilty than most of the
deluded anthropology of the Enlightenment whereby the exercise of choice and free-
dom was assumed to express and improve human nature, and Berlin appreciated this.
Yet this leads Berlin to assume, erroneously, that Montesquieu shared his own lack of
interest in, or neutral stance towards, the differing institutional forms that protect liberty
and ethical pluralism. As Jeremy Waldron’s essay in this volume argues, Enlightenment
constitutionalism was a blind spot in Berlin’s work, and particularly limiting in his
account of Montesquieu. As Waldron points out, Berlin has very little to say about the
famous account of the separation of powers and of the mixed constitution of England,
or about the pivotal role that Montesquieu played in the modernizing of classical
republicanism. He also downplays the practical emphasis of Montesquieu’s work. De
l’esprit de lois is greatly concerned with providing lessons of prudence and moderation
to magistrates and governors, as well as to the people who are governed by them.
Montesquieu aims to inculcate a spirit of moderation into the practice of government
and law-making, and to identify the most expedient institutions, customs, and behav-
iours which a governor might seek to foster or preserve.9 Though he resists designating
some customs as irrational and others as rational, Montesquieu does suggest that some
are more malleable than others, and some tend to better social outcomes than others,
and that law-makers and rulers can make practical use of this insight. Finally, although
he is not alone in this, Berlin does not take seriously Montesquieu’s attraction to repub-
lics, particularly the heroic, if unsustainable, republics of the ancient world, or acknow-
ledge the way that they were animated by the homogenizing principle of ‘virtue’, which
militates internally against pluralism of almost any kind. He assumes that, like Hume,
Montesquieu thought of them as highly effective, somewhat repellent, machines for
coercing men to act against their more natural instincts for self-indulgence, relaxation,
and disagreement.
In 1955, Berlin was writing about Montesquieu with an enthusiastic air of discovery
and self-discovery. By the time of his 1973 article ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, he
felt able to confirm that Montesquieu was one of the ‘sharp deviationists’ from the
Enlightenment mainstream, albeit one not wholly free from scientific rationalism and
a fondness for natural law (AC 19). Avi Lifschitz in his essay in this volume regards
such concessions to Montesquieu, Hume, and some of the other ‘deviationists’ as, in
some respects, tokenistic, or as exceptions that prove the rule of a monist, anti-pluralist
Enlightenment. However, it is also possible to position Montesquieu as more fun-
damental to the complex genealogy, in Berlin’s thought, of the Enlightenment,
Counter-Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the many strands that were woven through
9
Spector, Montesquieu, p. 24.
88 Karen O’Brien
all three. Robert Wokler has explored Berlin’s ‘Enlightenment disposition, malgré
lui’, and recent commentators have traced continuities in liberal thought between
Montesquieu and Berlin.10 Montesquieu himself had elements of the Romantic dispo-
sition, malgré lui: a particularizing, sceptical, and humane acceptance of differences
in goals, dispositions, and ends that linked him to Burke and to Romanticism, while
reinforcing and preserving the Enlightenment faith in reason, tolerance, and freedom
from state tyranny. It would be unrepresentative of Berlin’s thought to set aside this
celebratory recreation of Montesquieu as merely an ‘exception’ or a roadblock along an
increasingly smooth path to a dispensable Enlightenment.
10
Robert Wokler, ‘Isaiah Berlin’s Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment’, IBAC 20. See e.g. Dennis
C. Rasmussen, The Pragmatic Enlightenment: Recovering the Liberalism of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and
Voltaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 82.
6
Isaiah Berlin and the Origins of
the ‘Totalitarian’ Rousseau
Christopher Brooke
It is obvious that Isaiah Berlin did not like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and it is not difficult
to think of some possible reasons. But I want to begin this chapter by suggesting that
we can choose to be puzzled by this dislike of Rousseau perhaps a bit more than we
usually are. Jeremy Waldron elsewhere in this collection discusses Berlin’s neglect of
what he calls ‘Enlightenment constitutionalism’, focusing on the ways in which he
seemed to lack interest in the hard work of designing a constitutional order in which
self-interested, not always virtuous, ambitious men might live together in peace, pros-
perity, and freedom. Hearing Waldron’s paper, I was reminded of Rousseau’s attitudes
to modern constitutionalism, some of which can be organized under his sarcastic
label, ‘the masterpiece of policy in our century’.1 Rousseau—like Berlin—was generally
in favour of values such as freedom and equality, but was quite sceptical towards the
actually existing constitutionalisms of his own day. Europe was heading into an age of
violent revolutions, he thought, and no good would come of them—another point
of agreement with Berlin’s profoundly anti-revolutionary sensibility—and he also
thought that the people we might call the progressive intellectuals of his day didn’t
understand what they were doing with their schemes of social and political improve-
ment, and that this would contribute to their likelihood of going badly wrong.2
Rousseau, like Berlin, had one foot in the ‘Counter-Enlightenment’, without surren-
dering entirely to it. Rousseau, like Berlin, described a number of different visions of
human freedom and the good life across his various works, from Spartan citizens,
to the denizens of Clarens, to solitary walkers. Unusually among Enlightenment intel-
lectuals, perhaps—and the contrast with Voltaire is especially striking here—Rousseau
1
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Preface to Narcisse, in Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (eds), Œuvres
complètes (Paris, 1964–9), vol. 2, p. 968. For discussion, see Nannerl O. Keohane, ‘ “The Masterpiece of
Policy in Our Century”: Rousseau on the Morality of the Enlightenment’, Political Theory, 6 (1978),
457–84.
2
See, in particular, Béla Kapossy, ‘The Sociable Patriot: Isaak Iselin’s Protestant Reading of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’, History of European Ideas, 27 (2001), 153–70 (pp. 155–8).
90 Christopher Brooke
was also not hostile to Judaism. Perhaps Berlin might have warmed to him on that
score? Might his sharp antagonism towards Rousseau in part be rooted in what Freud
once called the narcissism of small differences?
No. The differences were bigger than that. And the antagonism—well, it was
antagonistic. Here are some of the ways Berlin talks about Rousseau. In his radio address
of November 1952, Rousseau’s tone, he tells us, is ‘exactly that . . . of a maniac . . . like a
mad mathematician’ whose ‘answer has . . . a kind of lunacy’.3 In the manuscript from
the same period that was posthumously published as Political Ideas in the Romantic
Age, Berlin repeats his charge three times. Rousseau ‘preaches’ his argument about the
general will ‘with the almost lunatic intensity of a somewhat crack-brained visionary’;
Rousseau looks for a way of squaring total liberty with total conformity, Berlin says,
‘with the fanatical cunning of a maniac’. ‘His polemic against the babel of voices all
claiming to speak for nature is acute, entertaining and convincing’, Berlin writes, ‘until
one realises that he is like the lunatic who rejects the claims of other inmates of his
asylum to be Napoleon because he himself is Napoleon.’4
In his notes for the Flexner Lectures which Berlin gave at Bryn Mawr earlier the
same year, he uses the phrase ‘lunatic cunning’,5 and the only other example I can find
of his using those words is with reference to Adolf Hitler, in his essay on Winston
Churchill that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1949.6 And Berlin did associate
Rousseau with the fascist dictators:
Rousseau is the greatest militant lowbrow of history, a kind of guttersnipe of genius, and figures
like Carlyle, and to some extent Nietzsche, and certainly D. H. Lawrence and d’Annunzio, as
well as révolté, petit bourgeois dictators like Hitler and Mussolini, are his heirs. (FIB 41)
Rousseau always went along with Carlyle, Nietzsche, and Lawrence in Berlin’s mind:
they appear together in Political Ideas in the Romantic Age (PIRA 2); in a letter to Violet
Bonham Carter in 1954 he talks of the ‘old war—since Rousseau—between the civi-
lised and superior and their enemies—not just barbarians, but corrupt & resentful
victims & casualties of the social system—moral & emotional cripples of various
kinds—sometimes brazen thunderers like Carlyle or D. H. Lawrence or A. J. P. Taylor’
(who is an interesting addition to the demonology) (L II 465). Rousseau, Carlyle,
Nietzsche, and Sorel are mentioned in a letter to Richard Wollheim in 1958, where
they are also associated with fascism (L II 611). In a 1972 letter to J. H. Huizinga, he
repeats the language of ‘thundering’: ‘I should be as nervous, and indeed, frightened of
meeting Rousseau if I had lived in the 18th century, as I should be of Carlyle or Wagner,
3
FIB 37. I have used the quotations in this paragraph elsewhere, in Christopher Brooke, ‘ “The porch to
a collectivism as absolute as the mind of man has ever conceived”: Rousseau Scholarship in Britain, from
the Great War to the Cold War’, in Avi Lifschitz (ed.), Engaging with Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2016), pp. 136–51 (p. 143).
4
PIRA: ‘crack-brained visionary’, p. 116; ‘cunning of a maniac’, p. 112; ‘Napoleon’, pp. 46–7.
5
MS. Berlin 570, folio 17.
6
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Mr. Churchill’, Atlantic Monthly, 184, no. 3 (September 1949), 35–44.
Berlin and the Origins of the ‘Totalitarian’ Rousseau 91
or D. H. Lawrence or all the other “angry” prophets who thundered at mankind after
theological sermons had somewhat gone out of fashion’ (L III 512).7
Why was Rousseau such a problem for Berlin? Kevin Hilliard points us in
the right direction in his contribution to this volume, when he reminds us that the
Enlightenment was important for Berlin because he wanted to understand the origins
of Marxism, drawing attention to ‘moral monism’, ‘scientism’, and ‘technocratic mech-
anism’. Rousseau obviously wasn’t either a scientist or a technocratic mechanist in any-
thing like the way in which some of his contemporaries were. But Berlin seems to have
become convinced that Rousseau played a key role in the history of this moral mon-
ism. We know, for example, that Berlin was thinking about Rousseau when he was
writing his book about Marx in the 1930s. In a letter to John Hilton from October
1935, Berlin writes:
My summer was peculiar: I am trying desperately to write a book on Marx: & find myself
(a) unable to write at all for at least an hour after settling to, (b) when I begin I suddenly let
loose a flood of words about Rousseau’s influence on the romantic style, & then remember that
the relevance needs proving. It really is torture: anyhow I spent a month thus, & then fell ill of
the quinsy. (L I 137)
‘Rousseau’s influence on the romantic style’ was the topic to which he returned again
and again over thirty years, without ever getting his thoughts into a state that he was
willing to publish. For the Marx book, he worried here that it was hard to show rele-
vance. The theme recurs in Political Ideas in the Romantic Age, drafted in 1950–2,
and, later, there were the 1965 lectures that have been published as The Roots of
Romanticism.
Just where is this coming from? Why this early and apparently deep conviction that
‘Rousseau’s influence on the romantic style’ might constitute part of the key for under-
standing Marxism? That is quite a peculiar thought to have. It looks as if the answer has
quite a bit to do with the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov. We know that Berlin was
immersed in Plekhanov, for his thinking about Marx in general, and the subject of
historical inevitability in particular. And if we turn to Plekhanov’s 1895 book The
Development of the Monist View of History, it is striking that there is a discussion of
Rousseau in that text, specifically in its fourth chapter, which, interestingly, claims to
be a chapter on German idealism.8 It is something of a tricky discussion to follow,
because Plekhanov is criticizing Nikolay Mikhailovsky, who was disagreeing with
Frederick Engels, who was writing about Rousseau in his Anti-Dühring, so there are
several layers of commentary in play. One question that was being chewed over in this
discussion is whether Rousseau is, properly speaking, a dialectician; but more substan-
tively, there was the question of progress, and Rousseau’s relationship to narratives of
7
It appears that Berlin had been sent, and was commenting on, the typescript of what eventually
became J. H. Huizinga, The Making of a Saint: The Tragi-Comedy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (London:
Hamish Hamilton, 1976).
8
G. Plekhanov, The Development of the Monist View of History (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1956).
progress in the context of his account of the contradictions of human social development
and civilization. It is my view that Berlin’s distinctive approach to Rousseau developed
in the 1930s in part out of this encounter with Plekhanov, and that this framework for
worrying about Rousseau remained with him for the rest of his life. This is a view that
sits comfortably with the broader scholarship on Berlin. As his biographer Michael
Ignatieff has written,
Having fluent Russian gave him a route to Marx barred to most other English scholars, with the
exception of E. H. Carr. Russian sources, especially Plekhanov, on the precursors of Marx led
him to the Enlightenment thinkers; and from there forward to the nineteenth-century social-
ists. The reading he did between 1933 and 1938 provided Berlin with the intellectual capital on
which he was to depend for the rest of his life.9
If that is, as I suspect, the origin of Berlin’s own problem of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
what else shaped the way he approached that problem? The first obvious answer is
philosophical anti-idealism. Plekhanov, as just noted, had treated Rousseau in a
discussion of German idealism, with which Rousseau had also been associated by
the older philosophical generation against whom Berlin and an only slightly older gen-
eration were reacting so sharply. The reason all these discussions of Rousseau include
references to ‘true selves’ and ‘real wills’—the reason why the Rousseau we encounter
from these writers is always a proto-Hegelian Rousseau, rather than a recognizably
eighteenth-century Rousseau—is that these twentieth-century discussions are so very
heavily mediated by late nineteenth-century philosophical idealism—the ideas of
Bernard Bosanquet, in particular, but also those of T. H. Green. These were the politi-
cal philosophers who had been so heavily criticized from the time of the First World
War. We shouldn’t exaggerate the contribution of L. T. Hobhouse’s Metaphysical Theory
of the State from 1918. That work is not so much an attack on philosophical idealism in
general, as a book by a left-leaning idealist attacking the right-leaning versions of
the theory.10 (His subsequent books, after all, included both The Rational Good and
The Elements of Social Justice.11) But in Berlin’s undergraduate Oxford, as Joshua L.
Cherniss has pointed out, H. A. Prichard lectured on T. H. Green on political obli-
gation in 1930 (and we know that Berlin attended those lectures), and E. F. Carritt
lectured specifically on ‘the general will’ in 1932 (though we don’t know whether
Berlin attended those).12
The anti-idealist pendulum continued to swing during the 1930s and 1940s. ‘It is
fashionable nowadays to discredit the theory of the general will, and an attempt to
rehabilitate it is not likely to receive much sympathy,’ wrote B. Mayo, in a short article
9
Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), p. 71.
10
L. T. Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State: A Criticism (London: George Allen & Unwin,
1918).
11
L. T. Hobhouse, The Rational Good: A Study in the Logic of Practice (London: George Allen & Unwin,
1921); The Elements of Social Justice (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922).
12
Joshua L. Cherniss, A Mind and its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 156, 161.
on the general will published in the 1950 volume of Philosophy.13 And it is perhaps
significant in this context that the better books that were being published on Rousseau
in the 1930s were by more historically minded scholars—Alfred Cobban and John
Stephenson Spink14—and not by the philosophers, who were losing their interest. The
chief exponent of philosophical idealism in the British universities was Michael
Oakeshott, but he never had much to say about Rousseau,15 and the political theorist
who was most interested in working more constructively with the categories of
Rousseau’s political thought was G. D. H. Cole, who produced the Everyman edition of
The Social Contract that is still widely used today, but it is fair to say that what appears
to have been Cole’s ambition to synthesize aspects of Rousseau’s political theory of the
general will with his own vision of guild socialism never really came off.16
One consequence of the fact that it was the generation who taught Berlin which was
most directly concerned with the counter-offensive against philosophical idealism was
that Berlin never seems to have felt that he really had to engage with Rousseau as a
serious theorist. What I mean by this is that Berlin never writes about Rousseau as if he
had encountered a reasonably well-worked out body of psychological, moral, social,
and political theory, had noticed various problems with it, and had then tried to con-
struct more adequate theories in their place. I can’t think of any passage in Berlin where
he treats any of Rousseau’s theoretical arguments especially patiently, or seriously.
Certainly—and notoriously—Berlin’s occasional invocations of Rousseau’s deliber-
ately paradoxical formulation about being ‘forced to be free’ have literally nothing to
do with the argument that Rousseau was actually making when he deployed those
words. Berlin instead latches onto the phrase, and then uses it to illuminate a more
general attitude that he thinks he finds in Rousseau’s political thought.
In addition to Plekhanov, and anti-idealism, the next source that structured and
shaped Berlin’s encounter with Rousseau was the American literary critic Irving
Babbitt, especially his 1919 book Rousseau and Romanticism.17 Indeed, Berlin was
interested in Babbitt well before he was working on his Marx book. For example,
Babbitt’s influence is apparent—and Babbitt is cited directly—in an article, ‘Some
Procrustations’, that appeared in the May 1930 issue of the Oxford Outlook, a periodi-
cal with which the young Berlin was involved.18 I don’t know exactly when Berlin first
13
B. Mayo, ‘Is There a Case for the General Will?’, Philosophy, 25 (1950), 247–52, reprinted in Peter
Laslett (ed.), Philosophy, Politics and Society, first series (Oxford: Blackwell, 1956), pp. 92–7.
14
Alfred Cobban, Rousseau and the Modern State (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934). J. S. Spink,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau et Genève (Paris: Boivin, 1934).
15
For what he did have to say, see Brooke, ‘“The porch to a collectivism . . .” ’, pp. 138, 142, 145.
16
For Cole on Rousseau, see Peter Lamb, ‘G. D. H. Cole on the General Will: A Socialist Reflects on
Rousseau’, European Journal of Political Theory, 4 (2005), 283–300. For remarks on Berlin and Cole’s
Rousseau, see Cherniss, A Mind and its Time, pp. 161–2.
17
Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1919).
18
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Some Procrustations’, Oxford Outlook, 10:52 (May 1930), p. 493. The reference is to
Babbitt’s ‘introduction to M. Julien Benda’s admirable Belphégor’ and Berlin remarks that ‘The case against
emotionalism is there overstated, but though the method is violent it is nowhere unscrupulous . . .’ . Thanks
to Joshua L. Cherniss for the reference.
read Babbitt’s Rousseau book, but my hunch is that it was earlier rather than later.
If the distinctive problem with which he was wrestling from the mid 1930s was
Rousseau’s influence on Romantic style, for example, it makes sense that he was
already reading, by then, the major twentieth-century work that addresses exactly
this subject. And Babbitt’s book clearly had an impact on Berlin. If you look at the
marked-up typescript of what was eventually published as Political Ideas in the
Romantic Age, for example, one feature that is striking is the almost complete lack
of footnotes—perhaps not surprising, for a text that was substantially dictated.
The notes in the book that was published from the manuscript have overwhelmingly
been supplied by its editor, Henry Hardy. But when Berlin discusses Rousseau,
there, in the typescript, is one of the very few footnotes indeed, and it’s a reference
to Babbitt’s book.19
Babbitt was obviously very critical of Rousseau, and Berlin took over a big chunk of
that critical agenda—but it seems to me that the combination of anti-idealism and
Babbitt created a problem for Berlin that he never quite worked out how to resolve, which
partially in turn explains the way in which he returned to scratch the Rousseau-and-
Romanticism itch over a period of thirty years without ever getting it quite right. The
problem relates to the two quite opposed versions of Rousseau that we find here. For
the late nineteenth-century philosophical idealists, as much as for their early twentieth-
century critics, Rousseau is a proto-Hegelian, an arch-rationalist. For Babbitt, on the
other hand, Rousseau is the man of feeling, sentiment, emotion, and imagination. It’s
practically impossible to synthesize these two approaches to Rousseau, and I’m not
sure Berlin was ever able to do so. For the argument about ‘positive’ freedom that
Berlin wanted to prosecute, he required a starkly rationalist Rousseau, but the single
book on Rousseau to which he appears to have been most powerfully drawn presented
a very different kind of Rousseau indeed. This tension could have been resolved simply
by choosing one interpretation of Rousseau over the other. But Berlin couldn’t manage
to do this, and I suspect that the reason owes to the connection that he forged in his
mind between Rousseau and Marxism. It was Marx who, in Berlin’s view, had pro-
duced a powerful synthesis between the traditions of Enlightenment and Romanticism.
Rousseau was interesting to him as a precursor of Marx precisely because these two
streams seemed to come together somehow in his writings, too. But without being able
to come to a coherent all-things-considered view of Rousseau, he was left at something
of an impasse.
The final major influence on Berlin’s thinking about Rousseau was Jacob Talmon,
whom Berlin met after the Second World War. But before turning to Talmon, I shall
say something first about Harold Laski, who plays what seems to me to be a curious
role in this story of Berlin’s reception of Rousseau. Arie Dubnov has suggested—
though without much direct evidence—that one of the stimuli that made Berlin want
19
MS. Berlin 570, folio 154, which is numbered p. 93 of the PIRA MS.
to write on Marx was dislike of the way in which Laski wrote on the subject.20 But when
we turn to Rousseau, three things catch the eye. The first is that Berlin more or less
takes over Laski’s approach to Rousseau in his 1930 book, Liberty in the Modern State.21
In contrast to Hobhouse’s earlier Metaphysical Theory of the State, this book really does
make a starkly anti-idealist political argument, in which Laski argues that what is
wrong with theories like Rousseau’s is the way in which they crowd out space for dissi-
dence. The idealist theory, wrote Laski, ‘contradicts all the major facts of experience’; it
is ‘a denial of that uniqueness of individuality’. ‘For as I encounter the state, it is for me
a body of men issuing orders.’ Laski insists that there must be a space for respecting
what Rawls will later call conscientious refusal, a space that he thinks idealism must
deny. ‘A true theory of liberty, I urge, is built upon a denial of each of the assumptions
of idealism . . . ’. What Laski presents there, in fact, looks quite a lot like Berlin’s famous
subsequent account of negative liberty.22
The second connection comes via Talmon himself. Laski had supervised Talmon’s
doctoral dissertation at the London School of Economics on ‘the Doctrine of Poverty’
in the Middle Ages,23 and he gets a mention in the acknowledgements to The Origins
of Totalitarian Democracy. But the relationship was not always a smooth one. In a let-
ter to Berlin, Talmon confessed to complex thoughts about Laski, on being asked to
write for a Hebrew periodical: ‘I am somewhat embarrassed: I would have to say some
very harsh things about that most ambiguous figure, while the man did his best to
earn my gratitude.’24 And Talmon’s own book reverses Laski’s own argument at a criti-
cal moment. There’s a 1930 Laski pamphlet on ‘The Socialist Tradition in the French
Revolution’, which appears in Talmon’s bibliography, and the narrative Laski offers there
is broadly similar to that which Talmon presents in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy,
except that when Laski gets excited, because things are getting properly socialist in the
manner of which he approves, these are exactly the moments—culminating of course in
the examination of ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf—where Talmon locates the full-blown emer-
gence of the messianic model of politics which he presents as the fountainhead of
modern despotism.25
Laski is interesting, furthermore, in light of his own relationship to Babbitt’s work.
He was not only the most prominent public figure in England to be both interested in
and critical of Babbitt, but in another curiously Berlin-themed moment, he connected
Babbitt’s conservative stance to Joseph de Maistre’s image of the public executioner,
which Berlin would later do so much to popularize, in his 1948 book The American
20
See Arie Dubnov, Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012), p. 129.
21
Harold J. Laski, Liberty in the Modern State (London: Faber & Faber, 1930).
22
Laski, Liberty, pp. 24–6.
23
J. L. Talmon (writing as J. L. Flajszer), ‘The Doctrine of Poverty in its Religious, Social and Political
Aspects as Illustrated by Some XII–XIII Century Movements’, unpublished PhD thesis (London School of
Economics, 1943).
24
25
Harold J. Laski, The Socialist Tradition in the French Revolution (London: The Fabian Society, 1930).
Democracy.26 (While I’m exploring these kinds of links, I can add that Babbitt’s most
important follower in England was T. S. Eliot, who wrote to Berlin in November 1952
to say how much he enjoyed his Rousseau radio broadcast, and would he be willing to
see the radio talks published by Faber & Faber?27)
And so, to Jacob Talmon and the post-war scene. Before Talmon, Robert Nisbet had
been the most prominent scholar to make a sustained argument for a ‘totalitarian’
interpretation of Rousseau’s political thought,28 and there had also of course been
Bertrand Russell’s casual remark in his 1945 History of Western Philosophy that ‘Hitler
is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill, of Locke.’29 Before Talmon, there
had been other scholars, too, who had floated a distinctive notion of ‘totalitarian
democracy’, such as Bertrand de Jouvenel and E. H. Carr.30 But Talmon commands
attention not only because he placed Rousseau at the centre of his story about totalitar-
ian democracy, but also because of his closeness to Isaiah Berlin. The two men appear
to have met in 1947, and, as Berlin recalled, they were ‘discussing what afterwards
became the central theme of his most famous book, Totalitarian Democracy, and since
my ideas were tending in the same direction, I found that talking with him was highly
stimulating and intellectually delightful.’31
Talmon’s ‘most famous book’, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, was published
in 1952, and this year also marks the high tide of Berlin’s own dealings with Rousseau.
Early in the year he had been in Pennsylvania in order to deliver the Flexner Lectures
on ‘The Rise of Modern Political Ideas in the Romantic Age’. That year, he is also thought
to have completed his draft—never published in his own lifetime—of the related book,
Political Ideas in the Romantic Age. In the autumn, he delivered his famous radio talks
on ‘Freedom and its Betrayal’, the second of which was devoted to Rousseau and was
first broadcast on 5 November. Those radio talks in turn prompted a leader column in
The Times, written by T. E. Utley, which gave rise in turn to a flurry of correspondence
on the letters page, to which Berlin contributed, and on the penultimate day of the year,
30 December 1952, Berlin wrote three letters which bear on my topic, and with which
I shall conclude.
The Times leader had juxtaposed the ‘rationalist philosophy’ of, for example,
Rousseau with the ‘empirical liberalism’ of Mill, and had praised the latter. ‘The search
for a single sovereign principle, for an all-embracing ideology, has been the bane of
26
Harold J. Laski, The American Democracy: A Commentary and an Interpretation (New York: Viking
Press, 1948), p. 424.
27
Letter to Berlin from T. S. Eliot, 6 November 1952, MS. Berlin 131, folio 33.
28
Robert A. Nisbet, ‘Rousseau and Totalitarianism’, Journal of Politics, 5 (1943), 93–114.
29
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy and its Connection with Political and Social
Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), p. 685.
30
See Cherniss, A Mind and its Time, p. 172.
31
See, e.g., Graeme Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 87. Isaiah Berlin,
‘A Tribute to My Friend’, Forum, no. 38 (summer 1980), 1–4. Cherniss, A Mind and its Time, pp. 171–2,
and especially p. 174 for discussion of the question of mutual influence.
the modern world.’ But Utley departed from Berlin’s line of reasoning when he
observed that
Rationalist philosophy has been able to do the harm which it has done because it satisfied an
undeniable human need—the need for the faith that history has a purpose and that politics is
subject to a consistent moral law. In the past, that faith was supplied—as it can be still—by a
Christian interpretation of history . . .32
The correspondence that followed began with a letter from Emile Cammaerts
endorsing Utley’s pro-Christian conclusion—‘Christianity . . . appears to-day as the
best means of checking the impatience of those who, while denying the existence of
evil, do not hesitate to foster hatred and use brutal force in order to achieve their own
end’33—but it was the third letter, from Edgar W. Jones, which directly took issue with
Berlin’s interpretation of Rousseau. Jones had remarked that ‘the general will is only
the name for that modification which each person must make in his own real will
when he seeks to take into account the real wills of other people’, and that, ‘If this is
so, Rousseau is really a good democrat after all . . . ’. Berlin, he complained (sensibly
enough, in my own view) was trying ‘to compress eighteenth-century thinking into a
kind of Hegelian strait-jacket which does violence to important parts of its anato-
my’.34 Berlin’s own contribution to the correspondence was a somewhat snotty reply
to Jones (L II 343–4), who in turn wrote in to complain that Berlin had ‘grossly misrep-
resented what I wrote’.35
Turn, finally, to the three letters of 30 December. The first is a letter to a former stu-
dent, Denis Paul, in which Berlin discusses his radio talks and restates his general ideas
about freedom (L II 352–3). The second is a letter to Herbert Elliston, in which Berlin
registers his disagreement with aspects of Utley’s leader, and also discusses Talmon.
‘I have much respect for Talmon’s book,’ he wrote, ‘but I think it erroneous in one or
two ways, although in general constructed along very much the right lines.’36 Finally,
there is a letter to Talmon himself, which contains a long passage on Rousseau that is of
greatest interest for present purposes, and worth reproducing in full:
God knows, the awful shadow of Marx broods over the entire thing, and I do not know whether
to put him in or keep him out, and I still feel terribly obscure and muddled about Rousseau.
You and I think that he is the father of Totalitarianism in a sense. Why do we think this?
Because of the despotism of the general will. What does he, in fact, say? He talks about, (a) the
necessity to keep out selfish and sectional interests, so that each man shall ask himself what is
it right to do from the point of view of the community in general; this assumes that there is
such a thing as a general interest or some course of action which are better for entire societies
32
‘The Fate of Liberty’, The Times, 6 Dec. 1952, p. 7.
33
Emile Cammaerts, Letter to the Editor, The Times, 9 Dec. 1952, p. 9.
34
Edgar W. Jones, Letter to the Editor, The Times, 12 Dec. 1952, p. 9.
35
Edgar W. Jones, Letter to the Editor, The Times, 18 Dec. 1952, p. 7.
36
MS. Berlin 131, folio 301. As Cherniss points out, however, in A Mind and its Time, p. 173n., Berlin
does not indicate what those ‘one or two ways’ might be.
than others, and this, although none too clear, obviously is in some sense valid; so far so good.
One may raise questions about how one ever knows which course is best and then one may
reasonably answer that Rousseau’s recommendations about eliminating selfish and sectional
interests, as practical tips, have a certain value, at least in some situations, and that the differ-
ence between what is traditionally considered to be the right frame of mind for members of the
English Parliament as against, say, American Senators, who quite openly represent territorial
or economic interests, is a case in point. Again so far so good. Furthermore, everyone in the
Assembly has the right to express his view as he pleases. Any suppression automatically breaks
the social contract and destroys the general will, the Sovereign, etc., so that liberty seems to be
guaranteed. But once the decision has been reached the dissidence must form and this, I sup-
pose, is the ordinary practice of all democratic assemblies, from Quaker meetings to Lenin’s
Regional Central Committee and Politbureau. What then do we complain of? Simply, (a) that
Rousseau thinks that an absolutely objectively true answer can be reached about political ques-
tions; that there is a guaranteed method of doing so; that his method is the right one; and that
to act against such a truth is to be wrong, at worst mad, and therefore properly to be ignored,
and that all these propositions are false? (b) the mystique of the soi commun and the organic
metaphor which runs away with him and leads to mythology, whether of the State, the Church,
or whatever. Is this all? or is there more to complain of? I don’t feel sure. The muddle is so great.
The precise transition from absolute freedom to absolute necessity is still not very clear to
me—it is in Hegel but not in myself. I suppose I must read him again, but if you have thoughts
I wish you would tell me. (L II 354–5)
The letter that Talmon said that he would write to Berlin about Rousseau does not
appear amongst the Berlin papers, and perhaps it does not exist.37 And although Berlin
says, ‘I suppose I must read him again’, I am not sure that he ever made real further
progress with Rousseau—though we do know, from the testimony of John Rawls, that
Rousseau was covered in the class he taught with Stuart Hampshire the following term
in Oxford, at the start of 1953.38 ‘Now I must sit down to the hideous task of writing a
book,’ Berlin also wrote in that same letter to Talmon.
But the hideous task, of course, was never completed.
37
38
Thomas Pogge, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007),
p. 16: ‘Rawls was especially impressed with a seminar taught by Berlin and Hampshire, with Hart’s active
participation, in the winter of 1953. This covered Condorcet, Rousseau’s Social Contract, John Stuart Mill’s
“On Liberty,” Alexander Herzen, G. E. Moore, and two essays by John Maynard Keynes.’ Berlin was
impressed by Rawls: ‘There is of course an American here better than all these I should think called
Rawls . . . ’. Letter to Morton White, 4 March 1953, L II 364.
7
Rococo Enlightenment? Berlin,
Hamann, and Diderot
Marian Hobson
As a style in art and in writing, the rococo is pretty much contemporaneous with the
Enlightenment. Yet the style, although it was already picked out and bore a name or
names in its own century, has been largely neglected by historians of thought, unlike
historians of aesthetics. And unlike the Enlightenment. This chapter tries to bring to
the surface a wider relevance, to Isaiah Berlin, to Diderot, and, more contentiously,
perhaps, to Hamann; for the last two, a rigid distinction between aesthetics and
thought in general is implausible.1 It will argue that the style, as an adjective or as a way
of writing, acts as a diffused and playful injection of insecurity into philosophical work,
and that it can be seen as a mode of the Enlightenment, or to use a musical metaphor, as
a kind of key in which the Enlightenment was played.
Rococo and Enlightenment?

In France at least, then, the phrase ‘le style rocaille’ applied to an eighteenth-century
fashion in art and architecture—the ‘roc’ referring to the irregular incrustations that
the style borrowed from garden ‘grottoes’, the ‘aille’ implying some disdain. Other
terms, even more derogatory, were used of the style: ‘prétintaille’ and ‘papillotage’, for
instance. In the nineteenth century Littré with his usual precision relates the style
to the artists known as ‘les ornemanistes’, that is, interior architects and furniture
designers: ‘Le genre rococo . . . caractérisé par les façades hérissées, courbes, et fron-
tons recourbés et brisés, par la profusion des ornements insignifiants, par la préférence
1
‘Perhaps contentious’, because ‘rococo’ has been analysed in different ways in the context of different
European cultures. For a study of the aesthetics of the French rococo see for example the fundamental
work, Fiske Kimball, The Creation of the Rococo Decorative Style (Philadelphia, PN: Philadelphia Museum
of Art, 1943; repr. New York: Dover, 1980); Marian Hobson, The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in
Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982; 2005), pp. 47–61; and on
Italy, Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (New Haven, CT: Yale
100 Marian Hobson
donnée aux rocailles, par les guirlandes de fleurs enlacées d’une manière affectée.’2 In
its own time, the rococo aesthetic was denounced by critics as one of slightly absurd and
puzzling triviality.3 An eighteenth-century architect remarked that it had banished all
symmetry.4 Likewise, the composer Rameau’s startling use of dissonance, his subtle
use of dance rhythms to destabilize and then to resolve musical tension, both attacked
by his critics as needlessly ‘piquant’, seem exemplary of a rococo aesthetic.
Now it is noteworthy that this nexus of attitudes to the rococo, when expanded
with material from their eighteenth-century context,5 bears what may be more than
an accidental resemblance to a definition of ‘Enlightenment’ in the Oxford English
Dictionary (first published 1884) which has aroused comment: ‘Sometimes used [after
the German Aufklärung, Aufklärerei] to designate the spirit and aims of the French
philosophy of the 18th c., or of others whom it is intended to associate with them, in the
implied charge of shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for
tradition and authority, etc.’. James Schmidt, in a witty and yet at its end quietly moving
discussion, examines in depth this dictionary article and some of the adverse com-
ments it has provoked; in particular, the examples the OED gives in order to back up
the definition, which it has culled from nineteenth-century writers on German philos-
ophy.6 He asserts that it is not until J. Baillie’s 1910 translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology
that Enlightenment consistently translates Aufklärung. In earlier histories of ideas, the
term employed was ‘Illumination’. He adds: ‘The OED offers definitions of “enlighten-
ment” as a process (“imparting or receiving mental or spiritual light”) and as a project
(“the spirit and aims of the French philosophers of the 18th century”), but not yet as a
period (“the Enlightenment”).’7
Now the definition and the criticisms of the Enlightenment quoted in the OED do
not derive, says Schmidt, from a battle between concepts of the Enlightenment and of
the Counter-Enlightenment in histories of thought, contrary to what a reader might be
tempted to think. The relative dates of the OED article and what it cites do not allow of
that explanation. I suggest instead that what may have happened is a kind of contami-
nation of definitions of the rococo with those of the Enlightenment; that the lack of
depth, the over-complication, and the triviality which the later eighteenth century
2
‘The rococo style . . . characterised by spiky curved façades, fronts bent and broken up by a profusion
of meaningless ornaments, by the preference for rock patterns, garlands of flowers laced together in an
affected manner.’
3
‘Caractérisé par la profusion des ornements contournés’ [Characterised by a profusion of crooked orna-
ments], Le Petit Robert. Article Rococo. My book, The Object of Art, gives a more searching sense to the style.
4
‘La symmétrie en est bannie’, Jacques-François Blondel, L’homme du monde éclairé par les arts, 2 vols
(Paris: chez Manory, 1774), vol. 1, p. 90.
5
See note 1 for literature on this context, and for a discussion of the nuances between the various terms
used in eighteenth-century French for what we would now call ‘rococo’.
6
James Schmidt, ‘Inventing the Enlightenment: Anti-Jacobins, British Hegelians, and the Oxford
English Dictionary’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64 (2003), 421–548.
7
Schmidt, ‘Inventing the Enlightenment’, p. 426. ‘At the dawn of the nineteenth century, opponents of
the French Revolution had successfully saddled something called “the Illumination” with all the negative
attributes that the Oxford English Dictionary would later associate with “Enlightenment” ’ (p. 437).
Rococo Enlightenment? Berlin, Hamann, and Diderot 101
attributed to rococo art and the mindset behind it has some hundred years later guided the
choice of quotations for the OED, and been projected on to the ‘spirit and aims’ of thinkers
accused, as in the quotation given above, of shallow intellectualism and pretension.
A Style of Talk? Berlin

Rococo as a style is used on several occasions by Isaiah Berlin of himself. He makes no
mention of the rococo as a period, as far as I can see. Instead, there are uses of the word
as an adjective in much the same sense of overcomplicated brilliance as is sketched
above. So far, so normal in usage. Less straightforwardly, I have lighted on a remark in
a letter from Berlin where something further is brought in, namely a cross-cutting
between the humorous and the straight-faced: ‘I was amused during the visit to the
Brighton Pavilion to a civic reception by the Mayor, to see that they could not decide if
the Pavilion was comical or serious; to laugh or express admiration for this Bokharan-
Chinese rococo fantasy.’8 Berlin’s reference to the Prince Regent’s pavilion and its
fake-Orientalizing rococo relays his own amusement at other people’s puzzlement.
However, his remark goes further, picking out a reaction which is one of the eighteenth-
century ways of offsetting the rococo’s lack of consequence: ‘they could not decide
if . . . ’. The hesitation between opposites is characteristic of ‘papillotage’, an eighteenth-
century term for the structure of rococo art (the term alludes to the movements of the
eye and eyelid), here rendered more destabilizing by being given as oscillation between
the serious and the comical. One might wonder why Berlin offloads, as it were, this
perception of effect on to others.
For in another letter, Berlin actually uses the word ‘rococo’ of himself: ‘fortuna . . . is the
oldest of all alibis, & denounced with fiery eloquence by the intemperate and worldly
pamphleteer, I. Berlin, in his over-repetitive, impressionistic, all over the place, non-
bullseye hitting, rococo rodomontades’.9 Here the movement of the rococo is not between
poles, but is a random speaking out, a hitting at and missing of targets, a describing of
what is itself fortuna, chance, Lady Luck. There is impishness in this self-description
of his own speaking—pamphleteer, not writer, ‘intemperate and worldly’—so not
purposive and balanced; this mixing together of surprising, mock self-deprecating
adjectives conveys an impression of Berlin being carried forward as much by the rhythm
of his sentence as anything else, a rhapsodic method of letting a phrase advance.
A Style of Thought? Hamann and Diderot

It was of course what Isaiah Berlin wrote—it was largely his book, as his essays finally
became—which resurrected the German writer Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88),
8
Berlin, in a letter to Rowland Burdon-Muller, mid-March 1961, L III 32. I owe this reference, like other
hints and advice on matters Berlinesque, to the kind patience and generosity of Henry Hardy.
9
Berlin, letter to Jean Floud, 11 Aug. 1970, quotation kindly supplied by Henry Hardy.
102 Marian Hobson
this poet/philosopher/satirist, in the English-speaking consciousness as a figure of

opposition to the Enlightenment. On the other hand, Denis Diderot may not have
been dismissed from Berlin’s account of the Enlightenment; however, given Diderot’s
importance, both through his persona and his writings, especially the Encyclopédie, he
is pretty much missing. One could try to argue that Diderot is also very largely absent
from Hamann. That would be incorrect.
The connection of Diderot with Hamann might seem to be only one of acquaintances
in common, of people they both knew: the chances of biography, then. But Hamann
was intrigued by Diderot. There is a steady stream of allusions to the philosopher in
his correspondence—far more numerous than to Rousseau. There is in particular a
set of remarks on Diderot’s Lettre sur les sourds et muets and its discussion of lan-
guage. However, something more, something more difficult flows from their joint
concern with language. I shall argue that the work of both Hamann and Diderot
raises very acutely the relation between thinking and writing or speaking: the ques-
tion of the meaning of their style. And that this naturally has impact on how they
are to be interpreted. Their styles, as the reader encounters them in some of their
writings, seem to have features which make ‘rococo’ a not inappropriate way to
label them.
Both writers can be very funny; both can make the reader sit up and work and worry.
I want to suggest that the disquiet aroused by some of the features of such a style can be
seen as an injection of scepticism, or at least of uncertainty, in the case of Diderot a
sometimes radical uncertainty. In the same way that in a great rococo painting planes
can twist and slide as you look at it, with Hamann and Diderot the sense of a phrase or
argument can twitch and shake as you read.
I start with examples of the destabilizing effect that both writers can induce on their
readers. Hamann:
Ich krähe immer von meinem kleinen Misthaufen. Wie mir Ihr Lustgarten gefällt, habe ich
schon gesagt. Daß die letzte Hälfte des vierten Buchs mir näher angeht, als alle überigen kön-
nen Sie leicht erachten. Dies schöne Thal gränzt unmittelbar an meinen Hügel oder wie ich ihn
erst nannte. Wenn ich auch so beredt wäre wie Demosthenes, so würde ich doch nicht mehr
als ein einziges Wort dreymal widerholen müßen. Vernunft ist Sprache, Λογος; an diesem
Markknochen nag’ ich und werde mich zu Tod drüber nagen. Noch bleibt es immer finster
über diese Tiefe für mich: Ich warte noch immer auf einen apokalyptischen Engel mit einem
Schlüßel zu diesem Abgrund.10
I am always crowing from my little dunghill. I have already said how much your pleasure gar-
den pleases me. The fact that the last half of the fourth book concerns me more than all the rest
you can easily guess. The beautiful valley is right next to my hill, or what I first called it. Even if
I were as eloquent as Demosthenes, I could do no more than repeat just one single word three
times: reason is language. Λογος. I am gnawing at this marrowbone and will go on gnawing this
10
Hamann to Herder, on reception of Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humanity, 6–10
Aug., 1784, in Briefe, 7 vols (vols. 1–3 ed. Walther Ziesemer and Arthur Henkel, vols 4–7 ed. Arthur
Henkel; Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1955–79), vol. 5, p. 177 (letter 753). The translation below is mine.
bone till death. It is still dark for me over these depths: I am still waiting for an apocalyptic
angel with a key to this abyss.
The letter to Herder containing this passage is very long, some of it written in this same
highly allusive manner, bringing together country things—the cock, the dunghill—
and Greek language and eloquence. The first line of my excerpt is a proverb common to
many languages, which itself probably derives from, or shares an origin with, a phrase
in the younger Seneca’s satire against Claudius, Apocolocyntosis (The Pumpkinification)
7: gallum in suo sterquilinio plurimum posse. The Roman work is usually classed as a
‘Menippean satire, that is as a satire rhapsodic in nature, combining many different
targets of ridicule into a fragmented satiric narrative similar to a novel’;11 a genre that
can be applied to Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau, as well as to Hamann. In the quotation
above, the latter is playing not merely with different targets, but also with a mix of
tones, and with rhapsodic disconnection—the décousu of the OED’s choice to define
‘rococo’, a phrase from an 1835 number of Fraser’s Magazine: ‘there are two new special
words of argot, rococo and décousu’. The writer in Fraser’s has picked out a kind of con-
scious stylizing of self in the rococo. In Berlin’s self-description quoted above it remains
that; in Hamann, the mix of tone between Demosthenes and the dunghill, the Greek
script for Logos (the fifth word of St John’s Gospel, ‘In the beginning was the Word’,
among many possible allusions or senses of logos), and the persistence in gnawing the
marrowbone, a reference to Rabelais’s Prologue to Gargantua, give a kind of damp-
ened passion, of waiting for the light, for the key, which the self-consciousness in
Hamann’s way of writing does not dismiss but only emphasizes.
In 1748, Diderot wrote anonymously a mildly licentious novel, Les Bijoux indiscrets.
His busybody acolyte, Naigeon, later claimed that Diderot had said he would rather
have lost a finger than have written it. The statement reported is undercut by the fact
that Diderot added chapters to the novel at a time indeterminate but certainly after the
first publication. Naigeon published them for the first time in his edition of 1798. It is
from one of these that I take the following:
Ce fut au milieu du caquet des bijoux qu’il s’éleva un autre trouble dans l’empire; ce trouble fut
causé par l’usage du pénum, ou du petit morceau de drap qu’on appliquait aux moribonds.
L’ancien rite ordonnait de le placer sur la bouche: des réformateurs prétendirent qu’il fallait le
mettre au derrière. Les esprits s’étaient échauffés; on était sur le point d’en venir aux mains,
lorsque le sultan, auquel les deux partis en avaient appelé, permit, en sa présence, un colloque
entre les plus savants de leurs chefs. L’affaire fut profondément discutée; on allégua la tradition,
les livres sacrés et leurs commentateurs; il y avait de grandes raisons et de puissantes autorités
des deux côtés. Mangogul, perplexe, renvoya l’affaire à huitaine. Ce terme expiré, les sectaires
et leurs antagonistes reparurent à son audience.
It was in the midst of the jewels’ babbling that another trouble arose in the empire; this one was
caused by the custom of using the penum, or bit of sheet that was applied to the dying. The
ancient rite ordered it to be placed on the mouth; the reformers claimed that it had to be placed
11
http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/sen/sen.apoc.shtml, consulted 2 Nov. 2015.
104 Marian Hobson
on the backside. Peoples’ tempers had got worked up, they were on the verge of coming to
blows, when the sultan, to whom the two sides had appealed, allowed a debate to be held in his
presence between the most learned of the leaders. The matter was discussed in depth: tradition
was alleged, sacred books and their commentators; weighty reasons and powerful authorities
were on both sides. Mangogul, perplexed, put off the matter for a week. At the end of this time,
the sectarians and their antagonists returned to his audience.12
After which, the story lapses into dialogue for a while. The bijoux at the beginning of
this passage and in the novel’s title are a coy euphemism for the female vaginas which
have been caused to babble by the magic ring that the Sultan is making use of in his
court. The whole conceit on which the story is based is shared by other pieces of French
rococo writing, all referring back to a medieval conte, Le Chevalier qui faisait parler les
cons. As in other eighteenth-century stories of the same ilk, there is mild satire, espe-
cially of state religion and its rites. And Diderot, as was often the practice in this type of
writing, makes up a word, pénum, which reminds inevitably of a male body part. But
here it is forced to take part in an apparently pointlessly complicated ritual, and sub-
jected to pointlessly complicated commentaries. There is an important further point:
Hamann in his correspondence makes use of the phrase bijoux indiscrets as a joking
nickname for truth. The bijoux do indeed involuntarily speak the truth in Diderot’s
novel. Hamann’s delight in slightly seedy, off-colour jokes is revealed in his extensive
use of the borrowing, and beyond that, his rejection of prudish separation of tones
and styles.
Berlin and Diderot

What about Berlin and Diderot? He said in a letter13 that he found Diderot ‘irresistibly
attractive’. Diderot, then, the French materialist, atheist, editor of the Encyclopédie,
knowledgeable about many things—trades, music, mathematics, painting, building,
navigation, physiology—though perhaps master of none? He who travelled to
St Petersburg to the imperial court to thank Catherine the Great for the funds she had
supplied? He who sometimes appeared in the Soviet pantheon of great masters of
thought? In spite of this ‘irresistible attraction’, I had trouble locating a consistent dis-
cussion. There are sporadic mentions, and above all, in The Roots of Romanticism, a
beautifully judged quotation from Diderot’s art criticism from the Salon de 1765
(RR 51). But it confirms the problem Berlin has just raised there: that Diderot doesn’t
fit well into the pattern he has imposed on the Enlightenment, as a rationally obsessed,
or at least rationally guided, culture that is both intellectual and, in the case of the states
of Prussia, administrative. For Diderot, he implies without developing the insight
12
My translation of Diderot, Œuvres, ed. Roger Lewinter, 15 vols (Paris: Le Club Français du Livre,
1969–73), vol. 1, p. 743. Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), has an excellent chapter on Les Bijoux indiscrets.
13
I quote this after an email from Henry Hardy, for which I thank him warmly.
in this passage, or anywhere else as far as I can see, is something of a risk-taker,

someone who acknowledges that ‘there are unconscious depths in which all kinds
of dark forces move’. The same could be said of Sade, one might object. What makes
Diderot different?14
Diderot is on the side of improved and more rational administration—the Encyclopédie
article ‘arithmétique politique’, for instance, shows this, even though traces of a com-
plex discussion with Rousseau about the value of the political-arithmetical can be con-
structed around it.15 But more than this administrative tidying up, Diderot is working
for freedom of thought and expression (after all, he spent some five months in prison
in 1749 for an unorthodox and highly speculative publication, the Lettre sur les aveu-
gles). Moreover, one can argue that Diderot himself saw in the implications of eight-
eenth-century thought some of what Berlin views with reprobation in the
Enlightenment; one can even maintain that he went a good deal further than Berlin in
spelling them out. For instance, in the Rêve de d’Alembert (1769), the determinist doc-
tor Bordeu makes of man in society a being that is correctable through punishment
rather than reformable through education and argument. This is speculation on
Diderot’s part—the title is a Dream—but not unlike what eugenics, behaviourism, and
inter-species breeding have got up to in the twentieth century. Diderot’s immediate
intellectual heirs before and in the Revolution certainly worked to rationalize the tools
at an administration’s disposal; to unify the system of administrative power over the
provinces, right down to the level of local calendars, weights and measures, and dialect.
And hence, they worked to unify France on every level. Whereas those who were seen
by Berlin as counter-Revolutionaries were, he claims, against this kind of rationaliza-
tion; they were on the side of pluralism, localism, populism, on the side of sentiments,
history, instincts.
To begin querying this partition, let’s take up a remark by Hamann about the rela-
tion between human reason and instinct: ‘If mathematics pretends to claim an aristo-
cratic privilege, because of its general and necessary reliability, it is clear that human
reason must lag behind the infallible and unerring instinct of animals.’16 This is a
remark in the style of Montaigne; let’s compare it with the position of Diderot, where
reason is a kind of generalized instinct, and though his remarks seem to create a kind
of fragile superiority for man over animals, man is still an animal: ‘la raison ou
l’instinct de l’homme’17 (inclusive ‘or’, vel, not exclusive ‘or’, aut); or again, ‘l’homme est
14
There is a Sadean element in Diderot, shown for example by at least one of the notes to his ‘trans-
lation’ of Shaftesbury having a tone of truculent cynicism: satire may be for Diderot an exorcism of
such elements.
15
See Marian Hobson, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Diderot in the Late 1740s: Satire, Friendship, and
Freedom’, in Christie McDonald and Stanley Hoffmann (eds), Rousseau and Freedom (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 58–76.
16
Hamann, Metakritik über den Purismum der Vernunft, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Josef Nadler, 6 vols
(Vienna: Herder Verlag, 1949–57), vol. 3, p. 285 (author’s translation).
17
‘Reason or man’s instinct’. Elements de physiologie, unfinished at Diderot’s death in 1784, in Œuvres,
ed. Lewinter, vol. 13, p. 675.
106 Marian Hobson
aussi une espèce animale, sa raison n’est qu’un instinct perfectible et perfectionné’18—
note the phrasing ‘n’est que’. What is important here is that both Hamann’s and Diderot’s
slightly different positions have a long history in philosophy: they have long been used
as sceptical arguments against the pride of human reason.Hamann was convinced of
the importance of Hume’s scepticism, though he uses it in an unorthodox way, to clear
the way for belief;19 it was said to be he who introduced Kant to that philosopher.
I have already suggested that Diderot does not fit easily into this scheme. Nor does
he fit with total ease into any relation between Enlightenment and totalitarianism
when such a construction is attempted. Like Voltaire, like the great mathematician
d’Alembert, the other editor of the Encyclopédie from 1746 until 1759, when he got
cold feet and bailed out of the enterprise, Diderot was careful to keep up contact with
the despot Catherine the Great and to forward her plans for a continuation of the work
of Peter the Great and the revival of Russia. Both men helped her take into her employ
some gifted artists, scientists, and administrators (they chose with amazing discern-
ment; the people who went were certainly not the second eleven). So they were spread-
ing knowledge of European science and art, through the power of Catherine. Like
Voltaire, Diderot seems to have been rather taken with her intelligence, good looks,
and vast power. Unlike Voltaire, he was not a rich man; he had worried a good deal
about the fate of his daughter, who was not likely to marry if she didn’t bring a dowry,
and might have had to enter a convent—an institution which his novel La Religieuse (The
Nun) describes from a corrosively anti-clerical viewpoint, as a kind of despotism, one
of sadism and sexual deviance, one made no better for occasionally having benevolent
and truly religious dictators directing it.
Catherine had given money for the dowry elegantly, by buying Diderot’s library at a
generous price and allowing him the use of it until his death; she had supported him
with a salary as her librarian. It was understood that Diderot would visit St Petersburg
to thank her personally. This visit is sometimes portrayed as one of gratitude during
which Diderot sustained a shock because he saw what the government of Russia was
really like. But the reality is more complex, and to my mind we still don’t have an accur-
ate view of it. One of the complicating factors is that Diderot knew about the way
Catherine wielded power before he left Paris; he didn’t have to wait to find out.20 He
was grateful for the protection she afforded him (as mentioned earlier, he needed it).
And his attitude to Catherine seems to have been one of slightly naïve, somewhat pon-
derous awe. But nevertheless, he had reservations before he embarked in 1773 on the
long journey to the North. The reservations may have been partly one of changes in his
18
‘Man is also a species of animal; his reason is only a kind of perfectible and perfected instinct’,
Réfutation d’Helvétius, ed. Lewinter, vol. 11, p. 531.
19
This will later be the position of F. H. Jacobi, in his David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus
und Realismus: Ein Gespräch, 1787. Like Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau, Jacobi employs the unusual form
of a dialogue between ER and ICH. He seems to have met Diderot, briefly, see Hobson, ‘Diderot, Jacobi, et
le Spinozastreit’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 106 (2006), 337–50.
20
See Anthony Strugnell, Diderot’s Politics: A Study of the Evolution of Diderot’s Political Thought after
the ‘Encyclopédie’ (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973).
thought, which turned from hopes placed in enlightened rulers (where much power in
the eighteenth century lay) to a more realistic appraisal of the likelihood of reform
being successful when introduced top-down. But it has to be said that it is difficult to
interpret his political ideas—at some point, he seems to have decided that survival
could best be ensured by masking his own thoughts:
Et que dire de Voltaire, qui dit avec Locke que la matière peut penser, avec Toland que le monde
est éternel, avec Tindal que la liberté est une chimère, et qui admet un Dieu vengeur et
rémunérateur? A-t-il été inconséquent? Ou a-t-il eu peur du docteur de Sorbonne? Moi, je me
suis sauvé par le ton ironique le plus délié que j’aie pu trouver, les généralités, le laconisme et
l’obscurité.21
Diderot warns here that his mask is mainly one of tone, that he uses an irony that may be
hardly perceptible. It is not accidental that Diderot worked at his dialogue on hypocrisy
and on acting, Le Paradoxe sur le comédien, exactly around this time of preparation for
his journey to the North (summer 1773). The courtier-hypocrite-actor, that text shows,
is at the front of his mind while he is reflecting on the effects of near-absolute power,
whether wielded by an audience or by a monarch.
He did not hide all his thoughts from Catherine. It is clear from the first lines of his
Observations sur le Nakaz that he is going to advocate a set of political values which
place the power and authority of a nation in its people, and nowhere else, however
much the changes in constitution and laws he is suggesting rely on an absolute execu-
tive power in the nation. ‘Il n’y a point de vrai souverain que la nation. Il ne peut y avoir
de vrai législateur que le people.’22 On reading this work some time later, Catherine
exploded: ‘This man is mad.’ But the whole point of his journey, apart from being part
of the financial bargain, was to influence the despot. And if he had few illusions on
leaving Paris, except those he needed for his own self-respect, on his return he had
none. In a famous letter written just after his return to Western Europe, he exclaims:
‘Je vous confierai tout bas que nos philosophes, qui paraissent avoir le mieux connu
le despotisme, ne l’ont vu que par le goulot d’une bouteille. Quelle différence du tigre
peint par Oudry ou du tigre dans la forêt.’23 Diderot refused point blank to go home
from Russia via Berlin to meet the other Enlightened despot, or great dictator,
Frederick the Great.
21
Œuvres, ed. Lewinter, vol. 11, p. 105. ‘And what to say about Voltaire, who says with Locke that matter
can think, with Toland that the world is everlasting, with Tindal that freedom is a chimera, and who allows
a God who avenges and rewards? Was he lacking in logic? Or did he get scared of the Sorbonne theologi-
ans? Me, I got myself off by the most ironic tone, the most nimble one I could find, by general statements,
by laconism, and by obscurity.’
22
‘The only true sovereign is the people. There can be no true legislator other than the people’, the first
lines of Observations sur l’instruction de sa majeste impériale aux députés pour la confection des lois [le Nakaz],
Œuvres, ed. Lewinter, vol. 11, p. 207.
23
‘I will tell you in confidence that our philosophers, who seem to have best been acquainted with
despotism, have only been looking through the neck of a bottle. What a difference between a tiger painted
by Oudry and the tiger in the forest.’ See Œuvres, ed. Lewinter, vol. 11, p. 1044, letter to Mme Necker, hence
a remark made to the wife of an important politician, which may be relevant, 6 Sept. 1774.
108 Marian Hobson
So Diderot has to be taken out of any quick correlation between the Enlightenment
and despotism. And he has to be taken out of another correlation, which in the eyes of
Zeev Sternhell, in his fine book on Counter-Enlightenments, is the central vector in
Berlin’s own view. For Sternhell, the main vector running through Berlin’s work on the
Enlightenment is the already mentioned tension between the local, the particular in its
fragmented complexity, which Berlin favours, and the general and universal, which
homogenizes.24
Sternhell’s analysis in fact reveals another absence in Berlin’s discussion, as far I can
see, and not a small one: Diderot’s masterpiece, Le Neveu de Rameau. That work indeed
operates a kind of hither-and-thither between the horns of the opposition, between
the particular and the general, the individual and the universal. But it does this through
its style: the tension is neither thematized nor commented on. This dialogue-novel-satire
(it is all three) actually assembles into one work both its style, i.e. the way it is written,
and those tensions that Berlin, and others who follow his commentaries, divide and
separate out to different writers and even to different countries, France for the general
and Germany for the individual. Diderot, the Frenchman, maintains both in tension;
Hegel, the German, doesn’t create a partition either, but makes of that very distinction
between particular and general one of the motors of his dialectic in the Phenomenology
of Spirit (look at the use and function of the word besondere in that work). Hegel saw
quite clearly its importance for Diderot’s work; the honour of textual quotation, as
opposed to allusion, is shared with only one other author, as far as I can see.25 So the
tension that Berlin takes apart is in fact an antithesis at work and one of the driving
forces in both these two great works with roots in the eighteenth century (Diderot’s
composed around 1772; Hegel’s published in 1807). But relevant to Hamann, the third
name in my triangle, is the fact that Diderot’s work is highly satirical.
‘Only eccentric truffle hunters like me’,26 Berlin asserts, would find and be inter-
ested in this writer at the margins—Hamann lived geographically at the margins, in
Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), then in East Prussia. Kant lived there too, and they
knew each other. But Hamann was highly appreciated—Kant tried to help him to a
more stable income; Goethe said of him that he was the most original head he had ever
met with, even if he also thought him a bit self-important.27 Hamann, I have pointed
out, was something like fascinated by Diderot. Indeed, his patroness, the Princess
Golitsyn, was surprised, and actually asked how a taste for Diderot and for Hamann
24
Zeev Sternhell, Les anti-Lumières: une tradition du XVIIIe siècle à la guerre froide (Paris: Gallimard,
2010; first published Paris: Fayard, 2006).
25
See Marian Hobson, ‘Hegel interprete du dialogue entre LUI et MOI sur la musique’, to appear in
Franck Salaün and Patrick Taïeb (eds), Musique et pantomime dans ‘Le Neveu de Rameau’ de Diderot, col-
lection ‘Fictions pensantes’ (Paris: Hermann, 2016), pp. 97–108. The only other textual quotation (as
opposed to allusions) beyond Diderot I can find in the Phenomenology is of another enlightened rococo
figure, Lichtenberg, who is also frequently satirical.
26
Berlin, letter, 4 Nov. 1985, quoted by Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004), p. 122.
27
Cf. R. A. Sparling, Johann Georg Hamann and the Enlightenment Project (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2010), p. 16.
could coexist.28 Her own difficulty was that she was religious and Herder is like her—he
explains his delay in reading a Diderot work by its ‘smell of atheism’. Hamann never
said anything so intellectually prudish. Princess Golitsyn had moved away spiritually
and physically from the kind of crypto-atheism of her husband, to Catholicism and
to Münster, leaving him—he was the Russian ambassador—in The Hague. Dmitri
Golitsyn, unorthodox in his beliefs, serious in his scientific interests, was a great
friend of Diderot’s. He had been Diderot’s host in Holland. She had at some point
either copied or removed copies of works from Diderot’s trunk while he was away in
Russia, after which he quarrelled with her irrevocably. It is not entirely clear what
these manuscripts were.
I turn now to the final point I wish to make about the styles of Hamann and of
Diderot, suggesting they have a relation not just to the rococo but also to scepticism—
in Hamann’s case scepticism about reason, about the public sphere and the public
reception of his work, or any work, about stability of values in the world outside of
religion, and possibly about friendship; in Diderot scepticism about many things: the
possibility of changing the world, about belief and religion, in particular. Hegel in his
article on Hamann (1828) says: ‘The French say: Le style c’est l’homme même. Hamann’s
writings don’t so much have a particular style as that they are style through and
through. In all of them that we have from Hamann’s pen, the personality is so very
pressing and so much overweighs things, that the reader is pointed more towards it
than to what might be grasped as content.’29 Hamann does indeed grab the reader by
the collar. And he does this with a purpose. Hamann announces that he is not bothered
by truth any more than are Kant’s friends, and compares himself to Socrates: ‘Like
Socrates, I believe everything that the next person believes, and only go into to it in
order to disturb others in their beliefs’.30 What we might call, then, an active scepticism,
one working on others.
Hamann read a good deal of Diderot, as one can gather both from his letters and from
his own writings: two of the pieces I have already mentioned, Paradoxe sur le comédien
and the Rêve de d’Alembert, were available only in manuscript copies and it seems possible
that he had at least seen these. But curiously enough, allusions to works which are now not
so well known as these seem to occur more frequently. References to the Lettre sur les
sourds et muets, or Diderot’s licentious novel, Les Bijoux indiscrets, seem to figure more
prominently in his mental universe. These existed in printed versions and will have been
easier to access. I take the latter first as it has already been mentioned. Hamann uses it for
its shock value. The novel is at the origin of the modern play The Vagina Monologues. It is a
tongue-in-cheek oriental fairy tale, with a considerable amount of playful and what seems
now rather harmless satire on contemporary France incorporated (c’est le cas de le dire).
28
Hamann, Briefwechsel, vol. 5, p. 313; 6 Jan. 1785.
29
Hegel, Hamann’s Schriften, 1818, in Theorie Werkausgabe, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus
Michel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970, 3rd edn 2003), vol. 2, p. 281.
30
Hamann, Briefwechsel, vol. 1, p. 377, letter to Kant, 27 July, 1759, my emphasis. Picked out by Hegel
in his article.
110 Marian Hobson
Developing my earlier commentary, a magic ring enables a sultan to listen in to

descriptions of the vagina’s owner’s sex life. The vagina speaks the truth, often in situa-
tions where the person whose body has taken on an articulate life of its own would
prefer total silence or ignorance. The magic, the mild licentiousness of the framing
conceit, perhaps rendered less dangerous the political satire. Hamann adopts the title
as a piece of shorthand in many places: the philosopher F. H. Jacobi’s knowledge
of truth is a bijou indiscret, he says, according to Jacobi’s account of Hamann to his
brother.31 Unlike Diderot’s use of the analogy wrapped within a conte oriental,
Hamann’s gathers a shock value, no doubt intended.
Hegel complains about the difficulty of Hamann’s style.32 It is indeed full of digs at
the reader, complicated references, quotations which may or may not be real. As Robert
Sparling, the author of a recent excellent book, has argued, the quirky self-conscious
writing does indeed imply that he is manoeuvring, phrase by phrase, against the idea of
a public sphere which is then emerging, one open and ‘transparent’ in our present-day
cant. This is often satirical: but why? This public sphere relies on appearance. Language
for Hamann goes back to the sources of mental life, is primary: ‘Without language, we
wouldn’t have reason.’ Hamann adds ‘without reason, no religion’.33 This is not Diderot’s
atheist perspective, self-evidently. Yet their views of language are connected. For
Hamann, language is translation, not the expression of some already itemized thing,
but creation of that thing by separating it out and meaning it in language.34
Diderot thought in similar fashion. His Lettre sur les sourds et muets deserves to be
better known. Hamann certainly knew it, alluded to it, and, more tellingly, on at least
one occasion seems to quote it almost by accident and without reference. For Diderot,
the structures of language and thought are superimposed on one another, but with a
slight delay, for language is linear, because occurring through the line of time; as we
speak, this inevitably injects into a whole and simultaneous thought a spacing out:
L’état de l’ame dans un instant indivisible fut représenté par une foule de termes que la préci-
sion du langage exigea, et qui distribuèrent une impression totale en parties: et parce que ces
termes se prononçaient successivement, et ne s’entendaient qu’à mesure qu’ils se prononçaient,
on fut porté à croire que les affections de l’âme qu’ils représentaient avaient la même succession;
mais il n’en est rien.35
31
Jacobis Werke, ed. Roth, vol. 3, p. 505, letter of 5 Sept. 1787, http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.
ah65f3;view=1up;seq=549, consulted 26 Nov. 2015: ‘My knowledge of Truth, said he, alluding to a novel by
Diderot, is a bijou indiscret’ [Meine Erkenntnis der Wahrheit, sagt er, (anspielend auf einen Roman des
Diderot) sei ein bijou indiscret]. Cf. Roland Mortier, Diderot en Allemagne (Paris: Presses universitaires de
France, 1954), p. 214.
32
He quotes with approval Moses Mendelssohn’s view that it was wrecked by Hamann’s desire to be
original.
33
Hamann, Werke, vol. 3, p. 231, l. 10 I have translated Vernunft by reason. 34 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 199, l. 4.
35
‘The state of the soul in one indivisible instant was represented by a crowd of terms which precision of
language made necessary and which distributed one total impression into parts; and because those terms
were pronounced successively, and were only understood as they were pronounced, we were led to believe
that the affections of the soul they represented had the same succession: but that is not the case at all.’
Diderot has already discussed the false ideas introduced by language, this influence of
logic on what we understand about ourselves. He goes on to contrast the simultaneity
of impression with the linearization that is the effect of logical thought:
Autre chose est l’état de notre âme; autre chose le compte que nous en rendons soit à nous-
mêmes, soit aux autres: autre chose la sensation totale et instantanée de cet état; autre chose
l’attention successive et détaillée que nous sommes forcés d’y donner pour l’analyser, la mani-
fester et nous faire entendre. Notre âme est un tableau mouvant d’après lequel nous peignons
sans cesse: nous employons bien du temps à le rendre avec fidélité; mais il existe en entier et
tout à la fois: l’esprit ne va pas à pas comptés comme l’expression. Le pinceau n’exécute qu’à
la longue ce que l’œil du Peintre embrasse tout d’un coup. La formation des langues exigeait la
décomposition; mais voir un objet, le juger beau, éprouver une sensation agréable, désirer
la possession, c’est l’état de l’âme dans un même instant; et ce que le grec et le latin rendent par
un seul mot. Ce mot prononcé, tout est dit, tout est entendu. Ah! Monsieur, combien notre
entendement est modifié par les signes; et que la diction la plus vive est encore une froide copie
de ce qui s’y passe.36
Only a few lines on, Diderot adds a phrase that Hamann actually quotes with approval
at other points: ‘Pour Moi qui m’occupe plutôt à former des nuages que les dissiper,
et à suspendre les jugements qu’à juger’ [for me, who works more at forming clouds
and at suspending judgement than at judging]. These are not the words of an
Aufklärer. His awareness of the complexity of language is based, it seems to me, on a
strong sense of the complexity of our mental awareness. These are in constant play
against each other, in a state of constant and mutual action and reaction. Whereas
Hamann’s sense of the depth of language is exactly that: depth, rooted in history and
tradition, beyond our ken.
Berlin’s placing of him in a Counter-Enlightenment certainly chimes with Hamann’s
opposition to Frederick the Great, as with his pitting the importance of language in
philosophy against Kant’s near-neglect. Yet this firm distinction Pro and Contra fails
to account for what in Hamann was attracted to Diderot: the roguishness, the sensi-
tivity to the eternal and ongoing lack of fit, both co-operation and struggle, between
thought and language within us. I have tried to suggest that describing certain features
of their writing as rococo in style reminds us that the playfulness, the enigmatic turn of
their expression on occasion, in its injection of uncertainty does perform some of
36
‘The state of our soul is one thing; quite another is the account we give of it, either to ourselves or to
others: the total and instantaneous is one thing; the successive, detailed attention that we are forced to pay
it so as to analyse it, to show it forth, and to make ourselves understood is quite another. Our soul is a
moving picture, and we paint it ceaselessly; we take up much time rendering it faithfully, but it exists as
a whole and at the same time: the mind doesn’t move in precise steps, like our expression. The paintbrush
takes a length of time to execute what the eye of the Painter takes in all at one go. The construction of lan-
guages demanded that the idea be decomposed; but seeing an object, judging it beautiful, feeling a pleasant
sensation, desiring the possession, is the state of our soul in one single instant; and Greek and Latin render
it by a single word. The word once pronounced, everything is said, everything is understood. Oh Sir, how
deeply our understanding is modified by signs; and how much the liveliest diction is still a cold copy of
what is going on inside.’ Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, ed. Marian Hobson
and Simon Harvey (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 2000), p. 111.
112 Marian Hobson
scepticism’s task. In that way, at least, it undoes the too firm distinction between
Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment made by Isaiah Berlin.
All three, Hamann, Diderot, Berlin, were brilliant letter writers and conversational-
ists. Berlin in his sociable and social persona, with his enjoyment of the playful and
slightly quirky, lived out an aspect of the Enlightenment that relates him to the
Enlightenment-as-rococo. Diderot doesn’t fit into a simple category. Hamann, with his
love of the grotesque, of the obscene, with his tendency to go against the opinions of his
interlocutor, with his insubordinate relation to consistency, with his enjoyment of
complicated writing, resembles Diderot at least in these, and doesn’t fit into a simple
category either, not anyway until we have a more adequate idea of the rococo’s relation
to the Enlightenment.
8
Sympathy and Empathy
Isaiah’s Dilemma, or How He Let the
Enlightenment Down
T. J. Reed
In 1954, in my last year at school, hoping for a place at Oxford and about to join the
National Service Russian course, I was naturally drawn to a series of broadcast lectures
by an Oxford don on Russian cultural history: Isaiah Berlin’s ‘A Marvellous Decade’.
There could have been no more impressive introduction to high academe than this
virtuoso performance, with its combination of volubility and clarity, dense detail and
authoritative-sounding conclusions. Most striking was the vivid characterization of
leading intellectuals of the 1860s, Ivan Turgenev, Alexander Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky.
Of Belinsky’s literary criticism Isaiah said ‘the vision is so intense, he has so much to
say, and says it in so first-hand a fashion, the experience is so vivid and conveyed with
such uncompromising and uninterrupted force, that the effect of his words is almost
as powerful today as it was upon his own contemporaries’. And how was this effect
achieved? ‘He himself said that no one could understand a poet or a thinker who did
not for a time become wholly immersed in his world, dominated by his outlook, identified
with his emotions; who did not, in short, try to live through the writer’s experiences,
beliefs and convictions.’1 That sounds very like Isaiah Berlin’s practice with some of his
subjects. He is describing empathy, and practising it as he describes it.
Empathy is a stage beyond sympathy. Sympathy, despite its etymology, can be a rela-
tively cool emotion, viewing a thinker’s world from the outside, tolerant, just, perhaps
even appreciative, but not necessarily enthusiastic. Empathy on the other hand enters
fully into that world, it speaks from the inside, to the point where the thinker’s voice
and the critic’s voice merge, so that where there is no interpolated ‘A. thinks’ or ‘B. argues’,
we get something approaching identification, the equivalent of viewpoint narrative in
fiction. Clearly, a critic may feel sympathy for one writer or school and practise empathy
for another. Sympathy and empathy may even stand in opposition to one another.
1
Russian Thinkers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. 185.
114 T. J. Reed
In the 1990s, I had three contacts with Isaiah Berlin relevant to our Enlightenment
subject and to those concepts. The first was when, as sometimes happened, he asked
me through Henry Hardy for a reference. Where did Kant’s phrase ‘the crooked timber
of humanity’, a favourite quotation of his since at least the 1930s,2 actually come from?
More about that phrase later. The second was when I sent him a copy of my Oxford
Past Masters volume on Schiller, to which he replied that he had ‘a particularly deep,
almost personal feeling for Schiller’.3 Having never detected any such feeling for the
great Enlightenment dramatist and thinker in Isaiah’s publications, I must have made
a comment to my former pupil and member of Isaiah’s circle Roger Hausheer which
he passed on, producing this response: ‘Do assure Jim Reed that I am entirely in
favour of the Enlightenment but prefer to deal with the views of enemies rather than
friends—I think they throw more light on the cracks in the armour of the ideas that
I like and approve.’4
Others have since noted the same gap and received much the same reply.5 It seems to
me a less than adequate justification, or at least—since a scholar has a right to work on
whatever he likes—a failure to see the likely effect of that choice when it was so mas-
sively exercised. Just occasionally Isaiah came close to a realization. In a letter of 1959,
along with the familiar negatives about the Enlightenment, he worried that ‘it might
look as if I were offering comfort to anti-rationalism, which is a dreadful thought’.6 He
certainly believed other prominent figures were guilty of that. A letter of 1994 names
writers from Horkheimer and Adorno to Foucault and Derrida who ‘really do give
succour to the forces of darkness by discrediting enlightened liberalism’ (TCE 510).
Nevertheless, any recognition of the Enlightenment in his own writings went on being
undermined by the repeated generalized objections. In a late conversation recorded
for publication he says Voltaire, Helvétius, Condorcet, and D’Holbach are ‘deeply sym-
pathetic’ to him; they were ‘liberators’ from all sorts of social evil, they ‘fought a good
fight, he is ‘on their side’—even though they may have been ‘too narrow and often
wrong about the facts of human experience’.7 (‘Narrow’—Voltaire!)
Hence, if the Enlightenment had Isaiah’s declared sympathy, it was never the object
of his empathy.
His sympathy is mostly expressed in informal contexts (conversations or letters,
reassuring a friend, a colleague or a reviewer), though even there the sympathy is never
2
He uses it in a letter of 30 Nov. 1933 to Elizabeth Bowen, L I 70. According to Henry Hardy, he first
came across it in a lecture of R. G. Collingwood’s in 1929. See CTH xxiii. On the proper translation of the
phrase, see note 13.
3
Unpublished letter of 30 Apr. 1991. 4 Berlin to Hausheer, 8 December 1991.
5
See Berlin’s correspondence with Mark Lilla following Lilla’s review of The Crooked Timber of Humanity
in the London Review of Books, 6 January 1994, now in extract in TCE 493–511.
6
To Karl Popper, 16 March 1959, L II 680ff. Isaiah’s influence across a liberated Eastern Europe has
apparently been benign. But there are (semi-) scholarly books that link anti-Western extremism, from
Heidegger to Osama bin Laden, back to Herder’s ideas, all apparently acknowledging a debt to Isaiah. See
Robert E. Norton, ‘The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 68 (2007),
635–58.
7
CIB 70. Used as the epigraph for L II.
Isaiah’s Dilemma, or How He Let the Enlightenment Down 115
unadulterated. In formal contexts, since he is always writing from the standpoint of the
Enlightenment’s opponents, we only see of it what can be presented negatively. The
positive image and the empathy are reserved for those who were struggling, to quote
the title of one of his essay volumes, ‘against the current’.
As far as I can see, Isaiah only once took the Enlightenment itself as his direct
theme, in a no longer much noticed anthology, The Age of Enlightenment. Perhaps the
publisher had simply hired Isaiah’s taxicab, that characteristically modest metaphor
he used for the intellectual excursions which diverted him from undertaking any
large-scale scholarly publication. Still, one might have expected that in such a com-
mission his declared sympathy for the Enlightenment would blossom into empathy.
It’s true the introduction ends with the grand statement that ‘their age is one of the
best and most hopeful episodes in the life of mankind’. But that is preceded by a page
of the usual reservations, above all that the whole Enlightenment was convinced
every problem was soluble by the discovery of objective answers which would be per-
manently valid for everyone in a harmonious natural and social world. (This statement
simply isn’t true, and no chapter and verse are quoted to support it—they never are.)
The extreme over-simplification is one premiss of Isaiah’s well-known thesis of the
incompatibility of the various proposed solutions to social problems, which demands
a tolerant pluralism.
What does Isaiah’s anthology contain? Eighty pages of Locke, forty of Berkeley, a
hundred of Hume. There are, astonishingly, just tiny snippets of French—two pages of
Voltaire, three of Condillac, two of La Mettrie; and equally tiny snippets of German—
two pages of Lichtenberg and five of Hamann. Hamann?! What is he doing there?
Wasn’t he part of the Anti-Enlightenment, one of Kant’s most uncomprehending and
vociferous assailants? Where, come to that, is Kant himself? Nowhere. There is noth-
ing by Kant. The preface offers a truly bizarre excuse for his absence: ‘Though of course
Kant belongs to the Enlightenment, the central strands in some of his views—perhaps
in a distorted or at any rate greatly altered form—enter the Counter-Enlightenment.
For these reasons Kant is more appropriately included in The Age of Ideology: the
Nineteenth-Century Philosophers.’8 ‘More appropriate’ to hold over the thinker who
revolutionized epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics in his own day, and perhaps in the
long run politics too, and to set him down in an alien century? It then turns out that no
text of Kant’s appears in the nineteenth-century volume either. Kant was certainly
not part of any kind of Counter-Enlightenment. That volume’s editor naturally did not
accept, if he even knew about, the eccentric transfer proposal.
So arguably Europe’s greatest philosopher, and certainly the most profound thinker
the Enlightenment produced, has been left out of the history of ideas altogether. In any
case, should any thinker be deliberately first presented to readers and students in the
wrong historical period and ‘in a distorted or greatly altered form’? Was Isaiah already
8
Prefatory ‘Author’s [sic] note’. The later volume, edited by Henry D. Aiken, appeared in New York in
the New American Library, 1956.
116 T. J. Reed
thinking towards his own later essay, ‘Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Nationalism’,
now to be found in a volume called The Sense of Reality? A sense of reality is what that
essay wholly lacks. It belongs with those all too familiar attempts to discredit the
Enlightenment for becoming or bringing about the opposite of its principles, where
the accusations get wilder as the references to specific individuals and texts get thinner,
and it all dissolves into hot air. On a better day Isaiah knew this kind of pseudo-causality
was ‘a historical and moral error’.9 Was he aware that he himself often sailed close to
the wind?
It would incidentally have been a simple matter to squeeze into Isaiah’s anthology, in
among that intolerable deal of English-language philosophy, the mere ten pages
(Germans can be very economical) of Kant’s luminous essay ‘An Answer to the
Question, What is Enlightenment?’, a text central to the German Enlightenment and a
foundation document of liberal European society. And having excluded Kant, was it
not adding insult to injury to include Hamann ‘as an act of belated homage’ and to
praise him to the skies for ‘the depth and originality of his ideas about the relation of
thought, reason and the spiritual life’, subjects about which Kant too had some things
to say? What at first seemed a dilemma has become misguided exclusion.
Isaiah’s later study of Hamann takes empathy further. It celebrates Hamann’s insist-
ence on concrete particulars against all abstractions and systems, and his half-mystical
views on language. To label a simple utterance on language and feeling ‘one of his
greatest claims to immortality’ (TCE 403) is already to set the bar high, overstating
both the criterion and the achievement; but then to say that ‘it is doubtful whether
without Hamann’s revolt—or at any rate something similar—the worlds of Herder,
Friedrich Schlegel, Tieck, Schiller, and indeed of Goethe too—would have come into
being’ is a wild travesty of literary history, only slightly mitigated by the bet-hedging
phrase ‘or at any rate something similar’ (TCE 422). But all empathy risks exaggerat-
ing. This time it involved putting all available eloquence into a caricature of Kant as
that ‘frozen-up old pedant who understood nothing worth understanding. For Kant,
the world—nature—is a dead, external object, to be observed, analysed, labelled, the
relevant concepts and categories are to be properly examined, their connections
established, and the great automaton that is the world for him can be described and
explained by a cut-and-dried system which, if it is true at all, will remain true for
ever’ (TCE 429).
Note that this is apparently not a direct quotation from Hamann, but part of a long
empathetic diatribe in his spirit. It’s elsewhere summed up in the phrase ‘Kant’s gnostic
hatred of matter’ (PSM 250). To see how gross these distortions are, we need only look
at things Kant actually wrote. In the Critique of Pure Reason he surveys the universe as
‘an immeasurable scene of diversity, order, purposiveness and beauty’, of ‘endless space
9
‘. . . a historical and moral error to identify the ideology of one period with its consequences in some
other, with its transformation in some other context and in combination with other factors’. ‘Herder and
the Enlightenment’, TCE 259.
and infinite division . . . so that our judgement of the whole must dissolve into a speechless
but all the more eloquent wonderment’.10 Not much ‘gnostic hatred of matter’ there,
any more than there is in Kant’s early scientific essays, with their proto-modern dynamic
conception of the world’s workings; or—surely too celebrated to have been forgot-
ten?—the conclusion of the Critique of Practical Reason, with its calm acceptance of
our small and temporary place in the ‘immeasurable immensity of worlds upon worlds
and systems of systems’, and its admiration and reverence for the starry heavens.11 By
declaring itself speechless, Kant’s ‘wonderment’ (Erstaunen) ceases to be speechless;
but he was always modest about his stylistic powers. Still, his wonderment is recogniz-
ably the same aesthetic-cum-scientific response to the physical world that inspired
Goethe’s poetry and was, in the old poet’s retrospect, his reason for existing: ‘Zum
Erstaunen bin ich da.’12
Misrepresenting Kant was not just a matter of seeing him through Hamann’s eyes.
Isaiah in his own right misrepresents Kant over (of all things) that favourite phrase of
his, ‘the crooked timber of humanity’. The one context in which he does more than just
refer to the phrase in passing reads: ‘No more rigorous moralist than Immanuel Kant
has ever lived, but even he said, in a moment of illumination, “Out of the crooked tim-
ber of humanity no straight thing was ever made” ’ (CTH 19). That is wrong on every
possible count. Most importantly, Kant’s insight didn’t come in a ‘moment of illumina-
tion’, it was part of the steady light in which he saw humanity—or, more correctly and
concretely translated, ‘the human being’. It isn’t an exception, at odds with Kant’s fun-
damental moral doctrine. On the contrary, it epitomizes his position. Kant was always
wholly realistic about the way things and people were, while keeping firmly in view
how they ought to be and could yet be made. Our timber is indeed crooked, and ‘noth-
ing entirely straight’ (again, to translate Kant’s wording properly) ‘can be made of it’—
‘can be made’, not ‘was ever made’.13 ‘Was ever made’ would be a world-weary comment
on the failures of the past. Kant, on the contrary, is sizing up a future task. The next
sentence tells us more about that task. It is to realize an idea. And what idea is that? ‘The
establishing of a perfect civil constitution.’14 Not a bad idea, then, certainly not a uto-
pian aim, not least because Kant the realist knows it can only be achieved imperfectly:
‘Nature requires of us only the approximation to this idea.’ Yet a practical aim it
remains. That is typical of Enlightenment thinking: hopeful, provisional, inviting active
engagement. This is not what Isaiah clearly thinks it means. He takes it as a reluctant
10
Immanuel Kants Werke, ed. Ernst Cassirer et al. (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1921–3), vol. 3, p. 428 (B 650).
11
Kants Werke, vol. 5, p. 174. 12 Last line of the poem ‘Parabase’ (1820).
13
Kant’s half-sentence reads in the original ‘aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist,
kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden’. Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher
Absicht (‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intention’), 1784, sixth proposition, Werke,
vol. 4, p. 158. The allegedly ‘more literal translation’ offered as an epigraph to the 1990 edition of Berlin’s
volume—‘nothing entirely straight can be carved’—is wrong in a new way. ‘Carved’ is a sculptural meta-
phor. Kant, aptly to a very basic point, was talking simple carpentry—‘gezimmert’ is best rendered just as
‘made’. He uses the phrase again in Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (‘Religion
within the Limits of Mere Reason’), 1793, Werke, vol. 6, p. 245.
14
Werke, vol. 4, p. 158.
118 T. J. Reed
concession to reality from a specialist in abstraction, as if Kant were saying, ‘Humanity

has always been imperfect, so give up these grand designs. They’ll only end in tears.’ On
the contrary, Kant is saying: this is the material we’ve got, yes we know it’s imperfect,
but there isn’t any other. So we must work with it and at least ‘approximate’ to the
fulfilment of the idea. It is relevant that Isaiah had to ask after the source of the key
phrase. Kant’s striking metaphor had stuck in his mind decades ago, but he’d forgotten
the context, and he can’t have checked it. He gets the angle wrong.
To return to Hamann’s angle on Kant: Isaiah does at last provide a précis of Kant’s
argument for intellectual independence in ‘What is Enlightenment?’, but only as a prel-
ude to Hamann’s response—and he ‘of course was outraged. Pride, independence are
the most fatal of all spiritual delusions’ (TCE 423). Notice a by no means trivial syntac-
tical point: the tense of Isaiah’s verb has shifted, from ‘was outraged’ to ‘are’ delusions.
Reporting someone’s view, in the normal sequence of tenses in English, is the function
of the past tense—Hamann ‘of course was outraged . . . pride, independence [it should
read] were . . . delusions’. Isaiah’s switch to the present tense joins his voice to Hamann’s.
It signals achieved empathy.
The two voices are joined again in Hamann’s attack on ‘the miserable Berlin ration-
alists, men who in the battle against fanaticism have themselves become rationalist
fanatics, murderers, incendiaries, robbers, cheats of God and man’ (TCE 418). One is
left gasping, and wondering who these—unnamed—‘Berlin rationalists’ can have been?
(Unnamed by Isaiah—were they unnamed by Hamann? One can never be sure what
in Isaiah is unattributed quotation and what is more or less fanciful extrapolation.)
The only candidates I know of for the title ‘Berlin rationalists’, though not for the title
of murderers and arsonists, are the two dozen members of the Wednesday Society,
otherwise known as the Society of Friends of the Enlightenment. They were a group
of writers, clergymen, lawyers, doctors, and highly placed civil servants who met to
read each other papers largely on social questions, which they also sometimes pub-
lished in the Enlightenment’s main journal, the Berlinische Monatsschrift, with the
aim of bringing about gradual improvements in the running of Frederick the Great’s
not altogether unenlightened Prussia. ‘Fanatics’ they were not, and the other charges
are simply ludicrous.
All this is emphatically not to say that Isaiah shared Hamann’s position. The subtitle
of his little book, The Magus of the North (1993), is ‘J. G. Hamann and the Origins of
Modern Irrationalism’. Leaving aside that this attribution itself considerably overstates
Hamann’s role, it does at least warn any reader who is not already a committed irra-
tionalist where Hamann will be shown to be leading. Isaiah knows very well when
Hamann had gone out on an impossible limb: that the onslaught on abstraction and
generalization in favour of concrete particulars is a crude category mistake; that ‘it is
‘an attack on thought as such’; that it leads to ‘blind obscurantism’, ‘hatred of criticism
and, in the end, all mental activity’. He knows it was really Hamann who was the
‘fanatic’, that his philosophy of life was ‘grotesquely one-sided’, that it fed the stream
that led to ‘social and political irrationalism, particularly in Germany, in [the twentieth]
century’ (TCE 436–7). But all this is concentrated in two pages towards the end of the
essay, too little, too late. Elsewhere we must not just read, but weigh the cumulative
effect of so much energetic entering into the anti-Enlightenment’s mental world, and
of so much dutiful denigration of the Enlightenment—of ‘dry reason’, of Voltaire’s
‘desiccated maxims’, or of some (once again unnamed) ‘fanatical arranger of facts’,
in comparison with whom Hamann’s speculations about the nature of primitive
man—themselves wholly fact-free—are still accorded value (TCE 405). Isaiah is never
short of a pejorative phrase that hovers on a borderline between what one of the
Enlightenment’s opponents actually said and what he himself has against it. As Mark
Lilla wrote in his review of The Crooked Timber of Humanity in 1994, ‘the ink cannot
flow quickly enough when he is describing the vices of the Lumières’. And in ironic
contradiction to Isaiah’s support for Hamann as the champion of particulars, his own
accounts are all sheer generalization, a fault his friend Stuart Hampshire criticized to
his face.15 He does not show up (as he claimed to be doing) those ‘gaps’ or ‘chinks’ in the
armour of the ideas he said he approved. Indeed, he doesn’t quote any single thinker
directly enough to even attempt that. Instead he merely conjures up the alleged cata-
strophic consequences of the Enlightenment with the broadest of brushes and the kind
of tenuous pseudo-causality mentioned above. One wonders how much ‘sympathy’ for
the Enlightenment Isaiah can have still privately felt. Publicly his empathetic rhetoric
in favour of the opposition carried the more weight because it came from a prominent
liberal intellectual. He never took the trouble to explain in any of his essays exactly
what he was up to—why it was that he preferred to go so deep into the darkness and so
consistently neglect the light that it seems less a dilemma than an addiction in the one
direction and an abstinence in the other. That abstinence—the failure to argue the
Enlightenment case, other than in weak concessive asides—leaves its negative image
standing by default. Defending himself against Mark Lilla with the old ‘chinks in the
armour’ argument, he said of the writers he approved of—and even this in a mere
parenthesis—‘I take those for granted.’ Writing about them would be, he said, ‘not very
interesting’ (TCE 496).
Well, maybe writing about the Enlightenment isn’t ‘interesting’, perhaps the
Enlightenment itself is positively boring—the way they all keep going on about the
ideals of tolerance, and freedom of thought and speech, and justice, and peace, all
the things we’re so confident we now enjoy and so sure we’re never likely to lose,
because isn’t the Enlightenment a historical fait accompli? Didn’t it win the decisive
battles with the religious and secular authorities, so that it no longer needs any active
support from us on the touchlines? If such was the icon that inspired Isaiah’s fascina-
tion with the iconoclasts, then it was a massive misjudgement, not just of intellectual
history but of social reality, from the eighteenth century down to and including the
present. Reflect a moment on today’s secular and religious authorities and the always
15
See on Stuart Hampshire’s objections, Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1998), p. 89.
120 T. J. Reed
precarious balance between reason and unreason. When has reason, no, let’s not be
high-falutin’, let’s just say when have good sense, sane judgement, and fairness, the
everyday seeds and needs of enlightenment, ever had the secure upper hand over igno-
rance, superstition, intolerance, injustice, belligerence, fanaticism, and the abuse of
power over the powerless? Pace Isaiah, writing about the Enlightenment becomes
‘interesting’—indeed it becomes in every sense vital—when you realize it was the
Enlightenment that had to struggle, and all later enlightenment that still has to struggle,
‘against the current’. That volume title mistook the direction of the current.
Did Isaiah’s dilemma—if we can still call it that—have some deep cause? One answer
seems obvious, though hardly original. We are all shaped in our thinking by the large
events of our lives, perhaps most of all by the events of our early life. It seems possible
that the Russian Revolution, whose beginnings the young Isaiah experienced and
which went on to distort a philosophy with humane origins into one of the twentieth
century’s ghastly tyrannies—it seems possible this was a primal trauma, creating in
Isaiah a mindset for which disaster seemed necessarily latent in the most high-minded
of intentions, and darkness showed through so clearly that light seemed not just
insufficient, but its very pursuit perilous and hubristic.
And if the actual effect of Isaiah’s rhetoric was to leave a negative picture of what
he had once called ‘one of the best and most hopeful episodes in the life of mankind’
(AE 29), the missing effect was what his powerful presentational skills might have achieved
on behalf of those writers and ideas he sadly felt so relaxed about ‘taking for granted’. We
could have done with him actively, eloquently—empathetically—on our side.
9
Isaiah Berlin, J. S. Mill,
and Progress
Alan Ryan
Isaiah Berlin paints with a broad brush when depicting the heroes and villains who
populate his essays in the history of ideas. I do not say this disapprovingly: intellectual
history needs swathes of bright colour as well as muted shades of grey on grey. Here,
I also paint with broad strokes, not for the sake of vividness but to highlight contrasts
that I often soften later. I focus on Berlin’s essay ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’,
but the background is provided by the other four essays reprinted in Liberty—‘Political
Ideas in the Twentieth Century’, ‘Historical Inevitability’, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’,
and ‘From Hope and Fear Set Free’. The last was added to the original Four Essays on
Liberty only in 2002, and therefore posthumously, but Berlin hankered after including
it from the outset.1 The aim is to illuminate the liberalism to which Berlin subscribed
and its connections to what Berlin saw as the strengths and weaknesses of the
Enlightenment; the strategy is indirect, allowing Mill to cast such light on Berlin’s lib-
eralism as a liberal of a different stripe can cast, but the thumbnail summary is that
Mill’s liberalism rests on a narrative about progress, psychological, cultural, moral,
economic, and political, while Berlin’s attitude towards progress was at least ambivalent.
Mill’s defence of liberty was advertised as the indispensable basis of progress construed
as he construed it, while Berlin’s liberalism sometimes appealed to an intuitive notion
of inviolable human rights, sometimes seemed heroically anti-foundationalist, but
never appeared to be justified as a means to some other goal. However, it is hard to
deny that Berlin was right to suspect that Mill’s commitment to the freedoms defended
in On Liberty was more than instrumental: that no amount of evidence in favour of
paternalism, or in favour of the view that suppressing dissent may promote both hap-
piness and better understanding of the world, would have changed his convictions.
Nor was Berlin’s liberalism any more monolithic than Mill’s, even in the very limited
sense in which a book like Anarchy, State and Utopia is so; Robert Nozick insisted that
1
See the editor’s introduction, in Isaiah Berlin, Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), pp. ix–xxxiv (pp. xix–xxi). Henceforth cited as L.
122 Alan Ryan
the rights of self-owning individuals were inviolable and may not be infringed by
social policies of no matter how benign an intention.2 Berlin did not. Because ‘Two
Concepts’ dominated the critical discussion for so long and so completely, it was easy
to think that Berlin’s political philosophy was exhausted by an insistence on the abso-
lute value of freedom. But Berlin always insisted that freedom must be balanced with
other values; he never denied that freedom for the pike meant death for the minnow,
and he readily embraced the social programme of the 1945 Labour government and
the welfare state it created. No more than Berlin did Mill think that the rights of prop-
erty were sacrosanct; ownership rights are a useful social device, to be modified as time
and circumstances demand. Land nationalization, for instance, might be wise or fool-
ish, but was not in principle illicit.
Nonetheless, the similarities between Mill and Berlin extend only so far. Mill was a
far more systematic thinker than Berlin. He would have been on the side of the critics
of the intuitionist and pluralistic moral philosophy common to Berlin and his contem-
poraries such as H. L. A. Hart and Stuart Hampshire. The critics complain that the
result lacks coherence, and John Rawls’s masterpiece, A Theory of Justice, attempted
among other things to reduce the number of jostling intuitions on which a defence of
liberalism is built.3 Berlin showed no sign of embarrassment at the implied criticism.
Mill, on the other hand, was wholly committed to the view that a rational ethics must
be based on one standard of value: utility. Mill’s emphasis on what he called axiomata
media complicates matters by introducing intermediate values such as justice, nobility,
beauty, and so indefinitely on, that in practice dictate our choices. That does something
to close the gap between Mill and Berlin, but Berlin simply takes it for granted that
Mill’s attempts to provide a utilitarian defence of his libertarian principles is hopeless.
By no means everyone has been persuaded.4 The argument continues.
Mill’s liberalism has features that alarm modern commentators, especially the out-
look revealed in his remarks about societies that are in ‘the nonage of the race’.5 Readers
are shocked by Mill’s defence of the avowedly ‘despotic’ colonial government of the
East India Company, but he was even-handed in nominating candidates for the bene-
fits of benevolent despotism, including the Irish of the early nineteenth century, the
English of Elizabeth I’s day, and the Russian people under Peter the Great. Mill’s
espousal of ‘all-in’ liberalism contrasts both with the ‘political liberalism’ of John
Rawls6 and with Berlin’s belief that it is all but self-contradictory for a professed liberal
to contemplate intervening in non-liberal societies for their own (liberal) good. I shall
not argue for a particular view on this, but will say without argument that it is not
2
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
3
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
4
Richard Wollheim, ‘John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin’, in Alan Ryan (ed.), The Idea of Freedom
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 253–69.
5
On Liberty, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 18 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1977),
p. 224.
6
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
Isaiah Berlin, J. S. Mill, and Progress 123
incoherent to contemplate forcing individuals or whole societies to be free, but that it is

morally awkward, and usually imprudent, since the risk of failure is so high and the
costs intolerable.
Behind these issues lie others. The most basic is what arguments on behalf of a liberal
world view liberals might muster. Mill, notoriously, said that he derived the right to be left
alone unless we harmed or threatened harm to others from utilitarian premises. An appeal
to rights unsupported by anything better than our intuitions was no argument at all. It was
what Bentham memorably called ‘ipse dixitism’, a mere assertion based on the speaker’s
say-so. Mill’s view was that rights, whether moral rights enforced by opinion or legal rights
enforced by law, must be ‘grounded in utility’. Berlin nowhere produced a defence of the
commitments of a liberal as elaborate as Mill produced in On Liberty, and elsewhere,
including his Principles of Political Economy. The question therefore is what Berlin’s con-
ception did rest on. The most popular answer points to Berlin’s well-known espousal of
moral pluralism—indeed a pluralism about ends generally, and not moral ends alone. This
is partially right. Berlin was certainly committed to the view that ends are many, varied,
incommensurable, and at odds with one another in all sorts of ways; but his liberalism,
especially in its political aspect, rests on something akin to the Kantian doctrine that we
may never treat other human beings as a means to ends they have not chosen. Variety
alone cannot found a defence of freedom without the addition of other premises, which
do much of the work. Negatively, Berlin’s is the doctrine I have elsewhere described as ‘no
sad caryatids’, and explain below.7 Positively it yields an account of one variety of positive
liberty, or ‘being one’s own master’, though without the openings for disaster that ‘Two
Concepts’ and other essays claim to see in Hegelian and other forms of Idealism (L 180, on
T. H. Green). Berlin’s doubts about the Enlightenment, politically speaking—which never
extended to a repudiation of its achievements—reflected his hostility to thinkers who felt
entitled to engage in some form of psychic and political engineering in the interests of
producing perfect societies populated by perfected individuals. Kant’s reminder that of
such crooked timber as man is, no straight thing was ever made was very much to Berlin’s
taste, as it was to Mill’s.8 This was not to side with the Counter-Enlightenment nor to be
‘anti-enlightenment’, but to insist on the variousness of human nature and to protest
against everyone who thought to cramp it, or remodel it. Most Enlightenment thinkers
were nonetheless committed to the idea of progress in some form; Kant himself wrote his
sketch of a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose to defend—as an Idea of Reason
to be sure, not as an unchallengeable fact—the claim that history was the story of progress,
indeed that it was the hidden purpose of history to bring humanity to the development of
all its capacities, not individual by individual, but as a species.9
7
In Michael T. Gibbons (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Political Thought (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell,
2015).
8
Indeed, it provides the title of a collection of his essays: The Crooked Timber of Humanity. See Immanuel
Kant, Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, tr. Lewis Beck (Chicago: Bobbs-Merrill,
1963), ‘Sixth Thesis’.
9
Kant, Idea, ‘Second Thesis’.
124 Alan Ryan
Finally, I recur to the contrast between Mill’s apparent readiness to drag backward
peoples into the improving mainstream and to intervene (under highly restrictive con-
ditions) to assist them in liberating themselves from tyrants, and Berlin’s seemingly
absolute prohibition on anything that smacked of forcing people to be free.10 Inevitably,
there is a good deal of overlap between what follows and what I have written else-
where,11 but I have tried to minimize repetition by concentrating on the contrast
between Mill and Berlin. In the context of this volume, it is clear that Mill and Berlin
shared doubts about what Mill described as the ‘mechanical’ mind-set of ‘the men of
the 18th Century’ and an affection for more ‘organic’ thinkers that stopped well short
of endorsing the irrationalism of many romantics. Mill may have been rescued from
depression by Wordsworth, the ‘poet of unpoetical natures’, but it was Goethe who
provided the motto for his new self—‘many-sidedness’—and Wilhelm von Humboldt
who provided the epigraph for On Liberty.12
‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’ was the 1959 Robert Waley Cohen Lecture. The
date is significant; it was the centenary of the publication of Mill’s On Liberty. It was
also the year after Berlin had given his inaugural lecture, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. As
Berlin pointed out, 1859 was the year that saw the death of Macaulay and Tocqueville,
and also the publication of The Origin of Species, a work that shook up inherited intel-
lectual habits, undermined traditional religion, and in the corrupted form of Social
Darwinism encouraged racism, and an irrational attachment to ‘might is right’ as a
principle of social action and international relations. Like all but the most austerely
analytical commentators on Mill, Berlin was fascinated by the contrast between the
aspirations of Bentham and James Mill for the young John Stuart and the results of
what Mill called ‘A Crisis in My Mental History’, the nervous breakdown that afflicted
him at the age of twenty.13 A sceptical reader might, however, take issue with Berlin’s
insistence that, unlike the many writers whose personalities were at odds with the
doctrines they professed, Mill, both as fashioned by his father and Bentham and as
refashioned by himself, was all of a piece with the doctrine he preached. As anyone
who has read Mill’s distressing, appallingly unkind, and utterly irrational verbal
assaults on his mother and sister at the time of his belated marriage to Harriet Taylor
would agree, Mill’s liberalism was not rooted in his character; Mill was far from
easy-going, and ‘live and let live’ was not his mode. Whatever the doctrine of On
Liberty was, it was not the good-natured injunction to ‘do your own thing’ one associ-
ates with 1960s counter-culturalism. Conversely, Jeremy Bentham was contemptuous
10
John Skorupski provides a particularly deft and convincing account of Mill’s balancing of Enlightenment
and Romantic insights, longer than I attempt here, but as brief as the topic allows. See Skorupski, Why Read
Mill Today? (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 22–34.
11
Much of it collected in The Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2012).
12
Autobiography, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 1 (Toronto: Toronto University Press,
1981), p. 171; On Liberty, Collected Works, vol. 18, p. 214.
13
Autobiography, Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 137.
of appeals to natural rights, and thought the freedom to behave badly was not worth
having; but he was himself more tolerant by temperament than was Mill. Disraeli’s
sneering remark ‘here comes the finishing governess’ when Mill appeared in the House
of Commons in 1865 as the Liberal MP for Westminster was cruel, but it picked up a
vein of prissiness in Mill that is hard to like. This was not an inheritance from Bentham.
J. S. Mill had nothing to say about sex except to dismiss it as ‘the animal function’, but
Bentham argued that homosexuality was harmless and denounced laws against
sodomy. This is not to condemn Mill. Mill was perhaps all the more impressive as a
defender of liberal values because he was not expressing a temperamental disinclina-
tion to push other people around, but seeking a rational basis on which to distinguish
between those areas where we could properly make people do what they did not wish
to do, and those where we must curb our inclination to coerce them into behaving as
we think best. ‘The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle as entitled
to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion
and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or
the moral coercion of public opinion.’14 The ‘harm principle’ may be less simple than
he thought, but the intention is clear enough.
It may seem carping to pick on a throwaway remark in the opening few minutes of a
lecture, but Berlin’s method as a historian of ideas is pictorial; the work is done by vivid
portraits of the thinkers whose ideas were under examination. Done with Berlin’s
verve, it yields much that is valuable in reminding us that ideas have authors who write
for a purpose, for an audience, and (usually) in a manner calculated to gain their readers’
assent to whatever it is that the authors have to tell them. Mill was very clear that On
Liberty was written for mid nineteenth-century British readers. But Berlin’s habit of so
to speak re-enacting the thinking and expository processes of the writers with whom
he engaged ran two obvious and opposite dangers; one was that the distinctiveness of
different writers would be obscured as they were forced to speak as Berlin required, the
other that their differences would be exaggerated for dramatic effect. Beyond that, of
course, lie questions of simple accuracy, but these are not at issue here, save in the
matter of Berlin’s underestimation of Mill’s qualities as a philosopher and of the depth
and complexity of Mill’s argument for the liberalism espoused in On Liberty. Even that
may rest on a misalignment of temperaments; when Mill lost his faith in what he had
come to see as the excessively narrow utilitarianism of his father and Bentham, he did
not ‘suffer the fabric of his thoughts to fall to pieces but was incessantly engaged in
weaving it anew’.15 He remained a committedly systematic thinker, but now convinced
that any adequate system must be very much more flexible and capacious if it was to
accommodate the full range of human nature and experience. The patient and careful
way in which he pursued this task made him, I suspect, appear to Berlin as a good man,
on the right side in important matters, but not much fun at the dinner table.
14
On Liberty, Collected Works, vol. 18, p. 223. 15
Autobiography, p. 163.
126 Alan Ryan
It is time to turn to the topics that I broached at the outset. First, the question of the
argumentative resources Mill and Berlin draw on in defending liberalism. Berlin was
interestingly silent on the subject. Some of what he might have said if he had set out to
write his own version of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice can be inferred from what he
said at length and in a variety of ways, but his aversion to the kind of theorizing that
Rawls engaged in was complete. He did not—as Mill did—attempt to derive principles
‘entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of mankind collectively with one of their
number’ from a moral theory that he thought rationality required us to accept. There is
no such theory to be had. He thought On Liberty lacking in logical coherence (L 246),
and part of the reason was surely that he thought the attempt to derive an absolute
prohibition on coercive interference for other than reasons of self-defence from the
principle of utility was a hopeless undertaking. This is not to say that there was no
coherence to Berlin’s views. In an interesting letter to George Kennan, who had com-
plained that Berlin seemed to think liberal individualism had no philosophical
resources whatever, Berlin defended the view that there was a zone of inviolability
around the individual; if it was not respected, any number of atrocities might be com-
mitted (L xxix–xx; 336–44). Put the other way, a society that did not accept the exist-
ence of such a zone could not be a liberal society. His essay ‘Political Ideas in the
Twentieth Century’ was scattergun, taking on everything from Stalinism to the activ-
ities of philanthropic foundations, but its coherence was essentially—and properly—
negative, which is to say that the villains of the piece are thinkers, or the disreputable
disciples of thinkers, who refuse to acknowledge that individuals are not the raw mate-
rials of whatever projects their rulers, managers, and manipulators have in mind, but
possessed of an individuality that should be treated as inviolable. Berlin’s vision of the
‘Bad Enlightenment’ sometimes focused on thinkers who espoused no-holds-barred
benevolence. Bentham’s Panopticon project might stand for all similar projects, a
Procrustean utopia, or as Bentham put it, ‘a mill for grinding rogues honest’. One ought
to acknowledge that before becoming vulnerable to imprisonment in the Panopticon,
someone would have had to have committed a serious crime, and in a world run on
Benthamite principles, the criminal code would have been very different from, and
infinitely less brutal than, that of the England of the 1800s. Nonetheless, Bentham’s
response to critics who complained that the regime he proposed was dehumanizing
was not reassuring. ‘Call them soldiers, call them monks, call them machines, so they
were happy ones, I should not care.’16
Berlin’s argument in ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’ is pictorial. Mill was
brought up to be a benevolent reasoning machine but revolted against the programme
to which he had been trained, and thereafter praised variety, colour, eccentricity, bold-
ness, originality. The antitheses pile up, and there is no doubt which side we are to pre-
fer, and what side Mill is on. What we do not get, and what there is little of anywhere in
Berlin’s work, is an account of who is to pay the price for a more vivid world and who
16
Jeremy Bentham, Collected Works, ed. John Bowring, 11 vols (Edinburgh: Tait, 1843), vol. 4, p. 64.
decides whether the price is acceptable or unacceptable. Consider General Napier’s

famous reaction to the Indian practice of suttee; when he stopped a group from immo-
lating a widow, they protested that it was their custom. His response was, ‘Our custom
is to hang men who murder women; you follow your custom and we will follow ours.’
Mill was on General Napier’s side. Nor is there any discussion of just which areas of life
are covered by a taste for vividness and which are not. Very few of us would be happy to
see diversity of taste rule in matters such as which side of the road to drive on. Berlin
may well have thought that it was boringly obvious that in a discussion of ‘the ends
of life’, an acknowledgment of the existence of an infinity of practical issues where
uniformity of conduct is essential would be pointless. This seems to me to be only par-
tially true. Take Bernard Williams’s discussion in Moral Luck of Gauguin’s throwing up
everything and abandoning his family to head for Tahiti and a life of painting in the
South Pacific.17 It was a matter of luck that Gauguin in fact turned out to be a highly
talented painter and that his behaviour was in some sense—if not a strictly or narrowly
moral sense—justified. Had he turned out to be a terrible painter after all, he would
have been merely a deserting husband. It would be hard to deny that the ends which
animated Gauguin pass any test you like of the pursuit of the vivid, original, and imag-
inative; those whose welfare was sacrificed to the pursuit paid what we may think of as
a high price that on Williams’s view was justified by a happy outcome, but would not
have been so by a less happy outcome. It is not clear to me what Mill might have
thought, although some of his obiter dicta in On Liberty suggest that Gauguin ought to
have stayed put, or at best that he committed a wrong that we may be glad that he
committed, by analogy with our reaction to Greek slavery. As slavery it was utterly
wrong; as a step to progress, it was indispensable.
On Liberty is often angry, but it is also very sober. It is angry because Mill thought
Victorian England was in a fair way to stifling originality and liveliness beneath a blan-
ket of respectability. The remedy must in part lie in curbing the English enthusiasm for
squashing anything that did not conform to current notions of respectability, and the
only way Mill knew of doing that was to set out as clearly as possible the criteria that
should decide when society at large might properly coerce individuals into or out of
any particular course of action. On Liberty may, as Mill’s dedication to Harriet Taylor
suggests, be a legacy of her passion for individual autonomy and an expression of his
own resentment as being thought of as a ‘manufactured man’ and the product of the
psychological engineering of his father and Bentham, but it is a carefully constructed
piece of work, for all Berlin’s doubts about its logical coherence. Sobriety was Mill’s
natural mode. Fitzjames Stephen observed that Mill could be provoked and that a ‘red
veil’ came across his eyes when he contemplated the massed ranks of stupid
Conservatives on the opposite benches of the House of Commons; but in general Mill
preserved the demeanour of the philosopher. Berlin, indeed, says he was without
humour (L 227), which is not wholly unfair, even though Mill remarked of Auguste
Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 23.
17
128 Alan Ryan
Comte that only a man who had never laughed could have produced his recipes for the
rituals of the religion of humanity, which suggests that Mill had some idea at least of
what it was like to laugh at ridiculous ideas.
Nonetheless, Mill was indebted to Comte for his own ideas about religion and pro-
gress. Berlin emphasizes Mill’s insistence that religion was a private matter, but this
somewhat understates his concern to argue for a ‘religion of humanity’, a notion
self-evidently borrowed from Comte. Mill was deeply hostile to prosecutions for blas-
phemy, outraged when atheists were denied justice in English courts, and a supporter
of Charles Bradlaugh’s efforts to be seated as an MP in spite of being unwilling to swear
on the Bible. Religion in itself was another matter. Detached from the Christian obses-
sion with individual immortality, but drawing on two millennia of taking comfort and
inspiration from the lives of great men and women, the religion of humanity, purged of
the absurdities with which Comte had encumbered it, could provide the psychological
support that most of us need if we are to pursue the long-run ennoblement of the
human race as a goal. So we should turn to Mill’s views on progress since it is that ideal
of progress that underpins his final thoughts on the ‘religion of humanity’. Mill insists
that his defence of the principle that individuals may be coerced only to prevent harm
to others is founded on utility. But it is the utility of ‘man as a progressive being’.18
(Some editions have ‘a man as a progressive being’, but there seems no reason to believe
that Mill attached any importance to the difference in wording.) What progress con-
sists in is thus the crucial question. Considerations on Representative Government is
similarly dependent on the idea of progress; the best form of government is the one
that makes the greatest use of the capacities that citizens already have and does most to
develop them further. It is on that basis that representative government is pronounced
the ideally best form of government, although it may be impossible to practise in a
society whose inhabitants are not ready for it. It needs, as On Liberty says, a society
whose members are ready to be improved by discussion. Mill’s argument is not wholly
agreeable to democrats in either work. It is a characteristic of Mill’s work in almost
every context that his high estimate of the potentialities of human existence is matched
by a strikingly low estimate of the existing state of affairs. For the most, he seems to
think, human existence as it is is a bad joke against the possibilities of human existence
as it might be. His belief in progress is not a belief that things will only get better, nor
that there is a remorseless tide of improvement on which we can simply embark in the
expectation of being borne onwards towards a brighter future. ‘Deterioration is the law
of being’ is a much more characteristic utterance. When discussing the claim that
modern politics needed a party of order and a party of progress to provide a form of
political balance, Mill would have none of it. The only necessity was for a party of pro-
gress. ‘Order’ understood as the preservation of the status quo had no value in itself,
but as a precondition of progress, it was certainly, but platitudinously, necessary not to
regress. This is where Mill’s gloomy remark ‘Deterioration is the law of being’ makes
18
Mill, On Liberty, p. 224.
the point he has in mind; he was not the kind of thinker pilloried in Berlin’s essay
‘Historical Inevitability’. This was partly temperamental, and no doubt the sentiment
was reinforced by the discovery that he and Harriet Taylor had consumption and were
likely to die sooner rather than later—although, in fact, she died in 1858, not he. At all
events, Mill’s diary comment on reaching the age of forty-eight was that it was hard to
hope that things would get better, and all too easy simply to wish they would not
get worse.
What we have in Mill is a defence of what we may call for shorthand the ‘non-coercion’
principle based on the utility of man as a progressive being. This does not imply a
cheerful faith in progress, although it did imply that in some, and perhaps most, areas
of life we have a clear enough picture of what progress consists in to allow us to talk of
some things having improved and others not. When Mill wrote his unavailing defence
of the East India Company’s governance of India in the aftermath of the Mutiny and in
the face of Parliament’s determination to substitute direct rule for the outsourced
administration of the East India Company, Mill insisted that its rule had in essence
been one of ‘improvement’. Material improvements were obvious; docks and railways
had been built and roads constructed across the subcontinent. Some improvements had
been partly material and partly not; the Thuggees had been converted from banditry
and murder into useful tent makers, which might count as a success both for material
well-being and character development. More interestingly, the management of Indian
affairs had been slowly put into the hands of the Indians themselves. Mill’s defence of
what he readily admitted was a ‘despotic’ form of government, accountable to the
British parliament but not to the Indian people themselves, was that it was educational.
This was putting into practice what On Liberty defended: that despotism was a legiti-
mate mode of government when dealing with barbarians if the aim was their improve-
ment and the means chosen were effective. One may think that the description of the
inhabitants of subcontinental India as ‘barbarians’ was absurd, just as one may doubt
that the motivation behind the East India Company’s actions, even in the nineteenth
century, was the improvement of the material and mental condition of the native pop-
ulation.19 Nonetheless, Mill’s position was clear enough. Although Mill did not invoke
the case of India in discussions of nationality and nationalism, his insistence that
self-government required a people to possess a strong sense of nationality, an idea he
took from Coleridge, was part and parcel of his theory of political development. Mill’s
writings on nationality and nationalism were admired by many of the early Indian
nationalists. Here, too, progress depended on things happening in the ‘right’ order.
Ireland could have benefited from what Mill referred to as a ‘good stout despotism’,
but the time was past when such a government was possible. National identity, built
on a sense of grievance against the mainland government, was too strong to accept
19
The argument between commentators who defend the role of the East India Company in developing
Indian roads and railways and critics arguing that the company acted only for its own benefit, and nobody
need feel grateful for its work, continues to this day.
130 Alan Ryan
government by outsiders, however benign. Some form of home rule was inevitable,
and political wisdom could only be devoted to bringing it about as peacefully as possible,
which Mill thought entailed drastic reshaping of the system of land ownership. We
could multiply examples, but the object is not to assess the credibility of Mill’s views
on the political development of particular societies, only to emphasize the extent to
which his appeal to the utility of man as a progressive being was genuinely the basis of
his defence of liberty in those societies where the inhabitants could benefit from free
discussion. Enough has been said to set the stage for a final confrontation between
Mill’s seeming willingness to justify despotism, ancient slavery, and much else by
their long-run effects and Berlin’s seemingly absolute prohibition on sacrificing the
present to the future.
Mill’s reliance on the idea of progress raises the question of his view of the ultimate
destination of this progress. This again raises the question of the similarities and differ-
ences between Mill’s pluralism and Berlin’s. Some similarities are simple and obvious.
Both are deeply opposed to any attempt to engineer individuals into one pattern of
existence. Men are not machines to be made on a pattern decided by a designer. Mill’s
prosaic observation that a man cannot get a jacket to fit him unless he has a warehouse
to choose from makes the point. We are as psychologically diverse as we are physically,
and need an array of existences to choose among if we are to be happy. This is a genu-
inely utilitarian argument and carries with it the usual problems. What of the person
who chooses to work in a leper colony in difficult and dangerous conditions? What of
the person who hazards his life climbing in the Alps or the Himalayas? Does the con-
cept of happiness really accommodate both the pleasures of the couch potato swigging
a beer while watching football on the television and the saint sacrificing himself to
serve the poor? Mill’s answer is that it does. How it does has been argued over for
a hundred and fifty years, and here is not the place to attempt a definitive answer. A
partial answer is essential, however, because it is implicated in any attempt to give a
utilitarian answer to the question of how we may distinguish between progress and
retrogression. The partial answer is that the test is whether the person who has made
the choice in question comes to regret it or to re-endorse it. If he or she re-endorses it,
we may safely say they would be made unhappier by being made to do something other
than what they have chosen. Of course, there are hard cases where we must appeal to
something very like a second-order criterion; the addict will be made unhappy by
being deprived of whatever it is that he has become fixated on, but in sober moments
wishes he had not become addicted. The climber at the limits of his abilities does not
wish he had never taken up climbing any more than the saintly worker in the leper
colony wishes he had never thought of serving the poor and the sick. Progress involves
what one might call a ratcheting of utility; we know that a person who has acquired one
kind of taste or embraced one kind of ideal will not willingly return to the tastes and
ideals that he or she formerly embraced. This is the thought that lies behind Mill’s
notorious appeal to qualities as well as quantities of pleasure in Utilitarianism. He con-
fuses the issue by treating it as a judgement of an experimental kind; we are to prefer
the pleasures of Socrates to those of the fool because Socrates knows both sorts of
pleasure, the fool only those of the fool. This invites the retort that Socrates has no idea
how much pleasure the fool gains from his foolish enjoyments; Benjamin Franklin
maintained that knowing about Descartes’s vortices was nothing to the pleasure of
uninhibitedly passing wind several times a day. The argument is best confined to the
choices made by one individual, and then it becomes very plausible that viewed as a
choice of lives, the strenuous and demanding lives that Mill promotes do indeed bene-
fit from the ratcheting effect. It is not so much that Socrates defeats the fool in a head-on
conflict as that what John Dewey later called ‘growth’ favours Socrates putting away
foolish things and leading an examined life.
The question to be answered is whether examined lives converge on one model,
several related models, or on nothing in particular. Berlin’s pluralism very straightfor-
wardly sides with the view that there is no convergence. Goods are many, frequently in
conflict—whence the epigraph to ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’—and although
Berlin was not a sceptic about the genuineness of their goodness he was certainly scep-
tical about the possibility of any metric that would allow us to rank the goodness of one
way of life about others. On this, he and Mill were on the face of it diametrically
opposed. Mill’s view, first to last, was that there must be some single standard of value if
we were to choose rationally between one course of action—and presumably one way
of life—and another. If there was more than one standard, there must be some further
standard allowing us to compare goods valued more highly by one with those valued
more highly by the other. On this view, there are two sorts of pluralism, or two grounds
for valuing different aspects of pluralism. One, which is one of the two official doc-
trines of On Liberty, is that we need a plurality of ways of life to provide the experi-
ments in living that will allow us to choose the more satisfying and eliminate the less
satisfying. This is not a doctrine of ‘anything goes’, since our experiments are doubly
constrained, on the one hand by the ‘harm principle’ that forbids us to act in ways that
damage other people’s interests, and on the other by whatever duties we have voluntar-
ily or semi-voluntarily undertaken. I say ‘semi-voluntarily’ to cover the cases where we
owe positive duties to other members of the society in which we happen to live, such as
service on a jury and the like. Mill regarded these positive duties as the exception
rather than the rule, which one might think a reflection of the difference between the
world of 1859 and our own; they also mark something of an extension of his argumen-
tative strategy, since he treats them as quasi-contractual in spite of his Benthamite
antipathy to the idea of a social contract. Within these constraints, however, which
evidently bite on our physical activities in ways they do not on our intellectual lives, we
may act as we choose, singly or with anyone else who has joined in with their free,
informed, and full consent. The apparatus is familiar; its point, however, is to elaborate
the experimental defence of complete liberty of thought and discussion. The other
defence is simpler, and amounts to an insistence that different people have different
natures; they will be made happy by different things, different ways of life, and should
be allowed to live as they think best, subject as always to the constraints just described.
132 Alan Ryan
One might wonder whether this allows room for systematically attempting to alter
the individual’s nature. Mill, after all, was very insistent that appeals to nature as a
moral standard were illicit, and equally insistent that all progress consisted in employ-
ing some of the powers of nature against others. Curing disease is an obvious example.
Taking that view, we might wonder whether there is any stopping point short of Brave
New World where we are adapted to an environment which is adapted to what we have
been created to be. As Berlin says, it is perfectly clear that Mill’s own reaction would be
a shudder of disgust; Bentham might encourage us all to swallow a happiness pill—or a
gram or two of Huxley’s soma—but Mill absolutely not. The obvious route is once again
to appeal to Mill’s distinction between quantitative and qualitative appraisals of happi-
ness. Although it is the obvious route, it once again leaves us agreeing with Berlin that,
far from defending liberty because it promoted happiness, as it does up to a point, but
not obviously on all occasions, Mill tailored his conception of happiness to the over-
whelming importance of individual autonomy.
The one last question one should ask about pluralism, is how much support for
liberalism it provides. One can see that it will provide a great deal if all of the steps in
Mill’s argument hold up. If it is true that rational persons will be utilitarians, that we
do not know all we need to know about the ways to promote utility, and that
‘experiments in living’ are the best way to discover what we need to know, the case for
allowing maximum freedom of inquiry is very strong. It may be combined, as it is in
Mill’s work, with an insistence on the existence of a non-coercive intellectual and
psychological authority that gives some persons a favoured role in structuring what
experiments others will think worth pursuing. Mill’s early thoughts on the role of the
poets in opening up visions of the good life may or may not have carried through to
On Liberty, but his observation that the glory of the ordinary man is that he can be led
‘with his eyes open’ by those who see the route to better things more clearly is a
profoundly inegalitarian one.
If we are less convinced by the argument from progress than Mill was, pluralism
combined with utilitarianism gives us a defence of tolerating a good deal of diversity of
ways of life, both for the sake of individual happiness and as a means to keeping the
peace. That argument, however, sustains something closer to conservatism than liber-
alism. Human beings are creatures of habit and will be happier if left to get on with
their lives as they have hitherto done; it is a powerful argument for not insisting that
everyone spend much time examining their lives. Liberal philosophers might be
tempted by the view that the unexamined life is not worth living, but l’homme moyen
sensuel rarely is, and those who are tempted include some strikingly non-liberal think-
ers ranging from Socrates to St Augustine. The utilitarian argument is that peace and
happiness will be promoted by letting people get on with their lives, examined or not,
as long as they refrain from assaulting their neighbours or stealing their goods.
Politically, this might well involve something like the millet system of the Ottoman
Empire, with a political despotism presiding over a variegated society in which differ-
ent ethnic and religious groups were largely allowed to get on with their lives as they
saw fit, but with no political or legal recourse against what their governors might get up
to, which might be appallingly brutal. Yet, considering the high cost and limited suc-
cess of attempts to build liberal democracy in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, it is
easy to think that prudence demands such a ‘live and let live’ view. Internationally, it
suggests non-intervention except in self-defence. Within any given society, the messy
compromises which liberal societies engage in with respect to illiberal religious
minorities whose views on education and gender make liberals flinch must be seen as
inescapable. Berlin nowhere spells out his stance on any of this, either domestically or
internationally, although his long and close friendship with George Kennan makes it
plausible that he subscribed to a version of containment: we must defend ourselves
against aggressively illiberal regimes, and defend all members of our society against
violence and abuse, but there is no case for écrasez l’infâme backed up by armed force.
Mill’s discussion of the issue in ‘A Few Words on Non-Intervention’ suggests that he
would in practice side with Berlin, but perhaps only reluctantly, and with a sharp eye
kept on gender relations domestically. Mill’s reasoning is not elaborate. On the one
hand, a people striving for freedom is only likely to retain it if they achieve it for them-
selves. On the other, there is a case for intervention if a people who could liberate
themselves from foreign tyranny are held in subjection by external intervention;
‘counter-intervention’ is permissible in a way that liberating a people as a principled
piece of liberal interventionism is not. Matters are different if we find ourselves in
charge of a society for whatever reason, such as at the conclusion of a war. Then, the
argument from benevolent despotism with a liberal face applies, as one might think it
did at the end of World War Two.
Finally, ‘sad caryatids’. The phrase is provoked by Alexander Herzen’s reflections on
the revolutions of 1848, the essays collected as From the Other Shore.20 In the course of
a devastating assault on the idea of progress, described as a Moloch eager to devour
humanity, one participant in the dialogue in which Herzen casts his reflections asks
the crucial question: ‘Do you truly wish to condemn all human beings alive to-day to
the sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others some day to dance on . . . or of
wretched galley slaves, up to their knees in mud, dragging a barge filled with some
mysterious treasure and with the humble words “progress in the future” inscribed on
its bow?’ This is Herzen’s assault on Hegel’s cheerful description of history as a ‘slaugh-
terbench’, and by extension an attack on all theorists ready to sacrifice the present to a
far-off future. How far the assault would take in Mill’s view of progress is not the imme-
diate question, although one might think that Mill’s retrospective justification of Greek
slavery would come off as badly as Hegel’s or Marx’s. The point, rather, is that Berlin’s
1950s antipathy to all social theories that sacrifice existing persons to abstract ideals is
the essence of his ‘negative’ account of liberty.
Much commentary on ‘Two Concepts’ gives the impression that Berlin mentions
positive liberty only to emphasize its dangers; but this is not true. Indeed, it cannot be
20
From the Other Shore, tr. Moura Budberg (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1956), pp. 36–7.
134 Alan Ryan
true. What Berlin offers is a negative, or perhaps a deflationary, theory of positive

liberty. To be our own masters does not involve heroic feats of self-mastery in which we
put down the promptings of our worse selves by the exercise of astonishing feats of
the will, let alone by submitting ourselves to the march of history. Ceteris paribus, ordi-
nary human beings are their own masters when an assortment of negative conditions
are met: they are not legally or physically constrained, not manipulated, not literally
owned, or all but owned, by someone else, nor tied to others by voluntarily assumed
obligations. What it is to be our own masters is heavily contextual; it is not only when
we are physically constrained that our actions are ‘owned’ by another, but when we
have given that ownership to another, and are, to paraphrase Hobbes, chained by our
ears to their lips. What underlies Berlin’s emphasis on the negative conception of lib-
erty is that we are free when none of these things is in place. The history of the idea of
freedom suggests that having no master, and possessing the capacity to bind oneself by
voluntarily taking on obligations—the mark of a Roman liber—provide the core of the
concept of liberty. Viewed thus, the final contrast between Berlin and Mill we should
note is that Berlin was not tempted, as Mill often was, by a ‘moralised’ conception of
freedom. Berlin’s liberalism embodies a more thoroughly negative vision than Mill’s.
Discussing the freedom of the will in the Logic, Mill allows himself to say that ‘none but
a person of confirmed virtue is truly free’, much as he implies in On Liberty that only a
person who is fully aware of all that he believes and all that might be said against it is
truly free, truly thinking his own thoughts. In light of the damage that aggressive
attempts to export liberal values to unreceptive places and persons have done over the
past two decades, many readers will side with Berlin.
PA RT I I I
Counter-Enlightenments?
10
Berlin, Machiavelli, and the
Enlightenment
Ritchie Robertson
Berlin’s Machiavelli
One of Isaiah Berlin’s finest essays must surely be ‘The Originality of Machiavelli’, the
longest by some way of those assembled by his editor Henry Hardy in Against the
Current (AC 25–79). It was first published, though only partially, in the New York
Review of Books on 4 November 1971, and appeared in full in a collection of essays on
Machiavelli published in Florence the following year. The essay is in part an attempt
to explain why Machiavelli still gets under our skin. As Berlin says in a letter of
21 November 1972 to Jakob Huizinga, ‘It is always proof of some depth of insight when
a nerve touched so long ago still quivers: when Popper is positively angry with Plato, or
Butterfield still horrified by Machiavelli.’
The essay begins with a survey of the diverse interpretations of Machiavelli that have
appeared over the centuries. The Prince has been understood either as a manual
of politics for unscrupulous rulers, or as a satire on the methods of those rulers.
Machiavelli is seen sometimes as a cold technician of power, sometimes as an ardent
Italian patriot. Sometimes he is a Christian, often an atheist or a modern pagan. Some
read him as discarding morality for a position beyond good and evil, others as agon-
izing over the incompatibility between morality and politics. To explain the many
contradictions in Machiavelli’s reception, Berlin argues that Machiavelli himself is
sharply aware of two contradictory sets of values. He thinks it desirable that people
should live in a polity which is strong and united, in extreme contrast to the frag-
mented Italy of his day. This polity needs to be ruled effectively, whether by a prince or
by the citizens who form a republic. Effective role will often have to be ruthless and
cruel, in contrast to Christian morality.
At this point it would be very easy to attribute to Machiavelli—as many
commentators have—the view that Christian morality is false and illusory.1 But
E.g. Friedrich Meinecke, Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte, ed. Walther Hofer
1
(Munich: Oldenbourg, 1957), p. 36.

138 Ritchie Robertson
Berlin points out that Machiavelli acknowledges it as forming a second set of values,
in considerable tension with the first. By contrast with pagan religion, Christianity
‘has assigned as man’s highest good humility, abnegation, and contempt for mun-
dane things, whereas the other identifies it with magnanimity, bodily strength, and
everything else that tends to make men very bold’.2 Christian values are therefore
unsuitable for political life. If you adopt them, you must accept that you will be
defeated by people who know how to exercise power. But this does not mean that
what Christianity considers good is not really good. Machiavelli sees two incompat-
ible sets of values, and prefers the first.3
Here Berlin introduces a subtle twist in his argument. Machiavelli is not saying,
as many twentieth-century commentators have wanted him to say, that there is an
agonizing conflict between morality and Realpolitik. For one thing, morality is not a
private matter: the life of a citizen, as in the ancient Greek states or the Roman
Republic, is itself a moral life. For another, Machiavelli does not agonize about the
ruthlessness required of an effective ruler, but accepts it as a fact. He is not
presenting the kind of conflict between personal morality and political necessity
that Arthur Koestler, in Darkness at Noon, embodies in the Old Bolshevik Rubashov.
Machiavelli thus serves to illustrate a favourite theme of Berlin’s own—namely, that
whereas Western thought often assumes that all values can ultimately be unified by
a single principle, in fact ultimate values may not be compatible. And Berlin
suggests that ‘it is Machiavelli’s juxtaposition of the two outlooks—the two

incompatible moral worlds, as it were—in the minds of his readers, and the c ollision
and acute moral discomfort which follow, that, over the years, has been responsible
for the desperate efforts to interpret his doctrines away’ (AC 70)—whether as
immoral, amoral, patriotic, satirical, or in any other reductive simplification of his
complex message.
How valid is this account of Machiavelli? Not being a Machiavelli scholar, I must
be cautious. It is certainly tempting to think that Berlin, rather than carefully recon-
structing Machiavelli’s thought, is recruiting Machiavelli as a witness to one of
Berlin’s cardinal beliefs, the existence of equally real but incompatible goods. On
this interpretation, Berlin would be putting a version of his own pluralism into
Machiavelli’s mouth. And that perhaps explains why Berlin’s essay on Machiavelli is
seldom cited in more recent studies of Machiavelli. In Quentin Skinner’s writings
on Machiavelli, for example, Berlin is cited only as the leading proponent of the
‘negative liberty’ to which Skinner opposes a conception, derived especially from
Machiavelli, of liberty as requiring engagement in the service of one’s polity.4 The
text by Berlin that Skinner is arguing against is of course Four Essays on Liberty; to
2
The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli, tr. Leslie J. Walker (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950), p. 364.
3
Similarly at CIB 44–5, 57.
4
Skinner, ‘The Idea of Negative Liberty: Machiavellian and Modern Perspectives’, in his Visions of
Politics, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), vol. 2: Renaissance Virtues, pp. 186–212.
Berlin, Machiavelli, and the Enlightenment 139
the best of my knowledge, he does not cite Berlin’s essay on Machiavelli here or
practically anywhere else.5
On the other hand, there is a remarkable coincidence between Berlin’s and Skinner’s
views of Machiavelli’s originality. For in showing how Machiavelli’s conception of civic
liberty is derived from the classical virtues expounded by Cicero, Skinner notes that
Machiavelli dissents from Cicero’s account of justice. Cicero insists that justice must be
practised at all times, both in peace and in war. Machiavelli does not deny that justice is
an important virtue. But he does deny that it can always be practised. In war, both
fraud and cruelty are often indispensable, as can be illustrated from the successes of the
most distinguished generals of republican Rome. This, according to Skinner, is ‘a dis-
senting judgement that takes us to the heart of his originality and his subversive quality
as a theorist of statecraft’.6 For Machiavelli, justice is a real virtue but it cannot always be
operated. Similarly, in Berlin’s account of Machiavelli, the Christian values are real but
they do not work in political life. Both Berlin and Skinner represent Machiavelli as a
thinker prepared to live with apparent contradictions or plurality of values. And while
this makes Machiavelli a spokesman for one of Berlin’s core beliefs, there is no logical
reason why it should not at the same time be a valid insight into Machiavelli’s thought.
The Enlightenment’s Machiavelli

Berlin does not explicitly associate Machiavelli with the Enlightenment, though at the
end of this essay I shall argue that for him Machiavelli is nevertheless, in a strange way,
an Enlightenment figure. Such an association has often been made, notably in a critique
of the Enlightenment which, despite glaring differences from Berlin’s outlook, broadly
agrees with him in identifying rationality and uniformity as the core Enlightenment
values—Dialectic of Enlightenment, composed in American exile by Max Horkheimer
and Theodor W. Adorno. In their hugely influential book, Horkheimer and Adorno
represent the Enlightenment as the triumph of value-neutral, instrumental reason
over a disenchanted and subjugated nature. The figures they associate with the
Enlightenment are Bacon, Hobbes, Mandeville, Kant, and especially the Marquis de
Sade. Machiavelli is included among this strange assortment of thinkers, because he is
regarded as an amoral technician of power.7 Late in life Berlin admitted that his own
presentation of the Enlightenment was at best incomplete, and that he made it an ‘Aunt
Sally’ in order to attack ‘rectilinear, emotionally blind, unimaginative, rationalist dog-
matism’ for which, writing to Michael Moran on 29 September 1981, he quoted
5
Cf. Skinner, Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), where Berlin’s essay does not appear
in the extensive list of further reading. It is, however, listed in the bibliographical note in Machiavelli, The
Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. xxx.
6
Skinner, Renaissance Virtues, p. 208.
7
See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments,
ed. Gunzelin Schmidt Noerr, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
Friedrich Hayek’s term ‘scientism’ (L IV 169). So his view of the Enlightenment proves
unexpectedly close to that of the Frankfurt School exiles.
If we turn to the Enlightenment itself, however, we find a much wider range of
responses to Machiavelli. They reflect the diversity of Machiavelli’s thinking, as set out
by Berlin himself, and also express the diversity of the Enlightenment, which was far
greater than Berlin allows. They show too that, far from recognizing Machiavelli as a
precursor, Enlightenment thinkers regarded him largely with disapproval or, at best,
considered his thought too remote in history to be relevant.
What I may call the ‘black legend’ of Machiavelli, founded on The Prince, still per-
sisted in the early eighteenth century. He often retained his reputation as a cynical
advocate of immorality, the ‘murderous Machiavel’—the sobriquet given him by
Richard of Gloucester in Henry VI Part 3, which makes him, I believe, the only modern
writer to be mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays. The Marquis d’Argens writes in his
Lettres juives (1736), a work modelled on Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes: ‘If I were the
sovereign, I would order all his writings to be burnt, for they make virtue the slave of
calculation, to which they teach that everything must be sacrificed.’8 In 1735, Legendre
de Saint-Aubin, whom Robert Shackleton calls ‘a modest compiler but not destitute of
intelligence’, describes Machiavelli as ‘this notorious master of a criminal politics’.9
Machiavelli owed his bad reputation in part to the adoption of his supposed precepts,
long after his death, by the theorists of royal absolutism and reason of state. The use of
force and fraud, and the political manipulation of religion, though wrong for ordinary
mortals and in everyday life, were permissible for kings and ministers laden with the
responsibility of government. The knowledge of when and how to overstep moral
constraints for the sake of high politics was called the arcana imperii, the secrets of
rule. However, although the ‘reason of state’ writers cited Machiavelli as their precur-
sor, they did not follow him in openly abandoning morality for the sake of expediency.
They insisted that the arcana imperii formed a higher morality, permitting the ruler to
do occasional and minor harm in the service of a greater good.10 Only the ruler himself
could be the judge of his actions. Louis XIV in his Mémoires, written for the guidance
of his son, maintained that if his subjects thought the king’s conduct deserved criti-
cism, this was because of their limited understanding of ‘reason of state, which is the
first of all laws by common consent yet the most unknown and the most obscure to all
those who do not rule’.11
8
Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d’Argens, Lettres juives, 6 vols (The Hague: no pub., 1738), vol. 2,
p. 105. Translations are mine unless otherwise stated.
9
Quoted in Robert Shackleton, ‘Montesquieu and Machiavelli: A Reappraisal’, in his Essays on
Montesquieu and on the Enlightenment, ed. David Gilson and Martin Smith (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation,
1988), pp. 117–32 (p. 122).
10
See Peter S. Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), pp. 111–13.
11
Quoted in Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the
Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 250.
Critics of absolutism in general, and of Louis XIV in particular, found a counter-ideal

in Fénelon’s fictionalized manual for princes, Télémaque (1699). In the imaginary
kingdom of Salente, with a magnificent palace and an impoverished countryside, and
damaged by continual wars, Fénelon gave a disguised picture of France under Louis XIV.
The widely read Télémaque was often contrasted with Machiavelli’s The Prince. Thus
the Marquis d’Argens says that Fénelon taught sovereigns ‘the art of ruling over hearts,
and to be more absolute through virtue and justice than by all the refined politics of
the Italians’.12 Fénelon’s mirror for princes became the ideal against which Frederick
the Great condemned Machiavelli in his attempted refutation of The Prince, written
in the winter of 1739–40 and published with revisions by Voltaire. Frederick’s Anti-
Machiavel presents Machiavelli’s text, in an unreliable French translation of 1696, and its
chapter-by-chapter refutation by Frederick, in parallel columns. Frederick denounces
in extravagant, even scatological terms both Machiavelli himself and the unscrupulous
prince whom Machiavelli describes. ‘The trickery and scoundreliness of Machiavelli
permeate his work as the smelly odor of a privy contaminates the surrounding air.’13
Frederick repudiates the claim—which Machiavelli does not in fact make—that people
act only from interest, and insists that the sole motive of our actions ought to be virtue.
The slippage here from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ suggests that Frederick is not prepared to accept
Machiavelli’s challenge to look at the world as it actually is.
Although Frederick writes in an insufferably high-minded tone, his precepts, when
examined closely, turn out to be less idealistic than pragmatic. When he addresses the
details of governance, Frederick strengthens his argument by pointing out that prag-
matism, as well as virtue, requires a prince to gain the affection of his subjects. The
wise prince will make his people happy, because ‘[c]ontented people will not think of
revolting’.14 Frederick imagines the origin of kingship as a kind of utilitarian social
contract. The sovereign must put aside every other interest and devote himself to the
well-being and happiness of the people he governs. He is less their master than ‘their
first servant’.15 Voltaire changed ‘servant’ to ‘magistrate’, perhaps because the original
formulation seemed too humble; but the new formulation still made the king, as con-
ceived by Frederick, a functionary in the service of his people as opposed to a divinely
appointed ruler.
While the Anti-Machiavel might seem to envisage a peaceful and prosperous reign,
Frederick necessarily devotes some space to the conduct of war. He denounces war,
but adds that some wars are justified: not only those fought in self-defence, but also
offensive wars which are intended to forestall a greater evil. These preventive wars
need to be undertaken at an opportune time, not when one is facing a threat from an
12
D’Argens, Lettres juives, vol. 2, p. 105.
13
Frederick of Prussia, The Refutation of Machiavelli’s ‘Prince’ or Anti-Machiavel, ed. and tr. Paul
Sonnino (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981), p. 43. For the original, see L’Anti-Machiavel, par
Fredéric II, roi de Prusse, édition critique avec les remaniements de Voltaire par les deux versions, ed. Charles
Fleischauer (= SVEC, vol. 5) (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1958).
14
Frederick of Prussia, Anti-Machiavel, p. 37. 15 Ibid., p. 34.
overwhelming enemy. In justifying them, Frederick adopts a characteristically high

moral tone: ‘all wars which are, after rigorous examination, undertaken in order to
repulse usurpers, to maintain legitimate rights, to guarantee the liberty of the world,
and to avoid the oppression and violence of the ambitious, are in conformity with jus-
tice and equity’.16 The moralistic rhetoric thinly disguises the actual pragmatism of
Frederick’s programme. He has thus reserved the option of going to war without prov-
ocation when he believes it to be in his country’s interest.
Frederick’s contemporaries were sharply aware that soon after writing the Anti-
Machiavel he had invaded what was then the Austrian province of Silesia, relying on
the weakness of the young empress Maria Theresa, and had held onto it. Many felt like
the abbé de Saint-Pierre, author of a scheme for perpetual peace in Europe, who found
Frederick’s conduct impossible to reconcile with his ‘precious work’ denouncing the
villainy advocated by Machiavelli.17
Frederick’s polemic inadvertently acknowledged Machiavelli’s importance. In the
foreword, Frederick says that Machiavelli has corrupted politics as Spinoza has cor-
rupted religion, but while theologians have refuted Spinoza, moralists have so far failed
to reduce Machiavelli’s authority: ‘[He] has maintained himself, in spite of them and in
spite of his pernicious morality, as an authority on politics to our day.’18 This estimate
was fully justified. Despite the ‘black legend’, Machiavelli had long been regarded as
an important, indeed indispensable, analyst of politics. Francis Bacon in his Essays
and The Advancement of Learning repeatedly quotes even the most notorious of
Machiavelli’s maxims—his advice, for example, that the prince must be both a lion and
a fox—and commends him for describing how the world really works: ‘we are much
beholden to Machiavelli and other writers of that class, who openly and unfeignedly
declare or describe what men do, and not what they ought to do’.19
Machiavelli’s cool, hard look at the real operations of the political world not only
suited the empirical approach to research which Bacon was foremost in developing,
but also came as a relief in an age of religious wars. Jean Bodin in 1566 includes
Machiavelli among writers on the ‘arcana of princes’, praising him as the first modern
writer to write well about government.20 Republicans of course admired him, espe-
cially for the Discourses. He was read attentively by the proponents of an English
republic, including James Harrington, who in the preface to his utopian treatise
Oceana (1656) cites the ideas about government held by ‘the ancients and their learned
disciple Machiavel, the only politician of later ages’.21 In the eighteenth century, we find
16
Frederick of Prussia, Anti-Machiavel, p. 162.
17
Quoted in Joseph Drouet, L’abbé de Saint-Pierre: l’homme et l’œuvre (Paris: Champion, 1912), p. 136.
18
19
‘Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning’, Book 7, ch. 2, in Collected Works of Francis Bacon, ed.
James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (1879; repr. London: Routledge/Thoemmes,
1996), v. 17.
20
Quoted in Donaldson, Machiavelli, p. 114.
21
James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, ed. J. G. A. Pocock
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 10.
Hume in the essay ‘That Politics May be Reduced to a Science’ referring with approval
to Machiavelli’s arguments in The Prince about why the Persians, conquered by
Alexander, failed to seek independence after his death; Hume finds ‘the reasoning of
Machiavel . . . solid and conclusive’.22 And a less-known figure, the clergyman, poet,
and philosophical essayist John Brown, published in the 1750s a diatribe against lux-
ury and ‘effeminacy’ as present-day threats to English liberty, in which he praised
Machiavelli as ‘the greatest political Reasoner upon Facts, that hath appeared in any
Age or Country’,23 defended him against charges of immorality, and drew an interest-
ing comparison between him and Montesquieu, as supreme political thinkers who
based their arguments respectively on facts and on philosophy.
Montesquieu is known to have read Machiavelli attentively and to have drawn
especially on the Discourses for his account of the decline of Rome in his
Considérations and for the description of republican government early in De l’esprit
des lois. He distinguishes between Machiavellianism and Machiavelli himself.
Machiavellianism, the unscrupulous statecraft which instigates coups d’état as a
means of seizing power, is reprehensible and fortunately outdated: ‘One has begun to
be cured of Machiavellianism, and one will continue to be cured of it.’24 The estab-
lishment of legal systems makes the opportunism of a Machiavellian prince obsolete.
In De l’esprit des lois he treats Machiavelli with respect and particularly shares his
view that factions and intrigues, far from undermining a republic, contribute to its
health.25 However, Montesquieu was not persuaded by the vision in Machiavelli’s
Discourses of a republic which maintained solidarity among its citizens by keeping
them in arms and perpetually expanding at the expense of other nations. Montesquieu
maintained that the sword had to be subordinate to the law. The armed republic
seemed inappropriate and irrelevant to a Europe consisting of large, stable, hierarchical
states increasingly connected by commerce.
On the other hand, peace and commerce themselves posed the dangers of luxury,
enfeeblement, and eventual surrender to tyranny. Here Machiavelli might after all have
valuable lessons. Adam Ferguson, warning against these dangers, was more sympa-
thetic to Machiavelli’s vision. He pointed out that the late Roman republic had fallen
victim to tyranny because its citizens, rather than sacrifice their comfort, relied on
mercenary armies which then assumed control of the state. Ferguson insisted that the
citizen and the soldier should not be separated.
22
David Hume, ‘That Politics May be Reduced to a Science’, in his Essays Moral, Political and Literary
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 13–28 (p. 21).
23
John Brown, Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, 2 vols (London: no pub., 1757),
vol. 2, p. 47. For the comparison with Montesquieu, see vol. 2, pp. 183–4.
24
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, tr. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone,
Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
p. 389.
25
The Spirit of the Laws, pp. 77, 14 (‘intrigue’). See the summary in Shackleton, ‘Montesquieu and
Machiavelli’, pp. 129–31. For the usual view that factions are harmful, see Hume, ‘Of Parties in General’, in
Essays, pp. 54–62.
The boasted refinements, then, of the polished age, are not divested of danger. They open a
door, perhaps, to disaster, as wide and accessible as any of those they have shut. If they build
walls and ramparts, they enervate the minds of those who are placed to defend them; if they
form disciplined armies, they reduce the military spirit of entire nations; and by placing the
sword where they have given a distaste to civil establishments, they prepare for mankind the
government of force.26
A few writers went further in rehabilitating Machiavelli. Bayle in the Dictionnaire

acknowledges that Machiavelli’s intentions are uncertain, but says that some people
regard him as animated by zeal for the public good: ‘Some excuse him, and come
forward as his defenders; and there are even some who regard him as a writer very
zealous for the public good, and who portrayed the artifices of politics only in order
to inspire horror of tyrants and to stimulate all the people to maintain their liberty.’
Bayle concedes that Machiavelli was a true republican in spirit: ‘Though his true
motive may be uncertain, one must at least recognize that he showed himself in
his conduct animated by the republican spirit.’27 As evidence, he referred to the
denunciation of tyrants in the chapter of the Discourses headed ‘Those who set up a
Tyranny are no less Blameworthy than are the Founders of a Republic or a Kingdom
Praiseworthy’.28
But if Machiavelli was an enemy of tyranny in the Discourses, how could one explain
the fact that in The Prince he seemed to have written a handbook for tyrants?
Commentators did their best to read The Prince not as a cynical manual of government
but as a satire, whether intentional or inadvertent, on the unscrupulous behaviour of
princes. Diderot, in the article ‘Machiavélisme’ in the Encyclopédie, distinguishes even
more sharply than Montesquieu does between Machiavellianism and Machiavelli
himself. Machiavellianism is a ‘detestable kind of politics which may be summed up as
the art of tyranny’.29 Yet Machiavelli’s life shows him to have been an active opponent of
tyranny, who was even arrested and tortured for his part in a conspiracy. Diderot
resolves this apparent contradiction by suggesting tentatively that The Prince is a warn-
ing about the consequences of yielding to tyranny. Machiavelli was telling his fellow
citizens what the consequences would be if they resigned their freedom and accepted a
master. If The Prince was misunderstood, it was the fault of readers who mistook a sat-
ire for a eulogy. Rousseau praised Machiavelli in The Social Contract (1762) as teacher
of republicans, and asserts that Machiavelli only pretended to praise Cesare Borgia in
order to show satirically how bad despotism was and thus indirectly to praise republi-
can liberty: ‘He professed to teach kings; but it was the people he really taught. His
26
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1966), pp. 231–2. Although Ferguson does not name Machiavelli, the connection is
pointed out by his editor, pp. xxviii, xxxi.
27
Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 4 vols (Amsterdam: Brunel, etc., 1730), vol. 3, p. 248.
28
Discourses, p. 236.
29
‘Machiavélisme’, in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers
(Neuchâtel: Faulche, 1765), vol. 9, p. 793.
Prince is the book of Republicans.’30 Schiller, in a letter to Schelling, calls The Prince a
satire, though an unintentional one, in which Machiavelli ‘auf die treuherzigste Weise
eine furchtbare Satyre auf die Fürsten gemacht hat’ (has in all good faith written a
terrible satire against princes).31
There were other ways of qualifying the still standard negative view of Machiavelli.
One is to be found in an essay by Johann Michael von Loen entitled ‘Von der Staats-
Kunst des Machiavels’ (On Machiavel’s Statecraft, 1750). The author deplores the
advice offered in The Prince and praises Frederick the Great for refuting it. Nevertheless,
he wishes to excuse Machiavelli, arguing that he described a wicked prince simply as a
warning. The Prince should therefore be read, if not as a satire, then as a work of subtle
irony, like Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees:
He talks about princes as Mandeville does about bees. He writes about what great men do to
reach the height of autocratic power. But he does not approve of this autocratic power, just as
an ingenious mathematician, who writes an elegant work on the art of throwing bombs and
burning cities, does not therefore approve of such violent actions.
Machiavel had a sharp mind, and because he lived in an age when one could not openly con-
front folly and superstition, he addressed them obliquely with refined irony.32
This broad-minded approach to Machiavelli derives additional interest from the

fact that its author would later become the great-uncle of Goethe. Goethe rarely mentions
Machiavelli, with one striking exception.33 The name ‘Machiavell’ occurs prominently
as the name of a character in Egmont, his historical tragedy about the Dutch nobleman
who was executed by the Spanish invaders led by the Duke of Alba at the beginning of
the Dutch Revolt. Machiavell is confidential secretary to Margarethe of Parma, the
Regent of the Netherlands before Alba’s arrival. He has usually been considered a
minor character who deserves little attention. Goethe’s use of the name, however,
cannot fail to make people think of the author Machiavelli and his reputation.
Machiavell is a historically attested figure. Goethe found him briefly mentioned in
the De bello Belgico decades duae by the Jesuit scholar Famianus or Famiano Strada
(1572–1649), published in 1632. In Strada’s history, Machiavell makes a very brief
30
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and The Discourses, tr. G. D. H. Cole, Everyman’s Library
(London: David Campbell, 1993), p. 242.
31
Letter to Schelling, 12 May 1801, in Friedrich Schiller, Werke und Briefe, ed. Otto Dann and others,
12 vols. (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992–2005), vol. 12, p. 569.
32
‘Von der Staats-Kunst des Machiavels’, in Des Herrn von Loen gesammlete kleine Schriften, 4 vols
(Frankfurt a.M. and Leipzig: Philipp Heinrich Hutter, 1750), vol. 4, pp. 270–81 (pp. 278–9). The writer
stigmatized as ‘Man-Devil’ was often compared with Machiavelli, e.g. by John Wesley: see Phillip Harth,
‘Introduction’, Bernard Mandeville: The Fable of the Bees (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 8.
33
On Goethe’s possible knowledge of Machiavelli’s writings, see Heinrich Clairmont, ‘Die Figur des
Machiavell in Goethes Egmont’, Poetica, 15 (1983), 289–313 (p. 296). The name occurs in a letter to the
Swiss theologian J. K. Pfenninger of 26 April 1774 where Goethe says that he regards all human utterances
as the word of God, however heretical—‘Apostel, Spinoza oder Machiavell’: Johann Wolfgang Goethe,
Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, ed. Friedmar Apel and others, 40 vols (Frankfurt a.M.:
Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1986–2000), vol. 28: Von Frankfurt nach Weimar: Briefe, Tagebücher und
Gespräche vom 23. Mai 1764 bis 30. Oktober 1775, ed. Wilhelm Grosse (1997), p. 359.
appearance as an envoy who carries messages between the Netherlands and Spain.34
Goethe, however, allows Machiavell to hold an important conversation with the
Regent and to offer her political advice. The occasion is the outbreak of iconoclasm by
crowds of Calvinists in the summer and autumn of 1566. The Regent is understandably
upset by this sacrilegious violence and at a loss how to bring it under control.
Machiavell puts forward his own ideas with due modesty.35 In his view, the progress
of the new faith cannot be stopped. The only way to control it is a pragmatic policy of
toleration which should drive a wedge between the moderate Protestants and the
extremists. The moderates, instead of listening to incendiary sermons by hedge-preachers,
should be allowed their own churches and thus enclosed within the order of civil soci-
ety. This will put an end to violence. Any other policy will lead to civil war, because the
new faith is not confined to the social fringes but has made headway among the broad
mass of the people and the soldiers, and has penetrated as high as the nobility and the
mercantile class; therefore an attempt to suppress the new faith will unite the whole
nation in opposition. This advice is of course borne out by events. The Regent, how-
ever, rejects it because she feels unable to allow the sacred doctrines and practices of
Christianity to become matters for political negotiation.
In this historical drama, different actors are living in different mental worlds and
therefore talk past each other. The Regent belongs in the world of medieval Catholicism
and cannot distance herself from it, whereas Machiavell shows a new, more secular
mentality for which even sacred things are subject to pragmatic management.
Similarly, the hero Egmont is led astray by his feudal outlook, which persuades him
that his overlord, Philip II of Spain, will never deceive him, while his antagonist
William of Orange (called ‘Oranien’ in the play) compares politics to a chessboard
where he is constantly trying to anticipate his opponent’s move. The play holds a
delicate balance between the warmth of feudal relations and the new and largely
unattractive world of Machiavellian pragmatism. On the latter side of the balance, it is
important that William of Orange will eventually lead the Netherlands to freedom
from Spanish tyranny, while the advice given to the Regent by Machiavell would in fact
have averted the conflict which makes the Spaniards under Alba intervene with huge
loss of life.36
If for Goethe the figure of Machiavell typifies, for better and worse, the new post-
medieval, pragmatic outlook, other commentators in the mid eighteenth century
thought that the author of The Prince was simply out of date. Frederick the Great points
out that the conditions that Machiavelli assumed in The Prince, with a large number of
34
De bello Belgico: The History of the Low-Countrey Warres, written in Latine by Famianus Strada; in
English by Sr Rob. Stapylton (London: Humphrey Modseley, 1650), Book 6, p. 35.
35
Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5: Dramen 1776–1790, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer (1988), p. 469. Future
quotations from Egmont are identified by page numbers in the text.
36
For a fuller version of this argument, see Ritchie Robertson, ‘Goethe and Machiavelli’, in The Present
Word: Culture, Society and the Site of Literature: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle, ed. John Walker
(London: Legenda, 2013), pp. 126–37.
small states in continual ferment, no longer obtain in eighteenth-century Europe,

where a number of great princes at the head of substantial kingdoms negotiate through
diplomats and thus maintain a balance of power.37 Hume similarly distances himself
from Machiavelli in ‘Of Civil Liberty’:
Machiavel was certainly a great genius; but, having confined his study to the furious and tyrannical
governments of ancient times, or to the little disorderly principalities of Italy, his reasonings,
especially upon monarchical government, have been found extremely defective; and there
scarcely is any maxim in his Prince which subsequent experience has not entirely refuted.38
Such historical detachment encouraged a more distanced and relaxed appreciation of

Machiavelli as a figure who needed to be understood in the context of his own time.
John Brown says that the moral standards prevailing in Renaissance Italy, and taken
for granted by Machiavelli, were very different from ours: ‘The Truth is, those iniqui-
tous Practices, which shock our Humanity, were familiarized to his Imagination by the
common Usage of his Country: Hence he treated them, as he did other political
Maxims of better stamp, and only talked the Language of his Time and Nation.’39
Herder in the 1790s praises Machiavelli as ‘an upright man, a subtle observer, and an
ardent friend of his fatherland’.40 His Prince is neither a satire nor a manual of wicked-
ness, but a product of its time. Herder explains that in Machiavelli’s day, and for a long
time afterwards, politics and morality were wholly separate, while religion was regarded
as a political instrument, and politics was dominated by reason of state. Hence The
Prince is ‘a purely political masterpiece for Italian princes of that age, following their
taste and their principles’, with the purpose of freeing Italy from foreign invaders.41 In
Machiavelli’s day, politics was dominated by reason of state, and Machiavelli is telling
his contemporaries that if they must practise statecraft, they should learn how to do
so effectively:
‘If this is your trade,’ he says in effect, ‘then learn it properly, so that you don’t remain such
wretched amateurs as I can show you to be and to have been. You think only of power and
reputation; very well, then at least make use of the prudence that can guide you to secure power
and Italy to peace at last. I didn’t give you your job, but if you’re going to do it, then do it prop-
erly.’ Every impartial reader will feel that this is the attitude throughout Machiavelli’s book.42
Further evidence of a more relaxed attitude towards Machiavelli comes from an

anecdote told by the Berlin Enlightener Friedrich Nicolai in his account of his trav-
els in South Germany and Austria. A friend of Nicolai, Johann Nicolaus Meinhard,
who wrote essays on Italian poetry, arrived in Vienna in 1763, on his way to Italy,
and had to submit to the usual practice of having his books examined by the censor.
His copies of the works of Machiavelli and Rousseau’s Émile were confiscated and
37
38
Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, Essays, pp. 89–97 (p. 89). 39 Brown, Estimate, vol. 2, pp. 46–7.
40
Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, ed. Günter Arnold and others, 10 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher
Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2000), vol. 7, p. 340.
41
Herder, Werke, vol. 7, p. 341. 42 Ibid.
burnt. Later, in Klagenfurt, Meinhard found another edition of Machiavelli, which

he took to Rome. There his books were again confiscated, but were returned to him
next day by a papal secretary, a Dominican, who told him that Machiavelli was ‘one
of our best authors’ and that as a scholar he could be trusted to be discreet in read-
ing Machiavelli, but he should use a better edition, which the Dominican was happy
to recommend.43
At the end of the century, however, we find hardening attitudes, typified by the
antithesis between Kant and Fichte. In Zum ewigen Frieden (On Perpetual Peace,
1795) Kant distinguishes the ‘moral politician’, who approaches politics in the light
of principles of justice, from the ‘political moralist’, who subordinates morality to
politics and the means to the end.44 The latter is a Machiavellian, and in sketching
him and his maxims, Kant provides a virtual mini-parody of The Prince. The political
moralist prides himself on his knowledge of how the world works and on how people
actually behave. His understanding of humanity is based on how people act now, not
on a wider, anthropological understanding of human nature and of people’s poten-
tial for acting differently. Relying on his empirical viewpoint, he regards morality as
mere empty words, and derives from his experience various practical maxims which
express prudence but not wisdom. He is like a lawyer who acts as an advocate for
his employer, makes up arguments in order to win his case, and never considers the
principles of justice. Convinced that human beings can never rise to the moral
standards prescribed by reason, he actually prevents them from becoming any better
than they are. His basic maxims are 1) act first and explain or apologize afterwards;
2) deny responsibility—e.g. if you drive your subjects into rebellion, blame their own
refractory character, or the irremediable faults of human nature; 3) divide and rule.
Although Machiavelli is not named here, this is a telling critique of his assumptions,
particularly that of an unchangeable human nature. Kant thus attacks what has
always seemed Machiavelli’s strongest defence—his claim to be showing the world as
it really is—and undercuts it by introducing the future. The world as it really is now
may not be the world as it will become. If Machiavelli intimidates the reader by
speaking as a hard-headed realist, Kant undercuts him by assuming the standpoint
of a hard-headed idealist.
Twelve years later, Fichte published an essay on Machiavelli. By this time, Napoleon
had defeated the Prussian army at Jena and occupied Berlin. Fichte, like others, sees an
analogy between the state of Italy as Machiavelli describes it, fragmented into squab-
bling principalities and overrun by French armies, and the German states, divided and
hence victims of another French invasion. Fichte is scathing about idealistic liberals,
among whom, as a scornful allusion to ‘perpetual peace’ shows, he includes Kant. His
43
Friedrich Nicolai, Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781: Nebst
Bemerkungen über Gelehrsamkeit, Industrie, Religion und Sitten, 8 vols (Berlin and Stettin: no pub., 1783–7),
vol. 4, pp. 854–5.
44
Immanuel Kant, Werke, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, 6 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1964), vol. 6, pp. 228–37.
Machiavelli is again the hard-headed realist, firmly rooted in practical life; he quotes
from chapter 15 of The Prince, where Machiavelli says he is representing things as they
really are, not as they are imagined.45
Fichte’s main concern in the Machiavelli essay is with foreign policy. Here, constant
suspicion is essential, because nations really are in a condition of perpetual enmity.
Thanks to a drive implanted by God, every nation seeks to increase its influence and to
enlarge itself at others’ expense; a state that ceases to expand is liable to be attacked and
to diminish. ‘Whoever does not grow will shrink when others grow.’46 A private indi-
vidual may be content with what he has, but a state must always seek to enlarge its pos-
sessions, for fear of having them reduced. So you must always assume that other
nations are trying to benefit at your expense, and you must be prepared to respond to
their aggression. Perpetual enmity, however, does not mean perpetual war, for readi-
ness for war is the best guarantee of peace. To maintain this readiness, Fichte recom-
mends that in peacetime young Europeans should be sent to fight with barbarians, of
whom there are some in Europe and many more in other continents. Thus the ideal of
the nation in arms, rejected by Montesquieu and many others, makes a comeback with
Fichte, who is a cardinal spokesman for what Berlin called the Counter-Enlightenment.
The gateway has opened to the long and miserable history of nationalism, and
Machiavelli, rejected or relativized by the Enlightenment, has been recruited as one of
its major prophets.
Epilogue: Berlin’s Enlightenment Machiavelli

So the Enlightenment had several Machiavellis, and the Counter-Enlightenment, rep-
resented by Fichte, had yet another. The Machiavelli whose originality Berlin analyses
does not correspond to any of them. But, in a strange way, Berlin’s Machiavelli is still an
Enlightenment figure. When Berlin speaks of the Enlightenment, he most often means
the philosophes grouped around the Encyclopédie, with their materialism, deism, or
atheism, and over-confident hopes for human progress. However, he makes many
tantalizing allusions to Enlightenment figures such as Diderot or Lessing who did not
follow this dogmatic party line but retained their independence and originality of
mind. Thus in an important letter to Mark Lilla, written on 13 December 1993, he
suggests a distinction between the Enlightenment mainstream and ‘Diderot, Lessing,
two of my favourite thinkers in the eighteenth century’ (L IV 475; cf. 477). They seem
to belong, as Machiavelli explicitly does, to ‘the isolated swimmers against the stream’
who often mark a ‘radical turning point’ in the history of ideas (to Quentin Skinner, 19
June 1979, L IV 107–8).
45
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, ‘Ueber Machiavell, als Schriftsteller, und Stellen aus seinen Schriften’, in
Gesamtausgabe, ed. Reinhard Lauth and Hans Gliwitzky, vol. 9: Werke 1806–1807, ed. Reinhard Lauth and
Hans Gliwitzky (Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1995), pp. 223–75 (p. 224).
46
Fichte, ‘Ueber Machiavell’, p. 242.
As several essays in this book maintain, it is a major and regrettable lacuna in Berlin’s
work that he failed to discuss at any length figures such as Diderot and Lessing whose
originality separated them from the philosophical consensus. The reasons he gave for
not writing at length about Helvétius and the other figures that he, rightly or wrongly,
regarded as the Enlightenment mainstream are at least intelligible, even if misguided.
Insofar as their values were self-evidently right, they were less interesting than the
enemies of Enlightenment who could not only reveal its shortcomings but also put
forward visions of life that were exciting just insofar as they were repellent. But why not
write about Diderot and Lessing, for whom he professed enthusiasm? Why rest con-
tent with an account of the Enlightenment so reductive that it seemingly had no place
for them? The answer is far from obvious, but I suspect—and this is no more than a
conjecture—that because of their very many-sidedness, they could not easily be
recruited for the serious political lessons about liberty and pluralism that Berlin
wanted to inculcate.
In the case of Machiavelli, however, there was a fortunate coincidence between the
character of his thought and one of Berlin’s core principles. In taking Machiavelli as a
case study in living with contradictions, Berlin also identified a real quality in
Machiavelli: he did accept contradictions, as we have seen, between the valid ideals of
classical and Christian virtue and the pragmatic need for political survival and success.
So what Berlin might have said about such figures as Lessing, I suggest, he did in fact
manage to say about Machiavelli. Machiavelli thus becomes an honorary member of
the Enlightenment, somebody who, unlike the main body of philosophes, was capable
of living with contradictions and who anticipated Berlin’s favourite idea that humanity
pursues valid but mutually incompatible goals.
11
Berlin, Vico, and the Critique
of Enlightenment
John Robertson
My subject in this chapter is Isaiah Berlin’s interpretation of the thought of the

eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), and his
perception of Vico’s relation to the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. I am
accordingly not concerned, except incidentally, with the lessons Berlin drew from
Vico for his own political and historical philosophy. What Vico did for Berlin has been
studied with knowledge and insight by the Israeli Vico scholar Joseph Mali, first in the
volume he edited with the late Robert Wokler, Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment
(2003), and more recently in his monograph, The Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural
History (2012).1 It has also been touched on by other students of Berlin, including
Michael Ignatieff, Arie Dubnov, and Joshua Cherniss.2 I will not add anything substan-
tive to their analyses. Instead, I shall try to do three things. First, I shall give an account
of Berlin’s Vico, tracing the stages of Berlin’s engagement with Vico’s works, outlining
what I take to be the salient features of the resulting interpretation of Vico, and assess-
ing the character of Berlin’s portrayal—what kind of history of ideas Berlin took him-
self to be undertaking. Second, I shall offer an intellectual historian’s alternative to
Berlin’s portrayal of Vico: instead of a Vico ‘born out of his time’, a Vico very much of
his time. Although this will do no more than pit my Vico against Berlin’s, my point is to
underline the extent to which Berlin’s Vico was the product of a certain conception of
the history of philosophy, one which was idiosyncratic, at best, by the time his famous
essays appeared. Third, and more positively, however, I will end by suggesting that
Berlin’s Vico may best be understood, not as an historical reconstruction, but as a
1
Joseph Mali, ‘Berlin, Vico, and the Principles of Humanity’, IBCE 51–71; Joseph Mali, The Legacy of
Vico in Modern Cultural History: From Jules Michelet to Isaiah Berlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012), pp. 195–256.
2
Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), pp. 58, 284–5; Arie M.
Dubnov, Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 6, 76,
204–10; Joshua L. Cherniss, A Mind and its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 31, 45.
152 John Robertson
contribution to an older tradition of engagement with Enlightenment: the philosophic

critique of the Enlightenment as the misconceived foundation of modernity.
Berlin’s Vico
In tracing the stages of Berlin’s engagement with Vico, I follow the chronology estab-
lished by Joseph Mali. It seems that Vico was first drawn to Berlin’s attention at Oxford
in the early 1930s by R. G. Collingwood, whose lectures he attended, and who urged
Berlin to read his translation of Benedetto Croce’s study of Vico.3 But it was probably
not until after the war that Berlin read Vico for himself, following the translation of the
third and final version of the Scienza nuova into English by the American scholars
T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch in 1948. Berlin would subsequently cite the New Science
in this translation, although of course he read Italian. Bergin and Fisch had previously
translated Vico’s Autobiography (1944), a work on which Berlin would rely for his
portrayal of Vico’s intellectual isolation. The 1940s also saw the publication of a
number of works explaining Vico’s significance, by Collingwood, Edmund Wilson,
Erich Auerbach, and Karl Löwith; it was probably also at this time, Mali suggests, that
Berlin was brusquely informed by Gaetano Salvemini over dinner at Harvard that
Vico was a charlatan, whose translation into English, an honest language, would burst
the bubble of his reputation.4
But it was another ten years before Berlin himself wrote on Vico. Berlin remem-
bered the occasion as an instance of his tendency to accept invitations as a cab driver
accepts fares: in this case the Italian Institute in London invited him to lecture on an
Italian subject in 1957, and he chose Vico as one of the few Italian philosophers of
interest (Machiavelli apart) (CIB 95). In fact, the published essay, ‘The Philosophical
Ideas of Giambattista Vico’ (1960), was his single most substantial engagement with
Vico’s thought, and became the first of the two-part treatment of Vico in Vico and
Herder (1976).5 In the essay Berlin identified Vico’s achievement as lying above all in
a philosophy of history which anticipated modern historicism. Vico’s crucial insight
had been to grasp the distinction between the purely external ‘knowledge’ we can
acquire of the natural world, and the inner ‘understanding’ which we can have of the
human world, because we ourselves have created it. Here was the distinction between
Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft: through the latter we can enter into others’
minds, and reach back, through language, myth, and art, to understand the variety and
3
Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, tr. R. G. Collingwood (London: Howard
Latimer, 1913).
4
Mali, Legacy of Vico, pp. 206–12; Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, p. 58; Dubnov, Isaiah Berlin, pp. 204–10 sug-
gests that it was in the late 1940s that Berlin returned to his ‘interwar philosophical reservoir’, drawing
inspiration in particular from the work of Collingwood.
5
Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Philosophical Ideas of Giambattista Vico’, first published in Art and Ideas in
Eighteenth-Century Italy: Lectures Given at the Italian Institute 1957–1958 (Rome: Edizione di Storia e
Letteratura, 1960), pp. 156–233; revised and republished in VH, and reissued in TCE. See the ‘Editor’s
Preface’, TCE xvii–xx for the protracted publication history of the essays.
Berlin, Vico, and the Critique of Enlightenment 153
difference of which humans have been capable. It was an insight, Berlin suggested,
which gave the lie to the notion of a fixed human nature, which in turn was the basis for
the notion that there are absolute standards, the notion which was ‘the very corner-
stone of the outlook of the Enlightenment’.6
The second of the two long essays on Vico republished in Vico and Herder derived,
as Mali points out, from another set of lectures, given in Princeton in 1973 and devoted
to ‘The Origins of Cultural History’.7 Entitled ‘Vico’s Theory of Knowledge and its
Sources’, this essay reiterated the conviction that Vico had virtually invented the con-
cept of Verstehen, while also acknowledging that no more than the Hegelians or the
Marxists had Vico been able to work out the relation between what men ‘make’ in
history and the laws which govern history’s development—laws which yield what
Vico called a storia ideal eterna. To these reflections Berlin added a discussion of the
possible sources of Vico’s revolutionary thinking, suggesting that his debt to the French
school of historical jurisprudence had been overlooked, perhaps because of a certain
jealousy among Neapolitan Vico scholars.8
In reconstructing Berlin’s Vico, pride of place should be given to the essays pub-
lished in Vico and Herder, because they represent their author’s most scholarly engage-
ment with his subject. But their account of Vico’s historical philosophy is not what
Berlin’s Vico is remembered for. Much more important in this respect was a series of
essays of which Vico was either the declared subject or a major exhibit. For our pur-
poses the most important were ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ (1973) and ‘Vico and the
Ideal of the Enlightenment’ (1976), both reprinted in Against the Current (1979). In the
former Vico was presented as wishing ‘to shake the pillars on which the Enlightenment
of his times rested’ by demonstrating that there were no absolute, universal truths of
human behaviour, no ‘eternal principles by following which alone men could become
wise, happy, virtuous, and free’ (AC 3, 6). The argument of the second of the two essays
was a variant of that of the first: Vico was credited with demonstrating the conceptual
incoherence of the Enlightenment ideal of perfection. The point had been made,
in passing, in ‘The Philosophical Ideas of Vico’; now it was reiterated and brought cen-
tre stage, but with no attempt to develop the characterization of the Enlightenment
against which Vico supposedly wrote. (As so often, Berlin gave only a brief, sweeping
definition of the Enlightenment.) The effect was to dramatize the role of the Counter-
Enlightenment, so much more interesting than its antithesis. Moreover the yoking
of Vico to Herder, embodied in the title of the 1976 book, was reinforced: they were
now explicitly presented as allies in the common cause of Counter-Enlightenment
(AC 120–9).
Other, parallel essays of the late sixties and early seventies collected in Against
the Current drew out the philosophical and moral implications of Vico’s concept of
6
VH 3–98, final quotation on p. 41; TCE 26–150, quotation on p. 76.
7
Mali, Legacy of Vico, pp. 243–4. The second essay replaced the three-page ‘Appendix: On Vico’s
Epistemology’ which followed the original 1960 publication of ‘The Philosophical Ideas of Vico’.
8
Berlin, Vico and Herder, pp. 99–142; Three Critics, pp. 151–207.
154 John Robertson
k nowledge, emphasizing what Berlin saw as Vico’s hostility to all forms of monism,
and his commitment to cultural pluralism.9 As a development of this theme, Vico was
later hailed as the progenitor of cultural history in an essay of 1983, republished in The
Crooked Timber of Humanity (1990).10 Mali makes a powerful case for thinking that
the value of cultural pluralism was the most important of Vico’s lessons for Berlin;11
conversely, Berlin used the insight he attributed to Vico to strengthen his presentation
of the Neapolitan as a Counter-Enlightener.
At the same time as he was pressing home the wider implications of his interpreta-
tion of Vico, Berlin was of course making Vico’s name among a wider public, on both
sides of the Atlantic. Articles in the New York Times Magazine in 1969 and The Listener
in 1972 presented Vico as a forgotten genius, whose name should be added to the
honours board of Western thought.12 There was much that was admirable and benefi-
cial in this, although the canonization was presented in terms very much of their time,
a time more remote from the literary culture of the early twenty-first century than we
may like to admit. But while Berlin aroused a wider interest in Vico, what he did not do
was set an agenda for further scholarly enquiry into Vico’s thought. There were studies
of Vico—by Joseph Mali and Cecilia Miller—which derived to a greater or lesser extent
from Berlin’s, while Mark Lilla framed his interpretation as a response to Berlin;13 but
there was no distinctively Berlinian line of Vico scholarship. The notion of a Counter-
Enlightenment commanded more followers, but the brunt of such enquiries fell
increasingly on the Germans, Hamann, Herder, Jacobi, and others.
The reason for this, I suggest, was Berlin’s highly personal, idiosyncratic conception
of what a historian of ideas should be doing. Berlin liked to think that he had been
lonely as a historian of ideas in British academic life (CIB 91–2). This sense of isolation
licensed him to pursue the subject on his own terms. In the ‘Introduction’ he wrote for
Vico and Herder, he acknowledged the legitimacy of historical enquiry into the sources
of ideas, but affirmed that accurate historical knowledge is not everything: ‘the impor-
tance of past philosophers in the end resides in the fact that the issues which they raised
are live issues still (or again)’.14 The historically interesting philosophers, therefore,
9
‘The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities’ (1974), ‘Vico’s Concept of Knowledge’ (1969),
AC 80–110, 111–19.
10
‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’ (1983), reprinted in CTH 51–72.
11
Mali, Legacy of Vico, esp. pp. 195–8.
12
Isaiah Berlin, ‘One of the boldest innovators in the history of human thought’, New York Times
Magazine, 23 November 1969, reprinted in PI; ‘Giambattista Vico’, Listener, 88 (1972), pp. 391–8. A full list
of Berlin’s writings on Vico is provided by Henry Hardy in an appendix to the second edition of Three
Critics, pp. 453–5.
13
Joseph Mali, The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s New Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992); Cecilia Miller, Giambattista Vico: Imagination and Historical Knowledge (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1993); Mark Lilla, G. B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard
14
VH xiv–xvi; TCE 9–11. Mali, Legacy of Vico, pp. 233–4 suggests that these pages were a response to
the challenge of the ‘Cambridge School’ in political theory and history. But there is nothing in Berlin’s
language to suggest engagement with their propositions. For Berlin the strictly historical dimension of the
history of ideas was the enquiry into the ‘origins’ or ‘sources’ of the ideas under discussion.
were those who were ‘forerunners’, the truly original thinkers who articulated ideas
which would only come to fruition much later.
But Berlin greatly exaggerated his isolation. He may have been unusual among
Oxford philosophers in his historical interests, but there were several contemporary
Oxford historians with interests in intellectual history, notably Hugh Trevor-Roper,
increasingly interested in this dimension of the past after 1960, and the younger
Keith Thomas.15 Berlin and Trevor-Roper corresponded occasionally across the
1950s and 1960s, and Berlin professed regard for Trevor-Roper as a historian.16
Beyond Oxford, Berlin was apparently oblivious to the post-Wittgensteinian discus-
sions of languages of thought which John Pocock has recalled participating in while
at Cambridge in the late 1950s.17 The idea that intellectual history might be written
in terms of such languages, each with its own conceptual structure and mode of vali-
dation, seems never to have occurred to him. Berlin’s closure to these developments
is the more surprising since he was perfectly capable of appreciating their results:
his suggestion that Vico owed more than had been acknowledged to the French
Renaissance jurists was avowedly inspired by his reading of Pocock’s The Ancient
Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957), along with D. R. Kelley’s work on the
French.18 In its persisting naiveté, Berlin’s approach to the history of ideas is as good
a confirmation as may be had of the necessity of the so-called ‘Cambridge revolution’
in the history of political thought, proclaimed from the late 1960s by Quentin Skinner,
John Dunn, and, at a distance, John Pocock. It is a naiveté particularly evident in the
case of Vico, not only ‘a man of original genius’, but ‘born before his time’ (VH 3;
TCE 26). To describe someone as ‘born before his time’ is a solecism no historian can
admit; Berlin’s conscious indulgence in the phrase is revealing of the licence he felt
he enjoyed as a historian of ideas.
15
On Trevor-Roper as an intellectual historian: Colin Kidd, ‘Lord Dacre and the Politics of the Scottish
Enlightenment’, Scottish Historical Review, 84 (2005), pp. 202–22; John Robertson, ‘Hugh Trevor-Roper,
Intellectual History and “The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment” ’, English Historical Review, 124
(2009), pp. 1389–421; Peter Ghosh, ‘Hugh Trevor-Roper and the History of Ideas’, History of European
Ideas, 37 (2011), pp. 483–505.
16
‘You understand the nature of history better than any of your contemporaries in England, and I dare
say in Europe, and there is no reason for concealing this fact.’ Isaiah Berlin to Hugh Trevor-Roper, 6 March
1962, L III 84–5. The context of this remark, however, was a plea to Trevor-Roper to be less reticent in
distinguishing himself from E. H. Carr (and also to make less fun of Berlin himself). Remarks in letters to
friends in the 1950s and 1960s show Berlin putting social and political distance between himself and
Trevor-Roper.
17
See the essays collected in J. G. A. Pocock, Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. the Preface, and Part I, chs 1–3.
18
VH 126–7, note 1; TCE 186–7, note 1, in which he remarks that Pocock’s Ancient Constitution and the
Feudal Law ‘seems to me the most original and illuminating, as well as the best written, treatment of this
topic to be found anywhere at present’. The references were to John G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution
and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), and D. R. Kelley, Foundations of
Modern Historical Scholarship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970)—along with articles by Kelley
and articles and monographs by Arthur Ferguson, Julian Franklin, Eugenio Garin, George Huppert, Frank
Manuel, and Arnaldo Momigliano. See also Berlin’s explanation of his interest in Vico’s sources in a letter
to Quentin Skinner, 15 March 1976, printed as an appendix to TCE 490–3.
156 John Robertson
Vico in His Time

Still, there are grounds for a defence of Berlin: the case that Vico was of his time needs
to be made. For one thing, Berlin could refer to Vico’s self-pitying Autobiography,
which wastes no opportunity to stress his professional and intellectual isolation.19
Berlin had a point too when he accused Neapolitan Vico scholars, headed by Fausto
Nicolini, of excessive intellectual patriotism, almost of a boria (conceit) of their own,
which led them to overemphasize the local, Neapolitan context of Vico’s thinking.20
More important, he could have invoked the support of respected Vico scholars, nota-
bly Arnaldo Momigliano and Paolo Rossi, who questioned how up-to-date Vico was
in his scholarship and references. Although not published until 1981, after most of
Berlin’s writings on Vico, Rossi’s article ‘Chi sono i contemporanei di Vico?’ argued
that too many scholars had imputed relations between Vico and contemporary think-
ers across Europe for which evidence simply did not exist. Rather more than half of
Vico’s references in the Scienza nuova were to works written between 1600 and 1680;
just over a quarter were to works published in his lifetime. Rossi also pointed to Vico’s
professed inability to read works in other vernaculars, French, German, and English,
and his ‘decision’ around 1710 to read no more books.21
Since Rossi asked his question, however, Vico scholarship has increasingly answered
it with more careful research and interpretation. The question of Vico’s knowledge of
French, Enrico Nuzzo argued in a particularly sensitive discussion, cannot be decided
on the basis of his disclaimer in the Autobiography alone.22 Meanwhile Latin still gave
Vico access to all the important scholarship of his time, as well as to much of the phi-
losophy; in addition, one of the new learned journals, the Acta Eruditorum of Leipzig,
reviewed new books in Latin. In many cases Vico would not have had to read a book in
detail to be aware of its argument, and able to respond to it. It is possible, therefore, to
make a case for understanding Vico that is the very opposite of Berlin’s: a case for a
‘Vico aggiornato’ rather than isolated from his own time.
Such a case rests partly on the richness of the Neapolitan intellectual context, and on
Vico’s known engagement with it.23 Vico was too young to be a member of the
19
The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, translated by M. H. Fisch and T. G. Bergin (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1944).
20
VH 140–41n; TCE 205n. The allusion to ‘conceits’ refers to the two conceits of nations and scholars
identified by Vico in Book I Section ii of The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translation of the third
(1744) edition of the Scienza nuova by T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell
University Press, 1948, revised 1968), §§124–8.
21
Paolo Rossi, ‘Chi sono i contemporanei di Vico?’, Rivista di filosofia, 62 (1981), 51–82, reprinted in
Rossi, Le sterminate antichità e nuovi saggi vichiani (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1999), pp. 275–303; Arnaldo
Momigliano, ‘Vico’s Scienza nuova: Roman “bestioni” and Roman “eroi” (1966), reprinted in his Essays in
Ancient and Modern Historiography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), pp. 253–76, esp. 253–6.
22
Enrico Nuzzo, ‘Attorno a Vico e Bayle’, in his Tra ordine di storia e storicità: Saggi sui saperi della storia
in Vico (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2001), pp. 165–239, esp. 174ff.
23
Nicola Badaloni, Introduzione a G. B. Vico (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961); Salvo Mastellone, Pensiero polit-
ico e vita culturale a Napoli nella seconda metà del Seicento (Messina and Florence: G. D’Anna, 1965); V. I.
Comparato, Giuseppe Valletta: Un intellettuale napoletano della fine del seicento (Naples: Istituto per gli
Accademia degli Investiganti, whose members explored the latest discoveries in

natural philosophy, several of them from a corpuscularian perspective. But several of
its leaders were still prominent in the city’s intellectual life when Vico was a young
man. Moreover, Vico was a member of the Academy founded by the Spanish Viceroy,
the Duke of Medina Coeli; active between 1698 and 1702, this discussed topics in
ancient sacred and profane history, focusing attention on a field Vico was to make very
much his own. Vico would also have had access to the city’s several excellent libraries,
almost certainly including the collection of Giuseppe Valletta, which he later helped to
secure for the library of the Neapolitan Oratorians. This was rich in the fields of sacred
and profane history discussed in the Medina Coeli—but Valletta also possessed many
items of French philosophy and theology, including many of the works of the French
Augustinians of Port-Royal. It is true that the Church kept a watchful eye on Neapolitan
intellectual life—and in the 1680s sought to curb the influence of the new philosophy
by a trial of supposed ‘atheists’: the threat was sufficient to frighten Vico into leaving
the city for several years, which he passed in the agreeable surroundings of Vatolla, in
the Cilento.24 But the threat fizzled out, and the impression is that intellectual life in
Naples was freer than in Rome, whether in the availability of books or in the scope for
publication without referral to the Index.
The best evidence for a Vico aggiornato lies, however, in his writings. I would point
to three aspects of Vico’s thought which demonstrate his familiarity with issues at the
forefront of intellectual debate across Europe in the first half of the eighteenth century.
One was his engagement with Augustinian and Epicurean conceptions of human
nature, and their implication that man was naturally unsociable. Vico protested his
opposition to Epicureanism at every opportunity; but the evidence of the Scienza
nuova suggests that he recognized the force, and the appeal, of the Augustinian–
Epicurean concept of fallen, utility-driven man, and that he made it the premise of his
own account of sociability.25
The complexity of his relationship with Epicureanism is evident in a second aspect
of the Scienza nuova: its critique, but also adaptation, of the arguments of the Protestant
natural lawyers Grotius, Pufendorf, and Hobbes.26 Ignoring the great Catholic tradition
Studi Storici, 1970); H. S. Stone, Vico’s Cultural History: The Production and Transmission of Ideas in Naples
1685–1750 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997); John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples
1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 94–109, 121–34; Barbara Ann Naddeo,
Vico and Naples: The Urban Origins of Modern Social Theory (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University
Press, 2011). Of these, Berlin was aware only of Badaloni’s study, which he criticized for paying too much
attention to natural philosophy as a possible source of Vico’s thinking.
24
L. Osbat, L’Inquisizione a Napoli: Il processo agli ateisti 1688–1697 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e
Letteratura, 1974); Vico, Autobiography, pp. 118–19, 126–9, an account of his absence which made no
mention of the trial.
25
Robertson, Case for the Enlightenment, ch. 5: ‘Vico, after Bayle’.
26
There is a considerable literature on Vico’s relation to the Protestant natural lawyers: see for
example, Dario Faucci, ‘Vico and Grotius: Jurisconsults of Mankind’, in G. Tagliacozzo and H. V. White
(eds), Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1969), pp. 61–76; Guido Fassò, Vico e Grozio (Naples: Guida, 1971); also Donald R. Kelley, ‘Vico’s
158 John Robertson
of natural law thinking, Vico engaged the Protestants on the issue at the heart of their
conception of natural law, the obligation to sociability. None of the three, he pointed
out, had represented man as naturally sociable: each had adopted a version of the
Epicurean hypothesis. But Vico’s criticism did not mean that he took a different view:
on the contrary, the giants whom he depicted as roaming the earth after the Flood were
equivalent to Hobbes’s fieri e violenti, solitary, fierce, and violent men. Vico’s argument
was rather that, admitting the Epicurean premise, he could offer a far better account of
men’s socialization than the natural jurists’ suggestion of an original contract. It was
idolatry, Vico argued, which had socialized the Gentiles, leading them to form regular
families and to support them with property.
The third respect in which Vico was aggiornato was in his engagement with sacred
history. In common with many other Vico scholars, Berlin supposed that Vico had
prudently set aside sacred history when he exempted the Hebrews from his post-diluvian
story of socialization by idolatry. But this is to miss the inventiveness of Vico’s argu-
ment, which took the chronology of the Vulgate Bible as its framework, only to exploit
it in a way which turned sacred history into a far richer resource for the history of
socialization than the Protestant jurists had ever imagined. Vico was well aware that
this was difficult ground for the Catholic Church. Not only had the Holy Office and the
Index condemned the works of the most radical Biblical scholars of the late seven-
teenth century, Benedict Spinoza and Richard Simon; recently two of the ablest young
Neapolitan scholars in Rome, both known to Vico, Celestino Galiani and Biagio
Garofalo, had had writings referred to the Index because they appeared to challenge
orthodox understandings of the Bible. Yet Vico succeeded in adapting the conserva-
tive Roman agenda to his advantage, exploiting the Bible’s status as the oldest known
history to show how primitive, solitary man became sociable.27
A Vico so fully of his time was not an enlightened Vico: Vico belongs to the intellec-
tual world immediately before Enlightenment came to Naples, in the 1750s. Even
if he was by no means as isolated as the Autobiography makes out, Vico had no
sense of participating in a wider intellectual movement alongside Montesquieu or
Voltaire, the Enlightenment philosophers closest to him in age; there is no way that
he can be regarded as a would-be philosophe. Equally, Vico did not think in terms of
human betterment: the progressi which he identified in the early phases of the storia
ideal eterna did not amount to ‘progress’, and he remained uninterested in political
Road: From Philology to Jurisprudence and Back’, in G. Tagliacozzo and D. P. Verene (eds), Giambattista
Vico’s Science of Humanity (Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 15–29;
more recently, Francesco Piro, ‘I presupposti teologici del giunaturalismo moderno nella percezione di
Vico’, Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani, 30 (2000), 125–49. But questions remain, not least why Vico
did not engage with the great Catholic exponents of the law of nature of the Second Scholastic.
27
John Robertson, ‘Sacred History and Political Thought: Neapolitan Responses to the Problem of
Sociability after Hobbes’, The Historical Journal, 56 (2013), pp. 1–29. Anticipated by the observations of
Momigliano, ‘Roman “bestioni” and Roman “eroi” ’, pp. 253–6, although the conclusion, that Vico ‘attrib-
uted too much importance to the Old Testament and too little to the New Testament to be relevant to his
Italian contemporaries’, is, in my view, mistaken.
economy, despite the attention it was beginning to receive from his contemporary
Paolo Mattia Doria and then from Celestino Galiani.28 But if a Vico of his time
was not an Enlightenment Vico, it should be equally impossible to cast him a
thinker of a ‘Counter-Enlightenment’. The idea that Vico, or anyone else, could be
a proponent of a Counter-Enlightenment when he did not recognize Enlightenment
is historically incoherent.
What we can appreciate, however, are the ways in which the Scienza nuova engaged
with questions which would continue to preoccupy Enlightenment thinkers. The
problem of ‘unsocial sociability’ would be tackled subsequently by Hume, by Rousseau,
and by Kant,29 while research predicated on the assumption that the history of religion
offered a privileged insight into the state of early society would be pursued by the
French philosophe Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger and the Neapolitan Francesco Mario
Pagano.30 Vico occupies an important place in both these stories, but nothing is gained,
and much may be lost, by associating them exclusively with Enlightenment, or, more
misleading still, Counter-Enlightenment.
Berlin’s Vico as a Philosophic Critique of Enlightenment

To conclude, however, I want to suggest that there is a better way to take the measure of
Berlin’s Vico than through contesting its historical adequacy. In rediscovering Vico,
Berlin was contributing to a story older than and at least as important as historical
reconstruction of the Enlightenment, the story of Enlightenment as the subject of phil-
osophical critique.
Whether as Les lumières or as Aufklärung, Enlightenment in the eighteenth century
had identified itself with ‘philosophy’. D’Alembert’s Discours préliminaire to the
Encyclopédie had associated the venture with the empirical philosophy of the senses
expounded by Bacon, Boyle, Newton, and Locke; Kant’s Was ist Aufklärung? tied it to
his philosophy of reason. The identification was then sealed by the strength and persis-
tence of the reaction against it. In France the anti-philosophes held ‘philosophy’
responsible for irreligion and social levelling—in short, for the Revolution. In
Germany Kant’s philosophy was the subject of continuous critique in the nineteenth
century, first by Hegel, later by exponents of varieties of historicism. Not until the end
28
Vincenzo Ferrone, Scienza natura religion: Mondo Newtoniano e cultura italiana nel primo Settecento
(Naples: Jovene, 1982), esp. pp. 546–83; Koen Stapelbroek, Love, Self-Deceit and Money: Commerce and
Morality in the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2008), pp. 12–126.
29
On this theme, Istvan Hont, ‘Introduction’ to Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the
Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 37–51,
111–48.
30
Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger, L’Antiquité devoilée pas ses usages, ou Examen critique des principales
opinions, ceremonies et institutions religieuses et politiques des différens peuples de la terre (Amsterdam,
1766); Franceso Mario Pagano, Saggi politici: De’ principii, progressi e decadenza delle società (Naples, first
edition, 1783–5, second edition 1791–2), in the edition by Luigi Firpo and Laura Salvetti Firpo (Naples:
Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, 1993).
160 John Robertson
of the century did more positive accounts of Enlightenment philosophy begin to be

offered, culminating in Ernst Cassirer’s Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (1932).31
But Cassirer’s moderate defence of Enlightenment philosophy did not convince
fellow philosophers. Regarded as a backward-looking neo-Kantian, he was widely held
to have come off second best to Heidegger in their debates before a student audience
at Davos in 1929. Cassirer’s Aufklärung was made to look still less convincing as the
consequences of the Nazi seizure of power became clear. Even those initially sympa-
thetic to him as a Jewish exile turned against his account of Enlightenment. Berlin was
among these. His review of the English translation, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment
(1951), was sharply critical: he disliked Cassirer’s tendency to ‘conciliate and appease’,
his ‘distaste for sharp delineation and the drawing of firm distinctions between ideas
or thinkers’. What might have been thought, when originally written, to be a brave
defence of Enlightenment values was dismissed as ‘well composed, well translated and
serenely innocent’.32
Only after the war did the Enlightenment finally became a subject of historical
scholarship and reconstruction. A scholarly approach to the texts of the eighteenth
century has been adopted at the very start of the century by the French literary histo-
rian Gustave Lanson; in the 1930s his pupils Daniel Mornet and Paul Hazard had
written major studies of eighteenth-century thought. In doing so, they made les lumières
a category of literary studies; they may also be seen as pioneers of intellectual history.
Among those they inspired was the young Italian historian Franco Venturi, in exile
with his father in Paris in the 1930s.33 By the 1950s Venturi had established himself
as the leading European historian of the Enlightenment, focused upon Italy, but
always emphasizing the Enlightenment’s trans-European character. For Venturi and
many other continental European historians, studying the Enlightenment was an
affirmation that Europe had a better past than its recent history suggested. At the same
time, the Enlightenment offered Venturi and other liberals a historical and political
philosophy of modernization and progress distinct from Marxism, enabling them to
steer an independent course through the ideological polarization of the Cold War
and subsequent détente.
Berlin knew and admired Venturi—but as the historian of Russian populism
(whose book on the subject he arranged to be translated into English by Francis
31
The philosophers’ Enlightenment has been explored particularly by James Schmidt, ‘Inventing the
Enlightenment: Anti-Jacobins, British Hegelians, and the Oxford English Dictionary’, Journal of the History
of Ideas, 64 (2003), 421–43; ‘What Enlightenment Was, What it Still Might Be, and Why Kant May Have
Been Right after All’, American Behavioural Scientist, 49 (2006), 647–63; along with his edited collection,
What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1996).
32
Review of Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, tr. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), in English Historical Review 68 (1953), 617–19. On this,
and the contrast with Berlin’s earlier, favourable judgement of a Cassirer lecture in a letter of 1933 to Adam
von Trott, see Dubnov, Isaiah Berlin, pp. 139, 205.
33
On the French scholars and their relation to Venturi, Giuseppe Ricuperati, Frontieri e limiti della
ragione: Della crisi della coscienza europea all’illuminismo (Milan: UTET, 2006), esp. chs 2 and 6.
Haskell), not as the student of an Enlightenment far richer than Berlin would ever
recognize.34 Perhaps, like many English historians, Berlin did not recognize the need
for a better past, England having won the war. For his part, Venturi had little time for
Vico, whose interests he regarded as remote from the reforming priorities of the illu-
ministi of the 1750s and after, who would put political economy before philosophy.
On the subjects of Enlightenment and of Vico, therefore, there was little basis for
common ground between Berlin and the leading post-war European historian of
Enlightenment.
Even as historians were rediscovering the Enlightenment as Europe’s better past,
however, the philosophers were renewing their critique. The opening salvo was
Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944); it was followed by
Koselleck’s shorter, wonderfully focused Kritik und Krise (1959).35 The critique was
interrupted in the 1960s by Habermas’s historically grounded defence of the
Enlightenment’s commitment to the ‘public sphere’,36 but was resumed in the 1970s by
Foucault,37 and then in the 1980s by a galère of anglophone philosophers, headed by
MacIntyre and Rorty and known collectively under the label ‘post-modernism’.38
Berlin is not an obvious recruit to this company. It is certainly not company he wished
to be seen in. Towards the end of his life he told Ramin Jahanbegloo that he could not
understand a word of the philosophical writings of Adorno, while he assured Mark
Lilla that he shared his hostility to ‘the Frankfurters—the Adornos, Horkheimers, and
indeed Foucault, and their followers; they really do give “succour” to the forces of
darkness, by discrediting enlightened liberalism’ (CIB 49; TCE 510). Nevertheless,
with appropriate qualifications, it is, I suggest, to a branch of this tradition of philo-
sophic critique that Berlin’s concept of Counter-Enlightenment, and the interpretation
of Vico which founded it, properly belong.
As Avi Lifschitz argues in his contribution to this volume, an important, under-
played figure in Berlin’s intellectual biography was the German historian of political
34
Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-
Century Russia, translated by Francis Haskell, with an introduction by Isaiah Berlin (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1960).
35
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente, first
published in mimeographed form by the New School of Social Research, New York, in 1944, and in revised
form, Amsterdam: Querido, 1947; Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmidt Noerr, tr. Edmund
Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise: ein Beitrag
zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt (Freiburg, 1959); translated by Keith Tribe as Critique and Crisis:
Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford, New York, Hamburg: Berg, 1988).
36
Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Darmstadt, 1962), translated by Thomas Burger
with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge:
Polity, 1989).
37
Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader: An Introduction
to Foucault’s Thought (New York, 1984; London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 32–50.
38
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981); Richard
Rorty, ‘The Continuity between Enlightenment and “Postmodernism”’, in K. M. Baker and P. H. Reill (eds),
What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001),
pp. 19–36.
162 John Robertson
ideas Friedrich Meinecke. Meinecke’s Die Entstehung des Historismus was first published
in 1936, and reissued in 1959. When an English translation by J. E. Anderson was
published in 1972, with the title Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, it was
with an enthusiastic ‘Foreword’ by Isaiah Berlin. Among those identified by Meinecke
as the ‘forerunners’ of the new historical outlook was Vico, the subject of a section of
the opening chapter.39 Berlin cites or refers to Meinecke’s work on only four occasions
in his two principal studies of Vico,40 but his interpretation of Vico’s New Science
clearly echoes Meinecke’s in two key respects: the identification of Vico’s achievement
as laying the foundations of modern historicism, and, essential to this, Vico’s repudia-
tion of the idea of a uniform human nature. Berlin also followed Meinecke in his view
of Vico as ‘a solitary and unrecognised outsider’, and adopted a similar approach to
Vico’s professions of Christian orthodoxy, recognizing the ‘Baroque’ character of
Vico’s faith, but identifying a secular implication to his doctrine of providence.41
There was still more in Meinecke’s remarkable, dense pages on Vico that Berlin did
not make use of; but it seems clear that his reading of Vico was in fundamental respects
close to Meinecke’s.
Meinecke’s Vico, however, also contributed to a critique of Aufklärung, Enlightenment.
For Historismus was not the Enlightenment’s philosophy of history. Meinecke allowed
that the Enlightenment historians Voltaire and Montesquieu, Hume, Robertson, and
Gibbon, and ‘the English pre-Romantics’ Ferguson and Burke, had contributed to the
rise of the new outlook. But their contributions fell short of the ‘developmental’ princi-
ple which Vico had earlier anticipated. Vico’s prescience, as Meinecke presented it, did
not make him a figure of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’; but his historical philosophy was
already superior to that of Enlightenment historians, and closer to that of the real
heroes of Historismus, Herder and Goethe. In this way, Meinecke set Vico off against
the Enlightenment. Berlin went further than this in deliberately identifying Vico with
a ‘Counter-Enlightenment’. So doing, Berlin may be thought to have simplified Meinecke’s
argument, and perhaps even over-extended it. But the critical edge, the interpretation
of Vico’s philosophy of history as antithetical towards the Enlightenment’s way of
thinking about human nature and history, was originally Meinecke’s. Berlin took
it over, and, without ever denying the validity of the Enlightenment’s commitments
to liberal values, made Vico’s historical thought a contribution to the critique of
Enlightenment philosophy.
Extended to Herder, Hamann, and De Maistre, Berlin’s ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ was
a distinctive contribution to the tradition of philosophic critique of Enlightenment
in several respects, but the importance he attached to Vico as the first of the critics
39
Friedrich Meinecke, Der Entstehung des Historismus (Munich, 1936, repr. 1939); Historism: The Rise
of a New Historical Outlook, translated by J. E. Anderson, with a foreword by Sir Isaiah Berlin (London:
Routledge, 1972). On Vico as one of four ‘forerunners’ of Historism, pp. 37–53; the others were Shaftesbury,
Leibniz, and Gottfried Arnold.
40
Berlin, VH 15, 76n, 91n, 118; TCE 42, 121n, 140n, 176.
41
Meinecke, Historism, pp. 38, 40–3, 44, 45.
is among the most interesting. Taking up where Meinecke had left off, Berlin’s
deployment of Vico against Enlightenment was a powerful Anglophone contribution
to a language, or tradition, of philosophic critique of the Enlightenment which has its
roots in the nineteenth century, and which continues to challenge those for whom
Enlightenment is the standard-bearer of modernity.
12
‘Populism, Expressionism,
Pluralism’—and God?
Herder’s Cultural Theory and Theology
Kevin Hilliard
1
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) is a figure of signal importance in Isaiah Berlin’s
thought. In 1960 he was planning to write on Herder as part of a work to be called Three
Critics of the Enlightenment.1 The essay that eventually emerged, ‘Herder and the
Enlightenment’, was first published in 1965, and in 1976 became part of the diptych Vico
and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (1976).2 There are significant passages on
Herder in the preface to Vico and Herder,3 in lectures on Romanticism Berlin delivered in
1965 (RR 57–67), in the essay ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ of 1973,4 and in an article
from 1980, ‘Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought’ (CTH 73–94).
As these titles indicate, Herder was of interest to Berlin in the context of a wider
interest in the Enlightenment, which includes an interest in what Enlightenment was
not and what was not Enlightenment. His view of him remained fixed throughout.
Herder was and remained one of Berlin’s chief witnesses against the Enlightenment.
It is largely, if not exclusively, thanks to Berlin that Herder owes his standing in the
English-speaking world.5 Charles Taylor’s ‘The Importance of Herder’, published in
Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration in 1991, points in both directions: it is a tribute to Berlin,
but also a tribute to Herder.6 Michael N. Forster has written extensively on ‘Herder’s
1
Henry Hardy, ‘Editor’s Preface’, TCE, 2nd edn, pp. xvii–xxii (pp. xvii–xviii).
2
Originally in Aspects of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Earl R. Wasserman (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
Press, 1965). Reprinted in revised form in TCE 208–300.
3
VH xiii–xxvii. Herder: pp. xxii–xxv. The introduction is reprinted in TCE 7–25; Herder: pp. 17–21.
4
In Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip W. Wiener, 5 vols (New York: Scribner’s, 1968–73),
vol. 2 (1973), pp. 100–12 (Herder: pp. 105–6).
5
My survey is necessarily selective. The debate inaugurated by Berlin is by no means confined to the
Anglo-American sphere. Berlin and Herder figure prominently e.g. in Zeev Sternhell, Les anti-Lumières:
Une tradition du XVIIIe siècle à la guerre froide, Collection Folio Histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2010).
6
Charles Taylor, ‘The Importance of Herder’, IBAC 40–63.
Herder’s Cultural Theory and Theology 165
Importance as a Philosopher’, to quote the title of one of a series of papers now collected
in a volume called After Herder (2010).7 Following the lead given by Berlin and Taylor,
modern-day advocates of multiculturalism have found a vital philosophical resource
in his work; Sonia Sikka’s Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference (2011) is a
recent example.8
So if Herder is a presence in contemporary philosophy, it is largely thanks to Isaiah
Berlin. The framing, too, that of a critique of Enlightenment positions, has remained
constant.9 More accurately, one should say: of positions attributed to the Enlightenment.
For of course Berlin’s view of what the Enlightenment stood for has not remained
unchallenged.10
My observations will have two parts. In the first, I want to do some intellectual
history on Berlin himself; in the second, to ask what is missing from his account of
Herder—and because of his influence, missing also from the English-language recep-
tion in general, as far as I can tell. In both parts, I hope to keep the question of
Enlightenment squarely in view.
2
One of the most astonishing things said by any critic about Berlin’s essays in intellec-
tual history is that they were ‘not written from a point of view’.11 We could reply with
Herder: ‘What happens for the time must happen in time . . . A tree that grows
nowhere . . . is an impossibility!’12 Berlin succeeded no better than anyone else in being
a tree that grows nowhere. On the contrary, his approach to Herder was inescapably
7
Michael N. Forster, After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010). The title of the essay, Forster points out, ‘pays tribute’ to Taylor’s ‘well-known essay’
(p. 131).
8
Sonia Sikka, Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011). Sikka’s starting point is Berlin (pp. 2–3). Charles Taylor is also a signif-
icant presence.
9
See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), where passages on Herder (pp. 368–70, 374–8) in the chapter ‘The Expressivist
Turn’ must be read with the earlier chapter ‘Radical Enlightenment’ in mind. Cf. also Taylor, Hegel
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 13.
10
See the correspondence between Mark Lilla and Berlin in TCE 493–511; the contributions by Lilla
and Robert Wokler in IBCE 1–11 and 13–31; Robert E. Norton, ‘The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment’,
Journal of the History of Ideas, 68 (2007), 635–58; Steven Lestition, ‘Countering, Transposing or Negating
the Enlightenment? A Response to Robert Norton’, ibid., 68 (2007), 659–81; Norton, ‘Isaiah Berlin’s
“Expressionism”, or: “Ha! Du bist der Blökende!”’, ibid., 69 (2008), 339–47; Sternhell, Les anti-Lumières, pp.
690–700; and the discussion in John H. Zammito, Karl Menges, and Ernest A. Menze, ‘Johann Gottfried
Herder Revisited: The Revolution in Scholarship in the Last Quarter Century’, Journal of the History of
Ideas, 71 (2010), 661–84 (pp. 666–70).
11
Roger Hausheer, ‘Introduction’, AC xiii–liii (p. xiii).
12
‘Was für die Zeit geschieht, muß in der Zeit geschehen . . . Ein Baum, der nirgend wachse . . . ist ein
Unding!’ An Prediger: Funfzehn Provinzialblätter (1774), in Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, 10 vols, ed.
Günter Arnold et al. (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2000), vol. 9/1 (1994): Theologische
Schriften, ed. Christoph Bultmann and Thomas Zippert, pp. 67–138 (p. 110). This edition is referred to as
Werke below.
166 Kevin Hilliard
conditioned by his time and place. As Jonathan Israel has observed, Berlin’s history of
ideas very much served the purposes of ‘commentary on contemporary affairs’.13
Berlin came to the Enlightenment from a study of Marx. He wanted to find out
where Marx’s conviction had come from that communism would be the solution, and
‘ “know itself to be the solution” ’, to all the woes of the world (TCE 486). He wanted to
find this out, not of course out of antiquarian curiosity, but because Marx had given
birth to a political movement which in the twentieth century had set out to bring about
this solution in reality, with baleful consequences, some of which the young Isaiah
Berlin experienced at first hand.
Berlin’s diagnosis was that Marxism suffered from the beginning from a combi-
nation of moral monism, scientism, and technocratic mechanism. That is to say
that Marx believed that there was only one way for human beings to be happy, and
one way for society to be organized to make them so; that human beings, along
with everything else in the world, were nothing more than objects obeying natural
laws of cause and effect; and that therefore the world, including the humans beings
in it, could be changed by harnessing those natural laws and processes in the cor-
rect way.
But Marx, according to Berlin, was not the first to formulate these ideas. Where,
then, did they come from? From the Enlightenment—from what he thought of as the
Enlightenment. Here he is summarizing its project: ‘The . . . dream, the demonstration
that everything in the world moved by mechanical means, that all evils could be cured
by appropriate technological steps, that there could exist engineers both of human
souls and of human bodies’ (POI 52). This is the Enlightenment as forerunner of com-
munism: Helvétius, Holbach, and Condorcet as prototypes of Marx, Plekhanov, and
Stalin.14 For of course the phrase ‘the engineer of human souls’ is a saying of Stalin’s. It
was a fixed point of reference for Berlin, the key to understanding communism, but
also the Enlightenment.15
Berlin was not content to describe communism. He also wanted to oppose it, to
show that it was wrong and that there were alternatives to it. And since communism
was in a direct line of descent from the Enlightenment (as he understood it), it was
important to do the same for the latter, i.e. to describe its limitations and draw up a
13
Jonathan Israel, ‘Foreword’, in TCE vii–xv (p. vii). It is telling that the essay ‘Herder and the
Enlightenment’ was reprinted in Encounter in its issues of July and August 1965 (see TCE 5). See also
Berlin’s letter to Quentin Skinner, 15 March 1976, TCE 491.
14
For Plekhanov as avatar of the philosophes, see TCE 497. Berlin confessed that he first learned to see
them through Plekhanov’s eyes: ‘Everything I knew about the Enlightenment came from Plekhanov’ (from
the tape of a conversation between Isaiah Berlin and Michael Ignatieff, quoted in Joshua L. Cherniss,
A Mind and its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013), p. 31). See also Cherniss, ‘Isaiah Berlin’s Thought and its Legacy: Critical Reflections on a Symposium’,
European Journal of Political Theory, 12 (2013), 5–23 (p. 7). Cf. G. V. Plekhanov, In Defence of Materialism:
The Development of the Monist View of History, tr. Andrew Rothstein (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1947).
15
See Berlin, ‘The Bent Twig: A Note on Nationalism’, Foreign Affairs, 51 (1972), 11–30, repr. in CTH
253–78 (pp. 272–3); TCE 385, 509.
counter-programme. Hence Berlin’s trinity of Vico, Hamann, and Herder, whose work
he mined for opinions with which to oppose the dogmas of the Enlightenment.16
Herder thus had to serve a purpose. Berlin wasted no time in getting to the
point. ‘Herder’s fame’, the essay on ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’ begins, ‘rests
on the fact that he is . . . the most formidable of the adversaries of the French philos-
ophes and their German disciples’ (TCE 208). We look in vain for an outline of
Herder’s career or a discussion of individual works and the occasions that gave rise
to them. From the ‘rich welter of his thought’, Berlin, with single-minded focus,
proceeds to pick out ‘three cardinal ideas’, synthesized from a range of works, that
make Herder important in the ‘two centuries’ after him: the ideas of ‘populism’,
‘expressionism’, and ‘pluralism’ (TCE 210). ‘Populism’ was ‘the belief in the value of
belonging to a group or a culture’ (or Volk: hence Berlin’s perhaps not entirely
happy coinage);17 ‘expressionism’ was ‘the doctrine that human activity in general,
and art in particular, express the entire personality of the individual or the
group’—though in truth, more the latter than the former;18 ‘pluralism’, following
from the first two, was ‘the belief . . . in the incommensurability . . . of . . . different
cultures and societies and . . . the incompatibility of equally valid ideals, together
with the . . . corollary that the classical notions of an ideal man and of an ideal soci-
ety are intrinsically incoherent and meaningless’ (TCE 218–19).
Pluralism is of course the political idea Berlin himself is best known for, and it is
clear that of the three ‘cardinal ideas’ he finds in Herder, this is the one that matters
most. The importance of belonging to distinct groups—‘populism’—and the way each
of these distinct groups creates a whole distinct world of cultural artefacts, habits, and
meanings around its identity—‘expressionism’—are evidently powerful obstacles to
the kind of uniformity Berlin deplores in the Enlightenment. Hence ‘pluralism’: the
belief, not only that judging one community according to the norms of the other is
misguided, but, more importantly, that imposing any one set of values and way of life
on the diversity of human societies is wrong. Pluralism brings the Enlightenment pro-
ject—and the communist project—to a halt.
That is Berlin’s view of Herder. He claims him explicitly as a source of his own
thought: ‘My political pluralism’, he says in ‘My Intellectual Path’, posthumously pub-
lished in 1998, ‘is a product of reading Vico and Herder’ (POI 13). I think it would be at
least as true to say that the pluralism he finds in Herder is a product of his own political
beliefs; and in a wider sense, of the Cold War context in which he was operating. To
16
Berlin’s acquaintance with their work was only in part the result of direct immersion in it. For the
sources of Berlin’s view of Herder in early twentieth-century German conservatism, in particular Friedrich
Meinecke, see Avi Lifschitz in this volume, and Sternhell, Les anti-Lumières, pp. 54–5, 69–70, 680–6.
17
Berlin hesitates over it in RR 64.
18
It is because of the potentially misleading confusion with the artistic movement of the early twentieth
century (see TCE 218 n. 1) that Berlin’s disciple Charles Taylor prefers the term ‘expressivism’; see Taylor,
Hegel, p. 13, and n. 11 above. Berlin later approved of this revision: see his ‘Reply to Robert Kocis’ (1983),
in TCE 303–13 (p. 311).
168 Kevin Hilliard
simplify: Herder was for Berlin a line of defence against communist ideology in the
East, and an antidote to the temptations of Marxism in the West.19
I will leave aside a variety of questions, political, historical, and philosophical, that
might arise at this point. These include the problematic proximity of pluralism to rela-
tivism; the claim that there was a direct line of descent from the Enlightenment to
communism; the adequacy of Berlin’s characterization of the Enlightenment by refer-
ence to a small hard core of French materialists; the question whether he got even them
right; and, with respect to Herder, the troubling spectre of völkisch nationalism, most
egregiously embodied in Nazi ideology, and the degree to which Herder may have
paved the way for it. Berlin was well aware of all of these difficulties, and had responses
to all of them. Whether they are sufficient is another question—but one I do not intend
to pursue here, since others have done so in considerable depth, though without reach-
ing a consensus.20
Instead I want to turn away from the concerns of the mid twentieth century which
so preoccupied Berlin, and back to the eighteenth century and Herder himself. I will
do so by asking what is missing from his account.
3
What is missing—strikingly so—is religion. Though of course he knew it, one would
barely suspect from Berlin’s account that Herder was a Lutheran minister for his whole
adult life, for twenty-seven years of which he was the head of the church in Sachsen-
Weimar. For Berlin, Herder is the author of works of literary criticism and the philoso-
phy of history. His works on the Bible and theology pass unmentioned, as do a lifetime’s
sermons.
19
This is shown in detail by James Schmidt, in ‘Inventing a Counter-Enlightenment: Liberalism, Nihilism,
and Totalitarianism’ (2011), http://www.academia.edu/3751128/Inventing_a_Counter-Enlightenment_
Liberalism_Nihilism_and_Totalitarianism (accessed 5 August 2015). For a discussion of Isaiah Berlin as a
Cold War intellectual, see Jonathan Hogg, ‘The Ambiguity of Intellectual Engagement: Towards a Reassessment
of Isaiah Berlin’s Legacy’, in Eras, 6 (November 2004), http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/publications/eras/
edition-6/hoggarticle.php#b39 (accessed 19 February 2014); and Cherniss, A Mind and its Time, ch. 3: ‘Anti-
Communist Manifestos: Berlin and Cold War Politics’ (pp. 67–87).
20
See the references above, n. 10. For Berlin’s own defence, see TCE 494–501 and 506–11; and ‘Alleged
Relativism in Eighteenth Century European Thought’. Berlin has been seconded e.g. by Roger Hausheer,
‘Enlightening the Enlightenment’, IBCE 33–50; and, with some qualifications, by Graeme Garrard, in ‘The
Counter-Enlightenment Liberalism of Isaiah Berlin’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 2 (1997), 281–96, ‘The
Enlightenment and its Enemies’, American Behavioral Scientist, 49 (2006), 664–80, Counter-Enlightenments
from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (London: Routledge, 2006), and ‘Strange Reversals: Berlin on the
Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment’, in George Crowder and Henry Hardy (eds), The One and
the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), pp. 141–57. For Berlin’s influ-
ence on him, see Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments, p. xi; for his account of Berlin’s own views, pp. 87–9.
Curiously, however, Herder is mentioned by Garrard only in passing (Counter-Enlightenments, p. 57) and
does not figure as one of his own major Counter-Enlightenment thinkers. This may have something to do
with ‘the other significant influence on my outlook’ (p. xi), James Schmidt, who criticizes Berlin for
‘recruit[ing] [Herder] … into the ranks for the Counter-Enlightenment’ (Schmidt, ‘Inventing a Counter-
Enlightenment’, p. 1).
To be sure, Berlin is in good company; with some notable exceptions, the separation
of the philosophical from the theological Herder is unfortunately well entrenched in
the literature.21 Some are indeed convinced that theological concerns played very little
part in Herder’s work.22 Others argue that, on the contrary, theological issues are pres-
ent to a greater or lesser degree even in apparently secular writings.23
My own view is that this latter opinion is closer to the truth. That Herder was heter-
odox in his theology may readily be granted; but far from indicating a lack of urgent
interest in religious questions, that itself might be all the more reason to suspect that in
his work he was trying to resolve deep-seated theological problems.24
I am going to approach the question obliquely. Henry Hardy, editing the reprint of
‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, has the following textual note: ‘Herder’s text is riddled
with emphases (indicated in print by wide letter-spacing)25 which are ignored in Berlin’s
quotations’ (TCE xxvi). This reflects a certain distaste—Berlin’s, not Hardy’s—for Herder’s
style: ‘Herder often wrote with a rhapsodic intensity not conducive to clear reflection or
expression’ (TCE 22). He speaks of ‘the notorious luxuriance and formlessness of his
ideas’, or his ‘naturally rhapsodical and turbid mind’, of his ‘exuberant and disordered’
manner (TCE 221). All of this is smoothed out in Berlin’s own presentation, including his
presentation of Herder’s text itself. Sonia Sikka, too, complains of Herder’s ‘effusive literary
style’ and lack of ‘the kind of extended, principled argumentation and cool analysis typical
of a philosopher like Spinoza or Kant’ and of the ‘patience and detachment’ that would
have been required to produce it.26 What Herder lacked, Sikka provides; and so she trans-
lates his unsystematic, sporadic effusions into patient, methodical philosophical prose.
There is nothing wrong with this approach; indeed, one is grateful to commentators
who clarify what is obscure and systematize what is disjointed in the originals. Even so,
21
See Hans Adler and Wulf Koepke (eds), A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder
(Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), where two pieces, ‘Herder’s Biblical Studies’, by Christoph
Bultmann, and ‘Herder’s Theology’, by Martin Kessler, stand separately from the other contributions
(pp. 233–46 and 247–75). The division of the two Herders is cemented in editions of his work that segregate
the theological writings from the rest; thus in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, 33 vols (Berlin:
Weidmann, 1877–1913) (vols 7–12, 19–20, 31), and Werke (see n. 12 above).
22
The dismissal of theology is particularly marked in Pierre Pénisson’s ‘Nachwort’ to: Johann Gottfried
Herder, Werke, ed. Wolfgang Pross, 3 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1984–2002), vol. 1 (1984), pp. 864–920
(pp. 879–80). Of the theological works, Pross’s edition gives only the dialogues on Spinoza: Gott. Einige
Gespräche (1787), vol. 2, pp. 743–843.
23
See e.g. Gerhard vom Hofe, ‘“Weitstrahlsinnige” Ur-Kunde: Zur Eigenart und Begründung des
Historismus beim jungen Herder’, in Gerhard Sauder (ed.), Johann Gottfried Herder 1744–1803 (Hamburg:
Felix Meiner, 1987), pp. 364–82; Eilert Herms, ‘Bildung des Gemeinwesens aus dem Christentum:
Beobachtungen zum Grundmotiv von Herders literarischem Schaffen’, in Martin Kessler and Volker
Leppin (eds), Johann Gottfried Herder: Aspekte seines Lebenswerkes (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter,
2005), pp. 309–25. Cf. Zammito et al., ‘Herder Revisited’, pp. 678–84.
24
Pénisson equivocates on this point. ‘Man sieht nicht, wie Herders Denken in die Perspektive ortho-
doxer Religiosität eingegliedert werden könnte’ (p. 880). Indeed: but that is not at all the same as saying ‘es
scheint ausgeschlossen, das Werk Herders als theologischen Diskurs zu konstituieren’ (p. 879).
25
German Sperrdruck. This, however, used in the standard edition of the works (Werke, ed. Suphan), is
itself only an editorial normalization of the various forms of emphasis (boldface, Sperrdruck, italics) in the
first editions.
26
Sikka, Herder on Humanity, p. 10.
170 Kevin Hilliard
one is entitled to ask what is lost in translation, and what Herder meant by writing in
the way he did.27
Here is a typical passage,28 from Herder’s commentary on the Book of Revelation,
published in 1779:
‘Jehovah speaks and it is done! no sooner commanded than it is complete!’ Brevity is his yard-
stick, the moment his effect. How then? if the commentator is meant to comment and has to
show things one by one, analyse, dismember, fragment? In Revelation, everything is swift: . . . a
messenger of the swiftly arriving Lord, the bolt of lightning, the judge . . . How am I to show
[these images]? how analyse and explain? In the whole book, speed, presence, fulfilment: . . . if
it were possible to . . . join the visions together . . . then I could perhaps hope for a complete
impression of the meaning and significance of this book. But I couldn’t do it. Meaning has
wings, words crawl; images are there and live and breathe; words have to chop them up . . .
I resisted, set a fast pace, put images back together that I ought to have dissected . . . in short,
there was no time for this here. The whole sequence of images is what matters, what sheds light.
I hurried . . . I did what I could; the reader must do the rest. May he be carried away on the
torrent of vision and thoughts, where the tongue and the pen lag behind.29
27
The distinctive quality of Herder’s style was frequently commented on in his own time. See Moses
Mendelssohn to Herder, 18 May 1781, on his ‘fast nicht zu verkennende Schreibart’ (‘a style that would be
virtually impossible to mistake for anyone else’s’), in Lutz Richter (ed.), Johann Gottfried Herder im Spiegel
seiner Zeitgenossen: Briefe und Selbstzeugnisse (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), p. 212. Cf.
Friedrich Nicolai to Herder, 25 January 1771, 24 August 1772, and 13 June 1774 (ibid., pp. 116, 127–9,
157–8); and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock to Herder, 5 May 1773, ibid., p. 140. The following comments are
indebted to Hans Adler’s important essay ‘Herder’s Style’, in A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried
Herder, pp. 331–50. Adler notes the distaste with which many, especially professional philosophers, have
discussed Herder’s writing, and the wilful erasure of his stylistic idiosyncrasies in many editions and trans-
lations, even recent ones. He then sets about redressing the balance by paying close attention to the use of
key metaphors in the work, and by considering the use of typographical emphasis as a stylistic device. See
also Forster, After Herder, pp. 11–13.
28
Adler draws attention to the uneven distribution of the relevant stylistic devices in different works
and in different phases of Herder’s writing, but concludes that they remain ‘an integral part of Herder’s style
throughout’ (‘Herder’s Style’, p. 347).
29
MAPAN. AΘA. Das Buch von der Zukunft des Herrn, des Neuen Testaments Siegel (Riga: Hartknoch,
1779), pp. 244–7. ‘“Jehovah spricht und es geschieht! er gebeut, so stehts da!” Die Kürze ist sein Maas, der
Augenblick seine Würkung. Wie nun? wenn der Ausleger auslegen soll und also einzeln vorführen, zerglied-
ern, zerstücken muß? Im Buche der Offenbahrung ist Alles schnell: . . . ein Bote des schnellkommenden
Herrn, des Blitzes, des Richters . . . [W]ie soll ich [diese Bilder] vorführen? wie zergliedern und erklären? Im
ganzen Buch ist Eile, Gegenwart, Ankunft: . . . wäre es möglich, daß . . . ich die Gesichte zusammen setzen
könnte . . . so könnte ich vielleicht auf einen ganzen Eindruck der Deutung und Bedeutung dieses Buchs rech-
nen. Aber es war mir nicht möglich. Der Sinn fliegt und die Worte kriechen; das Bild steht da und lebt und
athmet; die Worte müssen es zertheilen . . . Ich arbeitete dagegen, ließ schnell folgen, setzte Bilder die ich
zertheilen mußte, wieder zusammen . . . gnug, hier war zu alle diesem nicht Zeit. In der Folge, im Ganzen der
Bilder liegt Alles, auch Alles, was . . . Licht giebt . . . Ich eilte . . . Ich that was ich konnte; der Leser thue mehr. Er
schwimme hin auf dem reißenden Strom des Blicks, der Gedanken, wo Zunge und Feder nicht nachfolgt.’ The
ellipses indicate omissions from the original. Both in style and content, the passage on Revelation revisits
Herder’s empathetic appreciation of early odes and folksong (‘Von der Ode’ (1764–5), in Werke, vol. 1 (1985):
Frühe Schriften 1764–1772, ed. Ulrich Gaier, pp. 57–99; ‘Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die
Lieder alter Völker’ (1773), in Werke, vol. 2 (1993): Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur 1767–1781, ed. Gunter
E. Grimm, pp. 447–97). The common denominator is that they are all expressions of the primitive mind.
Herder’s ‘der Sinn fliegt und die Worte kriechen’ is a witty variant of the Latin proverb verba volant
scripta manent. See Kaspar Renner, ‘Schreibweisen der Apokalypse: Die Johannesoffenbarung in Herders
The passage not only illustrates Herder’s style. In it Herder is also grappling, reflexively,
with the same difficulty he presents to his modern commentators.
How, Herder asks, is exegesis meant to respond to the alien, ‘oriental’,30 ‘rhapsodical’
style of the Bible? The Book of Revelation is ‘fast’; commentary is by nature ‘slow’. But that
does not mean that the two styles are utterly irreconcilable; after all, Herder’s own book
remains a piece of exegesis, whatever it says about its difficulties.31 Biblical style is, rather,
a challenge and a stimulus for the expositor. His exegetical purpose has a natural ally in
language, which by its nature commits the writer to segmentation and method; and this
is doubly true of the written word (here metonymically represented by the pen). But to
represent the Biblical text by pondering every word and clause is to misrepresent its most
salient feature: its ‘swiftness’. Hence Herder’s attempt to recast his own style, and to fash-
ion a language which mimics the onrushing, breathless style of the original.32 The loss to
conventional exposition brings a gain in dynamism; and it is this dynamism that sets the
reader’s mind in motion, spurring it to sympathetic action,33 in the hope that the process
of comprehension will continue there before coming to rest—if it ever does.
So there are two kinds of style. But style is only the body of thought. If there are two
kinds of style, there are two kinds of thought, too, one ‘fast’, the other ‘slow’. At a deeper
level, Herder’s stylistic distinction is a distinction between two ways of thinking.
Herder brought a sustained interest to bear on the psychology of sensation and of
thought. As a psychologist, Herder anticipated not only the basic terminological dis-
tinction, but also many of the insights of Daniel Kahneman’s recent book Thinking Fast
and Slow (2011). Of course his conceptual framework was different. He relied on the
distinction, derived from Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten, between the ‘higher’ and
the ‘lower faculties’.34 The lower faculties—the senses, the imagination—are swift,
indeed often unconscious in their operation; the higher faculties—reason, logic—are
methodical and slow. The lower faculties are part of our universal endowment as
human beings; the development of the higher faculties is the effect of education, and
only a minority achieve any kind of skill in their use. But because their use requires
conscious effort, even the educated live much of their lives in ‘fast’ mode:
[Every passion] taking us unawares takes us back to a primitive state . . . The state of cool reflec-
tion is an artificial state, gradually acquired by experience, instruction and habit; maintaining it
when unexpected events befall is often difficult for us.35
andschriftlichem Nachlass’, in Ralf Simon (ed.), Herders Rhetoriken im Kontext des 18. Jahrhunderts
h
(Heidelberg: Synchron, 2014), pp. 253–74, for comments on this passage (p. 270).
30
‘Morgenländisch’, ΜΑΡΑΝ. ΑΘΑ, p. 244.
31
Renner, ‘Schreibweisen der Apokalypse’, p. 270.
32
Herder’s pieces in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, said its editor Nicolai, were very different from
the ‘slow’ (‘langsam’) ones by his other contributors (to Herder, 25 January 1771, as n. 27 above).
33
Renner, ‘Schreibweisen der Apokalypse’, p. 270.
34
For Herder’s interest in Baumgarten’s ‘aesthetics’ (i.e. the psychology of the ‘lower’ faculties) in the late
1760s, see Werke, vol. 1, pp. 651–94.
35
Herder, ‘Über Bild, Dichtung und Fabel’ (1787), Werke, vol. 4 (1994): Schriften zu Philosophie,
Literatur, Kunst und Altertum 1774–1787, ed. Jürgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher, pp. 631–77 (p. 643).
172 Kevin Hilliard
‘Fast’ thinking, the thinking of the ‘senses’, as Herder generally calls it (‘sinnlich’ is the
key word in German), sees the world in terms of images and stories, and to a large
extent makes what it sees—‘we do not see, we make images’, Herder says.36 Fast think-
ing is thus essentially a faculty of poetic apprehension. What is striking matters more
to it than what is true; or rather, what is striking strikes it as true. But equally what is
familiar: for part of what makes its operations fast is that new impressions are most
readily assimilated to older ones, to what we already have experienced and know, or
think we know. Ready-made mental schemata and expectations we are barely con-
scious of, if at all, take over the work of gathering in new impressions; and what fits in
with what we already believe is most readily absorbed.37 This is ‘prejudice’ in the neu-
tral, etymological sense, a ‘pre-judgement’, ‘Vor-urteil’: both the Latin and the German
word contain the whole theory of double thinking in a nutshell.
Prejudice has a bad name, and has had at least since the Enlightenment.38 But it would
itself be a rush to judgement to equate a realistic understanding of our mental processes
with obscurantism. Substitute ‘pre-judgement’ for ‘prejudice’, and ‘fast thinking’ for
‘pre-judgement’, and a different picture emerges. It is a fact of our psychological nature
that we often make judgements which are not rationally considered. We cannot assume
that this is always a bad thing. In fact, we don’t generally object to prejudices because
they are arrived at too hastily, i.e. for formal reasons, but because of their content—their
racism or misogyny, for instance. On that score, Herder comes out pretty well for his
century, as it happens.39 But let us leave the distracting concept of prejudice aside, and
stay instead with fast thought, taking it where Herder thinks it leads us.40
For he does have an ulterior motive. God is in my title: here He is. Although Herder
pursued his psychological inquiries to a considerable depth,41 this was never without
(‘Jede . . . Leidenschaft macht in unvermuteten Augenblicken uns alle noch zu Wilden . . . Der Zustand

unsrer kalten Besonnenheit ist ein künstlicher, durch Erfahrung, Lehre, und Gewohnheit allmählich erwor-
bener Zustand, dessen Besitz uns in völlig-unerwarteten Fällen zu erhalten oft schwer wird.’)
36
‘Über Bild, Dichtung und Fabel’, p. 635. (‘Wir sehen nicht, sondern wir erschaffen uns Bilder.’) Cf.
Herder, Übers Erkennen und Empfinden in der menschlichen Seele (1774), Werke, vol. 4, pp. 1090–1127: ‘We
live in a world we ourselves create’, p. 1112 (‘Wir leben immer in einer Welt, die wir uns selbst bilden’).
Isaiah Berlin chose this sentence as the motto to ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’ (TCE 208).
37
See e.g. the reflections on the environmental and cultural factors determining belief, in Herder, Journal
meiner Reise im Jahr 1769: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Katharina Mommsen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1976),
pp. 23–7; and the discussion of ‘fertige Gedankenformeln’ (ready-made formulas of thought) in Vom
Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele (1778), in Herder, Werke, vol. 4, pp. 327–93 (pp. 358–9).
38
See Werner Schneiders, Aufklärung und Vorurteilskritik: Studien zur Geschichte der Vorurteilstheorie
(Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1983); Rainer Godel, ‘“Eine unendliche Menge dunkeler
Vorstellungen”: Zur Widerständigkeit von Empfindungen und Vorurteilen in der deutschen Spätaufklärung’,
Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 76 (2002), 542–76.
39
See Sikka, Herder on Humanity, pp. 248–60.
40
For a discussion of Herder on ‘Vorurteil’, see Ernest A. Menze, ‘Herder and Prejudice: Insights and
Ambiguities’, Herder Jahrbuch. Herder Yearbook, 6 (2002), 83–93; Rainer Godel, Vorurteil—Anthropologie—
Literatur (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007), pp. 214–43; Zammito et al., ‘Herder Revisited’, pp. 676–7; and
Bernard Yack, ‘The Significance of Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment’, European Journal of Political
Theory, 12 (2013), 49–60 (pp. 55–6).
41
Notably in the Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772), Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der
menschlichen Seele (1774/8), and Plastik (1778).
an eye to the advantage the emphasis on pre-rational modes of sensation and thought
could bring to religion.42 We have just seen it in the passage on Revelation above. God
Himself speaks, not in syllogisms, but in images and stories, and He chooses this prim-
itive style because He knows that belief flows from images and stories.
‘Images’ are here to be understood in the sense of ‘figures of speech’ and ‘symbolic
visual objects presented in words’—not in the sense of ‘graven images’, which are of
course expressly prohibited by the God of Israel. ‘The God of Israel took every conceiv-
able measure to guard his sensual people against images and statues.’43 This very prohi-
bition, however, pays tribute to the primitive power of images to inspire belief: ‘If the
image was there, so too, for the senses of the people, was the spirit that animated it.’44
We ‘rational people’ (‘Vernunftleute’) know that a stone cannot be animated.45 But
‘sensual’ early mankind could not know this. The Lord’s apodictic commandment is
thus an anti-sensual placeholder for reason. But meanwhile, to compensate, God’s
word gives imagery in language the greatest possible scope, to conform to the nature of
a ‘sensual’ nation.
It is of a piece with this discussion of the deity’s style that Herder admonishes the
clergy in his Provincial Letters of 1774 that good sermons did not take the form of
philosophical lectures, but should cleave to the method of revelation, to the primitive
poetry of the Bible.46 Our ‘sensual . . . faculties’, which are the more powerful for operat-
ing below the threshold of full consciousness, are naturally predisposed to give cre-
dence to confidently asserted ‘fact’ and striking ‘narrative’; our defective understanding
is the ground for all ‘belief and obedience, love and hope’.47 Strip away the theological
language, and many of the psychological experiments of Kahneman and others con-
firm this picture of how our strongest convictions are formed.48
I can only hint at the connections in Herder’s thought between theology and homi-
letics, the priority of ‘fast thinking’, and cultural primitivism. But perhaps this is
enough to give an idea of why a clergyman, whose main mission in life was to keep the
Christian faith alive, might have been attracted by this nexus.49 Historically and psy-
chologically, phylo- and ontogenetically, belief is the human norm, the default posi-
tion. Cultures, too, are given cohesion, not by shared truths, but by shared beliefs and
shared narratives. Herder the philosopher developed these ideas across a broad front,
42
In this he was not alone. See ‘Joseph Gedeon Kr.’ (in fact Johann Jakob Stolz, a disciple of Johann
Caspar Lavater), Ueber Schwärmerey, Toleranz und Predigtwesen (Upsal: no pub. [recte Leipzig: Weidmann],
1776): ‘Spricht Bibel [sic] für die obern, oder für die untern Seelenkräfte?’ (pp. 35–8).
43
‘Der Gott Israels wußte sein sinnliches Volk vor Bildern und Statuen nicht gnug zu bewahren.’ Herder,
Plastik: Einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume (1778), Werke,
vol. 4, pp. 243–326 (p. 313).
44
‘War das Bild da, so war auch [den] Sinnen [des Volks] der Dämon da, ders belebte’. Ibid.
45
Ibid.
46
An Prediger, pp. 71–5. The subtitle (‘Provinzialblätter’) alludes to Pascal’s Lettres provinciales.
47
Ibid., pp. 84–5 (‘sinnliche … Kräfte’; ‘Tatsache’, ‘Geschichte’; ‘Glauben und Gehorsam, Liebe und
Hoffnung’); see also pp. 101–3.
48
See also Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (London: Portobello, 2010).
49
See Herms, ‘Bildung des Gemeinwesens’, pp. 309, 311.
174 Kevin Hilliard
and this is what he is now remembered for. But we should not forget that he was a
teacher of the Gospel before he was a philosopher. His secular discoveries were auxil-
iaries to his main task. His own deepest motive was to replenish the faith. His last ser-
mon in Weimar, at Easter 1803, a few months before his death, summed up his lifelong
mission: ‘Hinweg . . . Unglaube, die ganze Schöpfung lehrt glauben’—‘Away with unbe-
lief, the whole of creation teaches us to believe.’50
4
In closing, I should attempt to show where Isaiah Berlin’s Herder and mine overlap,
and where not. I can only give a few brief hints in this direction. I am certainly not
claiming that Berlin was all wrong. Something of Berlin’s ‘populism’ and ‘expression-
ism’ might be discerned in what I have been describing. ‘Pluralism’ less so. As Berlin
himself recognized, it would have been odd for an eighteenth-century Christian (how-
ever heterodox) to be a pluralist (CTH 85); for Christianity still defined itself as the
overcoming of Jewish particularism and as the bearer of a universal gospel. Herder
fully subscribed to this view.51 What looks like pluralism is in truth more like ecumen-
ism, a tolerant sense that all the traditions and all the intellectual achievements of
mankind contain some portion of the truth. Herder was a Leibnizian at heart. From
the animal kingdom upwards, all sentient beings are monads, reflecting the one true
world in a variety of ways: ‘The fly sees a different world from the frog; the fish a differ-
ent one from man; and yet all see . . . one and the same creation.’52 He was a Leibnizian,
too (and in this respect, not a Kahnemanian), in seeing no fundamental distinction
and opposition between the lower and the higher faculties of the mind, but only a gra-
dation by infinitesimal degrees;53 while they might need some adjustment, therefore,
the truths given to the lower faculties could not be contradicted by those arrived at by
ratiocination, which in any case could only work on the materials the senses had first
revealed.54 The light at dawn was the same light, only less distinct, as that shining at
midday.55 There could, therefore, be no fundamental opposition between cultures and
50
Martin Kessler, ‘Herders Kirchenamt in Sachsen-Weimar in der öffentlichen Wahrnehmbarkeit von
Stadt- und Hofkirche’, in Johann Gottfried Herder: Aspekte seines Lebenswerkes (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005),
pp. 327–51 (p. 351).
51
E.g. Von Religion, Lehrmeinungen und Gebräuchen (1798), Werke, vol. 9/1, pp. 725–857 (pp. 827–30).
52
‘Über Bild, Dichtung und Fabel’, p. 638. (‘Die Fliege sieht eine andere Welt, als die Schnecke; der Fisch
eine andre als der Mensch; und doch sehen sie alle … Eine und dieselbe Schöpfung.’)
53
‘In der Natur [sind] keine Abteilungen, Klassen, Arten. Alles fließt … in einander, fängt vom Mindesten
an und bereitet sich zum Höhern vor.’ Übers Erkennen und Empfinden in der menschlichen Seele, p. 1106.
54
E.g. Übers Erkennen und Empfinden in der menschlichen Seele, pp. 1090–92, 1105–6. For Herder, as for
Hamann, sense perception was a form of revelation, in line with the traditional understanding of the ‘book
of nature’ as an adjunct to scripture. ‘Offenbarung’ and ‘Aesthesis’ go together as primal forms of human
understanding (Herms, ‘Bildung des Gemeinwesens’, p. 311). See e.g. Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts
(1774–6), Werke, vol. 5 (1993): Schriften zum Alten Testament, ed. Rudolf Smend, pp. 179–660 (pp. 246–8);
Gott: Einige Gespräche (1787), Werke, vol. 4, pp. 679–794 (p. 765).
55
E.g. Viertes kritisches Wäldchen (1769), Werke, vol. 2, pp. 247–442 (pp. 275–9); ‘Hutten’ (1776), Werke,
vol. 2, pp. 609–29 (p. 611).
stages of civilization; all participate in the same humanity. And for precisely the same
reason there could be no fundamental opposition between revelation and reason:
‘I cannot see why there should be a quarrel between the two. If revelation is the educa-
tion of mankind, as it was and had to be, then it formed reason and raised it up: the
mother cannot therefore be opposed to her daughter.’56
What would perhaps be more interesting than lining up my Herder against Berlin’s
would be to compare Berlin’s Herder to Jonathan Israel’s. There is a certain piquancy
in the fact that Israel has contributed the foreword to the latest edition of the volume
containing Berlin’s essay ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’ (TCE vii–xv). One can see
the attraction of inviting the English-speaking world’s currently best-known histo-
rian of the Enlightenment to do so. Israel accomplishes the task with a great deal of
tact. What cannot escape our notice, however, is that he and Berlin place Herder in
diametrically opposing camps. For Berlin, Herder was part of the Counter-
Enlightenment; for Israel, he is a member of the Enlightenment’s radical wing.57
Conceptual clarification of what each means by their terms can reduce the dissonance
to a certain degree; but even so, a large gap remains. I know of no other figure in the
eighteenth century where two such diametrically opposed assessments have been
offered. One is inclined to suspect that where two views diverge so markedly, they
must both be wrong.
56
‘Der Streit zwischen [Vernunft und Offenbarung fällt] mir nicht ins Auge. Wenn Offenbarung die
Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts ist, wie sies wirklich war und sein mußte, so hat sie die Vernunft gebil-
det und erzogen: die Mutter kann also nicht gegen die Tochter sein.’ Briefe, das Studium der Theologie
betreffend (1785–86), Werke, vol. 9/1, pp. 139–607 (p. 390). Herder is alluding to Lessing’s Die Erziehung
des Menschengeschlechts (1780).
57
This is on account of Herder’s sympathetic reading of Spinoza, and his liberal political views. See
Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 272–4, 308–10, 698–9, 713–14, 736–9.
13
Discovering Isaiah Berlin in Moses
Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem
Ken Koltun-Fromm
I first discovered Isaiah Berlin at Wolfson College, where my family and I spent a
sabbatical some years ago. Then, as now, I could not help but imagine what it must have
been like to be present to hear the cadence and flow of Isaiah Berlin’s speech—and to
me, it has always been a form of hearing Berlin, especially so when I read him.
Discovering Berlin, then, is a full encounter with his persona—something much larger
than words on a page. That sabbatical year at Wolfson reminded me of my initial
encounters with Berlin’s voice, when as an undergraduate student I studied Russian
literature, and then in graduate school became enthralled with the work of philoso-
phers Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams, and through them encountered the
resonant opinions of Isaiah Berlin. My admiration of Berlin was based upon the simple
and (Stuart Hampshire might say) innocent view that Berlin meant to provoke and
entertain—it had something of the performative—but that he understood inevitable
conflicts of being human, that he recognized how reasonable and honorable goods
could and might always be incompatible; and besides, anyone who could whimsically
reduce the great Russian writers to hedgehogs and foxes in a way that recovered some-
thing deeply important about their work—anyone who could do that deserved my
attentive listening.
I continue to discover that sense of admirable provocation in Berlin’s masterful lec-
ture and short book The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess.1 This work, published in 1959,
was originally offered as a public talk (the Lucien Wolf Memorial Lecture) to the Jewish
Historical Society of England in December 1957. The society requested that Berlin
‘deal with any of the subjects with which Lucien Wolf ’s interests were particularly asso-
ciated’ (MH 2), and Berlin chose Moses Hess as his topic. Moses Hess (1812–75) was a
fascinating figure in socialist and early Zionist thought, and I have spent a good
amount of my early scholarly career studying his views of Jewish identity. As a socialist
1
Isaiah Berlin, The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1959), reprinted in
revised form, AC 213–52.
Discovering Isaiah Berlin in Moses Hess’s Rome and jerusalem 177
agitator and collaborator with Engels and Marx, Hess is most known in the circles
I travel in for his Rome and Jerusalem (1862),2 a book that considers the Jewish people’s
return to Zion, and one so out of character for Hess that most of his critics of his day
dismissed it as raving lunacy. Yet Berlin, like others in his generation, believed Hess’s
work to be particularly insightful, and he devotes a good deal of his lecture to reviving
that book and reimagining Hess’s character. Still, there were distinctive reasons why
Hess enchanted Berlin, and why Berlin felt compelled to apologize for his choice of
topic to the society (more on this below). When I first read Berlin’s lecture on Hess and
his Rome and Jerusalem, I found it to be a concise, elegant, and generally strong account
of Hess’s views; but I also thought it was seriously flawed and misguided. As I read it
again today, I am a bit more generous now than I was then, but I also read the subject
matter quite differently. To be sure, Berlin’s is a book about Hess; yet this essay will
argue that we learn far more about Berlin than we do about Hess in the Lucien Wolf
Memorial Lecture. I want to discover Berlin through his reading of Hess, and I do this
because it is but another way for us to recover something provocative in Berlin’s reso-
nant voice.
Those provocations come in four movements. The first is the rhetorical positioning
of Isaiah Berlin’s own voice in the opening minutes of his lecture. It is a commanding
piece of rhetorical persuasion as he defends the subject of his lecture, puts his audience
at ease, and establishes his authorial voice and authority. We hear and witness a master
at work in his craft, and marvel at a rhetorical performance all but lost in our scholarly
disciplines. The second provocation comes in his assessment of Hess’s character and,
just as important, his appraisal of Hess in comparison to Marx. Berlin finds in Hess an
honourable, innocent man of integrity and committed Jew whose generosity and sin-
cerity offers Berlin an instructive counterweight to Marx’s dogmatic, even despotic
bullishness. Though not Marx’s intellectual equal, Hess was authentic in ways that
Berlin could not help but admire—and this because, as I will argue, Berlin saw in Hess
a mirror to his own values and aspirations. Berlin wished to recover a thinker who had
been brushed aside by Marx himself. And here we discover the third provocation
I wish to discuss: although Berlin argues that we seek out these lost souls to discover
truths of our own existence (their views, as Berlin states in the lecture, have stood the
test of time), it becomes increasingly clear that what Berlin really values is the mode of
recovery itself, and the process of self-discovery. This, I take it, is a prescriptive model
for how we should go about doing intellectual history. We should recover lost trends,
repave forgotten avenues of exploration, reclaim those missed opportunities to reveal
life’s wrong turns and lucky fortunes—and perhaps learn something about ourselves
along the way. Finally, as Berlin closes his lecture, he informs us of Hess’s ethical moti-
vations and notions of human personhood, views I dare say that Hess himself would
2
Moses Hess, ‘Rom und Jerusalem, die letzte Nationalitätsfrage’, Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Horst
Lademacher (Cologne: Joseph Melzer, 1962); for the English translation see Moses Hess, The Revival of
Israel: Rome and Jerusalem, the Last Nationalist Question, trans. Meyer Waxman (Lincoln, NE: University
of Nebraska Press, 1995).
178 ken koltun-Fromm
find rather strange. We hear Berlin’s voice (and not Hess’s) loud and clear as an appeal
to personal freedom and integrity that speaks truth to power. In these four moments—
the rhetorics of persuasion, the attraction of personal integrity, the recognition of our-
selves in historical thinkers, and the ethics of individual liberty—we discover Isaiah
Berlin in Moses Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem.
Berlin opens his lecture with not one, but two apologies that effectively (and perhaps
affectively as well) situate his voice within an academic tradition, and position his
audience as maximally receptive to his claims. It is a ploy to disarm but still persuade,
and it is masterfully executed:
I must begin with two apologies. The first is for presuming to speak to you at all: you are pri-
marily a society of historians; whereas I have not, as Sir Charles Webster well knows, any claim
to be what he, and perhaps you too, would call a historian; and although I am deeply sensible
of the privilege of being permitted to stray into a province not my own, I do so with a genuine
sense of inadequacy. (MH 1)
The rhetorical positioning of inadequacy, as we might call it, protects Berlin from cri-
tique. Here he poses as amateur, as thoughtful dilettante who arrives from outside the
circle of expertise. He has been invited into a province not his own, and so the audience
must temper its expectations. The sense, too, of privilege and permission also cuts
deep for both Berlin the immigrant Jew and his Jewish audience. They, as he, recognize
the view from below, where offers are granted to and permissions accepted by those
less fortunate. Berlin is a foreigner in this domain, an outsider to a long and venerable
discourse. One cannot help but wonder how a Jewish audience might react to this
recognizable positioning of self, and how Berlin may have opportunistically provoked
this reactive empathy. Perhaps this scene of unburdening—of quieting grand expecta-
tions of the great Isaiah Berlin from Oxford, or requesting permission to dabble in new
areas of research—draws down the weight of academic seriousness, even as it allows
Berlin’s audience to breathe, in a very real sense, a sigh of relief. He is one of us: any
feelings of inadequacy held within the historical society are matched by Berlin’s own
sense of impotence. This is Jewish tragedy played out by knowing participants.
And Berlin knows his audience, for he immediately counters his admission of limi-
tation with the revelation that he has done his homework:
The late Mr. Lucien Wolf devoted his life and his talents to the service of the Jewish community
in the light of social and political views many of which he shared with other enlightened men
of his time. Of all the movements of his day, there were two to which he was strongly and, at
times, bitterly opposed: these were the incompatible, and to him equally unattractive, causes of
Communism and Zionism. (MH 1)
Berlin knows to whom he is speaking and for whom, as he admits, ‘the centenary of
whose birth we are gathered to celebrate here today’. These dual rhetorical gestures—
the one designed to limit expectations, even as the other suggests a more engaged and
thoughtful mind—allows Berlin to embark in serious play and to cultivate a receptive
audience. He is, to be sure, one of them, but he is also a brilliant strategist and
r hetorician. He plays the fool only to show his superiority. But he requires an open and
amenable audience, as Berlin makes clear in his second apology:
I cannot deny that the subject of this lecture was both a Communist and a Zionist . . . I do not
know whether the late Mr. Wolf, in the course of his historical researches, ever directed his
attention to the career and opinions of Moses Hess. If so, he can scarcely have approved of
them. Indeed, I can think of no two individuals who would have disagreed so sharply about the
issue that formed the common centre of their interest—the history and destiny of the Jews—as
the subject of this lecture and its honorand. (MH 1)
Not only has Berlin situated his own expertise outside the intellectual interest of his
audience (‘you are’, Berlin says to his listeners, ‘primarily a society of historians’), but
he has deliberately chosen a subject who remains suspect, certainly to Lucien Wolf,
and perhaps to his audience as well. What chutzpah! Berlin’s audacity serves him well,
for I cannot help but imagine an audience puzzled and curious, perhaps even yearning
for the dangling hook that will slowly bring them in. This is pure showmanship, and it
establishes an audience both expectant and open to Berlin’s intellectual brilliance.
How, indeed, will our speaker defend his choice of Hess as the subject of his lectures?
How will he draw the link between the one who opposed and the one who defended
communism and Zionism? There is a bit of the midrashic style in all this: the Jewish
rabbis of old would often compete against one another by showing how two seemingly
incompatible biblical texts were, in truth, intimately related. Their hermeneutical
gymnastics were all the more persuasive by the performative gestures of erudition and
cunning, and I suspect that Berlin too enjoyed playing the rabbinic role: not the histo-
rian, not one from within, but a curious outsider who will mend the breach.
I want to emphasize that Berlin has accomplished all this in the space of a few min-
utes. And I do intend this mixed metaphor: Berlin has created a space within time,
both for his voice and for the reception of it. He has opened himself up to ridicule, but
he has done so through invitation: his apologies seek a welcome reception, a kinder
judgement, a more exciting encounter. Berlin’s is a gentle rhetoric of persuasion, one
that appropriates the model of confession to open space for consent. As a reader of this
lecture, I find myself immediately disarmed and sympathetic—and I take this to be
Berlin’s intent. I am also aware, as I will suggest in the conclusion, that this rhetorical
play is peculiar to Berlin, for it is a style so often missing, to our detriment, in academic
discourse.
As he draws his introductory remarks to a close, Berlin does square the circle and
suggests how a lecture on Hess can indeed honour the memory of Lucien Wolf. On the
one hand, as he says, they ‘both were good men, civilized, honourable, public spirited,
unswerving in pursuit of justice, writers and publicists’, and on the other, ‘most of the
issues dealt with by Moses Hess are . . . virtually identical with those that all his life
engaged the mind and energies of Lucien Wolf ’ (MH 2). This tethering of personality
and ideas is not incidental. Indeed, I will suggest that Berlin admires Hess more for his
character than for his socialist or Zionist thought. Although brilliant, Marx comes off
as petty, immature, and even vindictive. For Berlin, these personal faults inevitably
find their expression in Marx’s theoretical works. This is true as well for Hess: his per-
sonal integrity matches the innocence and power of his political and social views. In
short, ideas for Berlin are personalities revealed. Berlin believes that Hess’s issues are
still live ones, and so one must understand both his ideas and his character, both the
life and opinions of Moses Hess.
Scholars and laypersons alike who have read Hess’s works, or read about them,
have discovered roughly the portrait that Berlin outlines here: a socialist agitator who
early in his career wrote some excruciatingly unremarkable texts about Hegelian dia-
lectics (the 1837 text The Sacred History of Mankind by a Young Spinozist comes to
mind),3 and later a thoroughly mundane account of European politics (the 1841 work
The European Triarchy).4 Hess was best known for his influence on Friedrich Engels
and Karl Marx (although the story that he ‘converted’ Engels to communism is most
likely untrue, and it is still unclear how the give and take with Marx actually proceeded).5
What does seem certain is that Hess was roundly admired by his colleagues, even by
someone like Marx who generally disliked others and who could ruthlessly attack his
friends (with Engels being, perhaps, the only exception). It was not until the age of
fifty that Hess published Rome and Jerusalem (1862), and here again, as I briefly men-
tioned, this book was generally ignored or scorned in Hess’s time by Jews and social-
ists alike. Abraham Geiger, then the most accomplished liberal Jewish theologian of
his generation, thought the book to be ‘one last pathetic attempt for a readership from
an old socialist revolutionary’.6 Hess’s last book, The Dynamic Theory of Matter, pub-
lished after his death by his wife Sybille in 1877, is virtually incomprehensible.7 And
yet Isaiah Berlin asserts, with great enthusiasm, that ‘Hess was, at any rate after 1848
[after the publication of Hess’s first two books—Sacred History and European
Triarchy], an exceptionally penetrating and independent thinker who understood
and formulated the problems with which he was dealing more clearly than the major-
ity of his critics, whose rival diagnoses, admired for their wisdom in their own day,
have stood up badly to the test of time’ (MH 3). I agree with this assessment, despite
the evidence against it. But when I turn later to Berlin’s account of Hess’s ethical views,
I hope to show how this claim tells us more about Berlin than it does about Hess him-
self. Berlin, in other words, is concerned about his own legacy, and how his formula-
tions will stand against the test of time. Yet Berlin knows that ideas often become old
3
Moses Hess, Die heilige Geschichte der Menschheit (Stuttgart: Hallberger, 1837).
4
Moses Hess, Die europäische Triarchie (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1841).
5
See Shlomo Avineri, Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism (New York: New York University
Press, 1985), pp. 115–33; Julius Carlebach, ‘The Problem of Moses Hess’s Influence on the Young Marx’, Leo
Baeck Institute Year Book 18 (1973), 27–39; Georg Lukács, ‘Moses Hess and the Problems of the Idealist
Dialectic’, Telos, Winter 10 (1971), 3–34; and Zevi Rosen, Moses Hess und Karl Marx: Ein Beitrag zur
Entstehung der Marxschen Theorie (Hamburg: Christians, 1983), pp. 95–111.
6
See Ken Koltun-Fromm, Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2001), p. 52.
7
Moses Hess, Dynamische Stofflehre (Paris: Syb. M. Hess, 1877).
and undercut by new theories and generational anxieties. Few, if any, really do pass
those tests. But personal integrity remains stubbornly independent of temporal chal-
lenges. When Berlin opens his lecture with appeals to personal inadequacy, with
claims to the lonely outsider, with existential fears that resonate with his Jewish audi-
ence, he too ranks character over ideas. Integrity trumps brilliance, as authenticity
overcomes reputation.
And Berlin gives us some reason to think this, for he, like Hess’s own contemporar-
ies, admires Hess’s character a good deal more than his socialist and even Zionist
thought. Most of Hess’s colleagues respected his earnest work for social equality and
better labour conditions, but they never truly considered him a first-rate thinker. This
is certainly how Marx appraised Hess, and Berlin too. Hess was, in Berlin’s own words,
a generous, high-minded, kindly, touchingly pure-hearted, enthusiastic, not over astute young
man, ready, indeed eager, to suffer for his ideas, filled with love of humanity, optimism, a pas-
sion for abstractions, and aversion from the world of practical affairs towards which the more
hard-headed members of his family were trying to steer him. (MH 10)
We hear in this character appraisal a dedicated and sincere, though a bit naive young
socialist who, despite his simple-mindedness, still commands attention and honour.
But this too is how Hess wished to be remembered. Berlin tends to read Hess the way
Hess desired to be read—in this sense, Hess’s own naiveté rubbed off on Berlin too.
Note Berlin’s appraisal of Hess’s ‘aversion’ to worldly affairs. The example he offers to
explain Hess’s lack of worldly sophistication is his marriage to Sybille, then a prostitute.
Hess did not marry out of love, Berlin tells us, but rather ‘in order to redress the injus-
tice perpetrated by society; he wished to perform an act expressive of the need for love
among men and for equality between them’ (MH 10). But Hess delayed his marriage to
Sybille until after his father’s death, worried as he was that his father would disinherit
him if he were indeed to marry a prostitute (he was most likely right to think this).
Hess did receive his inheritance, despite publishing an essay attacking the injustice of
this kind of monetary transference—a nod to his pragmatic and very this-worldly sen-
sibility. My point here is not to criticize Berlin for being taken in, but rather to show
how generous he is to Hess when Hess barely deserves the praise.
Part of what is going on here is Berlin’s clear preference for Hess over Marx; or, to say
this a bit differently, Berlin really goes after Marx by comparing him unfavourably to
Hess. In his 1939 book on Marx, Berlin describes Hess as ‘a sincere and enthusiastic
radical’, but to whom Marx ‘adopted a patronizing tone’ (KM 59–60). Berlin continues
this unflattering assessment of Marx’s character in the Wolf Memorial Lecture, despite
his clear appreciation for his genius:
He [Marx] lacked psychological insight, and poverty and hard work did not increase his emo-
tional receptiveness; this extreme blindness to the experience and character of persons outside
his immediate range made his intercourse with the outside world seem singularly boorish . . . He
looked upon moral or emotional suffering, and spiritual crises, as so much bourgeois self-in-
dulgence unpardonable in time of war. (MH 13)
How very different was the man Moses Hess, who engaged others with a selfless
appetite for justice, who yearned for those outside his immediate circle, and who suf-
fused his writings with a pathos that Marx derided as unscientific, sentimental, and
uncritically utopian. The contrast between Marx and Hess becomes ever more acute in
Berlin’s portrayal of their socialist thought. Marx believed, like his ‘tough minded fol-
lowers’, in ‘the inevitable next stage in the social evolution of mankind, a stage that
could be determined accurately only by means of scientific analysis and prediction’.
Rational persons would pursue this social revolution because history was on their side.
According to Berlin, ‘Hess would have none of this. He believed that justice was but
desirable, not because it was inevitable; nor was it to be identified with whatever was
bound, in any case, to emerge from the womb of time’ (MH 12–13). Hess’s ‘True
Socialism’—the very one that Marx and Engels mocked as ‘utopian sentimental-
ism’—‘remains founded on purely moral premises’ and, Berlin argues here, relies heav-
ily upon (what Berlin calls) a ‘traditional Jewish morality’. What becomes clear in these
portraits is just how much their thought derives from their personality. The cold, hard
Marx delivers the hard truths of historical determinism; the ethical, Jewish Hess cham-
pions a moral order attuned to personal integrity and compassion. The ideas reveal the
man, and I dare say Berlin saw a bit of himself in Hess’s ‘pleas for justice’ (MH 13–14).
Hess is the un-Marx, the simple-minded rather than brilliant theoretician of mod-
ern capitalism and socialism. Hess’s moral principles belong to all persons, not to par-
ticular classes, and his ethics were far more sincere, and, as Berlin suggests here, far
more humanitarian than Marx’s laws of history. Historians choose Hess or Marx, and
Berlin has made his choice:
Those who find the concept of class rights more real than that of human rights, as well as those
who find comfort in believing men to be agents of impersonal forces that will secure the victory
for their own group soon or late, whatever their opponents may wish or think, that is to say, all
natural Hegelians, Marxists, Calvinists, and other extreme determinists, particularly in the fields
of politics or social life, will inevitably find Hess both unrealistic and unsympathetic. (MH 15)
Berlin’s rhetoric here is clear, for one should chose to sympathize with Hess over Marx,
with human rights over class rights, with a more tenuous human struggle over the false
security of a determined and directed one. Towards the end of Berlin’s essay on Hess,
he offers this stark contrast:
Hess was not, like Hegel or Marx, a historical thinker of genius who broke with previous tradi-
tion, perceived relationships hitherto unnoticed (or at least not clearly described), imposed his
vision on mankind, and transformed the categories in terms of which human beings think of
their situation, their past and their destiny. But neither did he suffer from the defects of these
despotic system builders. He was intellectually (as indeed in every other respect) a man of
complete integrity and did not, for any psychological or tactical reason, try to force the facts
into some preconceived dogmatic pattern. (MH 39)
Hess counters brilliance with integrity. But genius comes at a price; for Berlin, the
payment arrives in the form of insincerity. Both Hegel and Marx do not merely produce
despotic and dogmatic systems; they are, personally, despotic and dogmatic as well.
They ‘force the facts’, and impose visions tactically and with precision. Hess counters
these ‘system builders’ with authentic personhood, and this is more than enough to
stand against the test of time. I do not wish to blandly psychologize this reading of
Hess, but I cannot but think that given the choice, Berlin would rather be remembered
for his character than for his genius, especially when, as Berlin suggests here, intellec-
tual brilliance cannot straighten the crooked timber of humanity. Though ideas reveal
the man, it is character that we remember, and it is character that moves us to be more
than who we are.
This contrast between Marx and Hess was not just a study of competing intellectual
and moral visions. For Berlin, this was personal in a way that touched his, and their,
Jewish identities. To be sure, Marx’s views of Judaism and Jews are deeply troubling,
but many scholars believe Hess influenced Marx’s depiction of European Jewry, especially
his association of Jews with money and capitalism.8 Berlin recognizes that Hess shared
much with Marx in this regard, and yet he offers this telling distinction:
But he [Hess] did not suffer from a self-hatred that made him wish to commit acts of violence
against his nature. He did not try to cut the traces of his origins out of himself, because he did
not, like Marx, feel it as a malignant growth that was suffocating him and of which he was
ashamed. (MH 18)
For Berlin, Hess merely ‘repeated the noble commonplaces’ of his time; but Marx’s
attitude towards the Jews ‘is one of the most neurotic and revolting aspects of his mas-
terful but vulgar personality’ (MH 18). Hess, in a word, is honourable: he does not
violate his nature, nor is he ashamed of his origins. Berlin describes Marx’s Jewishness
as a sickness that he wished to violently extract, as a ‘malignant growth’ that, were it to
remain part of his nature, would surely do him in. I do not subscribe to these biologi-
cal, medical, and natural metaphors of Jewish self-hatred, but Berlin employs them to
once again establish Hess as a man of integrity and authenticity, and to dishonour
Marx as a tyrannical false prophet. Hess would return, finally, to his Jewish roots with
the confessional letters of his Rome and Jerusalem (the book is written as a series of
twelve letters to a young woman); or so this false story goes.9 Too much, in my view, has
been made of Hess’s supposed ‘return’ to Judaism. Yet Berlin appropriates this narra-
tive, in part, because it resonates with his portrayal of Hess as the rooted, attuned, and
ethical modern Jew. Hess is not the fox to Marx’s hedgehog, but he is the unappreciated
noble soul that gives the lie to Marx’s shameful treason. Though perhaps not Jewish in
practice or belief, Hess is Jewish where it counts. I suspect Berlin was quite sympathetic
to that mode of Jewish commitment.
8
See, for example, Moses Hess, ‘Über das Geldwesen’, in Philosophische und Sozialistische Schriften
(1837–1850), ed. Auguste Cornu and Wolfgang Mönke (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1961).
9
My book, Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity, is an extended critique of this mythological narra-
tive, one that Isaiah Berlin subscribes to as well.
If, as I am suggesting here, Berlin portrays Hess in ways that mirror his own perception
of his Jewish self, then he all but comes out in full confession when he depicts Hess’s
ethical commitments. I have spent a good deal of my early scholarly career devoted to
Hess and his writings, and I would like to think I know him pretty well. But I simply
cannot recognize him in Berlin’s summary account of Hess’s moral concerns:
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; that nobody can, or should
be required to vivisect himself, to throw away that which affords him the deepest spiritual sat-
isfaction known to human beings—the right to self-expression, to personal relationships, to
the love of familiar places or forms of life, of beautiful things, or the roots and symbols of one’s
own, or one’s family’s, or one’s nation’s past. He believed that nobody should be made to sacri-
fice his own individual pattern of the unanalysable relationships—the central emotional or
intellectual experience—of which human lives are compounded, to offer them up, even as a
temporary expedient, for the sake of some tidy solution . . . All that Hess, towards the end of his
life, wrote or said, rests on the assumption that to deny what inwardly one knows to be true, to
do violence to the facts for whatever tactical or doctrinal motive, is at once degrading and
doomed to futility. (MH 48–9)
This is Berlin’s voice channelled through a fictional character named Moses Hess. It is
also one of the most moving passages of human freedom and fragility that I have ever
read. Berlin claims in the very beginning of this essay that we study historical thinkers,
especially those forgotten historical thinkers like Hess, because their questions are still
alive, and their truths remain so for us today. But this is not quite right, even if it may be
true. It would have been more honest for Berlin to admit that he studies thinkers in the
past to better understand himself, and to discover his values in those he admires. This
is what Moses Hess is to Isaiah Berlin: he has become Berlin’s intellectual, Jewish ances-
tor. This is how Berlin creates his Jewish heritage, and this is how we discover Isaiah
Berlin in Moses Hess.
It is telling, therefore, that Berlin ascribes to Hess a ‘traditional Jewish morality’ that
he believes Marx goes to great lengths to purge from his familial inheritance. Although
we do not choose our ancestors, we do choose how they will be ancestors to us. Berlin
has labelled and marked Hess as Jewish, but not so Marx. This trajectory positions
Berlin within the modern Jewish experience, as it does the Jewish Historical Society of
England. Hess is their ancestor because he is the most humane, the most expressive
and moral champion of individual liberty, the most Jewish where Jewish means integ-
rity, honesty, devotion, and love. The goyim can have their Marx; for British Jews, the
life and opinions of Moses Hess are more than enough.
Discovering Berlin in Hess, then, is a recovery of Jewish heritage. But so too is
reading and listening to Berlin on Hess. In conclusion, I want to admit to my own
Jewish heritage in this account of Isaiah Berlin. For the four issues I have discussed
in this paper—Berlin’s rhetoric of persuasion, his portrayal of Hess’s authentic char-
acter, his strong ethical voice and commitment to the beauty of human finitude, and
Berlin’s compassion for his intellectual forebears—are precisely the ones I wish to
appropriate from Berlin himself. If Berlin claims Hess as his own, then I wish to do
the same for Berlin.
Disagreements in academic circles are often fierce, especially so when the differ-
ences are small or, as critics of the academy would assert, inconsequential. I discover a
generosity in Berlin’s rhetorical voice, an opening to others to converse with him, as a
model for serious debate. Perhaps this form of charity stems from a deeper insecurity
or a felt inadequacy, but I take Berlin’s opening ploy to disarm his audience and to
prune expectations as a welcome gambit to explore intellectual worlds. This sense of
uncertain travel is not easy to accept from within disciplines that demand exegetical
rigour and precision, nor from disciplines that protect a ‘core’ sensibility and canon.
I have always found Berlin’s voice to be too impressionistic and sweeping to command
my assent. Yet even as I resist this loose scholarship, I still marvel at his rhetoric of per-
suasion. Though I admire what Berlin has to say about Hess, I delight far more in how
he says it. His gentle rhetoric, at once generous and commanding, is a voice I would
like to hear more of in colleges and universities. Perhaps then our voices would be
heard more charitably by the communities we wish to touch and engage.
Berlin discovered that authentic voice in Moses Hess, and I find it in Berlin too.
There is something of the prosecutor in Berlin’s rehabilitation of Hess’s reputation
before Marx’s unfair dismissal. It is as if Berlin wishes to redress a past wrong and
restore Hess’s place within socialist, Zionist, Jewish, and historical circles. I wanted to
do this too with Hess, and for me, as it was for Berlin, reclaiming Hess was more than a
way to explain historical misunderstandings; it was also a means to vindicate one’s own
choices and one’s own identity. Hess was a model for Berlin (as he was for me too)
because he was the model we were looking for. His ethical voice was ours too, and he
offered an encounter with Jewish tradition and moral integrity that illuminated the
conflicting choices we all make in pursuing a good life.
I have made Berlin’s voice my own in this turn to the first-person plural because
Berlin has become an intellectual superior and Jewish ancestor of my own. Berlin
touched lightly on Hess’s Jewish identity, for he was hesitant to make too much of it. Yet
Berlin closes his lecture with an upfront discussion of ‘the Jewish question’ (as it was
ignobly called in Hess’s day), and he concludes with a rereading of Marx’s disingenu-
ous label for Hess as ‘the communist Rabbi’. This prophet, as Berlin now calls Hess,
who ‘said much that was novel, true, and of still the first importance’ (MH 47–9), was
one of those Jewish prophets who spoke truth to power. Yet I think Berlin admired
Hess more for who he was than what he said, more for how he approached the world
than what he thought about it. This has been a long-standing Jewish bias: Jewish tradi-
tion tends to argue that ethical and religious engagement precedes (both in practice
and importance) ethical and religious reflection. We learn first from mentors and
models, one might say, and only then from books and texts. Here is how Moses
Mendelssohn (1729–86)—that great Enlightenment thinker, Jewish philosopher of
the eighteenth century, and friend of Immanuel Kant—put it in his magisterial
Jerusalem from 1783: ‘The inexperienced man had to follow in the footsteps of the
experienced, the student in those of his teacher; he had to seek his company, to observe
him and, as it were, sound him out, if he wanted to satisfy his thirst for knowledge.’ This
innocent model of communal harmony, where we hear and walk with our masters, has
given way, Mendelssohn tells us, to a time when ‘intercourse with the wise man is not
sought, for we find his wisdom in writings’.10 Many of Berlin’s students and colleagues
sought his company to ‘sound him out’—not to satisfy their thirst for knowledge but to
intensify it. They sought his company, far more than his writings, to discover a model
of intellectual integrity, honesty, and moral seriousness. I doubt Berlin was ever
ashamed, as he claims Marx had been, of his Jewish identity. And he should not have
been, for he models a kind of generous, public, and intellectual engagement that
Mendelssohn so admired, and the Jewish tradition has so prized. Berlin found com-
pany in Hess’s voice, and I find it in Berlin’s. The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess is, if
I could venture a bit further out, Berlin’s Jewish call for moral integrity.
10
Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, tr. Allan Arkush (Hanover, NH:
Brandeis University Press, 1983), pp. 103–4.
14
Isaiah Berlin and the Russian
Intelligentsia
Derek Offord
Russia, Isaiah Berlin once observed, was a latecomer to Hegel’s feast of the spirit;
‘humane culture’, he contended, therefore ‘meant more to the Russians . . . than to the
blasé natives of the West’.1 We may contest the opinion that Berlin expresses in this
passage about the differing values placed on ‘civilization’ in Russia and ‘the West’.
However, we should certainly take account of the consequences of the relative lateness
of Russia’s engagement with the secular thought and culture of post-Renaissance
Europe. These consequences included intense preoccupation among the nine-
teenth-century intelligentsia (itself a product of cultural westernization, it should be
noted) with definition of national identity, character, and mission. Was Russia part of
‘Europe’? Were the Russians an imitative people destined only to follow in the wake of
more ‘historical’ peoples? Or were they, on the contrary, peculiarly receptive to foreign
ideas and values and therefore capable of giving fresh life to them and of leading
European civilization to a higher level? There was a further consequence of late arrival
at the feast: the achievements of many phases of European cultural and intellectual
development became known in Russia in rapid succession, or more or less simultane-
ously, with the result that ideas could bloom there in unexpected configurations as well
as in conditions different from those in which they had originated. What is most
important for us here, though, is the fact that it was only in the mid-nineteenth century
that Russian intellectual and cultural life matured sufficiently for writers to emerge
who could undertake a searching re-examination of the Enlightenment and Counter-
Enlightenment thought that inspired Berlin’s panoramic vision of European civilization.
It is the mid-nineteenth-century Russian kaleidoscope of eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century European ideas, and the vividness of those ideas in this late
Russian variation of them, that so captivated Berlin.
1
Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, 2nd edn, revised by Henry Hardy (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 349. All
subsequent references to Russian Thinkers in this chapter are to this edition.
188 Derek Offord
Berlin’s corpus of writings about Russian thought is an important part of his legacy,
and it has deeply affected perceptions of the Russian intelligentsia in the United
Kingdom. The bulk of the corpus is collected in the volume Russian Thinkers, which
was first published in 1978, edited by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly. Here, among
other things, we have Berlin’s set of four essays on ‘The Remarkable Decade’ (that is to
say, the 1840s, when Berlin considers the intelligentsia to have been born), his compar-
ison of Alexander Herzen’s and Mikhail Bakunin’s treatment of individual liberty, his
famous discussion of Lev Tolstoy’s view of history, The Hedgehog and the Fox, his
introduction to the English edition of Franco Venturi’s monumental volume on
Russian Populism, a lecture on ‘Tolstoy and Enlightenment’, and a long essay derived
from his Romanes lecture on Ivan Turgenev. Over many years, this volume was pains-
takingly checked, corrected, and augmented by Henry Hardy, who oversaw its republi-
cation in 2008 as a completely revised second edition running to more than 400 pages.2
Besides the ten works collected in Russian Thinkers, Berlin wrote miscellaneous other
pieces on Russian intellectual history, including an essay on artistic commitment,
which focused on the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky,3 and introductions for books
containing translations of writings by Herzen.4
The bulk of Berlin’s corpus of writings on Russian thought (not all of which, it
should be noted, were originally intended for publication in printed form, for sev-
eral of them were conceived as lectures or radio talks) was produced as far back as
the 1940s and 1950s and first published between 1948 and 1961. This point is worth
emphasizing, for several reasons. First, most of the corpus (but not, it should be
noted, the essay on Turgenev) was written in the context of late Stalinism and the
Cold War. This was a time when Berlin’s highly positive treatment of Russian think-
ers served both to furnish inspiring examples of spirits who had retained their free-
dom and integrity under an oppressive regime and to counter predominantly
negative Western perceptions of Russian culture. Secondly, Berlin’s writings repre-
sent a type of intellectual history that inevitably now seems somewhat dated. Thirdly,
they were nevertheless pioneering (if I may use that hackneyed epithet), since the
body of anglophone scholarship on pre-revolutionary Russian culture was then
exiguous. Admittedly, D. S. Mirsky’s History of Russian Literature (first published in
1926–7),5 E. H. Carr’s The Romantic Exiles (a study of Herzen and other early Russian
émigrés, first published in 1933), and the same author’s still important biography of
Bakunin (1937)6 had already appeared before Berlin began to write the works I have
mentioned. Moreover, a generation of scholars based in the United States was
2
Cited in n. 1 above. 3 ‘Artistic Commitment: A Russian Legacy’, RT 194–231.
4
These essays were first published in 1956 and 1968. I have used the versions of them that were subse-
quently published as ‘A Revolutionary without Fanaticism’ and ‘Herzen and His Memoirs’, in PI 88–102
and AC 188–212 respectively.
5
Republished as D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900, ed. and
abridged by Francis J. Whitfield (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949).
6
E. H. Carr, The Romantic Exiles: A Nineteenth-Century Portrait Gallery (London: Victor Gollancz,
1933; reprinted Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).
Isaiah Berlin and the Russian Intelligentsia 189
eginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s to publish on pre-revolutionary Russian
b
culture and thought. However, a strong tradition of Russian studies had yet to
emerge in British universities and when it did, from the 1960s on, it concentrated
mainly on the fields of eighteenth-century and classical literature rather than the
history of ideas.
The qualities that have made Berlin’s essays on Russian thought indispensable sec-
ondary sources for students of the subject, and also compelling texts for the more
general reader, are numerous. Berlin was a multilingual scholar who had a pano-
ramic view of the European cultural and intellectual landscape in which Russian
thought flowered. He wrote, of course, with a grasp of philosophical ideas that ena-
bled him to describe in a way intelligible to readers who are not philosophers the
significance in the Russian context of Hegel, for example, or of Schelling, whose
treatises he likens to ‘a dark wood’ into which ‘too many eager enquirers have
entered . . . never to return’ (RT 155–6). He reminds us of the close link between
nineteenth-century Russian thought and imaginative literature, especially the great
novels (RT 131–2). His engagement with ideas is deep, serious, and sincere. (In this
respect, as in others, he was quite in tune with the Russian thinkers he admired.) Not
least, his prose (unlike that of many of his Russian subjects!) is distinguished by its
verve and clarity.
How, though, does Berlin characterize Russian thought and the intelligentsia to
which Russian thinkers belonged, when his writings on the subject are viewed in their
totality? How has he shaped our conception of this subject to this day and how does
that conception stand up when examined with historical and political hindsight and in
the light of the scholarship produced since the immediate post-Second World War
age? I shall argue that while Berlin’s work has of course greatly increased Western
understanding of Russian culture and set a high standard of discourse on it, it has also
helped to fix in the public mind an excessively uncritical impression of the Russian
intelligentsia.
I shall begin with some further remarks on the period that most interested Berlin
and by identifying the particular Russian writers and thinkers on whom he concen-
trated his attention. (I shall not discuss Berlin’s use of the term ‘intelligentsia’, inciden-
tally, although there is much that could be said on that score too.) I shall then briefly
outline the oeuvre of Herzen, who stands at the centre of the picture Berlin paints,
and examine Berlin’s reverential portrayal of Herzen as thinker and man. Next, I shall
point out aspects of Herzen’s thought that receive significantly little attention in
Berlin’s account of them. Finally, returning to the broader plane, I shall consider
Berlin’s explicitly heroic view of the Russian intelligentsia. It cannot be denied that the
Russian intelligentsia was a civilizing force in a backward country. Nonetheless, it
seems worth asking whether the generally romantic critique of urban, industrial
modernity offered by Russian thinkers across the political spectrum had wholly
beneficial effects in Russia in the age with which Berlin is concerned, or, indeed, in the
longer term.
190 Derek Offord
The Scope of Berlin’s Writings about Russian Thought

The period of Russian culture in which Berlin was principally interested was the classical
age encompassed by the reigns of Nicholas I (1825–55) and Alexander II (1855–81). It is
easy to identify the phenomena that render this period especially rewarding for Berlin: the
plight of the cultivated individual in an age of reinforced autocratic rule; the development
of an intellectual elite separated from political power and in revolt against a suffocating
environment; the reception of Romanticism in Russia; the development of socialist ideas
in Western Europe and Russians’ response to them; the revolutionary events of 1848–9 in
France, Italy, the German lands, and the Austrian Empire and Russia’s official and unoffi-
cial reactions to them; the interplay between thought and imaginative literature to
which I have already referred; and, as I have already indicated, the unfolding of an
intense debate in Russia about the nation’s character and its relationship to the West.
For all that, it seems unfortunate that the chronological sweep of Berlin’s writings on
Russian thought was limited to this period, indeed focused sharply on the middle
decades of the nineteenth century. Berlin’s lack of interest in eighteenth-century
Russian culture is particularly striking. Despite his preoccupation with the Age of
Enlightenment in Europe more generally, no essay on or even any substantial reference
to any eighteenth-century Russian writer is to be found, as far as I am aware, among his
published works on Russian culture, save for a few lines on the scientist and poet
Mikhail Lomonosov and two paragraphs in an essay of 1966 (RT 199; PI 72–4). The
names of Aleksandr Radishchev and Mikhail Shcherbatov are absent from the index to
Russian Thinkers and Denis Fonvizin is mentioned only once, thanks to a reference to
him by Belinsky. The late eighteenth- and early n ineteenth-century writer Nikolai
Karamzin, who was a seminal figure in Russian prose fiction, linguistic reform, and
historiography, and also a political thinker, is mentioned but twice in this book. These
lacunae cannot be entirely due to agreement on Berlin’s part with the common view
that eighteenth-century Russian intellectual and literary culture was highly derivative,
because that is a view that Berlin also holds about most of the nineteenth-century
Russian thought on which he wrote so copiously and with such enthusiasm. The lacunae
are due instead, it would seem, to Berlin’s belief that if comparisons between Russian
and Western European development are to be made then it is eighteenth-century
Europe that offers the closest analogy with Russia in the nineteenth.
The opposition of Russian liberals and radicals which, after the severe repressions following the
Decembrist uprising [of 1825], began to grow bolder and more articulate in the middle 1830s
and early 1840s, resembled the guerrilla warfare against the Church and absolute monarchy
conducted by the Encyclopedists in France or by the leaders of the German Aufklärung, far
more than the mass organizations and popular movements in Western Europe of the nine-
teenth century. The Russian liberals and radicals of the 1830s and 1840s . . . remained isolated
lumières . . . (RT 2)
Thus Belinsky is compared to the encyclopédistes and Tolstoy had ‘profound affinities
with the eighteenth-century philosophes’ (RT 187, 277). Eighteenth-century Russia, as
a participant in European cultural life, does not really seem to exist for Berlin. The
roots of many phenomena that interest him, such as the growth of patriotic national-
ism (which he appears to date from Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 (RT 135),
but which in fact has more distant antecedents), are therefore not explored.
Turning from the chronological scope of Russian Thinkers to the strands of thought
that Berlin examines, we may be tempted to think that the range of nineteenth-century
Russian writers who engaged his imagination was wide. It extends (if we use conven-
tional labels, though their usefulness is in some cases debatable) from liberals to
socialists, from so-called radical westernizers to Populists, who advocated a form of
socialism rooted in the Russian peasant commune, and from political and moral phi-
losophers to novelists and literary critics. Again, though, closer investigation reveals a
narrower focus. For one thing, Berlin has no interest in religious philosophy, or in con-
servative political thought of a non-religious nature, come to that. He never engages
with the ideas of the leading Slavophiles, Aleksei Khomiakov, Ivan Kireevsky, and
Konstantin Aksakov (to whom a great deal of scholarship has subsequently been
devoted), in spite of their centrality to the mid-century debates. Among the great clas-
sical writers, Berlin virtually ignores the poets and takes little interest in Gogol or
Dostoevsky (an oversight that is perhaps consistent with his distaste for conservatism
of one sort or another). Perhaps even more surprisingly, given his own political ideas,
he pays scant attention to those Russian thinkers who might most properly be called
‘liberal’. Timofei Granovsky and Konstantin Kavelin, for instance, are minor actors on
his stage; Boris Chicherin is mentioned just once in Russian Thinkers, and then only
because he visited Herzen in London (RT 7).
Russian Thinkers, then, does not provide anything like a balanced view of the gene-
sis of Russian thought in its golden age (but that is not Berlin’s purpose). Instead, it is
dominated by four individuals (Belinsky, Herzen, Tolstoy, and Turgenev), who
occupy some three-quarters of the volume and collectively exemplify what Berlin
finds most distinctive and admirable in the Russian intellectual and literary tradition.
It is not a straightforward matter to find in these writers’ ideas and attitudes common
features which might help us to explain Berlin’s attraction to all of them, but it is
tempting to see in the writings of each of them, at least at some stage in each man’s
career, some combination of the following. They offer a critique of the rationalist tra-
dition of the Enlightenment, and thus represent the Counter-Enlightenment that so
interested Berlin. (This was particularly the case with Herzen and Tolstoy.) They are
rebels—as Berlin puts it with regard to Tolstoy, but the label might equally apply to
Belinsky and Herzen—‘against current social values, against the tyranny of States,
societies, Churches, against brutality, injustice, stupidity, hypocrisy, weakness, above
all against vanity and moral blindness’ (RT 291). They have a complex vision, being
capable of understanding opposing points of view, and they may suffer as a result of
this tension. They are not confident that human problems are soluble (e.g. RT 230–1,
274). They believe that art should be informed by integrity and commitment (RT 146–7).
With the exception of Turgenev, they are moral preachers.
192 Derek Offord
At the same time, the depth of Berlin’s passion for all three of Belinsky, Herzen, and
Turgenev suggests a certain wavering on his part between respect for the cautious
counsel of advocates of the gradual extension of civilization, on the one hand, and
attraction to more rebellious spirits impatient for revolutionary change, on the other.
As we might expect of a man who was of cosmopolitan outlook and who espoused a
liberal political philosophy with insistence on the need for individual liberty at its core,
Berlin, as Henry Hardy has pointed out, had ‘a special affinity’ with Turgenev, that
most moderate of westernizers (RT xv). And yet he also wrote repeatedly, at length,
and with great sympathy about Belinsky,7 ‘furious Vissarion’ as he was known, whose
outraged concern for the oppressed led him to such avowals as the following, in a pri-
vate letter of 1841:
it is ridiculous to think that [a golden age of sociality] can come about on its own, simply in due
course, without violent upheavals and bloodshed. People are so stupid that you have to lead
them forcibly to happiness. And of what significance is the blood of a few thousand when com-
pared to the degradation and suffering of millions.8
No one, though, better exemplifies the sort of wavering I have attributed to Berlin than
his kindred spirit Herzen, who admired the Jacobins and sympathized with the social-
ist agitators of 1848 but later recoiled from the younger Russian generation of the
1860s, with their talk of axes and destruction, and at the end of his life cautioned his
‘old comrade’ Bakunin about the dangers of peasant revolt.
Alexander Herzen and Berlin’s Portrayal of Him

Herzen was undeniably a leading figure in the intellectual life of the ‘remarkable dec-
ade’. He stood with Belinsky and Bakunin on the radical wing of the westernist camp
and opposed the Slavophiles, who sought the key to Russia’s future in Orthodox piety
and the supposedly organic community of pre-Petrine Muscovy. His early enthusiasm
for the socialist ideas emanating from France put him at odds with more moderate
westernizers who also played a central role in the circles of the 1840s, such as Granovsky
and Vasilii Botkin.9 By 1848, he found himself in the West, where he had recently
arrived with his family, on a Grand Tour which quickly turned into permanent emigra-
tion, for Herzen’s sympathetic reaction to the European uprisings of 1848 in France
and Italy made it impossible for him to return to Russia without fear of arrest. The fol-
lowing years were marred by personal tragedies: his mother and younger son were
drowned in a shipping accident in 1851, and his wife, Natalie, conducted a passionate
7
Especially in PI 79–87, RT 170–211, and SR 194–231.
8
V. G. Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 13 vols (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1953–9),
vol. 12, p. 71.
9
On the liberal wing of the westernist camp and the debates within the camp in the 1840s, see Derek
Offord, Portraits of Early Russian Liberals: A Study of the Thought of T. N. Granovsky, V. P. Botkin,
P. V. Annenkov, A. V. Druzhinin and K. D. Kavelin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
affair with the German poet Georg Herwegh and then died from pleurisy in 1852.
Nonetheless, the late 1840s and early 1850s were highly fruitful for Herzen from the
literary point of view. They yielded two major cycles of essays, Letters on France and
Italy, a travelogue of sorts in which Herzen presented a negative view of the modern
Western world, and From the Other Shore, his most eloquent attempt to warn of the
danger of ideological abstractions and to refute teleological notions of history.10 In the
same period, Herzen wrote a number of essays on the Russian people and their com-
munal institutions, thus helping, as it turned out, to lay ideological foundations for the
Populist revolutionaries of the 1870s, who believed that Russia might pursue a separate
path to socialism, bypassing a capitalist phase of development and building on the
supposedly socialistic instincts of the Russian peasant.11 Having settled in London in
1852, following this turbulent period, Herzen began work on his autobiographical
masterpiece, My Past and Thoughts (1861–7).12 He also established a Free Russian
Press on which he produced a journal, The Bell, over the period 1857–67, thus making
a major contribution to the debate about social and political reform that took place in
Russia’s first age of glasnost’ after her defeat in the Crimean War.
As befits a thinker of such central importance in the history of classical Russian
thought, Herzen has received a great deal of attention in British and American scholar-
ship.13 Not all British scholarship on him has been adulatory. E. H. Carr, in particular,
maintained a scholarly distance in the wry account that he gave of Herzen’s life and
relationships in The Romantic Exiles. However, Carr’s portrayal of Herzen was long ago
overlaid by Berlin’s admiring treatment of him.14 Berlin’s Herzen towers over contempo-
raries both as thinker and human being. He is ‘the most realistic, sensitive, penetrating
and convincing witness to the social life and the social issues’ of his time (RT 238), a
publicist ‘who had no equal in his century’, ‘a writer of genius’ (RT 94). Only Karl Marx
10
Pis’ma iz Frantsii i Italii and S togo berega, in A. I. Gertsen [Herzen], Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati
tomakh (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1954–65; hereafter Herzen, SS), vol. 5, pp. 7–224, and
vol. 6, pp. 7–142 respectively.
11
The essays in question are: ‘La Russie’, in Herzen, SS, vol. 6, pp. 150–86; ‘Lettre d’un russe à Mazzini’,
ibid., vol. 6, pp. 224–30; Du développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie, ibid., vol. 7, pp. 9–132; ‘Le
peuple russe et le socialisme’, ibid., vol. 7, pp. 271–306; ‘La Russie et le vieux monde’, ibid., vol. 12,
pp. 134–66.
12
Byloe i dumy, in Herzen, SS, vols 8–11. For an English version see Herzen, My Past and Thoughts: The
Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, trans. Constance Garnett, revised by Humphrey Higgens, 4 vols (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1968).
13
The main works in this literature, apart from Carr’s Romantic Exiles and the writings by Berlin that are
examined here, are E. Lampert, Studies in Rebellion (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), pp. 171–259;
Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1961); Edward Acton, Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979); Aileen M. Kelly, Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers between Necessity and Chance
(New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1998); and Kelly, Views from the Other Shore: Essays on
Herzen, Chekhov, and Bakhtin (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999).
14
It is tempting to see the differences of tone in Carr’s and Berlin’s writings on Herzen as early signs of
the broader conflict about historical determinism and individual freedom that found expression in Carr’s
What Is History? (London: Macmillan, 1961) and Berlin’s Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1969).
194 Derek Offord
and Alexis de Tocqueville, in Berlin’s opinion, are comparable to him as observers of

the mid-nineteenth-century European scene, but as a moralist ‘he is more interesting
and original’ than either of them (RT 100). His ‘brilliantly entertaining and perma-
nently valuable’ fragments of observation of public and private life in England, France,
and Russia ‘still form a unique account’ of mid-nineteenth-century European life. The
Letters from France and Italy ‘contain the best general analyses of the political and
social scene of the West just before and during the revolutions of 1848–9’. My Past and
Thoughts, ‘a literary and political masterpiece worthy to stand beside the great Russian
novels of the nineteenth century’, is ‘held together by a gift for narrative and descriptive
writing which, in its own kind, has never been excelled’ (PI 93–4; cf. RT 238–9). In
sum, Herzen occupies a ‘position in the history not merely of Russian literature, but of
Russia itself ’ that seemed to Berlin, writing in the conservative British political climate
of the 1950s and in a world familiar with totalitarianism, to be ‘unique and secure’
(PI 101). As to personal qualities, which Berlin tends to merge with a writer’s intellectual
and literary qualities, Herzen had an ‘incorruptible sense of reality’ (RT 127). The
‘astonishingly imaginative, impressionable, perpetually reacting personality’ that cre-
ated My Past and Thoughts, endowed ‘with an exceptional sense both of the noble and
the ludicrous’ and a ‘power of absolute self-revelation’, possessed ‘a rare freedom from
vanity and doctrine’ (RT 232). As far as Berlin could see, there was no ‘trace of Byronic
self-dramatisation’ in Herzen (PI 96).
Thus Berlin seems, when he writes about Herzen, to remove all distance from his
subject and to suppress his critical faculty. His essay ‘Herzen and Bakunin on Individual
Liberty’, for example, is conceived as a eulogy in which Herzen’s qualities are offset by
Bakunin’s manifest shortcomings, such as his ‘strings of ringing commonplaces’, his
‘empty incantations’, his predilection for ‘mid-nineteenth-century radical patter’ and
‘glib Hegelian claptrap’ (RT 120–2). These shortcomings, moreover, are themselves
revealed partly through Herzen’s criticism of them. Again, Berlin is prepared, when
Herzen enters his narrative, to hand the narrative over to him. Thus Herzen is allowed
first to set the tone (Berlin’s essay on Herzen and Bakunin is prefaced by two passages
from Herzen’s writings), and then to speak for himself, directly through extensive quo-
tation and indirectly through prolonged paraphrase, without the intrusion of impar-
tial comment from Berlin (RT 93, 100–15, 221–9). More generally, Berlin is liable to
invoke Herzen as an authoritative source on some subject and to quote from him in
corroboration of the point he wishes to make.15 He may endorse Herzen’s judgement.
He says, for instance, that ‘Herzen’s analysis of the facts was quite correct’ (RT 5) and
asks whether any reader ‘shall say that history has proved that Herzen was mistaken’
(RT 228). Or he may simply take Herzen’s view of a subject as read, as, for example,
when Herzen represents the Western bourgeoisie as wholly mean-minded (RT 227) or
15
For example, on the difference between Russia and the West in 1848 (RI 4), on Russia’s reception of
Hegel (pp. 150–1), on Belinsky’s character (p. 175), and on relations between the westernizers and
Slavophiles (p. 206).
when, in ‘eloquent pages’ addressed to the French historian Jules Michelet, Herzen
describes the Russian character as ‘generous and spontaneous’ and ‘uncontaminated
by the corroding doubts and moral squalor of the Western world in decline’ (PI 98).
Berlin’s characterization of Herzen has remained highly influential. It is powerfully
reinforced by his pupil Aileen Kelly in various writings, including two books whose
titles invoke Herzen’s favourite creation, From the Other Shore.16 (Reverence for Herzen
in these works is interwoven with a similar veneration of Berlin himself.) It has also
affected perceptions beyond the academic field, notably in Tom Stoppard’s dramatic
trilogy The Coast of Utopia, for which Berlin’s writings served as important prepara-
tory reading and in which Herzen, as one reviewer put it, is acclaimed for his ‘congenial
sanity and wry intelligence’,17 while Bakunin is lampooned.
The Shortcomings of Berlin’s Characterization of

Herzen’s Thought
It is not my aim to quibble over the value that Berlin places on Herzen’s rebellion
against ‘every form of oppression, social and political, public and private, open and
concealed’ (RT 94) or on Herzen’s scepticism about intellectual systems whose creators
seek some sort of wholeness, a total explanation, be it scientific, religious, or metaphys-
ical.18 Rather my point is that there are important aspects of Herzen’s thought that
Berlin plays down or sides of Herzen that readers of Russian Thinkers may barely see.
I have in mind notions, sentiments, attitudes, types of assertion, and a mode of self-
presentation which might be expected to frighten readers who prize tolerance of
diversity and the dignity of the individual and who are aware of the abysses into which
peoples may be led, as Herzen himself warned, by beguiling ideas. There is much in
Herzen’s writings, I suggest, that Berlin was compelled to interpret charitably, condone,
gloss over, or altogether omit to mention, if his attempt to elevate Herzen to excep-
tional intellectual and moral eminence was not to be compromised. It is not difficult,
for instance, to find evidence in Herzen’s published writings and personal correspond-
ence of traits which darken the portrait of the man, including hypocrisy of various
kinds,19 misogyny,20 and casual racism.21 Here, though, I shall dwell on four aspects of
Herzen’s thought that are gently handled or overlooked in Russian Thinkers.
16
See n. 13 above. 17 Peter Kemp, in Times Literary Supplement, 9 August 2002, p. 3.
18
As pointed out by Kelly in her introduction to Russian Thinkers, p. xxv.
19
As reflected, for example, in the disparity between his public pronouncements on and private dealings
with the banking house of Rothschild: see Offord, ‘Alexander Herzen and James de Rothschild’, Toronto
Slavic Quarterly, 19 (2007), at http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/19/offord19.shtml (last accessed on 12 August
2015).
20
‘I disliked persons of consequence as a rule, particularly when they were women,’ he writes apropos
of a meeting with a well-known adventuress from the age of Catherine (Herzen, My Past and Thoughts,
vol. 2, p. 444).
21
Herzen, SS, vol. 5, p. 27.
196 Derek Offord
First, Herzen is prone to crude stereotyping of ethnic groups (the English, the
French, Germans, Slavs, and so forth) and social classes (the bourgeoisie, the peas-
antry, and the working class). ‘There is no nation in the world’, he writes in a passage
which Berlin quotes without embarrassment as an example of Herzen’s condemnation
of the tyranny of abstractions,
which has shed so much blood for freedom as the French, and there is no people which under-
stands it less, seeks to realise it less . . . The French are the most abstract and religious people in
the world; the fanaticism of ideas with them goes hand in hand with lack of respect for persons,
with contempt for their neighbours—the French turn everything into an idol, and then woe to
him who does not bow the knee to the idol of the day. Frenchmen fight like heroes for freedom
and without a thought drag you to jail if you don’t agree with their opinions . . . (RT 100–1)
Berlin treats this predilection for xenophobic cliché as a peccadillo. He does accept
that Herzen was capable of a ‘sweeping prejudice’ that he expressed in ‘diatribes against
entire nations and classes’, but he makes light of it on the grounds that the diatribes ‘are
the authentic expression of an indignant reaction against an oppressive milieu, and of a
genuine and highly personal moral vision which makes them lively reading even now’
(RT 233–4). Perhaps, though, it is unwise to dismiss such stereotyping so lightly, and
not for ethical reasons alone. For the stereotypes serve a polemical purpose in support
of a paradigm that Herzen habitually uses, according to which bourgeois civilization
can be contrasted with a purer and more authentic way of life of which certain classes
and peoples are capable because they are supposedly communitarian and have little
desire for private property.22 The former type of civilization is quintessentially
expressed, according to Herzen, in the egoistic, mercenary France of the July Monarchy
(1830–48), and is also represented in England, the German lands, and the Netherlands.
The latter type exists, or is in potentia, among the Italians and the Slavs, above all among
the Russian peasantry.23
Secondly, Herzen persisted in believing that Western civilization was moribund.
This was one of the ‘two or three ideas’ that he admitted were ‘particularly dear’ to him
and that by the early 1860s he had been repeating ‘for about fifteen years’.24 The old
world (the bourgeois element in his paradigm), he asserted, was dying and a new
world, led by Russia, would rise in its place.25 Moreover, there was a pattern in this
succession of civilizations. Herzen constantly alluded to the fall of the Roman world as
Christianity gained a following, and he reinforced the topicality of this allusion in his
own age by treating the barbarian Germanic tribes as predecessors of the emerging
22
For his view of the Slav aversion to private property, see Herzen, SS, vol. 5, p. 74.
23
Berlin himself is not averse to patronizing generalizations about national character, e.g. a ‘deep inner
conflict between intellectual beliefs and emotional, sometimes almost physical, needs is a characteristically
Russian disease’ (RT 205), or a capacity ‘for concentration on concrete detail’ is rare among Russians
(RT 256–7).
24
Herzen, SS, vol. 16, p. 160.
25
On the notion that the bourgeois world was in its death throes, see especially Herzen’s essays on
Russian socialism, e.g. Ibid., vol. 7, p. 273, and vol. 12, pp. 134, 148.
Slav peoples and the early Christians as forerunners of the socialists (who implicitly
included Herzen).26 Nor, despite his antipathy to teleological systems, is he against a
dash of historical inevitability when it suits him: ‘the development of the middle
class, a constitutional order’, one of his personae in From the Other Shore declares,
‘are nothing but transitory forms linking the feudal-monarchic world with the social
republican one’.27
Thirdly, Herzen is inclined to condone revolutionary violence. In particular, he took
a relatively lenient view of the Jacobins who unleashed the terror of 1793, comparing
them favourably to the authorities who crushed the insurrection that he witnessed in
Paris during the ‘June Days’ of 1848. Whereas the bourgeois victors of his own day ‘just
took vengeance, took vengeance meanly, safely, on the quiet’, the Jacobins, he pre-
sumed, had conscientiously considered the death sentences they meted out and shed
blood only when they thought it impossible to do otherwise. Indeed, the Jacobins, as
Herzen perceives them, suffered a tragic fate, inasmuch as they were doomed to
assume a heavy historical responsibility.28 Berlin is aware of the ambivalence in
Herzen’s championship of revolution against conservatives and liberals, on the one
hand, and his defence of individuals against revolutionaries’ onslaughts on them, on
the other (RT 238). And yet, he seems untroubled by Herzen’s moral relativism, excus-
ing Herzen’s readiness to countenance violent change on the grounds that the change
would never be ‘in the name of abstract principles, but only of actual misery and injus-
tice, of concrete conditions so bad that men were morally not permitted . . . to let them
exist’ (PI 100).
A fourth aspect of Herzen’s writings which is inconspicuous in Russian Thinkers is
his prolonged, comprehensive, and bitter critique of the economic, social, and political
foundations of the contemporary Western order. Herzen deplored laissez-faire
economics, the pursuit of profit, and financial speculation. He inveighed against social
inequality and the sentimental and tasteless bourgeois mores reflected in vaudeville.
Moreover, and crucially, he railed at parliamentary institutions of the sort that were
developing in north-western Europe, irrespective of the extent of the franchise.
Indeed, universal suffrage, he told the liberal westernizers who remained in Russia in
1848, and from whom he was growing apart, was ‘the last vulgar commonplace of the
formal political world’; it had ‘enfranchized the orang-utans’, who made up ‘four-fifths
of France as a whole and four-and-three-quarter-fifths of Europe as a whole’.29 No
doubt this attitude was partly due to his nobleman’s disdain for the bourgeoisie and
the masses, for there is a pronounced strand of social elitism in Herzen’s thought.
At the same time, Herzen viewed democracy as a tool with which the bourgeoisie
26
Herzen, SS, vol. 6, pp. 31, 58, 137, 140–1.
27
Ibid., p. 60. For further examples (and for a fuller account of the tensions in From the Other Shore) see
Offord, ‘Alexander Herzen’, in G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole (eds), A History of Russian Philosophy,
1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010), pp. 52–68, on which I have drawn in this section of this chapter.
28
Herzen, SS, vol. 5, pp. 154–5; see also pp. 185–6. 29 Ibid., vol. 23, p. 111.
198 Derek Offord
could deflect demands for social justice30 and, in the broadest perspective, as an
ephemeral phenomenon which would have no place in the utopia he imagined on the
far side of the metaphorical ocean he intended to cross.31 The prospects for social
change, he believed, were better under revolutionary dictatorship than under democ-
racy. Thus he argued that the Provisional Government that came to power in France in
February 1848 ought to have assumed dictatorial powers, like the Jacobins,32 and he
endorsed the view of the Decembrist Pavel Pestel that Russia needed to be governed
with such powers for at least a decade.33
Berlin’s Characterization of the Intelligentsia

Now that I have drawn attention to a number of aspects of Herzen’s thought that Berlin
seems to me to understate or overlook, it is time to consider the broader characteriza-
tion of the Russian intelligentsia that emerges from Berlin’s work and to ask what this
characterization tells us about the kind of intellectual history in which Berlin was
engaged.
Berlin seems prepared—more prepared than most students of the text would
nowadays be—to take at face value the testimony of writers to whose views he is sym-
pathetic. He does not reflect on the context of their remarks, the unstated intentions
they may have, or the rhetorical strategies they may use. It is not apparent, for example,
that he detects the artifice in Herzen’s writings or appreciates that Herzen can be an
unreliable witness. In fact, Herzen, pace Berlin, is a vain man who stands at the centre
of all his works, craves to be seen in the most positive light, and always contrives as a
narrator to worst his interlocutors. He is a Romantic hero, perhaps a poet manqué,
who deftly deploys the imagery of epic voyages, shipwrecks, isolation, exile, and coura-
geous independence. A passage in My Past and Thoughts in which Herzen presents
himself as a masterly swimmer capable of ‘adapting and balancing himself among the
waves’ and thus negotiating the swirling currents of the capitalist world ruled by the
Rothschilds is a case in point.34
Berlin’s account of the mid-nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia is therefore
an unfiltered or only lightly filtered version of the image of themselves that members
of the intelligentsia whom he most admired wished to project. That image came partly
from the valuable memoirs of Pavel Annenkov, a close friend of Belinsky, Herzen,
and Turgenev. Berlin even borrowed Annenkov’s title, The Remarkable Decade, for
his own cycle of essays on the birth of the intelligentsia. His most important source
of all, though, was My Past and Thoughts itself. This was a work that was conceived, it
should be remembered, in the immediate aftermath of Herzen’s catastrophic family
drama of the years 1849–52 and that was coloured by Herzen’s desire to justify his
30
Ibid., vol. 6, p. 74. 31 Ibid., vol. 6, pp. 77–8.
32
Ibid., vol. 5, p. 159. 33 Ibid., vol. 13, p. 133.
34
Ibid., vol. 10, p. 134; quoted here from My Past and Thoughts, vol. 2, pp. 758–9.
own role in this drama, and it soon developed into a nostalgic, highly poetic, and by
no means dispassionate account of lost youth, dreams, hopes, love, companionship,
and native land.
Uncritical acceptance of what is said by his favoured subjects leads Berlin, of course,
into scholarship of a very partial kind. He is strongly affected by the atmosphere of the
intellectual circles of the 1840s, as it was described by participants in them. These par-
ticipants come across as self-consciously noble, in a moral sense, and even chivalrous.
One of the central personalities, Granovsky, who was a medieval historian, had a keen
interest in knight-errantry and wrote about the institution with enthusiasm.35 (In the
guise of Stepan Verkhovensky, he was subjected to merciless ridicule for his pains by
Dostoevsky in The Devils.) Annenkov, in a passage that Berlin approvingly quotes,
explicitly articulates a conception of the emergent intelligentsia of the 1840s as ‘an
order of knighthood, a brotherhood of warriors’ (RT 152). Inspired also by familiarity
with the beautiful souls of Schiller’s drama, these dilettanti prized friendship, culti-
vated in a milieu that is eloquently described in My Past and Thoughts and in which
one imagines Berlin himself would have felt very much at home. It was a milieu distin-
guished by sincere and serious engagement with ideas and high culture but also by
companionship (almost exclusively male companionship, as far as one can gather), the
pleasures of the table, and effervescent conversation.36
The attractiveness of this milieu to Berlin is well conveyed in a passage in one of his
essays on Herzen, in which he characterizes the so-called ‘superfluous men’ who felt
themselves oppressed in the age of Nicholas. These young men, he writes,
belonged to the class of those who are by birth aristocratic, but who themselves go over to some
freer and more radical mode of thought and of action. There is something singularly attractive
about men who retain, throughout life, the manners, the texture of being, the habits and style
of a civilised and refined milieu. Such men exercise a peculiar kind of personal freedom which
combines spontaneity with distinction. Their minds see large and generous horizons, and,
above all, reveal a unique intellectual gaiety of a kind that aristocratic education tends to pro-
duce. At the same time they are intellectually on the side of everything that is new, progressive,
rebellious, young, untried, of that which is about to come into being, of the open sea, whether
or not there is land that lies beyond. (RT 213–14)
This loss of distance from the subject matter and the explicit approval of a certain way
of life and cast of mind seem to take Berlin’s writings on the Russian intelligentsia
away from the realm of scholarship, as we tend to conceive of it in early twenty-first-
century academe, and in the direction of apology. Berlin creates a cult which accords
favoured thinkers heroic status. Indeed, he unabashedly asserts that Belinsky and
Herzen are ‘the greatest of the heroes of the heroic 1840s’ (RT 173; cf. 186). Again,
35
See Granovskii, Sochineniia, 4th edn (Moscow: Tovarishchestvo tipografii A. I. Mamontova, 1900),
pp. 420–37, 540–50.
36
Herzen, Annenkov noted, was an ‘entrancing talker’ (RT 215), as was Turgenev, as Berlin himself
notes (RT 300).
200 Derek Offord
Tolstoy is a ‘hero . . . in the tradition of European Enlightenment’ (RT 298). This status
is enhanced by Berlin’s claims, which are surely overblown, that his subjects sacrificed
themselves and achieved a sort of martyrdom. Berlin believes, for example, that
Tolstoy ‘sacrificed all he had upon [the] altar [of truth]—happiness, friendship, love,
peace, moral and intellectual certainty, and, in the end, his life’ (RT 298). Similarly,
Herzen’s entire life was dominated by ‘the pursuit of liberty, personal and political, of
his own and other nations, to which he sacrificed his public career and his private
happiness’.37 This Western attempt at canonization was all the more urgent for the fact
that by the 1950s Herzen, to Berlin’s dismay, had been brazenly inducted into the
Soviet pantheon.38
Berlin also highly values the moral passion which he rightly identifies as a property
of Russian thought, and even the sermonizing to which this passion gives rise. The
preoccupations of Belinsky were ‘predominantly social and moral’ and Belinsky
himself was ‘a moral fanatic’ and ‘a preacher’ (RT 202, 203; cf. 304). In the same spirit,
Berlin defended the moral humanism of the Populists against the dismissive assess-
ments of them by both communist and ‘bourgeois’ historians.39 As for Herzen, he was
a moral preacher of genius (RT 95). Berlin’s interest in and approval of the moral tincture
of Russian thought are bound up with what he describes as a ‘Russian’ conception of
art and the artist, which he contrasts with what he takes to be a ‘French’ conception.
According to this Russian conception, as Berlin explains it in his essay on Belinsky,
who typifies it,
the man and the artist and the citizen are one; and whether you write a novel, or a poem, or a
work of history or philosophy, or an article in a newspaper, or compose a symphony or a pic-
ture, you are, or should be, expressing the whole of your nature, not merely a professionally
trained part of it, and you are morally responsible as a man for what you do as an artist.
(RT 207)
The artist, then, should not be a ‘purveyor’ or craftsman but is obliged to commit his or
her whole being to the creative enterprise. This conception of the artist is underpinned
by a view of human personality as one and indivisible and by a belief that humans’
functions cannot, or should not, be compartmentalized, so that one does what one
does, or ought to do, with one’s whole personality (RT 146–7). Berlin’s acceptance of
the notion that the intellectual or literary creation is inseparable from its author as a
whole moral being perhaps goes some way to explaining why there is in his essays on
37
Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, p. lx, note. Berlin is accepting Herzen’s presentation of himself as a
noble martyr who has made a mature and rational decision to sacrifice ‘everything’ to human dignity and
free speech (see Herzen, SS, vol. 6, p. 13; see also vol. 5, p. 7).
38
RT 118–19; see also p. 111. Berlin’s account of Herzen, though, tends to obscure those very aspects
of his thought—his sympathy for revolutionary doctrines, his vilification of liberals, his Slavonic
nationalism—which, along with his opposition to tsarist autocracy, gave him high status in Soviet eyes.
39
RT 263, 269–70. Berlin questions here whether capitalism (which, as I have said, the Populists hoped
to bypass) was inevitable in Russia. His acceptance of the Soviet term ‘bourgeois historians’ seems curious.
his preferred Russian writers such a large dose of praise for their personalities. It may
help to explain too why feeling intrudes to such an extent into his discussion of Russian
intellectual life.
Perhaps, in the final analysis, the study of Berlin’s work on nineteenth-century
Russian thought helps us to classify his distinguished contribution to the intellectual
life of his own time. Passionate engagement with ideas; the marshalling of more of
one’s being than the mere intellect in this enterprise; the demand for strong moral
commitment, partiality even; consideration not only of what is or was but also of what
ought to be; a love of perceived moral nobility; a desire to reach a public beyond the
academic sphere—the very manner of Berlin’s engagement with the history of ideas, at
least in the Russian domain, brings to mind the pre-revolutionary Russian public intel-
lectuals themselves about whom he wrote with such affection.
Conclusion
It may be that yet more factors can be adduced to explain Berlin’s attraction to par-
ticular members of the mid-nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, besides the
appeal of their ideas, their personalities, and their social milieu. Perhaps he shared
the distaste of many of his subjects—Belinsky, Herzen, Tolstoy, the Populists, and
Bakunin too—for everything, as he defines it in a passage on Bakunin, that was ‘tidy,
orderly, small-scale, philistine, established, moderate, part of the monotonous prose
of daily life’ (RT 126). His great sympathy with Herzen, the central figure in his gal-
lery, may also owe something to an unspoken understanding of the pain of exile in a
cramped land which lacked the perceived spiritual immensity of Russia and where
middle-class values reigned. Moving from St Petersburg via Riga to Surbiton at the
age of eleven, Berlin could no doubt empathize with another political refugee from
Russia who had been cast up some seventy years before him in the suburbs of the
bourgeois metropolis.
Whatever its roots, Berlin’s conception of the Russian intelligentsia, especially his
interpretation of Herzen, seems to me problematic in a way which it is worth high-
lighting, as we come finally to consider his great contribution to the history of Russian
thought. His idealization of the intelligentsia, indeed his heroization of some members of
it, discourages consideration of the possibility that attitudes prevalent in it had certain
negative effects on the nation’s economic, social, and political development (as opposed
to its intellectual and cultural development). Reading the works of Russia’s most influen-
tial nineteenth-century writers, one is entitled to conclude that the intelligentsia as a
group created a strong prejudice in Russian educated society against entrepreneurial
activity, the creation and enjoyment of wealth, the bourgeois values of thrift and assidu-
ity, observance of legal norms and procedures, and participation in democratic politics.
The notion of partnership between political and social thinkers, on the one hand, and
the community of inventors, industrialists, and entrepreneurs, on the other, which
202 Derek Offord
characterized the English and Scottish Enlightenments as Roy Porter has described
them,40 was alien to the leading figures of the Russian intelligentsia. Valuing certain cul-
tural capital (especially moral commitment and declared abhorrence of materialism)
more than financial assets, Russian thinkers (including many so-called ‘Westernizers’, as
well as all Slavophiles) preached a form of cultural nationalism based on the assumption
that the key to Russia’s futurity lay in rejection of contemporary Western values. When it
comes to study of the Russian form of the Counter-Enlightenment, then, romantic rebel-
lion, with all its poetry, seems to prevail in the landscape that Berlin approvingly sur-
veyed, at least in the 1950s. More prosaic concepts and institutions, such as democracy,
the rule of law, parliaments, and law courts, are either invisible in that landscape or
darken it, even though they may actually have been more conducive than rebellion to the
establishment of that ‘minimum area’ that may be ‘guaranteed to all men within which
they can act as they wish’ (RT 128), the negative liberty that Berlin prized.
40
Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2000).
Pa rt I V
Berlin’s Legacy
15
Isaiah Berlin’s Neglect of
Enlightenment Constitutionalism
Jeremy Waldron
Staking My Claim
I have a general claim to make about the Enlightenment and a particular claim about
Isaiah Berlin.
The general claim is this: one of the most important achievements of the European
Enlightenment is what I shall call Enlightenment constitutionalism. It is massively
important; it transformed our political thinking out of all recognition; it left, as its leg-
acy, not just the repudiation of monarchy and nobility in France in the 1790s but the
unprecedented achievement of the framing, ratification, and lasting establishment of
the Constitution of the United States.1 Both of these are part now of our political world.
They grew up in the Enlightenment. That is my general claim.
The particular proposition is about the work of Isaiah Berlin. Berlin, supposedly one
of our greatest interpreters of Enlightenment thinking, had very little to say about this
heritage of thought and these achievements. I have ransacked his work and I mean it:
there is almost nothing on Enlightenment constitutionalism in his writings—some few
rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper here and there; nothing of any significance.
You will balk at this proposition. You will say: what about the insistent theme in all
of Berlin’s essays cautioning us against perfectionist projects and against the ideation
of a perfect society in which all values will be integrated harmoniously and
commensurably, and in which conflict among the solutions to each and all of the
problems of mankind will be precluded by the unity of the standard that makes each
of solutions rational.2 What about his warning? Isn’t that his verdict on Enlightenment
constitutionalism?
1
If ‘[h]istory is an arid desert with few oases’ (AC 113), this is among the oases.
2
Cf. Berlin, ‘Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century’, in L 55–93 (p. 62); or as Berlin describes the
Enlightenment aspiration in ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, L 166–217 (p. 193): ‘All true solutions to all genuine
problems must be compatible: more than this, they must fit into a single whole; for this is what is meant by
calling them rational and the universe harmonious.’
206 Jeremy Waldron
No, it is not. For in none of that does he really address the idea of constitutional
structure, the possibility of institutionalized forms that will house rather than try to
abolish human imperfection, protecting liberty and ethical pluralism and providing a
modest institutional structure with which security and the general good can be pro-
moted through representation and the rule of law, without anything approaching the
hubris of totalitarian utopianism. Isaiah Berlin said nothing about that. He proceeded
in his work as though all attempts at social and political design were on a par, and as
though everything invested in the eighteenth-century constitutionalist enterprise was
beneath comment.
Why? Well, an unkind interpretation would be that Berlin remained silent about
Enlightenment constitutionalism because it challenged—it was a most glaring coun-
ter-example to—his thesis about the dire consequences of Enlightenment rationalism.
Having committed himself to this thesis at an early stage in his career, he was not about
to endanger it by identifying the one strain of rationalist constructivism that offered to
refute his central concern.
I am sorry to say that one cannot read into this area without entertaining that
hypothesis. But it is a frightful thing to say about a public intellectual. I think
Berlin deserves our charity, and maybe the more charitable explanation is that he
just wasn’t interested in law, constitutions, or institutional politics generally. For
some reason he didn’t think that political philosophers should really be preoccu-
pied with all that. I’ll say more about possible biographical explanations at the end
of this paper.
Enlightenment Constitutionalism
But first: what do I mean by Enlightenment constitutionalism? I mean a body of
thought that emerged in the eighteenth century, but originated in England in the later
decades of the seventeenth century, about forms of government and the structuring of
the institutions of government to promote the common good, secure liberty, restrain
monarchs, uphold the rule of law, and to make the attempt to establish popular govern-
ment—representative, if not direct democracy—safe and practicable for a large mod-
ern republic.
I have in mind an array of thinkers: James Madison, Emmanuel Sieyès, Voltaire,
Denis Diderot, Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Condorcet, Alexander
Hamilton, Montesquieu—above all Montesquieu—and of course Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Maybe we could extend it back as far as James Harrington writing in the 1650s or
forward to Benjamin Constant in the early decades of the nineteenth century; the
boundaries are of course blurred and there are continuities with later and earlier
movements. But my arbitrary bookends are John Locke, who finished writing the
second of his Two Treatises of Government in the 1680s, and Immanuel Kant in his
declining years, putting republican pen to paper in 1795 in Perpetual Peace and in the
Berlin’s Neglect of Enlightenment Constitutionalism 207
middle sections, the constitutional sections (§§43–50), of the Rechtslehre in The

Metaphysics of Morals published in 1797.3
It’s a long list and I apologize if I have left off the name of anyone’s loved ones. I make
no apology for populating it with American names as well as French ones: Madison,
Hamilton, Jefferson, and one could add James Wilson, Benjamin Franklin, and John
Adams. We need to get over whatever snobbery leads us to separate the work of the
American framers from the broader trends of the Enlightenment. Gordon Wood is
right when he says in his essay ‘The American Enlightenment’ that ‘America was the
first nation in the world to base its nationhood solely on Enlightenment values.’4
The Americans based their constitutional structures on Enlightenment principles,5
they thought of themselves as contributing to the constitutional thought of the
Enlightenment, and those on this side of the Atlantic whom we unhesitatingly categorize
as Enlightenment philosophes thought so too.6
People in the United States worship Isaiah Berlin, like they worship Winston
Churchill. They might think less well of him if they knew how airily he slighted the
aspect of Enlightenment so crucial to their political and constitutional arrangements.
Berlin and Montesquieu

The theorists I have named wrote about many things: other Enlightenment themes
are associated with their work. And I am not saying that Isaiah Berlin neglected these
3
I have in mind also side contributions from David Hume in his essays on government, Blackstone in
his Commentaries, and Jeremy Bentham in A Fragment on Government.
4
Gordon Wood, ‘The American Enlightenment’, in Gary L. McDowell and Johnathan O’Neill (eds),
America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 159–76
(p. 160).
5
Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, 2 vols (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967–70), vol. 2: The Science of
Freedom, p. 560. ‘Even George Washington, though less of an intellectual than his colleagues . . . almost
automatically adopted . . . their enlightened philosophy.’ When he addressed the governors of the American
states in June 1783, shortly after victory, his circular letter breathed pride in his philosophical century: ‘The
foundation of our Empire’, he said, ‘was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an
Epocha when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former
period; the researches of the human mind after social happiness, have been carried to a great extent, the
treasures of knowledge, acquired by the labours of Philosophers, Sages, and Legislators, through a long
succession of years, are laid open for our use, and their collected wisdom may be happily applied in the
Establishment of our forms of Government.’ Gay’s source for this quote is cited as Douglass Adair, ‘ “That
Politics May Be Reduced to a Science”: David Hume, James Madison, and the Tenth Federalist’, Huntington
Library Quarterly, 20 (1957), 343–60.
6
See Michael Kammen’s observations on the influence of American constitution-making in France
in A Machine that Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1986),
p. 65. See also Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, vol. 2, p. 556, citing Turgot: ‘America, wrote Turgot in that
year, was bound to prosper, for the American people were “the hope of the human race; they may well
become its model.”’ And Gay himself closes his book (vol. 2, p. 568) with the observation: ‘[T]here was
a time when tough-minded men looked to the young republic in America, saw there with delight the
program of the philosophes in practice, and found themselves convinced that the Enlightenment had
been a success.’
208 Jeremy Waldron
theorists or these other aspects of their work. He wrote about them all—or almost all:
there is very little about Sieyès 7 and I think nothing at all about Madison (certainly
nothing that rates a listing in the indexes of any of his books).8 There is plenty on
Montesquieu, but most of Berlin’s comments tended to be on precisely those aspects of
The Spirit of the Laws that were furthest from Montesquieu’s interest in the structures
and processes of government.9
When I say ‘Montesquieu’s concerns about the structures and processes of govern-
ment’, I’m referring not just to the famous chapter on the constitution of England
(Bk 11, Ch. 6)—though that is very important—but also to passages like this, from
Book 5 of The Spirit of the Laws, which followed Montesquieu’s characterization of the
horrors of life under despotism.
After what has been said, one would imagine that human nature should perpetually rise up
against despotism. But notwithstanding the love of liberty . . . most nations are subject to this
very government. This is easily accounted for. To form a moderate government, it is necessary
to combine the several powers; to regulate, temper, and set them in motion; to give, as it were,
ballast to one, in order to enable it to counterpoise the other. This is a masterpiece of legislation;
rarely produced by hazard, and seldom attained by prudence.10
By contrast, a despotic government is simple and straightforward; as Montesquieu

puts it, ‘it offers itself . . . at first sight; it is uniform throughout’. All that is necessary is
the diffusion of terror. But moderate government needs to be carefully designed: ‘to
combine the several powers; to regulate, temper, and set them in motion; to give . . . bal-
last to one . . . to enable it to counterpoise the other’.
That is exactly the theme of Enlightenment constitutionalism that I have in mind.
And my point is that Berlin had very little to say to address this theme of structural
intricacy and design of a constitution, even though—as we will see—it has a massive
bearing on the plausibility of Berlin’s well-known and destructive claim that the
Enlightenment aspiration to remake society has been a philosophically misbegotten
source of totalitarian hubris and terror.
He didn’t ignore it entirely. Here is what Berlin said in his essay entitled ‘Montesquieu’
in Against the Current. (I am going to quote it at length because it represents almost the
sum total of Berlin’s observations on Enlightenment constitutionalism.)
Montesquieu advocated constitutionalism . . . put his faith in the balance of power and the divi-
sion of authority as a weapon against despotic rule by individuals or groups or majorities . . . His
most famous doctrine, that of the separation of powers, an enthusiastic but mistaken tribute to
the system that he had so falsely imagined to prevail in England . . . proved impracticable in
7
Sieyès appears in one or two of Berlin’s lists of Enlightenment philosophes, but beyond that I think
there is just a reference to his being the first to use the phrase ‘social science’ (or its French equivalent) in
What Is the Third Estate?
8
There is a brief mention of American Founding Fathers and their debt to Locke at TCE 10.
9
See ‘Montesquieu’ in AC 130–61. 10 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 5.14.
France . . . and had been much too faithfully adopted in the United States, with results not alto-
gether fortunate.11
That’s it. Six lines. That is all he wrote. Nothing more elaborate on Montesquieu’s con-
ception of constitutional structure than these airy and dismissive gestures. No attempt
to take up Montesquieu’s theme of the combining of the several powers, their regula-
tion, their tempering, and the setting of them in motion, the giving of ballast to one
enabling it to counterpoise the others. Berlin did say a little bit about Montesquieu’s
conception of the judiciary.12 He criticized his mechanical jurisprudence—the judge as
the blind and anonymous mouth of the law—and his disparagement of ‘[t]he entire
tradition of judge-made law’. But there is nothing on Montesquieu’s account of the rule
of law or the complexities and procedures of legalism.13
Depending on which piece of Berlin you pick up, Montesquieu was guilty or not
guilty of ignoring Kant’s stricture that nothing straight was ever made from the
crooked timber of humanity. In Against the Current, we are told that Kant’s view was
the same as Montesquieu’s ‘as against that of [Montesquieu’s] friends, the optimistic
planners of his day’ (AC 187). In a letter to Andrzej Walicki of 25 March 1970, however,
we are told that Montesquieu was one of a long line of thinkers ‘all unable to face the
proposition that out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever
made’ (L III 421). The fact is that Berlin was mostly interested instead in Montesquieu
as a sociologist and possibly as a sort of relativist; he had no real interest in what
Montesquieu said about the intricate design of political and legal institutions.14
The Constitutional Machine

The conception of a society’s constitution as something like a machine with weights,
springs, ratchets, ballasts, escapements, and centrifugal governors is present through-
out eighteenth-century political philosophy. The Enlightenment constitutionalists
were the engineers and scientists of this machinery. They thought of themselves as
experimenters—as in Madison’s observations in The Federalist Papers, no. 14, about
‘the experiment of an extended republic’.15
11
AC 164–5. See also his letter to Morton White, 19 July 1957 (L II 589–91), which repeated, without
elaboration, the jibe at the United States.
12
AC 194–5. (See also letter to Peter Stein, 5 October 1956, L II 543–4.) And he attacked Montesquieu’s
dutiful observations on natural law at the very beginning of The Spirit of the Laws, banal observations
which in fact play virtually no role at all in his constitutionalist theory: AC 195–6. Cf. Montesquieu, Spirit
of the Laws, Bk 1, ch. 1.
13
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Bk 2, ch. 4; Bk 5, ch. 9; and Bk 6, chs 1–2.
14
The closest he gets to Montesquieu’s views on legal and constitutional structure is in his portrayal of
Montesquieu as cautious about change (TCE 432–3) and the aspersions he casts on Montesquieu’s conception
of liberty, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, L 193–4 (‘political liberty does not consist in an unlimited freedom.
In . . . societies directed by laws, liberty can consist only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in
not being constrained to do what we ought not to will’, 11.3).
15
Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist Papers, ed. George W. Carey and
James McClellan (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2001), p. 67 (no. 14: Madison).
210 Jeremy Waldron
I don’t mean that the approach to constitutionalism is scientistic (in the sense that
Berlin condemned in his essay ‘Does Political Theory Still Exist?’), but that it is well to
think of the problem of governance as though it involved the design of a complex
machine. If it is a science, it is a relatively new science, wrote Emmanuel Sieyès, and it
has been slow to progress. It is not the sort of thing, he says, that despots and aristocrats
could have been expected to encourage. But, he insisted, ‘[w]e will never understand
social machinery unless we examine a society as though it were an ordinary machine.
It is necessary to consider each part of it separately, and then link them all together in
the mind in due order, to see how they fit together.’16
Analysis is indispensable and so is analytic rationality. ‘In politics’, said Sieyès, ‘it is
the mingling and confusion of powers that constantly make it impossible to establish
social order.’ The case against monarchy in the modern era could only begin to be made
when Locke took apart all the different functions kingship was performing (whose
legitimacy seemed to depend on their being blurred together)—legislative, executive,
prerogative, and federative—to see how they might be separated, reallocated, and
recombined.
So when I talk about the Enlightenment conception of a constitution as something
like a well-designed machine, I mean the deliberate disaggregation—in thought first
and then insistently in practice—of government into separate organizations under-
stood functionally—a legislature (perhaps the two chambers of a legislature, with its
complex representative relation to social classes); a judiciary in several layers; an exec-
utive responsible for the enforcement of law; an external executive or (in Locke’s
words) a federative power; and, in a federation, a fractal reproduction of these distinc-
tions at the state or provincial level, and the complex relation of state to federal arrange-
ments. And I mean a body of philosophic reflection on the values that served by
figuring out how to separate these institutions from one another, man them with sepa-
rate personnel with separate lines of responsibility, and then re-establish on a rational
basis the articulate modes of connection that are necessary to prevent paralysis in a
divided commonwealth. Reflection and analysis on the parts and design of the mecha-
nism are what human societies have to do to avoid tyranny and to house the competing
concerns that people bring to their politics.
It is odd that Berlin had so little to say about this, for it was conceived in
Enlightenment thought as exactly a response to the human imperfection that he did
write so much about. I have mentioned already the use that Berlin made of Kant’s say-
ing about ‘the crooked timber of humanity’. It’s a bon mot he cherished. There’s a collec-
tion of Berlin’s essays with that title and an essay in it called ‘The Bent Twig’. But Berlin
failed to explore what Kant did with this insight. In his Idea for a Universal History,
Kant presented the crooked timber as an observation on the prospects for political
16
Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate?, tr. M. Blondel, ed. S. E. Finer (London: Pall Mall
Press, 1963), p. 120.
leadership among humans: humans need a master because of their ‘selfish animal
inclinations’; but any possible master is also human; ‘such a master is just as much an
animal in need of a master’.17 That is precisely why we have to design a constitution. In
Perpetual Peace, where he also uses the phrase, Kant elaborates the thought the repub-
lican constitution is the only one entirely fitting to the rights of man. But it is the most
difficult to establish and even harder to preserve, so that many say a republic would
have to be a nation of angels, because men with their selfish inclinations are not capa-
ble of a constitution of such sublime form. However, Kant says that this gets things
entirely the wrong way round:
The problem of organizing a state can be solved even for a race of devils . . . The problem is:
‘Given a multitude of rational beings requiring universal laws for their preservation, but each
of whom is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them, to establish a constitution in such a
way that, although their private intentions conflict, they check each other, with the result that
their public conduct is the same as if they had no such intentions.’ A problem like this . . . does
not require that we know how to attain the moral improvement of men . . .18
That’s Kant in 1795.

Berlin reads the ‘crooked timber of humanity’ passage as saying that ‘forc[ing] peo-
ple into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed in schemes is almost
always the road to inhumanity’ (CTH 19–20). But Kant said almost exactly the oppo-
site: precisely because of the crooked wood of which humankind is made, we have to
keep trying to concoct a constitutional scheme. Kant’s whole point here is about the
need for a constitution and the importance for us of this heritage of thinking about
constitutional design.19
This theme, of constitutional design for men who are not angels, is vividly present
too in the arguments of James Madison, urging ratification of the US Constitution.
Talking about the separation of powers, Madison suggested that
the great security against a . . . concentration of the several powers . . . consists in giving to those
who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to
resist encroachments of the others . . . Ambition must be made to counteract ambition20
17
Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History’, in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace
and History, ed. Pauline Kleingeld (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 9 (8: 24).
18
Ibid., p. 90.
19
Ibid., pp. 8–9: ‘The greatest problem for the human species to which nature compels it to seek a solu-
tion is the achievement of a civil society which administers right universally … Thus a society in which
freedom under external laws is connected to the highest possible degree with irresistible power, that is, a
perfectly just civil constitution, must be the highest goal of nature for the human species … This problem
is both the most difficult and also the last to be solved by the human species … [I]ndeed, its perfect solu-
tion is impossible: nothing entirely straight can be fashioned from the crooked wood of which humankind
is made. Nature has charged us only with approximating this idea. That this task is also the last to be carried
out also follows from the fact that such a constitution requires the right conception of its nature, a great
store of experience practiced in many affairs of the world, and, above all of this, a good will that is prepared
to accept such a constitution’ (8: 22–3).
20
Hamilton, Jay, and Madison, The Federalist Papers, p. 268 (no. 51: Madison).
212 Jeremy Waldron
—echoing Voltaire’s observation that ‘[a] republic is not founded on virtue . . . it is

founded on the ambition of each citizen, which keeps in check the ambitions of all the
others’.21 ‘It may be a reflection on human nature’, Madison continues, ‘that such
devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is govern-
ment itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?’
The archaeology of this facet of Enlightenment constitutionalism does not stop
there. Forty years earlier, David Hume invited us to understand ways in which institu-
tional forms can be designed so as to outwit and outflank what Hume called ‘the casual
humours and characters of particular men’.22
Political writers have established it as a maxim, that, in contriving any system of government,
and fixing the several checks and controuls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed
a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest. By this interest we
must govern him, and, by means of it, make him, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambi-
tion, co-operate to public good. Without this . . . we have no security for our liberties . . . except
the good-will of our rulers; that is, we shall have no security at all.23
And of course a version of this is present in Adam Smith’s conception of markets—

economic mechanisms in which a person ‘who intends only his own gain . . . is . . . led by
an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention’.24
None of this interested Isaiah Berlin. There is but one reference in his work to this
constitutional economy of self-interested ambition. In Three Critics of the Enlightenment,
he mentioned the possibility that ‘[l]egislation can turn private vices into public
virtues’. But the account he offered was crude by the standards of the constitutional-
ism we have been examining: he alluded to Helvétius’s and Bentham’s suggestion
that ‘by dangling rewards and punishments judiciously before men . . . [t]heir egoistic
instincts can be canalized by education and laws into doing good’ (TCE 119). That’s
it; that’s all. And anyway, it was just an aside; a momentary distraction in a discussion
of Vico.
Design and Humility

The thing that is so fascinating in Enlightenment constitutionalism is that all this
is presented as a project of deliberate design. True, for much of the eighteenth
century, the constitution of England had been held up as a model,25 despite the fact
that, in Sieyès’s words, it was ‘more a product of chance and circumstance than of
21
Voltaire, ‘Thoughts on Public Administration’ (1752) in Voltaire: Political Writings, ed. David Williams
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 222 (§xxxviii).
22
Hume, ‘That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science’, in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene
F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987), p. 15.
23
David Hume, ‘On the Independence of Parliament’, in Essays, p. 42.
24
Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 4, ch. 2.
25
Berlin mentions Vico’s admiration of England’s oligarchy (TCE 493).
enlightenment’.26 Montesquieu and Voltaire glorified it,27 though Sieyès said he was
not inclined to prostrate himself before the English system, and Kant wrote acidly
about a people who ‘carry on about their constitution as if it were a model for the
whole world’.28 Michael Kammen tells us that after 1789 the French Revolutionaries
no longer professed themselves admirers of English constitutionalism, but rather,
in the words of Joseph Antoine Cerutti, anticipated ‘the glory of building a
Constitution which makes the English in their turn our disciples and imitators’.29
For this is what they had seen the Americans do.
At the beginning of The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton observed that if we
accept that the British Constitution was a product more ‘of chance and circumstance
than enlightenment’, then ‘it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country
[America] . . . to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really
capable . . . of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether
they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident
and force’.30
Constitutional design, in this spirit, was not just speculation or philosophic fantasy;
it involved serious proposals by diverse bodies of serious men facing the serious diffi-
culties of actual societies. And those difficulties could be faced down only by the hard
and deliberate work of reason, brought to life and put to work in the real world.
According to Berlin, Enlightenment social design was arrogant and monistic, seek-
ing a fatuous reconciliation of all values and a comprehensive solution of all conflicts in
a glittering work of reason. As Henry Hardy states the Berlin view, there is simply
no possibility of combining all plausible human values and human aspirations ‘into a
single coherent overarching system in which all ends are fully realized without loss,
compromise or clashes’.31 And this is seen as an indictment of the Enlightenment
agenda, of the ‘Enlightenment vision of an eventual orderly and untroubled synthesis
of all objectives and aspirations’. But for the Americans, constitutional design, though
deliberate, was understood to be untidy and pluralistic, setting out to house rather than
reconcile the pursuit of competing and incommensurable values. Peter Gay called the
American design ‘a political system constructed on distrust of human nature and
hostile to utopian optimists’.32 Not only was it a contraption to accommodate the
26
Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate?, p. 113.
27
Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 11.6. Voltaire, ‘Republican Ideas’, in Williams (ed.), Voltaire: Political
Writings, pp. 202–4. Also Voltaire in Letters Concerning the English Nation, tr. Nicholas Cronk (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1994): ‘The English are the only people upon earth who have been able to pre-
scribe limits to the power of Kings by resisting them; and who, by a series of struggles, have at last estab-
lish’d that wise Government, where the Prince is all powerful to do good, and at the same time is restrained
from committing evil; where the Nobles are great without insolence, tho’ there are no Vassals; and where
the People share in the government without confusion.’
28
Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, TP 8: 303. 29 Kammen, Machine, p. 65.
30
Hamilton, Jay, and Madison, The Federalist Papers, p. 1 (no. 1: Hamilton).
31
Henry Hardy, ‘Isaiah Berlin: A Personal Impression’, in Raphael Cohen-Almagor (ed.), Challenges to
Democracy: Essays in Honour and Memory of Isaiah Berlin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. xxxvii.
32
Gay, Enlightenment, vol. 2, p. 566.
214 Jeremy Waldron
unruliness of human nature, but its establishment also partook of that unruliness.
From the outset, it was (in Berlin’s phrase) a provisional and uneasy equilibrium, in
need of repair;33 most of the states that ratified it did so on the assumption that there
would shortly be amendments, and of course there were. It was a product of reason, no
doubt, but of many reasons sitting uneasily with one another, offering the citizens of
the thirteen states an avowedly flawed and untidy compromise, yet something better
than what they had had since 1777 and certainly preferable from the point of view of
self-government to the arrangements they had had before 1776.
In other words, the design of the American constitution presented itself in a spirit
almost entirely contrary to the spirit that Berlin attributed to Enlightenment design.
Yet it was an Enlightenment product. It was presented to the American people during
the ratification process in a spirit of humility as a modest, pragmatic, and experimental
compromise. Nobody said it was perfect. And it was debated in the thirteen ratification
conventions from multiple points of view, from town and country, from commerce and
agriculture, by scholars, inn-keepers, and self-taught politicians; it was voted on and
the votes were often close.34
This sense of humility was not confined to the western side of the Atlantic. The best
that is to be said for a republican system, said Voltaire, is that it is ‘the most tolerable of
systems’. ‘There has never been a perfect government, because men have passions; and
if they did not have passions, there would be no need for government’35—again that
insistent Enlightenment trope. These voices are sounding back and forth across the
Atlantic in the tones of humility. Yet there is not a word about them in Berlin’s very
considerable corpus.
His editor attributes to Berlin the view that ‘[i]nstead of a splendid synthesis, there
must be a permanent, at times painful, piecemeal process of untidy trade-offs and
careful balancing of contradictory claims’.36 And another follower tells us that because
values and principles ‘clash and come into conflict’, there is a need for ‘mechanisms of
compromise, tolerance, and relaxation of tensions and conflicts’.37 But while Berlin,
Hardy, and others wrote in the abstract about processes and mechanisms for conflict
and balancing, it was the Enlightenment constitutionalists who sought to specify
these processes in institutional terms and define the mechanisms and procedures that
would frame and furnish a form of governance that could sponsor these trade-offs and
compromises.38
33
Berlin, CTH. See also Ira Katznelson, ‘Isaiah Berlin's Modernity’, Social Research, 66 (1999), 1079–101
(p. 1100).
34
Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788 (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2010), pp. 36, 48, and 51.
35
Voltaire, Political Writings, p. 198 (§xliii).
36
Henry Hardy, ‘Isaiah Berlin: A Personal Impression’, in Raphael Cohen-Almagor (ed.), Challenges to
Democracy, pp. xxxi–xxxviii (p. xxxvii).
37
Ibid.
38
William Galston, ‘Constitutional Pluralism’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 28 (2011), 228, actually does
put Berlin’s pluralism to work in thinking about constitutional structure.
Constitutionalism and Liberty

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we often associate constitutionalism
with limited government and the protection of individual liberty. That was a theme in
eighteenth-century constitutionalism too, though by no means the only theme. We
design constitutions to constitute governments as well as restrict them, to empower as
well as to limit—particularly in the case of popular republics that aim to empower
those who would ordinarily be without power in a society. But, sure, limiting govern-
ment in the interest of liberty is certainly one thing that constitutions do, and of
course it was a concern of Enlightenment constitutionalism. And since individual
liberty was something that Isaiah Berlin did write about, he might have been expected
to approach the topic of constitutionalism at least from this angle; he might have been
alert to, and alerted his readers to, what had been done on this front in Enlightenment
political thought.
Not a bit of it. In fact Berlin said next to nothing in his published work about the
constitutional devices that might be used to uphold the negative liberty that interested
him—‘freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others . . . the
absence of bullying or domination’ (L 48). He wrote next to nothing about the institu-
tional mechanisms that might secure the modicum of liberty he thought was ethically
required for each person—‘a certain minimum area of personal freedom which must
on no account be violated’.39 He was interested only in debating with the philosophes
about what liberty was, not about how it was to be secured.
He did say that ‘there must be some frontiers of freedom which nobody should be
permitted to cross’ (L 210). But he betrayed no scintilla of interest in the question that
exercised Madison and both his friends and opponents in the American ratification
process—about what good ‘parchment barriers’ could do, and whether the frontiers of
freedom were better secured by the structural principles of a constitution than by a
dedicated bill of rights.40
One thing we may infer is that Berlin would not have accepted Sieyès’s suggestion
that ‘political rights are the sole guarantee of our civil rights and our personal freedom’,
and that to secure liberty ‘we have to know where our political rights lie and take pos-
session of them’.41 Though Berlin sometimes used the phrase ‘political liberty’ to refer
to his favoured negative liberty, it appears that all he meant by this is that liberty is
a value which is studied in the theory of politics—not that it is in and of itself an
essentially political activity. Berlin was happy to accept Bernard Crick’s reproach that
he was not particularly concerned with political participation.42 He offered a grudging
39
‘Two Concepts’, L 171. There are one or two comments in a letter to Alan Dudley, dated 17 March
1948, which mention the rule of law as a way of upholding civil liberties (L II 44–8).
40
This refers to Federalist doubts about parchment barriers and about the need to have a list of restric-
tive rights when there was no grant of plenary authority anyway.
41
Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate?, p. 155. My emphasis.
42
Bernard Crick, ‘Freedom as Politics’, in Philosophy, Politics and Society, 3rd series, ed. Peter Laslett and
W. G. Runciman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), pp. 194–214: ‘What is missing in Berlin’s analysis . . . is any
216 Jeremy Waldron
acknowledgement of the instrumental value of the exercise of political freedom:

‘Perhaps the chief value for liberals of political—“positive”—rights, of participating in
government, is as a means for protecting what they hold to be an ultimate value,
namely individual—“negative”—liberty.’ He did not deny that political participation
was a human right (L 49). But he was not prepared to say there was anything wrong
with political apathy; he would not say, with Rousseau or with Pericles, that freedom
devoted entirely to private pursuits was not really worthy of the name.
The most he would say about institutional provision for liberty was to repeat the Oxford
tutorial commonplace that there is ‘no necessary connection between individual lib-
erty and democratic rule’.43 He cited Frederick the Great of Prussia for the proposition
that an autocrat may be a better guarantor of liberty than a popular government: ‘[I]t is
perfectly conceivable that a liberal-minded despot would allow his subjects a large
measure of personal freedom.’44
But even here the conceptions that he used were banal and sophomoric. Berlin
showed no interest in what the Enlightenment constitutionalists made of the idea of a
‘liberal-minded despot’. There might have been plenty to talk about. There were Kant’s
observations on the possibility that a constitution may be republican in its spirit, being
governed by a king on principles analogous to those of a republic.45 There were
Montesquieu’s comments on the structural differences between a monarchy and a
despotism in this regard.46 And there was Denis Diderot on the danger of putting all
liberty ‘in absolute dependence on a single person’.47 Berlin mentioned in passing the
precariousness of putting all the eggs of freedom in one despotic basket. But he did not
explore what the philosophes made of that point (L 49). Nor did he express the suspi-
cion that enlightened despotism was much more likely to associate itself with the
Berlin nightmare of comprehensive social planning, than representative or republican
government with all the comforting untidiness and compromise that that inevitably
involved.
And on the other side of Berlin’s comparison between a liberal-minded despot and
an illiberal democracy, the comments on ‘democracy’ were equally uncontaminated
by reflection on political structure. Democracy is not distinguished, for Berlin, by its
analysis of the link between freedom and political action—a typically liberal lack, if a socialist may say
so . . . Freedom is being left alone from politics—is it?’ See also Robert A. Kocis, ‘Reason, Development, and
the Conflicts of Human Ends: Sir Isaiah Berlin’s Vision of Politics’, American Political Science Review, 74
(1980), 38–52, and Berlin’s letter to Crick, 29 March 1966 (L III 271–5).
43
Berlin, ‘Two Concepts’, p. 208: ‘Democracy may disarm a given oligarchy, a given privileged indi-
vidual, but it can still crush individuals as mercilessly as any previous ruler.’ Also: ‘The connection
between democracy and individual liberty is a good deal more tenuous than it [has] seemed to many
advocates of both.’
44
L 176 and note. There is some discussion of Hamann’s view of Frederick the Great in TCE 425–7.
45
Kant, CF 7: 88: ‘a mode of government conforming to the spirit of a representative system’ (Towards
Perpetual Peace, 8: 352).
46
Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 2.4, 3.9–10, and 5.14–15.
47
Diderot, ‘Observations sur le Nakaz’, VII, in Diderot, Political Writings, ed. John Hope Mason and
Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 88–9.
direct or representative or republican forms. Berlin did not write about representation,
nor did he try to make sense of the design perspective that would build representation
into the complex constitutional structures we have been describing. The term ‘repub-
lic’ does not figure in any of the indexes to the numerous Berlin volumes that have been
cranked out in recent years. ‘Representation’ does, just once—in the volume called
Liberty, edited by Henry Hardy in 2002—but the page that is referred to contains noth-
ing whatever about representation (or any cognate term). Yet representation was one
of the main themes of Enlightenment political thought.48
In all of this, it is not Berlin’s general hostility to democracy and participatory liberty
that concerns me.49 That’s a matter of record. What concerns me is his failure to con-
sider the subtle and interesting things that were said on this score by the Enlightenment
thinkers he continually excoriated for their perfectionism and for their excessive faith
in social design. What annoys me is Berlin’s general cautionary thesis about the
Enlightenment, which seems to be predicated on his directing us away from any con-
sideration of Enlightenment constitutionalism.
Explaining Berlin’s Neglect

I could go on. But before I run out of time, I would like to offer something by way of
explanation for this neglect. The most damning possibility I have alluded to already. It
is that this was not a blind spot at all, but deliberate avoidance of an aspect of the
Enlightenment heritage that would have falsified Berlin’s central proposition that
Enlightenment social design was a matter of monistic and bullying perfectionism.
That has certainly been the effect of his failure to address this aspect of the matter, and
unfortunately those who worship at the Berlin shrine have not thought it worthwhile
to undertake any independent exploration of the side of Enlightenment social design
that he ignored. Whether this was Berlin’s intention or not, one really shouldn’t try to
say. Probably Sir Isaiah deserves better of us than this uncharitable diagnosis.
So what are the other options? One possibility, which is almost as discrediting, is
that he shied away from this aspect of the Enlightenment because it was already so
prominent in the work of his arch-enemy, Hannah Arendt, particularly in her 1964
book, On Revolution. But I can’t see any connection of this kind in his scattered expres-
sions of lack of respect for that lady’s ideas.
48
Berlin had no interest in Locke’s speculation about the combination of representation, the rule of law,
and the separation of powers as a partial security against oppression. I mean Locke’s argument for investing
legislative power in a large representative assembly (Locke, Two Treatises, 329–30 (II, §94)). Legislative
authority should be placed, he says, insisting that the laws they make should be general in form and that
the enforcement of the law should be separated from institutions devoted to their enactment. That way,
legislators would be given pause by the thought that they and their families would have to bear the burden
of any oppressive laws they enacted.
49
If it were, we would have to consider the rough, crude, and almost telegraphic notes that Berlin made
for his lecture ‘Democracy, Communism and the Individual’ (1949).
218 Jeremy Waldron
Probably, the best explanation is that he was just uninterested in this aspect of the
Enlightenment. Certainly he was well known for his lack of interest in law and legal
structures (though there are those interesting comments about Montesquieu and
judge-made law). Berlin considered reading for the Bar after his graduation in 1932
but took an All Souls Prize Fellowship instead. Also, despite the years that he spent in
the United States during the Second World War, Berlin seemed more or less completely
uninterested, as far as I can tell, in American constitutional law and constitutional
jurisprudence. In his word portrait of Felix Frankfurter, in Personal Impressions, there
is nothing about American constitutionalism, and there is just one incurious para-
graph in the letters on controversies about judicial decision-making on the Supreme
Court (to Joseph Alsop, 11 February 1944, L I 485).
There is a throwaway line in a discussion of Alexander Herzen in the New York
Review of Books in 1968 where Berlin talks casually of ‘the corrupt constitutionalism in
the West’:
He [Herzen] began with an ideal vision of mankind, largely ignored the chasm which
divided it from the present—whether the Russia of Nicholas, or the corrupt c onstitutionalism
in the West.50
But I don’t know what to make of that, not even whether Berlin is intending to use the
phrase in his own voice. I certainly haven’t seen it elaborated anywhere. He also wrote
disparagingly about constitution-mongering in a letter to Chaim Weizmann on the
foundation of Israel in 1948.51
Maybe it is just that Berlin had a different conception of the theory of politics, of
political philosophy, than the one that has motivated me in this paper. I said in my
inaugural lecture (to the Chair that he also occupied) that Berlin’s conception of politi-
cal theory was far more ethical in its character than political. When Berlin was asked
in a 1997 interview, a few months before his death, ‘What do you think are the tasks
of political philosophy?’ he replied: ‘To examine the ends of life’, and he added that
‘[p]olitical philosophy is in essence moral philosophy applied to social situations’.52
True, he went on to say that the social situations to which moral philosophy is applied
‘of course include political organization, the relations of the individual to the community,
50
‘The Great Amateur’, New York Review of Books, 14 March 1968.
51
Letter to Chaim Weizmann, 16 Sept. 1948 (L II 55). Also Berlin’s observation in a letter to Rowland
Burdon-Muller, 11 Sept. 1974, about the US in the wake of the Watergate scandal: ‘reverence for law,
constitution, justice is bound to be overwhelming in a nation whose bonds are not cultural or racial or
religious or even linguistic or dynastic etc. but founded on a set of written principles which are evidently
being flouted’ (L III 577).
52
CIB 46. He also observed that that ‘political theory is about the ends of life, about values, about the
goals of social existence, about what men in society live by and should live by, about good and evil, right
and wrong’. ‘The business of political philosophy is to examine the validity of various claims made for
various social goals, and the justification of the methods of specifying and attaining these . . . It sets itself to
evaluate the arguments for and against various ends pursued by human beings . . . This is the business of
political philosophy and has always been such. No true political philosopher has omitted to do this’ (ibid.).
the state, and the relations of communities and states to each other’. But he gave no
indication that ‘political organization’ was worth study in its own right.
To read almost any of Berlin’s work, whether it addresses the Enlightenment or
not, is to read essays that are resolutely uninterested in the political institutions of
liberal society. As I have already said, beyond airy talk of freedom and openness,
Berlin was simply unconcerned with the ways in which liberal or democratic politi-
cal institutions might accommodate the pluralism and untidiness he thought so
important in human life.
The Consequences of Neglect

Whatever the explanation, the blind spot on Enlightenment constitutionalism has
done political theory no service. Pedagogically, it has been detrimental to the theory of
politics in England: Berlin set an example to his students and followers; his lack of
interest in institutions and constitutions has turned out to be contagious and it has
contaminated the theory of politics as we see it and know it today. We study justice and
the meaning of liberty; we don’t study bicameralism or the separation of powers.
Probably this is something that would have happened anyway, under the influence of
Rawls and others, but Berlin’s steadfast indifference to questions of institutional poli-
tics has certainly contributed to the atmosphere—an atmosphere I talked about in my
2012 inaugural lecture—in which political theory is treated in Oxford more as a branch
of ethics than as the theoretical and normative side of the institutional structures that
fascinate our colleagues in political science.
Beyond the academy, there is also a cost to this sidelining of eighteenth-century consti-
tutional thought. It is something we ought to have been studying, because we are in large
part the heirs of Enlightenment constitutionalism, and much that is best in our theory of
politics and in the real-world application of that theory in the past seventy years is the herit-
age of the work of thinkers like Locke, Montesquieu, Condorcet, Sieyès, Madison, and
Kant. We believe now in constitutional republics and the design of constitutional republics,
even if they are wearing the fancy dress of a monarchy, and we should not be scaring our
students away from an inquiry into the intellectual foundations of constitutional republi-
canism by raising yet again this bogeyman of perfectionist totalitarian design.
This has not been a particularly respectful essay, especially considering that it origi-
nated as a keynote address for a conference on Isaiah Berlin. But if the price of a greater
interest in Enlightenment constitutionalism and a better understanding is a bit of
disrespect, then so be it. The old man’s reputation can take it.
16
Second Thoughts of a Biographer
Michael Ignatieff
Biographers work with a variety of complex motives, some of which surface only
when their work is done. These days biographers come to bury their Caesars as often
as they come to praise them. In my case, my ostensible motive was to praise, to
remember a friendship, and to honour a life I had witnessed, at least over the last ten
years of its span. It was, as critics have pointed out, a biographical essay, more than a
biography, a preliminary report written in the last year of his life, and published in
the year following his death.
He had asked me to do it, after all, and so I was honouring a promise and fulfilling
an obligation of which I was proud. Selecting me as his biographer was a v alidation
of me and so I had to take care not to turn my work into compensatory validation of
him. I owed an obligation to him, but I owed an equal obligation to be truthful.
While I erased my own presence from the book, as a biographer should, the result
was the tacit record of a friendship, one of the most important in my life. Because the
project was personal, seen from my perspective, other friends, often more important
to him, did not see ‘their’ Isaiah in mine. When the book was published, I was sur
prised to be told that I had missed some essential story or feature of his character.
I even felt uneasy, a little jealous even, when friends imitated his inimitable voice better
than I did, when they recalled some particularly telling story that I had either left out or
never heard. In the years since his death, I’ve learned to be pleased to discover things
about him of which I had no idea at the time. In this fashion, he lives on and I continue
to learn about him.
Despite a sense of my sins of omission and commission, I believe I painted a true
likeness of the man I knew. I’m delighted that the book itself and my interviews with
him, now made available by the Berlin archive, have become a source to future scholars.
I was also the first to read his letters, some still in envelopes, none in order. I still
remember batches of them tumbling across a desk in Wolfson Library and realizing as
I struggled with his handwriting that I would have to become a cryptographer. Henry
Hardy’s exemplary, exhaustive, and magnificent edition of the correspondence was
still years away.
Second Thoughts of a Biographer 221
Now that four volumes of correspondence have appeared, I know I should revise
my biography, but I also see how large a project this would be. Henry Hardy, with his
habitual fastidiousness, has compiled, for his own amusement and mine, a list of the
factual errors in the biography, and if I were to correct these in a new edition, I would
have to add a small number of interpretive ones. So if I revisit the biography and
produce a revised edition, it will require a long sojourn, changing my life once again as
my first sojourn with him certainly did.
A new edition would also have to make sense of his continuing reputation. He has
certainly enjoyed an extraordinary afterlife. The stock of many of his contemporaries
may be declining, but his continues to rise. Much of this should be associated with the
curatorial devotion of Henry Hardy. No one has been a truer keeper of the flame, and
his editorial achievement guarantees that his life and work—like some National Trust
home newly opened to the public—receive ever more visitors every year.
Since the publication of my biography in 1998, so much excellent interpretive
work has followed that I struggle to keep up: Joshua Cherniss’s deep account of his
intellectual development; Arie Dubnov’s reinterpretation of his Jewishness and its
impact on his thought; Enrique Krause’s account of the intellectual origins of
Freedom and its Betrayal; William Galston’s analysis of Berlin’s heterodox insights
into the psychology of political judgement; Hermione Lee’s treatment of Berlin’s per
sonal impressions as a disguised autobiography; even David Caute’s Isaac and Isaiah
adds a polemical dimension to our understanding of Isaiah as a Cold War liberal.1
I say nothing of the ever more complicated debate in political theory about liberal
pluralism and the incommensurability of values, in which Isaiah’s work continues to
have a controversial—and therefore fruitful—afterlife.
I’m delighted in this abundant afterlife, especially since it is short on hagiography
and long on critical analysis. Jeremy Waldron—of whom I shall say more in a
moment—says Berlin is worshipped, at least in America, as Churchill is worshipped.
I’d dispute this as a factual claim, and just say, if it were true, that Berlin himself would
have said no man is well served by worship.
A biographer, even of a friend, would betray them if admiration were to become
worshipful. There is the matter of truth, and there is many a painful moment when
you are trying to tell the truth about a friend. When conducted by a friend, biography
is a trial between truth and loyalty, with the reader handing down the verdict.
1
Joshua Cherniss, A Mind and Its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2013); Arie Dubnov, Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (London:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2012); Enrique Krauze ‘Foreword’, in Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six
Enemies of Human Liberty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); William Galston, Liberal
Pluralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); ‘Moral Pluralism and Liberal Democracy:
Isaiah Berlin’s Heterodox Liberalism’, The Review of Politics, 71 (2009), 85–99; Hermione Lee, ‘Foreword’, in
Isaiah Berlin, Personal Impressions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); David Caute, Isaac
and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University
Press, 2014).
222 michael ignatieff
Biography is an act of closure. When I finished, I thought that I was done with him.
One wants simultaneously to commemorate and move on. Momentum is all in life
and so after fixing stories on a page, transcribing memories, putting it all between
covers, one hopes to both honour the task and get on with the rest of one’s own life.
A biographer needs to take care not to be taken over by his subject and to be able,
once the duty is done, to resume life as it was before. A biography, at least one that
began as a project during the life of a subject and was completed after his death, is a
tombstone in the grass. Once it is placed in the ground, those who placed it there
should walk away.
I certainly expected to walk away. Yet it soon became obvious that my work was not
done, that closure is the last thing one should expect a completed biography to deliver.
Once one role is completed, a new role emerges: defender and guardian of the flame.
Here loyalty and truth come into conflict once again.
I don’t keep close watch on what is happening to Berlin’s reputation. Henry Hardy
plays Cerberus. I do not. But I do stir when something disobliging is said about him.
One example of this might be John Banville’s recent observation, in a review of the
third volume of Isaiah’s letters, that Berlin, as a director of Covent Garden, was more
hostile to Benjamin Britten’s homosexuality than one might have expected.2 At first
my reaction was defensive: no one is perfect and none of us, certainly not this bio
grapher, would get to heaven if all their own catty or disparaging sexual innuendos
were entered into St Peter’s ledger book.
Charity towards a biographical subject is as necessary as charity towards our own
lives. But charity easily slips into apologia. Banville’s remark set me re-evaluating
Isaiah’s remarks about the ‘homintern’, his phrase for the progressive, left-wing
gay Englishmen—from Anthony Blunt to Guy Burgess—whom Berlin knew in the
1930s. Had I missed disapproval of their sexuality beneath Isaiah’s jokes at their
expense?
It would matter to our account of his politics if liberal tolerance stopped at homo
sexuality. I can’t conclude that it did, but the question has been posed. What is the
answer: that he was a child of his times in sexual matters and therefore in drawing up
the boundaries of what he could tolerate? That he simply didn’t like Britten’s operas as
music? Or that he was a hypocritical prig, pleasant to the faces of his homosexual
friends, but lethal when their backs were turned, and business was being done in the
committee rooms at Covent Garden? I see no evidence of this last possibility: he did
not use his authority to spike Britten’s career, but I cannot acquit him of being more
deferential to the prejudices of his time than I had supposed.
The larger issue here is that Isaiah had one of the most successful liberal tempera
ments of all times—a rare public reputation combining wisdom, wit, charm, and
good judgement. His central achievement, my biography argues, was to vindicate
2
John Banville, ‘Learning a Lot about Isaiah Berlin’, New York Review of Books, 19 Dec. 2013.
the possibility, in his life and work, taken together, of a liberal temperament that was,
in my concluding words, ‘skeptical, ironical, dispassionate and free’.3
To the extent that Berlin’s enduring influence relates not merely to what he wrote,
but to the degree that he himself incarnated the tolerant virtues at the core of the
liberal disposition, any failing in this area would condemn not just Berlin but the
liberal temperament itself, suggesting that even in its most successful exemplar, liberal
tolerance was a hypocritical mask, concealing heterosexual disdain and fear.
A similar accusation is at the heart of David Caute’s Isaac and Isaiah. Caute’s essen
tial point is that despite an appearance of liberal tolerance towards communists and
socialists, Berlin misused his intellectual authority to blackball Deutscher, a Trotskyist
scholar, from a post at the University of Sussex in the early 1960s. The accusation is not
just that Berlin’s tolerance was hypocritical but that he abused the authority that Berlin’s
liberal temperament and worldly success had brought him by the mid-1960s.
Rushing to Isaiah’s defence, in these situations, risks confusing impulses of friend
ship with obligations to truth. The charges in both cases must be answered directly. In
the Deutscher case, Berlin did write a letter recommending against giving Deutscher a
job at Sussex. Deutscher was, he wrote, ‘the only man whose presence in the same
academic community I should find morally intolerable’ (L III 377–8). The question is
why. Caute claims the motive was fury at Deutscher’s dismissive review of Berlin’s
lecture ‘Historical Inevitability’ in 1954. This adds vanity and vindictiveness to the
charge against Berlin. There is no doubt that Berlin was thin-skinned about bad
reviews. This merely illustrates that the temperamental achievement—sunny and
amused detachment—was vulnerable rather than Olympian. But to put Berlin’s deci
sions about Deutscher down to personal pique seems to miss the point: what he cared
about was not Deutscher’s review, but Deutscher’s politics, and beyond that his ethics,
his moral endorsement of Bolshevism and Trotskyism.
Deutscher’s embrace of Trotsky as the heroic prophet of world revolution was
everything that Berlin could not abide: beyond the hero worship was a consequen
tialist endorsement of the ‘vast impersonal forces’ of historical change, with lofty
indifference to the human costs of Trotsky’s revolutionary project. This, after all, had
been his chief target in ‘Historical Inevitability’. Berlin objected to the idea that a man
could pass himself off as a scholar when he used his scholarship to endorse humanly
unendurable costs.
This much is clear enough. What is more puzzling—and here Caute’s book strikes
home—is why Berlin singled out Deutscher. After all, E. H. Carr, Eric Hobsbawm,
Christopher Hill, and others were scholars whose Marxist politics led them to endorse
similar positions that argued for the historical inevitability and desirability of revolu
tionary violence. Could it be true that Carr, Hill, and Hobsbawm escaped Berlin’s
wrath simply because they were more ‘clubbable’ Oxford or Cambridge types, not
renegade outsiders like Deutscher?
3
Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), conclusion.
This is not an attractive thought. It suggests that Berlin’s tolerance was bounded
by the confines of Oxbridge and respectable London society. But that doesn’t work either,
since Deutscher was a clubbable member of that quintessentially English institution:
the British Marxist counter-establishment. I suspect the dislike of Deutscher was not
social or cultural, but temperamental: Deutscher was a fanatic masquerading as a
scholar while other members of the Marxist counter-establishment were scholars first
and last.
Caute’s book strikes me as wrong-headed, but it has the virtue of recovering an
aspect of British intellectual life in the post-war years that bears emphasizing: just how
influential this counter-establishment of Marxist and socialist historians, p hilosophers,
and economists was, and how central a role they played as an antithesis in the shaping
of Berlin’s liberal thought.
Thanks to Caute, Cherniss, and Dubnov we can now see that the very richness of
Berlin’s liberalism relates first of all to the intellectual power of the ‘in-house oppo
nent’—the British Marxists—and his emotional rejection of their consequentialist
historical determinism; second, his recovery of Herzen and the Russian populists;
third, his adaptation and modernization of Benjamin Constant’s liberty of the ancient
and moderns; fourth, his visceral reaction against the schematizing, paternalistic
rationalism of the radical Enlightenment (of which more in a moment); and finally, the
defining encounter with Anna Akhmatova, whose life and work served as a heroic
vindication of the capacity of individuals to survive tyranny uncrushed and unbroken.
His liberalism is distinctive in the range and depth of the sources that made it possible
and hence the rich and complex moral psychology of the liberal temperament that he
was able to create from these sources.
Berlin’s politics is a Cold War liberalism, whose defining context is an argument with
British Marxists and fellow-travellers about whether one could justify the immense moral
costs of the Soviet experiment; and about where the impulses—to engineer souls—came
from in the history of the Enlightenment. If it is a cold war liberalism, it was also haunted by
what had come before, the fascist dictatorships of the 1930s. Like Bolshevism, these had
abolished liberal constitutional regimes in the name of an ideal that fascinated and repelled
Berlin: delivering humankind from the narrow horizon of bourgeois right and propelling
them towards full human emancipation—positive liberty—experienced as the total fusion
of the individual with society, state, and nation.
This is the historical context that is resolutely absent in Jeremy Waldron’s contri
bution to this volume, taxing Berlin for neglect of Enlightenment constitutionalism.
Neglect is the wrong word, it seems to me, since Berlin was quite explicit that negative
liberty could only be secure within a framework of constitutionally entrenched and
guaranteed rights. In a letter from 1991, he wrote:4
It seems to me that the only guarantee of civil liberties, or indeed any kind of freedom, neg
ative or positive, is, in the end, their establishment by laws beyond the interference of
4
Isaiah Berlin to Frederick Rosen, 17 July 1991, L IV 427.
ajorities, laws that guarantee Constant’s minimum private space, and therefore [by] consti
m
tutions, whether written or as good as written, accepted without much question; bills of
rights; basic principles and laws, perhaps of such a kind (if much more egalitarian, applying
to all the inhabitants of a country) as a group of slave-owning American landowners (not
keen supporters of total popular liberty) drew up for their country.
Berlin does not neglect constitutionalism so much as take it for granted. His alle
giance to the liberal architecture of rights, first articulated by Montesquieu and
Madison, is beyond doubt. This strain of thought saw the rule of law, checks and
balances, separation of powers, as the solution to the problem of how to preserve
political freedom—and all other freedoms besides—from the inveterate selfishness,
egotism, avarice, lack of public spirit in ordinary men and women. Waldron is right to
single this out as Enlightenment liberalism’s great legacy, the insight that liberty did
not require the republican ideal of virtue, did not require, as the twentieth-century
Marxists and fascists proclaimed, the engineering of human souls. What liberty
needed, Madison and Montesquieu so rightly understood, was resilient constitu
tional architecture.
Waldron believes that Berlin’s neglect of constitutionalism is puzzling since this
constitutional architecture is all that keeps liberty secure in any order where, as Berlin
believed, human beings seek plural and incompatible goods. ‘The give and take, live
and let live, agree to disagree’ of liberal tolerance was entirely dependent, Waldron
argues, again rightly, on liberal constitutionalism.
Berlin took all of this for granted. He simply was not an institutionalist and did not
teach liberal institutions or constitutionalism. He liked to say that he was not a political
philosopher at all, but a moralist and a historian. Occupying the Chichele chair in
political philosophy—Jeremy Waldron is one of his distinguished successors—was
uncomfortable to him. He knew he ought to teach institutions, constitutions, and the
machinery of liberal order and he just didn’t.
Is this just a story of laziness or indifference? Waldron says no: Berlin ignores
eighteenth-century constitutionalism for a reason. He was too invested in his story of
the totalitarian dimensions of Enlightenment thought to pay due attention to
Madison’s saving constitutional liberalism. In Waldron’s eyes, Berlin took the dark
and coercive Enlightenment he wanted and neglected the light-filled Madisonian
version, in effect twisting history for ideological purposes.
But hang on a minute. Waldron argues as if the only Enlightenment that matters is
the constitutional Enlightenment. But there were at least two other Enlightenments
that matter just as much. What about the ‘disciplinary Enlightenment’, the subject of
my first book, A Just Measure of Pain, and of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and
Punish?5 Philadelphia is not just the site of Madison’s and Jefferson’s sublime consti
tutional inventions (and also their less than sublime accommodation of slavery); it is
5
Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution (New York:
Pantheon, 1978); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977).
also the site of the Philadelphia penitentiary and Benjamin Rush’s asylum. The
disciplinary rationalism of the Enlightenment cannot be so easily separated from
the constitutional version. The Founders understood that disciplining the poor, the
insane, the disorderly—and especially the slaves—was a precondition for white
propertied males enjoying the blessings of constitutional liberty. This disciplinary
Enlightenment—have we forgotten Bentham’s Panopticon?—was emphatically
interested in straightening out the crooked timber of humanity, at least of that part of
humanity that threatened the liberal constitutional order.
There is a third Enlightenment, the radical Enlightenment, of Gracchus Babeuf,
the Conspiracy of Equals, and the guillotine. Waldron argues as if the Enlightenment
ends with the ratification of the US Constitution or the Tennis Court Oath of 1789.
In fact the Enlightenment goes some distance further: to revolutionary war, to
export freedom at the point of a gun, to the terror, the execution of counter-
revolutionaries, to regicide, to Napoleon and the Empire. Waldron’s Enlightenment
runs from Montesquieu to Madison, but where, we might ask, are Marat, St Just, and
Robespierre?
If Waldron accuses Berlin of choosing the Enlightenment that suits his purpose,
Waldron is doing the same. A historian would say to both: you don’t get to choose
which Enlightenment you’d prefer. It is at least three conflicting strains that inter
weave but also pull against each other.
So then the question becomes, if Berlin can be accused of selectivity in his account of
the Enlightenment why did he choose the radical version that ends with terror? Because
his overriding preoccupation as a refugee from the Russian Revolution was to under
stand how the visions of human liberation that originate in the Enlightenment, that were
nurtured by his beloved Russian radicals of the nineteenth century, Herzen and others,
ended in the dismal tyrannies of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky. Waldron taxes Berlin with
failing to spell out the necessary institutional prerequisites of the liberty he takes for
granted. If you will allow me to ventriloquize for a second, Berlin’s reply would be: I live
in England, I know exactly what the institutional prerequisites of liberty are. That’s not
my problem, and as far as I can see, these prerequisites of liberty are not in danger from
within, but from without.
When he goes to see Akhmatova in 1945, he sees that his work is to explain why and
how the life-enhancing liberty that made the Russian silver age possible between 1870
and 1914 was replaced by the soul-crushing tyranny that followed. The radical
Enlightenment and the Jacobin fanaticism that it unleashed, he argues, did not end
with Napoleon. The impulses migrate into the Russian populists and early Marxists
and attain their dire apotheosis in Lenin and the Bolshevik engineers of human souls.
This line of historical descent remains his central subject: not as a historian, but as a
moralist. And why as a moralist?
Because the challenge of his time, as he sees it, is not to lay out the institutional
prerequisites of constitutional democracy—those are only too evident. What is
more urgent is to refute the moral rationalization of tyranny and mass murder by
Deutscher and Co. What is striking about the British post-war milieu in which
Berlin’s thought took shape is the sheer number of Marxists and socialists he counted
as colleagues, friends, or rivals. All of them lived within the constitutional order that
allowed them to preach on behalf of their radiant tomorrow. Berlin maintained con
vivial relations with many of them, but he thought Marxism was a bastard child of
the Enlightenment and he wanted to show how and why.
Waldron ignores the Cold War context, ignores the fact that Berlin is a refugee
from the Revolution that most explicitly claimed its descent from the radical
Enlightenment. He lived his intellectual life among social democrats, socialists, and
communists—Christopher Hill, Maurice Dobb, R. H. Tawney, Eric Hobsbawm,
G. D. H. Cole—who continued to believe in a political future beyond the frontiers of
liberal constitutionalism. He was not interested in defending liberal constitutional
ism: he took it for granted. His problem was to understand its enemies.
Waldron goes further and accuses Berlin not of taking it for granted, but of being
actively hostile to it. Waldron speaks at one point of Berlin’s ‘general hostility to
democracy and participatory liberty’. This, he says, is a matter of record.
What record, pray?
Waldron repeatedly accuses Berlin of ‘sophomoric’ ‘Oxford tutorial common
places’, so it seems only fair to reply that Waldron is making the same kind of mis
take. He runs democracy and participatory liberty together, when they are two
separate things. You can be a democrat without believing that democracy requires
you to be an activist or even a participant. Berlin explicitly rejected the idea that to be
a democrat required civic virtue or civic participation. If you believe in freedom and
tolerance, you respect the freedom of free riders as well as the virtuous participation
of solid citizens. If you believe that republican virtue should be the compulsory tem
perament of a free society, you have started on a journey that can lead to St Just and
to a democratic despotism enforced by the guillotine.
Any commitment to constitutional liberalism is a commitment to let people
alone, to leave them the choice to participate, to be good citizens, bad citizens, or
even leave their citizenship behind altogether. His liberal pluralism means accepting
that some citizens participate, some don’t, some are actively enchanted with democ
racy, others not so much, and some actively cynical. Liberal tolerance commits you
to tolerance even of those hostile to democracy, provided they do not engage in vio
lence. This is what freedom entails and as Berlin said, many times, it is a chilly virtue.
It was, he said to Stephen Spender, ‘not particularly warm and not at all cosy’
(L II 656). To move from this to the proposition that he was generally hostile to
democracy leaves me wondering to what extent Waldron’s liberal constitutional
machinery actually requires a ghost in the machine: the participatory virtues. Berlin
simply disagreed. Liberal constitutionalism has to work with the crooked timber of
humanity, not with virtuously participatory citizens.
To sustain the argument that Berlin is hostile to democracy Waldron then quotes
Berlin to the effect that ‘enlightened despots’ can and do allow their subjects a
easure of private freedom. This strikes me as a historical commonplace, rather

m
than proof of any normative hostility to democracy. It recalls John Rawls’s careful
consideration in The Law of Peoples of an imaginary place called Kazanistan, a
law-abiding despotism that allows private liberty without public participation or
democracy.6 Would such a government be legitimate or at least a rightful member
of a world of peoples? Rawls said yes. And so, I think, would Berlin.
Pluralism at home commits you, Rawls argued, to pluralism abroad, meaning that
democracy is not the only government compatible with minimal observance of
basic principles of justice. Berlin was merely saying the same, and to use a sentence
in Berlin about enlightened despots to accuse him of hostility to democracy is to lay
the same charge against Rawls.
Waldron blames Berlin’s influence for the degree to which his discipline of politi
cal theory has become a branch of ethics, leading to a drastic neglect of politics and
institutions. Apportioning nearly exclusive responsibility to Berlin for this neglects
the constitutive role of others. In any event, we look to Jeremy Waldron to correct the
problem, as he has been doing with signal success and distinction for more than
thirty years.
Waldron concludes that ‘the old man’s reputation can take it’. Here at least we cer
tainly agree. That we are having this argument at all is proof that the old man retains
all his capacity to provoke and inspire.
6
John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 5, 75–8, 92.
Bibliography
Works by Isaiah Berlin, in chronological order
‘Some Procrustations’, Oxford Outlook, 10 (1930), 491–502.

Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939).
‘Mr. Churchill’, Atlantic Monthly, 184, no. 3 (September 1949), 35–44.
‘The Intellectual Life of American Universities’, Time and Tide, 12, 19, and 26 November 1949.
The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1953).
Review of Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, tr. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James
P. Pettegrove, English Historical Review, 68 (1953), 617–19.
The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess, Lucien Wolf Memorial Lecture (Cambridge: W. Heffer &
Sons, 1959).
‘The Philosophical Ideas of Giambattista Vico’, Art and Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Italy:
Lectures Given at the Italian Institute 1957–1958 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura,
1960).
Karl Marx, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).
‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, in Earl R. Wasserman (ed.), Aspects of the Eighteenth Century
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965).
‘The Great Amateur’, New York Review of Books, 14 March 1968, 9–18.
Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).
‘One of the Boldest Innovators in the History of Human Thought’, New York Times Magazine,
23 November 1969, 76–100.
‘A Note on Vico’s Concept of Knowledge’, in Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White (eds),
Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969).
Foreword to Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, tr.
J. E. Anderson, revised by H. D. Schmidt (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).
‘The Bent Twig: A Note on Nationalism’, Foreign Affairs, 51 (1972), 11–30.
‘Giambattista Vico’, Listener, 88 (1972), 391–8.
‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip W. Wiener (New
York: Scribner’s, 1968–73), vol. 2 (1973), 110–12.
The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities, 2nd Tykociner Memorial Lecture
(Urbana: University of Illinois, 1974).
Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London: Hogarth Press, 1976).
‘Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment’, Social Research, 43 (1976), 640–53.
Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (London: Hogarth Press, 1978).
Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. and with a bibliography by Henry Hardy;
introduction by Roger Hausheer (London: Hogarth Press, 1979).
Personal Impressions, ed. Henry Hardy; introduction by Noel Annan (London: Hogarth Press,
1980).
‘A Tribute to my Friend’, Forum, no. 38 (summer 1980), 1–4.
230 Bibliography
‘Notes on Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought’, British Journal for

Eighteenth-Century Studies, 3 (1980), 89–106.
‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, in Leigh S. Cauman and others (eds), How Many
Questions? Essays in Honor of Sidney Morgenbesser (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983).
The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London:
John Murray, 1990).
The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism, ed. Henry
Hardy (London: John Murray, 1993).
The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1996).
‘Isaiah Berlin in Conversation with Steven Lukes’, Salmagundi, 120 (fall 1998), 52–134.
The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999).
Freedom and its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto &
Windus, 2002).
Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2004).
Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought, ed. Henry
Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006).
Russian Thinkers, 2nd edn, revised by Henry Hardy (London: Penguin, 2008).
Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, ed. Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes (London: Chatto &
Windus, 2009).
The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, 2nd edn, ed. Henry Hardy,
with foreword by John Banville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, 5th edn, ed. Henry Hardy, with foreword by Alan Ryan,
afterword by Terrell Carver (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
The Power of Ideas, 2nd edn, ed. Henry Hardy, with foreword by Avishai Margalit (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2013).
The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, 2nd edn, ed. Henry Hardy and Roger
Hausheer (London: Vintage, 2013).
Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, 2nd edn, ed. Henry Hardy, foreword
by Jonathan Israel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
Building: Letters 1960–1975, ed. Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle (London: Chatto & Windus, 2013).
Personal Impressions, 3rd edn, ed. Henry Hardy, with foreword by Hermione Lee (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2014).
Affirming: Letters 1975–1997, ed. Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle (London: Chatto & Windus,
2015).
General
Acton, Edward, Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Adair, Douglass, ‘ “That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science”: David Hume, James Madison,
and the Tenth Federalist’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 20 (1957), 343–60.
Adler, Hans, ‘Herder’s Style’, in Hans Adler and Wulf Koepke (eds), A Companion to the Works
of Johann Gottfried Herder (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 331–50.
Bibliography 231
Argens: Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d’Argens, Lettres juives, 6 vols (The Hague: no pub.,
1738).
Avineri, Shlomo, Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism (New York: New York
Babbitt, Irving, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1919).
Bacon, Francis, Collected Works, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon
Heath (1879; repr. London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1996).
Baier, Annette, The Cautious Jealous Virtue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Banville, John, ‘Learning a Lot about Isaiah Berlin’, New York Review of Books, 19 December
2013.
Baum, David Bruce, and Robert Nichols (eds), Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom: ‘Two
Concepts of Liberty’ Fifty Years Later (London: Routledge, 2015).
Bayle, Pierre, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 4 vols (Amsterdam: Brunel, etc., 1730).
Becker, Carl, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, CT: Yale
Belinskii, V. G., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 13 vols (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR,
1953‒9).
Bentham, Jeremy, Panopticon, or The inspection-house; in which by persons stationed . . . and see-
ing without being seen, any number of other persons, may at all times be inspected without
change of place . . . applicable . . . to penitentiary and other prisons, work-houses, manufactories,
mad-houses, lazarettos, and schools, 3 vols (London: R. Baldwin, 1812).
Blondel, Jacques-François, L’homme du monde éclairé par les arts, 2 vols (Paris: chez Manory,
1774).
Bongie, Laurence, ‘Hume and Skepticism in Late Eighteenth-Century France’, in Johan van der
Zande and Richard Popkin (eds), The Skeptical Tradition around 1800 (Dordrecht: Kluwer,
1998), 15–29.
Boulanger, Nicolas-Antoine, L’Antiquité devoilée par ses usages, ou Examen critique des princi-
pales opinions, cérémonies et institutions religieuses et politiques des différens peuples de la
terre (Amsterdam, 1766).
Bowra, Maurice, Memories 1898–1939 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966).
Brockliss, Laurence, A History of the University of Oxford, c. 1100–2013 (Oxford: Oxford
Brooke, Christopher, ‘Images of Rousseau in Twentieth-Century Britain’, in Avi Lifschitz (ed.),
Replying to Rousseau (in press).
Brown, John, Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, 2 vols (London: no pub.,
1757).
Bultmann, Christoph, ‘Herder’s Biblical Studies’, in Hans Adler and Wulf Koepke (eds),
A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder (Rochester, NY: Camden House,
2009), 233–46.
Burtonwood, Neil, Cultural Diversity, Liberal Pluralism, and Schools: Isaiah Berlin and
Education (London: Routledge, 2006).
Carlebach, Julius, ‘The Problem of Moses Hess’s Influence on the Young Marx’, Leo Baeck
Institute Year Book, 18 (1973), 27–39.
232 Bibliography
Carlyle, R. W., History of Medieval Political Theory in the West, 6 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood,
1903–36).
Carr, Edward Hallett, Karl Marx: A Study in Fanaticism (London: J. M. Dent, 1934).
Carr, Edward Hallett, The Romantic Exiles: A Nineteenth-Century Portrait Gallery (London:
Victor Gollancz, 1933; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).
Carr, Edward Hallett, What Is History? (London: Macmillan, 1961).
Carver, Terrell, ‘Berlin’s Karl Marx’, in George Crowder and Henry Hardy (eds), The One and
the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin (New York: Prometheus Books, 2007), 31–46.
Cassirer, Ernst, ‘Die Idee der republikanischen Verfassung: Rede zur Verfassungsfeier am 11. August
1928’ (1929), in Cassirer, Aufsätze und kleine Schriften (1927–1931), ed. Tobias Berben, vol. 17 of
Gesammelte Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Birgit Recki (Hamburg: Meiner, 2004), 291–398.
Cassirer, Ernst, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, tr. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P.
Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951).
Caute, David, Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (New Haven, CT
and London: Yale University Press, 2014).
Cherniss, Joshua, ‘Isaiah Berlin’s Thought and its Legacy: Critical Reflections on a Symposium’,
European Journal of Political Theory, 12 (2013), 5–23.
Cherniss, Joshua, A Mind and its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Clairmont, Heinrich, ‘Die Figur des Machiavell in Goethes Egmont’, Poetica, 15 (1983),
289–313.
Cobban, Alfred, Rousseau and the Modern State (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934).
Cohen, Alix, ‘In Defence of Hume’s Historical Method’, British Journal for the History of
Philosophy, 13 (1995), 489–502.
Cohen, G. A., ‘Isaiah’s Marx, and Mine’, in Cohen, Finding Oneself in the Other (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2013), 1–15.
Cohon, Rachel, Hume’s Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946).
Collini, Stefan, English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999).
Comparato, V. I., Giuseppe Valletta: Un intellettuale napoletano della fine del seicento (Naples:
Istituto per gli Studi Storici, 1970).
Crawford, Sally, and Katharina Ulmschneider (eds), Civilisation’s Ark: Oxford and Refugee
Academics in the Arts during the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Crick, Bernard, ‘Freedom as Politics’, in Philosophy, Politics and Society, 3rd series, ed. Peter
Laslett and W. G. Runciman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 194–214.
Croce, Benedetto, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, tr. R. G. Collingwood (London: Howard
Latimer, 1913).
Crowder, George, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).
Curran, Mark, Atheism, Religion and Enlightenment in Pre-Revolutionary France (Woodbridge:
Boydell & Brewer, 2012).
Darnton, Robert, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton,
1995).
Darnton, Robert, ‘George Washington’s False Teeth’, New York Review of Books, 27 March 1997,
35–8.
Bibliography 233
Darnton, Robert, ‘In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History
of Ideas’, Journal of Modern History, 43 (1971), 11–62.
Diderot, Denis, Lettre sur les aveugles, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, ed. Marian Hobson and
Simon Harvey (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 2000).
Diderot, Denis, ‘Machiavélisme’, in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts
et des métiers (Neuchâtel: Faulche, 1765), ix. 793.
Diderot, Denis, Œuvres complètes, ed. Roger Lewinter, 15 vols (Paris: Club français du livre,
1969–73).
Diderot, Denis, Political Writings, ed. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (Cambridge:
Donaldson, Peter S., Machiavelli and Mystery of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988).
Drouet, Joseph, L’abbé de Saint-Pierre: l’homme et l’œuvre (Paris: Champion, 1912).
Dubnov, Arie M., Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012).
Edelstein, Dan, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
2010).
Ellis, Heather, ‘Efficiency and Counter-Revolution: Connecting University and Civil Service
Reform in the 1850s’, History of Education, 42:1 (2013), 23–44.
Fassò, Guido, Vico e Grozio (Naples: Guida, 1971).
Faucci, Dario, ‘Vico and Grotius: Jurisconsults of Mankind’, in Giorgio Tagliacozzo and
Hayden V. White (eds), Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 61–76.
Ferguson, Adam, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1966).
Ferrone, Vincenzo, The Enlightenment: History of an Idea, tr. Elisabetta Tarantino (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
Ferrone, Vincenzo, Scienza natura religione: mondo Newtoniano e cultura italiana nel primo
settecento (Naples: Jovene, 1982).
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, ‘Ueber Machiavell, als Schriftsteller, und Stellen aus seinen Schriften’,
in Gesamtausgabe, ed. Reinhard Lauth and Hans Gliwitzky, vol. 9: Werke 1806–1807, ed.
Reinhard Lauth and Hans Gliwitzky (Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog,
1995), 223–75.
Forster, Michael N., After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010).
Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977).
Foucault, Michel, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader: An
Introduction to Foucault’s Thought (London: Penguin, 1991), 32–50.
Frederick of Prussia, L’Anti-Machiavel, par Fredéric II, roi de Prusse, édition critique avec les
remaniements de Voltaire par les deux versions, ed. Charles Fleischauer (= SVEC, vol. 5)
(Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1958).
Frederick of Prussia, The Refutation of Machiavelli’s ‘Prince’ or Anti-Machiavel, ed. and tr. Paul
Sonnino (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981).
Galston, William, ‘Constitutional Pluralism’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 28 (2011), 228–41.
Galston, William, Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
234 Bibliography
Galston, William, ‘Moral Pluralism and Liberal Democracy: Isaiah Berlin’s Heterodox
Liberalism’, The Review of Politics, 71 (2009), 85–99.
Garrard, Graeme, ‘The Counter-Enlightenment Liberalism of Isaiah Berlin’, Journal of Political
Ideologies, 2 (1997), 281–96.
Garrard, Graeme, Counter-Enlightenments from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (London:
Routledge, 2006).
Garrard, Graeme, ‘The Enlightenment and Its Enemies’, American Behavioral Scientist, 49
(2006), 664–80.
Garrard, Graeme, ‘Strange Reversals: Berlin on the Enlightenment and the Counter-
Enlightenment’, in George Crowder and Henry Hardy (eds), The One and the Many: Reading
Isaiah Berlin (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), 141–57.
Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment, 2 vols (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967–70).
Gay, Peter, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1959).
Ghosh, Peter, ‘Hugh Trevor-Roper and the History of Ideas’, History of European Ideas, 37
(2011), 483–505.
Godel, Rainer, ‘“Eine unendliche Menge dunkeler Vorstellungen”: Zur Widerständigkeit von
Empfindungen und Vorurteilen in der deutschen Spätaufklärung’, Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift
für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 76 (2002), 542–76.
Godel, Rainer, Vorurteil—Anthropologie—Literatur (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007).
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, ed. Friedmar
Apel and others, 40 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1986–2000).
Gonthier, Ursula Haskins, Montesquieu and England: Enlightened Exchanges, 1689–1755
(London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010).
Granovskii, T. N., Sochineniia, 4th edn (Moscow: Tovarishchestvo tipografii A. I. Mamontova,
1900).
Gray, John, Isaiah Berlin (London: Harper Collins, 1995).
Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, tr. Thomas Burger and
Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1989).
Habermas, Jürgen, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der
bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962).
Hacking, Ian, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
Hamann, Johann Georg, Briefe, 7 vols (vols 1–3 ed. Walther Ziesemer and Arthur Henkel, vols
4–7 ed. Arthur Henkel; Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1955–79).
Hamann, Johann Georg, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Josef Nadler, 6 vols (Vienna: Herder Verlag,
1949–57).
Hampshire, Stuart, ‘Nationalism’, in Edna and Avishai Margalit (eds), Isaiah Berlin: A
Celebration (London: Hogarth Press, 1991), 127–32.
Hanson, D., Fideism and Hume’s Philosophy (New York: Peter Lang, 1993).
Hardy, Henry, ‘Isaiah Berlin: A Personal Impression’, in Raphael Cohen-Almagor (ed.),
Challenges to Democracy: Essays in Honour and Memory of Isaiah Berlin (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2000), xxxi–xxxviii.
Harrington, James, The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, ed. J. G. A. Pocock
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Haslam, Jonathan, The Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr, 1892–1982 (London: Verso, 2000).
Bibliography 235
Hausheer, Roger, ‘Enlightening the Enlightenment’, in Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler (eds),
Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society,
93, part 5 (Philadelphia, 2003), 33–50.
Hazard, Paul, La Pensée européenne au XVIIIe siècle: de Montesquieu à Lessing (Paris: Boivin,
1946).
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, ‘Hamann’s Schriften’, 1818, in Theorie Werkausgabe, ed. Eva
Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970; 3rd edn, 2003),
vol. 2.
Herder, Johann Gottfried, Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed.
Katharina Mommsen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1976).
Herder, Johann Gottfried, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, 33 vols (Berlin: Weidmann,
1877–1913).
Herder, Johann Gottfried, Werke, ed. Wolfgang Pross, 3 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1984–2002).
Herder, Johann Gottfried, Werke, ed. Günter Arnold and others, 10 vols (Frankfurt a.M.:
Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2000).
Herms, Eilert, ‘Bildung des Gemeinwesens aus dem Christentum: Beobachtungen zum
Grundmotiv von Herders literarischem Schaffen’, in Martin Kessler and Volker Leppin (eds),
Johann Gottfried Herder: Aspekte seines Lebenswerkes (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter,
2005), 309–25.
Herzen, Alexander [A. I. Gertzen], From the Other Shore, tr. Moura Budberg (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1956).
Herzen, Alexander [A. I. Gertzen], My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen,
trans. Constance Garnett, revised by Humphrey Higgens, 4 vols (London: Chatto & Windus,
1968).
Herzen, Alexander [A. I. Gertzen], Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo
Akademii nauk SSSR, 1954‒65).
Hess, Moses, Dynamische Stofflehre (Paris: Syb. M. Hess, 1877).
Hess, Moses, Die europäische Triarchie (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1841).
Hess, Moses, Die heilige Geschichte der Menschheit (Stuttgart: Hallberger, 1837).
Hess, Moses, The Revival of Israel: Rome and Jerusalem, the Last Nationalist Question, tr. Meyer
Waxman (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).
Hess, Moses, ‘Rom und Jerusalem, die letzte Nationalitätsfrage’, in Ausgewählte Schriften, ed.
Horst Lademacher (Cologne: Joseph Melzer, 1962), 221–320.
Hess, Moses, ‘Über das Geldwesen’, in Philosophische und Sozialistische Schriften (1837–1850),
ed. Auguste Cornu and Wolfgang Mönke (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1961), 329–48.
Hobhouse, L. T., The Elements of Social Justice (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922).
Hobhouse, L. T., The Metaphysical Theory of the State: A Criticism (London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1918).
Hobhouse, L. T., The Rational Good: A Study in the Logic of Practice (London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1921).
Hobson, Marian, ‘Diderot, Jacobi, et le Spinozastreit’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 106
(2006), 337–50.
Hobson, Marian, Hegel interprete du dialogue entre Lui et Moi sur la musique, in Franck
Salaün and Patrick Taïeb (eds), Musique et pantomime dans ‘Le Neveu de Rameau’ de Diderot,
collection ‘Fictions pensantes’ (Paris: Hermann, 2016), pp. 97–108.
236 Bibliography
Hobson, Marian, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Diderot in the Late 1740s: Satire, Friendship, and
Freedom’, in Christie McDonald and Stanley Hoffmann (eds), Rousseau and Freedom
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 58–76.
Hobson, Marian, The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France
Hont, Istvan, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical
Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical
Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmidt Noerr, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente
(New York, 1944; revised, Amsterdam: Querido, 1947).
Huizinga, J. H., The Making of a Saint: The Tragi-Comedy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (London:
Hamish Hamilton, 1976).
Hume, David, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Principles of Morals, 3rd edn,
rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
Hume, David, Essays: Moral, Literary and Political, ed. Eugene Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty
Fund, 1987).
Hume, David, Essays Moral, Political and Literary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).
Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1978).
Hunt, Richard N., The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels: Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy,
1818–1850 (Pittsburgh, VA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974).
Ignatieff, Michael, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998).
Ignatieff, Michael, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution (New
York: Pantheon, 1978).
Israel, Jonathan, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights
1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Israel, Jonathan, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man
1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Israel, Jonathan, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750
Israel, Jonathan, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of
Modern Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Jackson, Ben, Equality and the British Left (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
Jacob, Margaret, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London:
Allen & Unwin, 1981).
Jahanbegloo, Ramin, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin: Recollections of a Historian of Ideas
(London: Peter Halban, 1992).
Kail, Peter, ‘The Sceptical Beast of the Beastly Sceptic’, in Constantine Sandis and Mark J. Cain
(eds), Human Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 219–31.
Kammen, Michael, A Machine that Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture
(New York: Knopf, 1986).
Kant, Immanuel, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (Chicago, IL: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1963).
Bibliography 237
Kant, Immanuel, Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, tr. H. B. Nisbet, 2nd edn (Cambridge:
Kant, Immanuel, Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace and History, ed.
Pauline Kleingeld (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
Kant, Immanuel, Werke, ed. Ernst Cassirer et al. (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1921–3).
Kant, Immanuel, Werke, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, 6 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1964).
Kapossy, Béla, ‘The Sociable Patriot: Isaak Iselin’s Protestant Reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’,
History of European Ideas, 27 (2001), 153–70.
Katznelson, Ira, ‘Isaiah Berlin's Modernity’, Social Research, 66 (1999), 1079–1101.
Kelley, Donald R., ‘Vico’s Road: From Philology to Jurisprudence and Back’, in Giorgio
Tagliacozzo and Donald P. Verene (eds), Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity (Baltimore,
MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 15–29.
Kelly, Aileen M., Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers between Necessity and Chance (New
Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1998).
Kelly, Aileen M., Views from the Other Shore: Essays on Herzen, Chekhov, and Bakhtin (New
Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999).
Kelly, Duncan, ‘The Political Thought of Isaiah Berlin’, British Journal of Politics and International
Relations, 4:1 (2002), 25–48.
Keohane, Nannerl O., ‘ “The Masterpiece of Policy in Our Century”: Rousseau on the Morality
of the Enlightenment’, Political Theory, 6 (1978), 457–84.
Keohane, Nannerl O., Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).
Kessler, Michael, ‘Herder’s Theology’, in Hans Adler and Wulf Koepke (eds), A Companion to
the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 247–75.
Kessler, Michael, Johann Gottfried Herder: Aspekte seines Lebenswerkes (Berlin: de Gruyter,
2005).
Kidd, Colin, ‘Lord Dacre and the Politics of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Scottish Historical
Review, 84 (2005), 202–22.
Kimball, Fiske, The Creation of the Rococo Decorative Style (originally Philadelphia: Philadelphia
Museum of Art, 1943; repr. New York: Dover, 1980).
Kocis, Robert A., ‘Reason, Development, and the Conflicts of Human Ends: Sir Isaiah Berlin’s
Vision of Politics’, American Political Science Review, 74 (1980), 38–52.
Koltun-Fromm, Ken, Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
Koselleck, Reinhart, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society,
tr. Keith Tribe (Oxford, New York, Hamburg: Berg, 1988).
Koselleck, Reinhart, Kritik und Krise: Ein Beitrag zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt
(Freiburg: Alber, 1959).
Krauze, Enrique, ‘Foreword’, in Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human
Liberty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
Lamb, Peter, ‘G. D. H. Cole on the General Will: A Socialist Reflects on Rousseau’, European
Journal of Political Theory, 4 (2005), 283–300.
Lampert, E., Studies in Rebellion (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957).
Laski, Harold J., Liberty in the Modern State (London: Faber & Faber, 1930).
238 Bibliography
Laski, Harold J., The Socialist Tradition in the French Revolution (London: The Fabian Society,
1930).
Lattek, Christine, Revolutionary Refugees: German Socialism in Britain, 1840–1860 (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2006).
Lee, Hermione, ‘Foreword’, in Isaiah Berlin, Personal Impressions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Lehner, Ulrich L., and Michael Printy (eds), A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in
Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
Leopold, David, ‘Karl Marx and British Socialism’, in W. J. Mander (ed.), The Oxford Handbook
of British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014),
402–22.
Leopold, David, The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human
Flourishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Lifschitz, Avi, Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century
Lilla, Mark, G. B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard
Lilla, Mark, ‘What is Counter-Enlightenment?’, in Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler (eds), Isaiah
Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 93,
part 5 (Philadelphia, 2003), 1–12.
Lilla, Mark, and others, The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (New York: New York Review of Books,
2001).
Loen, Johann Michael von, ‘Von der Staats-Kunst des Machiavels’, in Des Herrn von Loen gesa-
mmlete kleine Schriften, 4 vols (Frankfurt a.M. and Leipzig: Philipp Heinrich Hutter, 1750),
iv. 270–81.
Lukács, Georg, ‘Moses Hess and the Problems of the Idealist Dialectic’, Telos, 10 (winter 1971),
3–34.
Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Discourses, tr. Leslie J. Walker (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1950).
Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price, Cambridge Texts in
the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981).
Maier, Pauline, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788 (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 2010).
Mali, Joseph, ‘Berlin, Vico, and the Principles of Humanity’, in Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler
(eds), Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment, Transactions of the American Philosophical
Society, 93, part 5 (Philadelphia, 2003), 51–72.
Mali, Joseph, ‘The Invention of the Counter-Enlightenment: The Case for the Defense’, in
Asaph Ben-Tov, Yaacov Deutsch, and Tamar Herzig (eds), Knowledge and Religion in Early
Modern Europe: Studies in Honor of Michael Heyd (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 205–28.
Mali, Joseph, The Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural History: From Jules Michelet to Isaiah Berlin
Mali, Joseph, The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s New Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992).
Mali, Joseph (ed. with Robert Wokler), Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment, Transactions of
the American Philosophical Society, 93, part 5 (Philadelphia, 2003).
Bibliography 239
Malia, Martin, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Mandeville, Bernard, The Fable of the Bees, ed. Phillip Harth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970).
Margalit, Edna and Avishai (eds), Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration (London: Hogarth Press, 1991).
Marx, Karl, Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1976).
Mastellone, Salvo, Pensiero politico e vita culturale a Napoli nella seconda metà del Seicento
(Messina and Florence: G. D’Anna, 1965).
Mayo, B. ‘Is There a Case for the General Will?’, Philosophy, 25 (1950), 247–52, repr. in Peter
Laslett (ed.), Philosophy, Politics and Society, first series (Oxford: Blackwell, 1956), 92–7.
McMahon, Darrin, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the
Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Meinecke, Friedrich, Die Entstehung des Historismus, 2 vols (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1936).
Meinecke, Friedrich, The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections, tr. Sidney B. Fay
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).
Meinecke, Friedrich, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, tr. J. E. Anderson, with a
foreword by Sir Isaiah Berlin (London: Routledge, 1972).
Meinecke, Friedrich, Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte, ed. Walther Hofer
(Munich: Oldenbourg, 1957).
Mendelssohn, Moses, Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, tr. Allan Arkush (Hanover,
NH: Brandeis University Press, 1983).
Menze, Ernest A., ‘Herder and Prejudice: Insights and Ambiguities’, Herder Jahrbuch. Herder
Yearbook, 6 (2002), 83–93.
Mill, John Stuart, Autobiography, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: Toronto
University Press, 1981), vol. I.
Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: Toronto
University Press, 1977), vol. XVIII.
Miller, Cecilia, Giambattista Vico: Imagination and Historical Knowledge (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1993).
Mirsky, D. S., A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900, ed. and abridged by
Francis J. Whitfield (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949).
Mitchell, Leslie, Maurice Bowra: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Momigliano, Arnaldo, ‘Vico’s Scienza nuova: Roman “bestioni” and Roman “eroi”, in Momigliano,
Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 253–76.
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, tr. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S.
Stone, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
Mortier, Roland, Diderot en Allemagne (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1954).
Naddeo, Barbara Ann, Vico and Naples: The Urban Origins of Modern Social Theory (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).
Nicolai, Friedrich, Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781:
Nebst Bemerkungen über Gelehrsamkeit, Industrie, Religion und Sitten, 8 vols (Berlin and
Stettin: no pub., 1783–7).
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, tr. Reginald Hollingdale
Nisbet, Robert A., ‘Rousseau and Totalitarianism’, Journal of Politics, 5 (1943), 93–114.
Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
240 Bibliography
Nuzzo, Enrico, ‘Attorno a Vico e Bayle’, in Nuzzo, Tra ordine di storia e storicità: Saggi sui saperi
della storia in Vico (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2001), 165–239.
Offord, Derek, ‘Alexander Herzen and James de Rothschild’, Toronto Slavic Quarterly, 19 (win-
ter 2007), unpaginated (available online).
Offord, Derek, ‘Alexander Herzen’, in G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole (eds), A History of
Russian Philosophy, 1830‒1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 52‒68.
Offord, Derek, Portraits of Early Russian Liberals: A Study of the Thought of T. N. Granovsky,
V. P. Botkin, P. V. Annenkov, A. V. Druzhinin and K. D. Kavelin (Cambridge: Cambridge
Osbat, Luciano, L’Inquisizione a Napoli: il processo agli ateisti 1688–1697 (Rome: Edizioni di
Storia e Letteratura, 1974).
Outram, Dorinda, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Ozouf, Mona, Les mots des femmes: essai sur la singularité française (Paris: Fayard, 1995).
Pagano, Franceso Mario, Saggi politici: de’ principii, progressi e decadenza delle società (Naples,
first edn, 1783–5, second edn 1791–2), ed. Luigi Firpo and Laura Salvetti Firpo (Naples:
Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, 1993).
Pangle, Thomas, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism: A Commentary on ‘The Spirit of the
Laws’ (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1973).
Pénisson, Pierre, ‘Nachwort’, in Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, ed. Wolfgang Pross, 3 vols
(Munich: Hanser, 1984–2002), vol. 1, 864–920.
Piro, Francesco, ‘I presupposti teologici del giunaturalismo moderno nella percezione di Vico’,
Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani, 30 (2000), 125–49.
Plekhanov, G. V., In Defence of Materialism: The Development of the Monist View of History,
tr. Andrew Rothstein (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1947).
Plekhanov, G. V., The Development of the Monist View of History (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1956).
Plekhanov, G. V., ‘The Development of the Monist View of History’, Selected Philosophical
Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing, 1976), vol. 1.
Plekhanov, G. V., ‘Essays on the History of Materialism’, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow:
Foreign Languages Publishing, 1976), vol. 2.
Pocock, J. G. A., Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999–2015).
Pocock, J. G. A., Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge:
Pogge, Thomas, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice (New York: Oxford University Press,
2007).
Porter, Roy, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane,
2000).
Porter, Roy, and Mikuláš Teich (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge:
Prawer, S. S., Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
Rawls, John, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
Bibliography 241
Reed, T. J., Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 2015).
Reill, Peter H., The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1975).
Reill, Peter H., Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2005).
Renner, Kaspar, ‘Schreibweisen der Apokalypse: Die Johannesoffenbarung in Herders hand-
schriftlichem Nachlass’, in Ralf Simon (ed.), Herders Rhetoriken im Kontext des 18.
Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg: Synchon, 2014), 253–74.
Richter, Lutz (ed.), Johann Gottfried Herder im Spiegel seiner Zeitgenossen: Briefe und
Selbstzeugnisse (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978).
Ricuperati, Giuseppe, Frontieri e limiti della ragione: della crisi della coscienza europea all’illu-
minismo (Milan: UTET, 2006).
Robertson, John, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge:
Robertson, John, The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015).
Robertson, John, ‘Hugh Trevor-Roper, Intellectual History and “The Religious Origins of the
Enlightenment”’, English Historical Review, 124 (2009), 1389–421.
Robertson, John, ‘Sacred History and Political Thought: Neapolitan Responses to the Problem
of Sociability after Hobbes’, The Historical Journal, 56 (2013), 1–29.
Robertson, Ritchie, ‘Goethe and Machiavelli’, in The Present Word: Culture, Society and the Site
of Literature: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle, ed. John Walker (London: Legenda, 2013),
126–37.
Rockwood, R. O. (ed.), Carl Becker’s Heavenly City Revisited (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1958).
Rorty, Richard, ‘The Continuity between Enlightenment and “Postmodernism” ’, in K. M. Baker
and P. H. Reill (eds), What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2001), 19–36.
Rosen, Zevi, Moses Hess und Karl Marx: Ein Beitrag zur Entstehung der Marxschen Theorie
(Hamburg: Christians, 1983).
Rossi, Paolo, ‘Chi sono i contemporanei di Vico?’, Rivista di filosofia, 62 (1981), 51–82, repr. in
Rossi, Le sterminate antichità e nuovi saggi vichiani (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1999),
275–303.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols
(Paris: Gallimard, 1964–9).
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract and The Discourses, tr. G. D. H. Cole, Everyman’s
Library (London: David Campbell, 1993).
Russell, Bertrand, History of Western Philosophy and its Connection with Political and Social
Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945).
Ryan, Alan (ed.), The Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
Ryan, Alan, The Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2012).
Schiller, Friedrich, Werke und Briefe, ed. Otto Dann and others, 12 vols (Frankfurt a.M.:
Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992–2005).
242 Bibliography
Schmidt, James, ‘Introduction: What is Enlightenment? A Question, Its Context, and Some
Consequences’, in James Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers
and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of
California Press, 1996).
Schmidt, James, ‘Inventing a Counter-Enlightenment: Liberalism, Nihilism, and Totalitarianism’
(2011) (http://www.academia.edu/3751128/Inventing_a_Counter-Enlightenment_Liberalism_
Nihilism_and_Totalitarianism).
Schmidt, James, ‘Inventing the Enlightenment: Anti-Jacobins, British Hegelians, and the
Oxford English Dictionary’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64 (2003), 421–43.
Schmidt, James (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-
Century Questions (Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press,
1996).
Schmidt, James, ‘What Enlightenment Was, What it Still Might Be, and Why Kant May Have
Been Right after All’, American Behavioural Scientist, 49 (2006), 647–63.
Schneiders, Werner, Aufklärung und Vorurteilskritik: Studien zur Geschichte der Vorurteilstheorie
(Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1983).
Schulz, Kathryn, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (London: Portobello, 2010).
Seneca the Younger, Apocolocyntosis (The pumpkinification) (http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/
sen/sen.apoc.shtml).
Shackleton, Robert, ‘Montesquieu and Machiavelli: A Reappraisal’, in Shackleton, Essays on
Montesquieu and on the Enlightenment, ed. David Gilson and Martin Smith (Oxford: Voltaire
Foundation, 1988), 117–32.
Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph, What Is the Third Estate?, tr. M. Blondel, ed. S. E. Finer (London: Pall
Mall Press, 1963).
Sikka, Sonia, Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism (Cambridge:
Skinner, Quentin, Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
Skinner, Quentin, Visions of Politics, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
vol. 2: Renaissance Virtues.
Slee, Peter, ‘The Oxford Idea of a Liberal Education: The Invention of Tradition and the
Manufacture of Practice’, History of Universities, 7 (1988), 61–87.
Sorkin, David, The Religious Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Sparling, R. A., Johann Georg Hamann and the Enlightenment Project (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2010).
Spector, Céline, Montesquieu: liberté, droit et histoire (Paris: Michalan, 2010).
Spink, J. S., Jean-Jacques Rousseau et Genève (Paris: Boivin, 1934).
Stapelbroek, Koen, Love, Self-Deceit and Money: Commerce and Morality in the Early Neapolitan
Enlightenment (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2008).
Sternhell, Zeev, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, tr. David Maisel (New Haven, CT: Yale
Sternhell, Zeev, Les anti-Lumières: une tradition du XVIIIe siècle à la guerre froide, Collection
Folio Histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2010).
Stolz, Johann Jakob, writing as ‘Joseph Gedeon Kr.’, Ueber Schwärmerey, Toleranz und
Predigtwesen (Upsal: no publ. [recte Leipzig: Weidmann], 1776).
Bibliography 243
Stone, H. S., Vico’s Cultural History: The Production and Transmission of Ideas in Naples
1685–1750 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997).
Strada, Famianus, De Bello Belgico: The History of the Low-Countrey Warres, written in Latine
by Famianus Strada; in English by Sr. Rob. Stapylton (London: Humphrey Modseley, 1650).
Strugnell, Anthony, Diderot’s Politics: A Study of the Evolution of Diderot’s Political Thought after
the ‘Encyclopédie’ (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973).
Susskind, Jamie, Karl Marx and British Intellectuals in the 1930s (Burford: Davenant Press, 2011).
Talmon, J. L., writing as J. L. Flajszer, ‘The Doctrine of Poverty in its Religious, Social and
Political Aspects as Illustrated by Some XII–XIII Century Movements’, unpublished
PhD thesis (London School of Economics, 1943).
Taylor, Charles, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
Taylor, Charles, ‘The Importance of Herder’, in Edna Margalit and Avishai Margalit (eds),
Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration (London: Hogarth Press, 1991), 40–63.
Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge
Toews, John, ‘Berlin’s Marx: Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment, and the Historical
Construction of Cultural Identities’, in Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler (eds), Isaiah Berlin’s
Counter-Enlightenment, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 93, part 5
(Philadelphia, 2003), 163–76.
Venturi, Franco, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in
Nineteenth-Century Russia, tr. Francis Haskell, with an introduction by Isaiah Berlin
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1960).
Vico, Giambattista, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, tr. M. H. Fisch and T. G. Bergin
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1944).
Vico, Giambattista, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, tr. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948, revised 1968).
Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation, tr. Nicholas Cronk (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994).
Voltaire, Voltaire: Political Writings, ed. David Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994).
vom Hofe, Gerhard, ‘“Weitstrahlsinnige” Ur-Kunde: Zur Eigenart und Begründung des
Historismus beim jungen Herder’, in Gerhard Sauder (ed.), Johann Gottfried Herder
1744–1803 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1987), 364–82.
Wertz, Spencer, ‘Hume, History, and Human Nature’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (1975),
481–96.
Williams, Bernard, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Wokler, Robert, ‘Isaiah Berlin’s Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment’, in Joseph Mali
and Robert Wokler (eds), Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment, Transactions of the
American Philosophical Society, 93, part 5 (Philadelphia, 2003), 13–32.
Wollheim, Richard, ‘The Idea of a Common Human Nature’, in Edna and Avishai Margalit
(eds), Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration (London: Hogarth Press, 1991), 64–79.
Wood, Gordon, ‘The American Enlightenment’, in Gary L. McDowell and Johnathan O’Neill
(eds) America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2006), 159–76.
244 Bibliography
Yack, Bernard, ‘The Significance of Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment’, European Journal of

Political Theory, 12 (2013), 49–60.
Zammito, John H., Karl Menges, and Ernest A. Menze, ‘Johann Gottfried Herder Revisited:
The Revolution in Scholarship in the Last Quarter Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas,
71 (2010), 661–84.
Index
absolutism 140–1, 216, 227–8 Babbitt, Irving 14, 93 and n.18, 95–6
see also authoritarianism Rousseau and Romanticism 93–4
Acta Eruditorum 156 Babeuf, ‘Gracchus’ 95, 226
Adams, John 207 Bacon, Francis 139, 142, 159
Adler, Hans 170n.27 The Advancement of Learning 142
Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer 6 and Essays 142
n.14, 80, 114, 139–40 Badaloni, Piero 157n.23
Dialektik der Aufklärung 5, 139, 161 Baillie, J. 100
aesthetics 18, 63, 72, 99 and n.1 see also style Bailyn, Bernard 7n.20
Aiken, Henry D. 115n.8 Bakunin, Mikhail 188, 192, 194–5, 201
The Age of Ideology: The Nineteenth-Century Banville, John 222
Philosophers 115 Barruel, abbé Augustin 6n.16
Akhmatova, Anna 16, 48, 224, 226 Basel 58n.13
Aksakov, Konstantin 191 Bauer, Bruno 34
Alba, Duke of 145–6 Baumgarten, A. G. 171
d’Alembert, Jean le Rond 106 Bayle, Pierre
Discours préliminaire (to the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique 144
Encyclopédie) 159 Becker, Carl 6n.18, 80
Alexander II (of Russia) 190 Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century
Ancien Régime, the 7, 9, 12, 37 Philosophers 6n.18
ancient world, the 3, 87, 138, 150, 224 behaviourism 105
see also Greeks and Romans Belinsky, Vissarion 113, 188, 190–2, 194n.15,
Anderson, J. E. 198–201
Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Bell, The 193
Outlook 162 Bentham, Jeremy 43, 82, 124–6, 131–2,
Anglo-American world 7, 12, 25–6, 61, 163, 212, 226
164n.5, 175 A Fragment on Government 207n.3
Annenkov, Pavel 198, 199n.36 Bergin, T. G. 152
d’Annunzio, Gabriele 90 Berkeley, George 11, 36, 39n.11, 54, 115
Arendt, Hannah 217 Berlin 107, 148
On Revolution 217 Berlin, Isaiah
d’Argens, Marquis 141 background/education/life of 3 and n.9, 4,
Lettres juives 140 13, 16, 48–50, 65, 80, 92, 155, 160, 166,
Aristotle 3n.9 201, 220–2, 227
atheism 9, 44, 56, 104, 109, 137, 149 correspondence of see Berlin, Isaiah, works of,
Atlantic Monthly 90 letters
atomism/corpuscularianism see mechanism/ ideas about the Enlightenment
mechanistic philosophy see Enlightenment, the, Berlin’s
Auden, W. H. ideas about
‘Voltaire at Ferney’ 47 intellectual milieu/development of 13, 25–6,
Auerbach, Erich 152 30, 35–6, 41–2, 52, 70, 82, 92–4,
Augustine, St 132 96n.31, 165, 166 and n.14, 167–9, 184,
Austin, J. L. 35 and nn.1–2 221–2, 227
Austria 142, 147, 190 legacy of 14, 50, 180, 220, 228
authoritarianism 33, 85, 90, 100, 107 and n.23, liberalism of see under liberalism and liberty
108, 120, 122, 129–30, 143–5, 188, parents of 30n.35 see Berlin, Marie
190–1, 198, 208, 210, 216, 227–8 and Berlin, Mendel
see also absolutism and totalitarianism perceptions/reception of 1, 18, 38, 119, 165,
Ayer, Alfred (Freddie) 3–4, 35 and n.1 168n.19, 176, 186, 207, 221–2, 228
Language, Truth and Logic 3 scholarly practice of 22n.10, 92
246 index
Berlin, Isaiah (cont.) ‘Democracy, Communism and the

sources used by 27, 92–4, 154n.14, 157n.23, Individual’ 36
167n.16, 194, 224 ‘Freedom and its Betrayal’ 37
style/rhetoric of 18, 81–2, 85, 99, 101, ‘History as an Alibi’ 38
154n.14, 169, 177–9, 184–5, 220 ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends
work of 5, 18, 38, 42, 115, 223 of Life’ 124–6
works of 69 ‘The Life and Opinions of
Against the Current 55, 79, 137, 208–9 Moses Hess’ 176–81
The Age of Enlightenment 11, 39, 42, 54, ‘Montesquieu’ 79, 81–3
58, 65, 70, 80, 115 ‘The Origins of Cultural History’ 153
broadcasts 11, 17, 37, 90, 96–7, 113, 188 ‘The Rise of Modern Political Ideas in
The Crooked Timber of Humanity 119, 154 the Romantic Age’ 36, 80–1, 90, 96
essays 11, 17, 65, 81 ‘The Romantic Age, 1760–1830’ 36
‘Alleged Relativism in ‘The Roots of Romanticism’ 11n.32,
Eighteenth-Century Thought’ 164 39–40
‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ 42, 51, ‘Three Turning Points in the History of
55, 57, 60–1, 87, 153, 162, 164 Political Thought’ 40n.16
‘Does Political Theory Still Exist?’ 210 ‘Vico’s Theory of Knowledge and its
‘Freedom and its Betrayal’ 51, 221 Sources’ 153
‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’ 188 letters 1, 11, 18, 46, 51, 195, 220–2 see also
‘Herder and the Enlightenment’ 164, under Hardy, Henry
169, 175 to Violet Bonham Carter 90
‘Herzen and Bakunin on Individual to Elizabeth Bowen 114n.2
Liberty’ 194 to Rowland Burdon-Muller 218n.51
‘Herzen and His Memoirs’ 188n.4 to Alan Dudley 215n.39
‘From Hope and Fear Set Free’ 121 to Herbert Elliston 97
‘Historical Inevitability’ 38n.8, 44, 121, to Diana Hubback 62n.29
129, 223 to Jakob Huizinga 14n.38, 90, 137
‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of to Mark Lilla 165n.10
Life’ 121, 124, 126, 131 to Quentin Skinner 155n.18, 166n.13
‘Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of to J. L. Talmon 97
Nationalism’ 116 to Stephen Toulmin 58
‘A Marvellous Decade’ 113 to Hugh Trevor-Roper 155n.16
‘Montesquieu’ 208 to Adam von Trott 160n.32
‘My Intellectual Path’ 167 to Andrzej Walicki 209
‘The Originality of Machiavelli’ 137–9 to Chaim Weizmann 218
‘The Philosophical Ideas of Giambattista to Morton White 40n.16, 209n.11
Vico’ 152–3 Liberty 217
‘Political Ideas in the Twentieth The Life and Opinions of Moses
Century’ 121, 126 Hess 176–86
‘The Remarkable Decade’ 188, 198 The Magus of the North 71, 118
‘A Revolutionary without Personal Impressions 218
Fanaticism’ 188n.4 Political Ideas in the Romantic Age 90–1,
‘Tolstoy and Enlightenment’ 188 94, 96
‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ 1, 121–4, The Roots of Romanticism 11n.32, 51,
133, 205n.2, 216n.43 91, 104
‘Vico and the Ideal of the Russian Thinkers 188, 190–1, 195, 197,
Enlightenment’ 153 199–200
foreword to Historism: The Rise of a The Sense of Reality 116
New Historical Outlook 162 Three Critics of the Enlightenment
Four Essays on Liberty 38n.8, 121, 138 164, 212
The Hedgehog and the Fox 16, 188 Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the
Karl Marx: His Life and Environment 4, History of Ideas 152–4, 164
10, 14, 21–3, 25–6, 30, 33–6, 40–1, Berlin, Marie 30n.35
52–3, 93, 181 Berlin, Mendel 30n.35
lectures 11, 37 and n.4, 38, 40, 81–2, Berlinische Monatsschrift 2n.4, 118
176–9, 185 Bernstein, Eduard 6n.17
index 247
Besterman, Theodore 13n.36 Cherniss, Joshua 21n.4, 25, 34n.51, 92, 93n.18,
Bible, the 5, 9, 15, 103, 158 and n.27, 168, 170–1, 151, 221, 224
174 and n.54, 175, 179 Chicherin, Boris 191
bin Laden, Osama 114n.6 Christianity 2, 4, 15, 59, 97, 128, 138–9, 148,
Blackstone, William 150, 162, 173–5, 196–7
Commentaries 207n.3 Augustinian 6n.19, 157
Blumenberg, Werner 23n.13 Catholic 56, 59, 109, 146, 157, 158 and n.26
Blunt, Anthony 222 opposition to 4n.12, 5–6, 9, 15
Bodin, Jean 142 Orthodox 192
Bonald, Louis Gabriel Ambroise de 56 Protestant 56, 59, 146, 157–8
Bonaparte, Napoleon 11n.31, 90, 148, 226 Anglican 17
Bordeu, Théophile de 55 Calvinist 146, 182
Borgia, Cesare 144 Lutheran 168
Bosanquet, Bernard 92 Pietist 65
Botkin, Vasilii 192 Quaker 98
Boulanger, Nicolas-Antoine 159 Socinian 8
Bowen, Elizabeth 26, 114n.2 tradition of 37
Bowra, Maurice 3–4, 17, 22 Christians 7, 39, 137
Boyle, Robert 159 Church, the 98, 157–8, 190–1
Bradlaugh, Charles 128 Churchill, Winston 90, 96, 207, 221
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Cicero 139
the 36, 37n.4 citizens/citizenship 3, 17, 128, 138, 143–4, 227
Britten, Benjamin 222 City University of New York 49n.58
Brooke, Christopher 14 civilization 2, 15, 91, 175, 187, 192, 196
Brown, John 143, 147 Classics (or Literae Humaniores) 3 and nn.7
Bryn Mawr College 36, 37n.4, 38, 39 and n.10, and 9
40, 48, 80, 90 Cobb, Richard 7n.22
Buckle, Henry Thomas 82 Cobban, Alfred 93
Burgess, Guy 222 Cold War, the 1, 10, 16, 34, 160, 167, 168n.19,
Burke, Edmund 6n.16, 37, 54, 55 and n.7, 86, 188, 221, 224, 227
88, 162 Cole, G. D. H. 25, 93, 227
Butterfield, Herbert 137 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 129
Collingwood, R. G. 43, 114n.2, 152 and n.4
Calas, Jean 47 Collini, Stefan 10, 17
‘Cambridge School’, the 154n.14, 155 Columbia University 6
Cammaerts, Emile 97 communism 10, 138, 166, 178–80, 227
capitalism 24, 30, 183, 193, 198, 200n.39 see also Marxism
Carlyle, Thomas 90 Berlin’s ideas about 36, 166–8, 223
Carr, E. H. 25, 92, 96, 155n.16, 193 and community 61, 78, 85, 196, 218–19
nn.13–14, 223 Comte, Auguste 38, 82, 127–8
Karl Marx: A Study in Fanaticism 25 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 26, 39n.11, 42,
The Romantic Exiles 188, 193 and n.13 54, 57, 115
What is History? 38n.8, 193 and n.14 Treatise on Sensations 54
Carritt, E. F. 92 Condorcet, Nicholas de 26, 30, 32, 38 and n.8,
Cassirer, Ernst 5–6, 11, 52, 62 and n.29, 46, 54, 114, 166, 206, 219
63–6 conservatism 28, 65, 167n.16
and Berlin 9n.29, 27, 63 and n.30, 65, 80, Constant, Benjamin 10, 11n.31, 38, 224–5
160 and n.32 Adolphe 11n.31
Die Philosophie der Aufklärung 5, 42, 63 constitutionalism 16, 64, 79, 87, 89, 205–8,
and n.30, 65, 80, 160 209 and n.12, 210, 212–15,
Catherine the Great (of Russia) 104, 106–7 217–19, 224–7
Catholic Enlightenment 8 and n.24 constitutions 107, 117, 207 and n.6, 208, 209
Caute, David 26, 223–4 and n.14, 210–11, 213, 214n.38,
Isaac and Isaiah 221, 223–4 215, 217–18, 225
censorship 147 constructivism 206
Cerutti, Joseph Antoine 213 conversation 47–50, 101, 112
Charron, Pierre 55 cosmopolitanism 8n.23, 45, 80
248 index
Counter-Enlightenment, the 12 and n.34, Dobb, Maurice 25n.23, 227

13n.34, 16, 18, 45, 52, 57, 58 and n.13, Dostoevsky, Fyodor 5n.14, 46, 191
59, 62, 86–7, 89, 100, 108,115, 119, The Devils 199
150, 152, 154, 187, 191, 202 Dubnov, Arie 25, 30–1, 94, 151, 221, 224
Berlin’s idea of 14–16, 27–8, 32, 40, 42, 44–8, Dunn, John 155
51–3, 55–7, 60–2, 65, 79, 86–7, 108, Durkheim, Émile 82, 84
111–12, 115, 119, 149, 151, 153–4, Dutch Revolt, the 145
161–3, 167, 175
members of the 15, 29, 54n.5, 65, 71, 86, 102, East India Company, the 122, 129 and n.19
111, 115, 149, 154, 159, 167, 175, 212 economics 3n.9, 23, 30–1, 39, 43, 121, 143–4,
Crick, Bernard 215 197, 201, 212 see also political
Crimean War, the 193 economy
Croce, Benedetto 152 education 2, 3n.5, 4, 16–17, 81, 171, 175
Crowder, George 34n.51 egalitarianism 4, 9, 132 see also equality
Cuba 6n.17 Eliot, T. S. 96
culture 28, 38, 63–5, 72–3, 76–7, 81–3, 99n.1, Elizabeth I (of England) 122
121, 124, 154, 172n.37, 173–4, 187, emotions 18, 29, 44, 74, 78, 84, 105, 113, 116
189, 191, 202 empathy 24, 45, 113–16, 118, 120, 178
and diversity 45, 75, 77, 83, 86, 165 empiricism 9, 26, 29–30, 32, 34, 38–9, 53–6,
see also multiculturalism and 61, 96, 142, 148, 159
pluralism Encyclopédie, the 43, 102, 104–6, 144, 149
Encyclopaedists, the 30n.35, 37, 39n.10, 41,
Darnton, Robert 7 and n.22 44, 60, 190
Darwin, Charles Engels, Friedrich 23, 91, 177, 180, 182
The Origin of Species 124 England 61, 63, 79, 87, 96, 98, 122, 127–8, 143,
Dedieu, Joseph 80 194, 196, 206, 208, 212, 213 and n.27,
deism 9, 149 219, 224, 226
democracy 4, 9, 16, 53, 81, 133, 198, 201–2, 206, and the Enlightenment 202
216n.43, 217, 219, 226–8 thinkers/scholarship of 32, 37, 44,
opposition to 56n.8 155n.16, 161
totalitarian 96 Enlightenment, the
Demosthenes 103 ‘Arminian’ 44
Derrida, Jacques 114 aspects of 14, 29–30
Descartes, René 8–9, 14, 37, 54, 56–7, 60, 131 Berlin’s ideas about/narrative of 5, 9–12, 13 and
despotism see authoritarianism and n.34, 25–6, 27 and n.33, 28, 36, 39 and
totalitarianism nn.10 and 13, 40, 42–8, 52–4, 55 and
determinism 53, 84, 182, 193n.14 n.6, 56 and n.8, 57, 61, 65–6, 79–81, 86,
Deutscher case, the 223–4, 227 88–9, 91, 94, 102, 104–6, 112, 115, 117,
Dewey, John 131 119–21, 126, 139, 149–51, 153, 160–1,
dialectical movement 12, 28, 34n.51, 41, 91, 180 163–4, 166, 168, 205, 208 and n.7, 210,
Diderot, Denis 14, 26, 41–3, 47, 54, 56n.8, 63, 212–15, 217–19, 224–7 see also
79, 99, 101–4, 105 and n.14, 106–7, philosophes, Berlin’s ideas about
108 and n.25, 109–12, 149–50, notion of two Enlightenments 12 and
206, 216 n.34, 13–15, 27, 32, 40, 44, 112
Berlin’s ideas about 55 and n.7, 56, 63, Catholic see Catholic Enlightenment
102, 104, 216 critics of 1, 6n.19, 9, 25, 27, 40, 45, 52, 55n.6,
Les Bijoux indiscrets 103–4, 109–10 61, 102, 114–15, 119, 126, 150,
Le Neveu de Rameau 103, 106n.19, 108 159, 161–7, 191 see also Counter-
Observations sur le Nakaz 107 Enlightenment and Enlightenment,
Le Paradoxe sur le comédien 107, 109 the, interpretation of, as something
La Religieuse 106 negative
Le Rêve de d’Alembert 45, 105, 109 debates about 7, 160, 164n.5
Lettre sur les aveugles 105 definitions of 100, 153
Lettre sur les sourds et muets 102, 109–11 as a dialectical movement 12, 61
‘Machiavélisme’ 144 interpretations of 1–2, 6 and n.18, 7 and
Salon de 1765 104 nn.21–2, 8–9, 12 and n.33, 34, 39,
Dilthey, Wilhelm 45, 58n.13 57n.9, 60–6, 80–1, 87, 106, 112, 120,
index 249
124n.10, 149, 152, 160 and n.31, France 11n.31, 63–4, 83, 99 and n.1, 105,
161, 165, 175, 187, 200, 205, 207, 108–9, 141, 148, 159, 190, 192, 194,
210, 224, 226 196–8, 205, 207n.6, 209, 226
as something negative 5–6, 9–10, 13n.34, culture of 100 and n.5, 104
37, 39, 43, 105, 114, 121, 126, 139–40, and the Enlightenment 12, 26, 32, 41, 44, 51,
150, 161, 164–5, 208, 213, 217 53, 55, 58, 61, 65, 100, 167
see also Counter-Enlightenment and people of 7, 155, 157, 167, 195, 207
Enlightenment, the, critics of thinkers/scholarship of 9n.28, 28, 32, 36–9,
as something positive 5–7, 9, 121, 160 41, 44–5, 54–6, 58, 60, 62n.27, 79, 160
legacy/influence of 2, 5, 16, 31–2, 39, 53, 91, and n.33, 167–8, 200
149, 166, 172, 219 Frankfurt School, the 5, 140
limits of 8 and n.25, 33 Frankfurter, Felix 218
‘membership’ of 9, 11, 41, 43, 51, 53, 54n.5, Franklin, Benjamin 47, 131, 207
60–1, 71, 79, 81, 104, 106, 115, 139, Franklin, Julian 155n.18
150, 158–9, 175, 200, 208n.7 Frederick the Great (of Prussia) 107, 111, 118,
as monolithic 26, 33, 57 and n.10, 87 141–2, 145–6, 216
as a non-homogenous phenomenon 7, 8 and Anti-Machiavel 141–2
n.23, 14, 56, 79, 81, 140, 150 freedom 2, 13, 23, 37–8, 81, 85, 88–9, 119,
see also Enlightenment, the, Berlin’s 121–2, 125, 132, 134, 144, 178, 184,
ideas about/narrative of, notion of two 193n.14, 199, 209n.14, 215, 216 and
Enlightenments n.42, 219, 225–8 see also liberty
thinkers of 5–7, 18, 86, 123, 159, 185, 209, ‘enforced’ 93, 123–4, 129
217 see also philosophes, the French Revolution, the 2n.4, 6–7, 12, 38, 44, 53,
Ensler, Eve 86, 100n.7, 105, 159, 197, 226
The Vagina Monologues 109 Freud, Sigmund 90
environment, the 27, 30, 85
influence of 41, 75–7, 172n.37 Galiani, Celestino 159
Epicureanism 157–8 Galileo 27, 56
epistemology 54 see also knowledge Galston, William 221
equality 27, 89, 181, 226 see also egalitarianism Gans, Eduard 30
Erasmus, Desiderius 43 Garin, Eugenio 155n.18
ethics 1, 36, 87, 122, 177, 180, 184, 206, 219, 228 Garrard, Graeme 168n.20
Europe 6–7, 38, 52, 106–7, 116, 142, 147, 149, Gauguin, Paul 127
155n.16, 157, 160–1, 183, 187, 189–91, Gay, Peter 6 and n.17, 12, 57, 213
194, 197 and Berlin 9n.29, 57n.10
Eastern 114n.6 The Enlightenment: An Interpretation 6, 7n.22
and the Enlightenment 11–12, 27 ideas/theses of 6n.19, 7 and n.20, 8 and n.23,
expressionism 167 and n.18, 174 9 and n.29, 11, 80
general will, the 14, 90, 92–3
fascism 90, 225 see also Nazis Genovesi, Antonio 43
federalism 79 German Movement, the (Deutsche
Fénelon, François 141 Bewegung) 58
Télémaque 141 Germany 33, 59–61, 63, 108, 118, 147–8, 159,
Ferguson, Adam 43, 143, 144 and n.26, 162 190, 196
Ferguson, Arthur 155n.18 and the Counter-Enlightenment 12, 15, 27,
Feuerbach, Ludwig 30 29, 32, 51, 53, 60, 65
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 31, 37, 40, 148–9 and the Enlightenment 8 and n.23, 29, 32, 64,
Fisch, M. H. 152 167, 190
Fisher, H. A. L. 4, 21 people of/from 9n.29, 45, 59, 62n.27, 161, 167
Fonvizin, Denis 190 refugees from 3, 5, 6 and n.17
Ford Foundation, the 47n.48 thinkers/scholarship of 8, 13, 23, 36, 39,
Forster, Michael N. 164 51–4, 57–60, 61n.27, 63–5, 80, 91–2,
After Herder 165 100, 154, 167
‘Herder’s Importance as a Third Reich, the 59 see also Nazis
Philosopher’ 164–5 society/culture/politics of 46, 59, 62n.27,
Foucault, Michel 8n.25, 114, 161 64–5, 69, 167n.16
Discipline and Punish 225 Weimar 59, 64
250 index
Gibbon, Edward 44, 47, 54, 162 thought of 28–9

God 172–3 Phenomenology of Spirit 100, 108 and n.25
Godwin, William 38 Hegelianism 23, 92, 97, 123, 153, 180, 182, 194
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 44, 61n.27, 108, Heidegger, Martin 114n.6, 160
116–17, 124, 145 and n.33, 146, 162 Heine, Heinrich 22
Egmont 145, 146 and n.35 Helvétius, Claude Adrien 9, 26, 37, 41–3, 45–6,
Gogol, Nikolai 191 56n.8, 63, 114, 166, 212
Golitsyn, Dmitri 109 Herder, Johann Gottfried 12, 15, 37, 39, 45, 54,
Golitsyn, Princess 108–9 57, 61 and n.27, 69, 102n.10, 103, 109,
Göttingen School 61n.27 114n.6, 116, 154, 162, 164 and n.5,
government 75, 80, 87, 105–7, 128–30, 141, 144, 165, 168 and n.20, 169 and n.21, 170
147, 202, 208, 210–11, 213n.27, and nn.27–8, 173–4, 175 and n.57
214–16, 228 see also separation of Another Philosophy of Human History 45
powers and state, the Berlin’s ideas about 44, 47, 51, 55 and n.7, 56,
Granovsky, Timofei 191, 199 153, 164–5, 167 and n.16, 168–9,
Gray, John 69, 71, 74–8 174–5
Greeks, the 5, 39, 55, 89, 103, 133, 138 Provincial Letters 173
Green, T. H. 92, 123 Herwegh, Georg 193
Grotius, Hugo 157 Herzen, Alexander 15, 25, 38n.8, 113, 133,
Guizot, François 80 188–9, 191–5, 196 and n.25,
197–9, 201
Habermas, Jürgen 161 Berlin’s ideas about 192, 193 and n.14, 194–9,
Hamann, Johann Georg 12, 14, 39 and nn.11 200nn.37–8, 201, 218, 224, 226
and 14, 54, 99, 101–6, 108–9, 110 and From the Other Shore 133, 193, 195, 197
n.32, 111–12, 115–19, 154, 162, Letters from France and Italy 193–4
174n.54 My Past and Thoughts 193–4, 198–9
Berlin’s ideas about 44, 47, 55 and n.7, 71, Herzen, Natalie 192
103, 119, 167 Hess, Moses 15, 176–7, 180–4, 186
Hamilton, Alexander 206–7, 213 Berlin’s ideas about 177–86
Hamilton, Alexander and John Jay and The Dynamic Theory of Matter 180
James Madison The European Triarchy 180
The Federalist Papers 209, 213 Rome and Jerusalem 177–8, 180, 183
Hamilton, Thomas 32 The Sacred History of Mankind by a Young
Hampshire, Stuart 38n.8, 69–70, 98, 122, 176 Spinozist 180
happiness 10, 27, 39, 42, 53, 130, 132, 166 Hess, Sybille 180–1
Hardy, Henry 11–12, 21nn.1 and 4, 22n.10, Hill, Christopher 223, 227
30n.35, 51, 94, 101nn.8–9, 114 Hilliard, Kevin 15, 91
and n.2, 154n.12, 169, 192, 213, Hilton, John 91
217, 221–2 historians 8, 11, 29, 32, 48, 62, 151, 154–5,
collected letters of Isaiah Berlin 1, 18, 220–1 160–1, 178–9, 182, 185, 199, 200 and
Haskell, Francis 161 n.39, 224, 226
Hausheer, Roger 46, 58n.13, 114 historical context 6, 11–12, 14, 25, 56n.9, 73, 77,
Harrington, James 147, 165–6, 222, 227
Oceana 142 historicism 28, 52–4, 57–9, 62, 65, 74, 77, 80,
Hart, H. L. A. 122 159, 162
Hartley, David 70n.3 history 13n.35, 43–4, 53, 60, 64, 72–5, 86, 105,
Observations 70n.3 134, 153–3, 154 and n.14, 160, 162,
Harvard University 7n.20, 48, 152 188, 197, 200, 225–6
Russian Research Centre 36 ideas about 4, 27–8, 30, 33–4, 41, 44, 52–3,
Hayek, Friedrich 43, 140 59, 62, 71, 91, 97, 123, 133, 151, 155
Hazard, Paul 6n.19, 160 and n.16, 162, 168,188, 193, 197, 223
La Pensée européenne au XVIIIe siècle: de Hitler, Adolf 5, 59, 86, 90, 96
Montesquieu à Lessing 6n.19, 80 Hobbes, Thomas 73, 134, 139, 157–8
Hegel, G. W. F. 23, 28–9, 31, 37, 98, 109 and Hobhouse, Leonard 22
n.30, 110, 133, 159, 189, 194n.15 Metaphysical Theory of State 92, 95
Berlin’s ideas about 28–9, 32, 53, 61 Hobsbawm, Eric 223, 227
ideas of 32 and n.44, 34, 52, 187 Hobson, Marian 14
index 251
d’Holbach, Paul-Henry Thiry 41–2, 45–6, forcing things upon 10, 123–4
114, 166 liberty/liberation of 2, 5, 37, 178, 193n.14,
Home University Library 4, 21–2, 40 215 and n.39, 216 and n.43, 226, 228
honesty/integrity 16, 53, 59, 177–8, 181–3, see also freedom and human beings,
185–6, 191 liberation of and liberty
Hook, Sidney 25 and the state 17, 105, 149, 218 see also
human beings 14, 38–9, 40n.16, 47–8, 53, 55, state, the
61, 70, 72, 74, 77–8, 83–5, 92, 128, 134, industrialization 12
148, 166–7, 173, 200, 219 see also institutions 29, 38–9, 71, 87, 199, 206, 209–10,
humanity and individuals 214, 219, 224–5, 228
affairs of 54, 57, 60, 73 intellectuals/intellectuality 17, 53, 89, 100, 132,
agency of 24, 60 189–90, 192, 198–202, 206
freedom/liberation of 9, 13, 37, 184, 226 genealogy of 79, 82, 86–7
nature of 10, 11n.31, 14, 26–7, 39–40, 42, 47, opposition to (anti-intellectualism) 46
55, 61, 70–8, 84, 87, 105, 106n.18, 123, Ireland 129
125, 148, 153, 157, 162, 206, 212–14 irrationalism 33, 118, 124
as evil 157 Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration 164
as good 33, 76 Israel 48, 218
needs of 18, 74, 211 Israel, Jonathan 8, 9 and nn.27–8, 11–12,
self-realization of 23, 76, 78, 177, 194 166, 175
treatment of 37, 225 Italy 27, 61, 137, 141, 147–8, 160, 190, 192, 196
human sciences 28, 72, 210 thinkers/scholarship of 153–4, 156–8
humanism 33, 43, 200
humanities 61 Jackson, T. A. 25n.23
humanity 8n.25, 42–3, 46–8, 91, 105, 115, Jacob, Margaret
117–18, 120, 128, 149–50, 152–3, 175, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists,
211n.19, 219 see also human beings Freemasons and Republicans 9n.27
ideas about/views of 10, 30, 48, 53, 56, 74, 148 Jacobi, F. H. 106n.19, 110, 154
see also human beings, nature of Jahanbegloo, Ramin 46–7, 161
and Kant, Immanuel, ‘crooked timber Jefferson, Thomas 47, 206–7, 225
of humanity’ (phrase) Jewish Historical Society of England 176, 184
Humboldt, Wilhelm von 124 Jews 3–4, 158, 176–86, 221 see also Judaism
Hume, David 11, 14, 26, 32, 39n.11, 42–3, 47, as refugees from Germany 3, 160
70–8, 84, 87, 106, 115, 147, 159, 162, Johnson, Samuel 6, 55
207n.3, 212 Jones, Edgar W. 97
Berlin’s ideas about 14, 51, 53–6, 69, 70 and Joseph, H. W. B. 25n.23
n.3, 71, 74, 77–9 Jouvenel, Bertrand de 96
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Judaism 15, 22, 90, 182–4
Morals 70, 76 anti-Semitism 59
‘Of Civil Liberty’ 147 judgement 111, 172, 221
‘That Politics May be Reduced to a justice 27, 85, 119, 139, 179, 181, 191, 198,
Science’ 143 219, 228
A Treatise of Human Nature 54, 70n.3,
73, 76, 78 Kahneman, Daniel 173
Huppert, George 155n.18 Thinking Fast and Slow 171
Huxley, Aldous 132 Kail, Peter 14
Brave New World 132 Kammen, Michael 213
Kant, Immanuel 3n.9, 7, 11, 15, 30, 37, 38n.8,
idealism 4n.12, 14, 64, 91–4, 123, 141, 148 39, 43 and n.33, 53–4, 61n.27, 63–4,
opposition to 92–4 106, 108–9, 111, 114–16, 117 and n.13,
Ignatieff, Michael 4, 16, 21n.3, 25, 41n.20, 92, 151 118, 139, 148, 169, 185, 206–7,
A Just Measure of Pain 225 209–11, 213, 216, 219
illiberalism 10, 15 ‘An Answer to the Question: What is
India 15, 127, 129 and n.19 Enlightenment?’ 116, 118, 159
individuality 16, 40, 61, 70 Berlin’s ideas about 15, 40n.16, 54n.5, 55–6,
individuals 4, 11, 28, 40–1, 44, 48, 53, 57, 60, 83, 116–18, 211, 216
122, 126–8, 132, 149, 216n.43, 218, 224 Critique of Practical Reason 117
252 index
Kant, Immanuel (cont.) Lenin, Vladimir 86, 98, 226

Critique of Pure Reason 116 Leningrad 16, 48
‘crooked timber of humanity’ (phrase) 114, Leopold, David 14, 53
183, 209–11, 226–7 Le Roy, Maxime 86
ideas of 6, 32, 123 Lee, Hermione 221
‘Idea for a Universal History with a Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 11, 30, 43, 47, 54,
Cosmopolitan Purpose’ 43, 210 61n.27, 62n.27, 149–50
The Metaphysics of Morals 207 liberalism 1, 4, 6–7, 8 and n.25, 10, 11 and n.31,
‘On Perpetual Peace’ 148, 206, 211 12, 38, 64, 79–81, 86, 88, 96, 116, 123,
Karamzin, Nikolai 190 125, 132–4, 161–2, 175n.57, 197, 222,
Kavelin, Konstantin 191 225, 227 see also illiberalism
Kelly, Aileen 195 and n.18 of Berlin 11 and n.31, 15–17, 46, 82, 121,
Kelly, D. R. 155 and n.18 131, 133–4, 192, 221–5, 227
Kennan, George 126, 133 opposition to 114
Kepler, Johannes 27 liberals 27, 65, 123, 132, 160, 190–1, 192n.9,
Kessler, Martin 169n.21 197, 200n.38, 221
Keynes, John Maynard 38n.8 libertarianism 14, 37, 122
Khomiakov, Aleksei 191 liberty 5, 37, 74, 82, 85, 87, 90, 98, 132, 134,
Kireevsky, Ivan 191 142–4, 150, 206, 209n.14, 215 and
knowledge 28, 44, 69, 71, 110–11, 152, 154, 186 n.39, 216–17, 219, 224, 226–8
Koestler, Arthur see also freedom and human beings,
Darkness at Noon 138 liberation of and individuals, liberty/
Kohn, Hans 58 liberation of
Koltun-Fromm, Ken 15, 81 negative 11, 16–17, 87, 95, 134, 138, 202, 216,
Königsberg 108 224
Koselleck, Reinhart positive 11, 94, 123, 131, 133–4, 216, 224
Kritik und Krise 161 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 39n.11, 54, 115
Krause, Enrique 221 Lifschitz, Avi 14, 45, 80, 87, 161, 167n.16
Lilla, Mark 42, 114n.5, 119, 149, 154, 161,
La Mettrie, Julien Offray de 39n.11, 42, 53, 115 165n.10
language 3, 56n.9, 102–3, 110–11, 116, 152, Lindsay, A. D. 24 and n.21, 25
154n.14, 155–6, 163, 170n.27, 172 Listener, The 154
English 2n.5, 13n.35, 63, 116, 152, 156, literature 2n.5, 3, 13n.35, 23, 65, 176, 189–91, 194
160, 165 Locke, John 11, 39n.11, 42, 56, 96, 107, 115, 159,
French 156 206, 208n.8, 210, 217n.48, 219
German 100, 156, 172 Berlin’s ideas about 54–5, 217n.48
Greek 103 Essay Concerning Human Understanding 54
Latin 156, 172 Two Treatises of Government 206
Russian 3–4, 92, 113, 190 Loen, Johann Michael von 145
Lanson, Gustave 80, 160 ‘Von der Staats-Kunst des Machiavels’ 145
Laski, Harold 21–2, 25, 94–5 logic 37, 111, 126, 171 see also rationality
The American Democracy 95–6 and reason
Communism 22 logical positivism 3
Liberty in the Modern State 95 Lomonosov, Mikhail 190
‘The Socialist Tradition in the French London 6, 23, 35n.1, 193, 224
Revolution’ 95 Italian Institute 152
law 81, 83, 107, 125, 128, 143, 202, 206, 209 London School of Economics (LSE) 38, 95
and n.14, 217n.48, 218, 225 Louis XIV 141
moral 97 Mémoires 140
natural 14–15, 56, 60–1, 80–1, 85, 87, 157, Lovejoy, Arthur 40
158 and n.26, 166, 174n.54, 209n.12 Löwith, Karl 152
see also rights, natural luxury 143–4
philosophy of 62
Lawrence, D. H. 90–1 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 124
Legendre de Saint-Aubin 140 Machiavelli, Niccolò 13, 15, 57, 137, 139–43, 144
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 8, 30, 54–5, 56–7, and n.26, 145 and nn.32–3, 146–9, 152
61, 63, 171, 174 Berlin’s ideas about 15, 79, 137–9
index 253
Discourses 142–4 metaphysics 28, 32 and n.44, 34, 73, 75, 77–8,

The Prince 137, 140–1, 143–9 85, 195
MacIntyre, Alasdair 161 method/methodology 71, 75, 125, 169
MacMurray, John 25 rhetorical 79
Madison, James 206–9, 211–12, 215, 219, 225–6 scientific 10, 37, 54, 56
Maistre, Joseph de 10, 37, 44, 46, 162 Michelet, Jules 80, 195
Berlin’s ideas about 47, 56, 95 Middleton Murry, John 25n.23
Mali, Joseph Mikhailovsky, Nikolay 91
The Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural Mill, James 43
History 151 Mill, John Stuart 3n.9, 10, 13, 15, 38n.8, 96,
Mali, Joseph and Robert Wokler 51, 151–4 121–3, 124 and n.10, 125–30, 132–4
Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment Berlin’s ideas about 15, 37–8, 43, 124–6,
12n.34, 151 131, 134
Mandeville, Bernard 73, 139 Considerations on Representative
The Fable of the Bees 145 Government 128
Mann, Thomas 46 ‘A Few Words on Non-Intervention’ 133
The Magic Mountain 46–7 On Liberty 123–5, 127, 129, 131–2, 134
Manuel, Frank 155n.18 Principles of Political Economy 123
Marat, Jean-Paul 226 Utilitarianism 130
Maria Theresa (of Austria) 142 Miller, Cecilia 154
Marx, Heinrich 30, 32 minorities 133
Marx, Karl 4, 22, 24, 26 and n.28, 28, 30n.35, Mirsky, D. S.
31n.38, 41, 133, 166, 177, 179–82 History of Russian Literature 188
Berlin’s ideas about 5, 14, 21–6, 29–33, 34 and modern languages 2n.5, 13n.35
n.51, 52–3, 94, 97, 166, 180–6, 193–4 Momigliano, Arnaldo 155n.18, 156
Das Capital 22, 24, 31 ‘monism’ (Berlin term) 43, 57, 91, 154,
and the Enlightenment 29–30, 33–4 166, 217
ideas of 4, 23–5, 29–31, 32 and n.44, 33, 34 Montaigne, Michel de 55, 105
and n.51 Montesquieu 14, 44, 54, 57, 79–84, 86–8, 143,
intellectual development of 23–4, 30–4, 52 149, 158, 162, 206, 208, 209 and n.14,
scholars of 25, 32n.46 213, 216, 218–19, 225–6
Marxism 6n.17, 10, 31n.38, 91, 94, 153, 160, Berlin’s ideas about 51, 55–6, 79–88, 208–9,
168, 224–5 see also communism 216, 218
Marxists 4n.12, 5, 41, 224, 226–7 De l’esprit des lois 83, 85–7, 143, 208, 209n.12
materialism 9 and n.28, 22, 41, 44, 53, 104, Lettres persanes 85, 140
149, 168 Moore, G. E. 38n.8
Mattia Doria, Paolo 159 morality 2n.5, 8, 24, 47, 53, 55–7, 71–2, 74–6,
Maupertuis, Pierre Louis 55 80, 84–5, 93, 97, 116n.9, 121–3, 125,
Mayo, B. 92 127, 134, 137–8, 140–2, 147–8, 153,
McFarlane, K. B. 4n.12 166, 182–6, 194–7, 199–200, 218n.52,
McMahon, Darrin 12n.33 224, 226 see also education, moral
mechanism/mechanistic philosophy 55, 61, 91, and virtue
124, 157, 166, 214 Christian 15, 138–9, 146
Medina Coeli, Duke of 157 political 57, 137–8, 140–2, 146–8
Meinecke, Friedrich 14, 52, 54, 57, 58 and n.13, see also Realpolitik and state,
59, 61 and n.27, 62, 63 and n.30, 64–6, reason of
162–3 Moran, Michael 139
Berlin’s ideas about 57, 59–60, 167n.16 Mornet, Daniel 160
Die deutsche Katastrophe 59 Moscow 4
Die Entstehung des Historismus 57, 58n.13, Möser, Justus 61n.27
59–62, 65, 80, 162 Mount Holyoke College 36
Die Idee der Staatsräson multiculturalism 165 see also pluralism
(Machiavellism) 57–8 Murray, Gilbert 22
Meinhard, Johann Nicolaus 147–8 Mussolini, Benito 90
Mendelssohn, Moses 54, 110n.32, 170n.27,
185–6 Naigeon, Jacques-André 103
Jerusalem 185 Napier, General 127
254 index
Naples 153–4, 156–8 life and learning at 2n.5, 3 and n.5, 13n.35,
Academia degli Investiganti 157 16–17, 25, 35, 49, 216, 219, 227
nations/nationalism 8 and n.23, 28–9, 34, 45, see also education and individual
62, 65, 137, 142–3, 149, 168, 187, 191, academic disciplines (e.g., Classics)
196 and n.23, 200 and n.38, 207, 224 scholars of 13
nature 28, 45, 52–3, 55, 71–2, 76, 116–17, 152, Voltaire Foundation 13 and n.36
174n.54, 211n.19 Wykeham Professorship of Logic 35n.1
Nazis, the 13, 59, 160, 168
Netherlands, the 9 and n.27, 109, 145–6, 196 Pagano, Francesco Mario 159
see also Dutch Revolt, the paganism 137–8
New York Review of Books 137, 218 Paine, Thomas 38, 206
New York Times Magazine 154 Pakenham, Frank 21
Newton, Isaac 6, 8–9, 54, 159 see also science, Pangle, Thomas
Newtonian Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism 86
Nicholas I (of Russia) 190, 199 Paris 7, 9, 23, 48, 107, 160
Nicolai, Friedrich 147 Pater, Walter 3
Nicolini, Fausto 156 Paul, Denis 97
Nietzsche, Friedrich 22, 46 and n.45, 47, 72, 90 peace 119, 132, 142, 148–9
Norton, Robert 45, 58 and n.13 Pennsylvania 96
‘The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment’ 58 people, the 107 see also public, the
Novalis 44 perfectibility/perfectionism 29, 61n.27, 84, 153,
Nozick, Robert 121 205–6, 217, 219
Anarchy, State and Utopia 121 Pericles 216
Nuzzo, Enrico 156 Peter the Great (of Russia) 106, 122
Pestel, Pavel 198
Oakeshott, Michael 48, 93 Philadelphia 226
O’Brien, Karen 14 Philip II (of Spain) 146
Offord, Derek 15 philosophers 4–5, 6n.17, 7, 9, 16, 35, 39, 70, 72,
organic notions 55, 61, 63 93, 152, 154–5, 173, 176, 185, 206
Ottoman Empire, the 132 philosophes, the 9, 11, 41, 80, 84, 119, 149–50,
Oxford 50 158–60, 190, 207, 216
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 100 and n.7, see also Encyclopaedists, the
101, 103 Berlin’s ideas about 15, 36–7, 39n.10, 42–3,
Oxford Outlook (periodical) 93 45, 47, 83, 167, 208n.7, 215–16
Oxford Past Masters series 114 criticism of/opposition to 6, 8n.25, 10–11,
Oxford University 7n.22, 17 and n.41, 35–6, 37, 83, 159
38n.8, 41, 48–9, 80, 92, 98, 113, 152, philosophy 3 and n.9, 4, 25, 31, 35–6, 38–9,
155, 223–4 40, 44, 51, 61, 65, 70, 92–3, 100,
Bodleian Library 22 120, 143, 150, 153, 156, 159–61,
Chichele Professorship of Social and Political 169, 200, 208
Theory 17, 39n.13, 47 and the analysis of language 3, 35, 116, 155
colleges of analytic 4, 14, 36
All Souls 4, 9n.29, 17, 35–6, 47–9, ancient 3
62, 218 history of 64, 106, 151
Balliol 24 idealist see idealism
Christ Church 3–4, 62n.29 of law see under law
Corpus Christi 2 moral 122
Iffley 47 natural 157n.23 see also science
Magdalen 4n.12 political 1, 151, 154n.14, 160, 192, 209,
New 4, 17, 21, 35 218n.52 see also political thought
Nuffield 49 rationalist 96–7
St Anthony’s 49 ‘romantic’ 53
St Cross 47 Philosophy (journal) 93
Wadham 3, 17 Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) 3
Wolfson 47 and n.48, 48–9, 50 and n.63, and n.9, 13n.35
51, 57n.10, 176, 220 Plato 3n.9, 55, 137
Franks Commission 49n.58 Plekhanov, Georgi 14, 23, 166
index 255
and Berlin 27, 41–3, 91–3, 166 and n.14 race 9, 28, 196
The Development of the Monist View of racism 15, 124, 195, 196 and n.23
History 41, 43, 91 radicalism 9, 38, 53, 83, 190–1, 226
pluralism 17, 33, 34 and n.51, 51, 56, 66, 71, 74, Radishchev, Aleksandr 190
76–8, 84–7, 105, 115, 122–3, 130–1, raison d’état 15
138–9, 150, 154, 167–8, 174, 206, 213, Rameau, Jean-Philippe 100
214n.38, 219, 221, 228 rationalism 26, 28–30, 42, 44, 54–6, 58, 61, 80,
Pocock, John 44, 155 87, 96–7, 104, 114, 118, 191, 206, 224,
The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal 226 see also irrationalism
Law 155 and n.18 rationality 14, 27, 40, 73, 84, 104, 122, 125, 132,
Poland 6n.16 139, 172–3, 205 and n.2, 210
political economy 32, 161 see also rationalism and reason
political thought 1–2, 3n.9, 14, 24, 36–8, 93, 96, Rawls, John 98
143, 154n.14, 175n.57, 191, 201, 205, The Law of Peoples 228
215, 217–19, 228 see also philosophy, A Theory of Justice 122, 126
political realism 34, 65, 149
politics 6, 23, 26, 28, 37, 55, 57, 64, 81–2, 84, Realpolitik 138
86–7, 97, 107, 118, 121, 128–30, 132, reason 10, 26–7, 29, 60–1, 63, 80, 116, 120, 148,
137–42, 146–50, 167, 194–5, 201, 205, 171, 173, 175, 213–14
207, 209–10, 215, 216n.42, 218–19, see also rationality
221–2, 225, 228 see also state, the, ideas about 5, 29, 33, 51–3, 63–4, 80, 88, 105,
running of 109, 123, 159
science of 5, 219 Reed, T. J. 15, 52, 114
structures 16, 38–9, 83, 211, 213–15, 219, 225 Reid, Thomas 39n.11
study of 27, 31, 36, 143, 228 see also political Reformation, the 65
thought relativism 51, 55, 84, 149, 168, 197, 209
polity, the 137–8 see also citizens/citizenship religion 9, 72, 128, 133, 147, 159, 168, 173, 175,
and public, the and society 192, 195 see also Christianity
Popper, Karl 137 Renaissance, the 13, 27, 155, 187
populism 105, 160, 167, 174, 188, 191, 193, republicanism 9, 64, 86–7, 142–5, 209,
200n.39, 201, 224 214–17, 227
Porter, Roy and Mikuláš Teich revolution 153, 181, 195, 197–8, 200n.38,
The Enlightenment in National Context 8n.23 223, 226
Postgate, Raymond 25 Revolutions of 1848 133, 192, 194, 197–8
post-modernism 161 Riga 201
prejudice 172 rights 142, 215–16, 224–5
Prichard, H. A. 92 civil 215
Princeton University 5, 7, 9, 153 human 121–2, 216
private sphere, the 128, 138, 149, 194–5, natural 27, 125
225, 228 political 215
progress 8–9, 27, 29, 33, 45, 91, 121, 123, Robertson, John 15
128–30, 132, 149, 158, 160 Robertson, Ritchie 15
property 122, 130, 196 and n.22, 225 Robertson, William 43, 162
Prussia 104, 108, 118, 148 Robespierre, Maximilien 226
psychology 5, 25, 74, 93, 121, 128, 130, 132, rococo, the 99 and n.1, 100 and nn.2 and 5,
171–3, 182–3, 221, 224 101–2, 104, 111–12
public, the 1, 18, 53, 56, 75, 194–5, 225, 228 Romanticism 12, 31, 38–9, 53, 64–6, 69, 74,
see also public sphere, the 80, 86–8, 94, 124 and n.10, 162, 164,
Berlin and 38, 81–2, 206 190, 198
interest of 74, 144 Berlin’s ideas about 40, 44, 51, 69, 81, 86, 91
opinion of 125 Romans, the 5, 103, 134, 138–9, 143, 196
public sphere, the 110, 161 Rome 157–8
Pufendorf, Samuel von 157 Roosevelt, Franklin 96
Pushkin, Alexander 5 Rorty, Richard 161
Rosenkrantz, Karl 32
Rabelais, François Rossi, Paulo 156
Gargantua and Pantagruel 103 Rothschilds, the 195, 198
256 index
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 7, 9–10, 14, 37 and n.4, separation of powers 87, 219, 225
38n.8, 41–2, 54, 59, 79, 89, 90 and n.3, sexuality 125, 222
93–6, 98, 102, 105, 206, 216 Shackleton, Robert 140
Berlin’s ideas about 14n.38, 36, 53, 55 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of
and n.7, 56, 89–94, 96–8 55 and n.7, 56, 61, 105n.14
Émile 147 Shakespeare, William
The Social Contract 93, 144 Henry VI Part 3 140
Rowse, A. L. 21 Shcherbatov, Mikhail 190
Royal Opera (Covent Garden) 222 Sieyès, Emmanuel 206, 208 and n.7, 210,
Ruge, Arnold 34 212–13, 215, 219
Rush, Benjamin 226 What is the Third Estate? 208n.7
Russell, Bertrand Sikka, Sonia 169
History of Western Philosophy 96 Herder on Humanity and Cultural
Russia 5, 83, 106–7, 109, 160, 176, 187–92, 194 Difference 165
and n.15, 196–8, 200n.39, 201–2, 226 Simon, Richard 158
Berlin’s ideas about 187–92, 200–1 Skinner, Quentin 138–9, 149, 155 and n.18
culture of 188–91, 194, 200–1 Skorupski, John 124n.10
people of 15, 122, 192–3, 196, 201, 224 Smith, Adam 43, 47, 54, 212
thinkers/scholarship of 25, 27, 84, 91–2, The Wealth of Nations 32
188–92, 194, 199–202 sociability 157–9
Russian Revolution, the 4, 36, 120, 226 social contract 141
Ryan, Alan 15 social science 80, 82, 208n.7 see also human
Ryle, Gilbert 3, 35 and n.1 sciences and sociology
socialism 93, 177, 180–2, 185, 196n.25
Sachsen-Weimar 168 socialists 6n.17, 15, 27, 65, 92, 179–82, 185, 191,
Sade, Marquis de 105 and n.14, 139 197, 216n.42, 224, 227
St Just, Louis Antoine de 226 society 8n.25, 26–8, 37, 41, 56, 64, 73–6, 78, 81,
St Petersburg 104, 106, 201 83–5, 88, 105, 116, 118–19, 122–4,
St Pierre, abbé de 142 126, 130, 195, 201, 211n.19, 213, 215,
Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy 37 218, 224, 227 see also polity, the
salons 83 conflict within 34n.51, 53, 81, 159,
Salter, F. R. 25n.23 181, 214
Salvemini, Gaetano 152 organization of 42–3, 81, 83, 86, 159, 211,
scepticism 4n.12, 14, 70–1, 88, 102, 106, 109, 213, 216–19
112, 195 problems within 115, 198, 201, 208
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 145, 189 structures of 38–9, 83, 86, 210, 213–15, 225
Schiller, Friedrich 44, 114, 116, 145, 199 thinking about/understanding 5, 14, 27, 29,
Schlegel, Friedrich 116 31, 36, 92–3, 124, 157–8, 191, 198,
Schmidt, James 100 200–1 see also sociology
science 2n.5, 3, 6, 31, 45, 47, 54, 56–7, 61, 106, transformation of 198, 208
117, 174n.54, 195 sociology 38, 44, 82, 84, 209
human see human sciences Socrates 109, 131–2
methodology of see methodology, scientific Sorel, Georges 90
Newtonian 5, 39, 42, 54 see also Newton, Isaac sovereignty 107n.22
social see social science Soviet Union, the 4, 104, 200 and nn.38–9
scientism 42–3, 55, 91, 140, 166, 210 Spain 9, 146, 157
Scotland 32–3, 43, 72, 79, 202 Sparling, Robert 110
secularism 5, 9, 15, 38, 80, 146, 169, 174, 187 Sparrow, John 49 and n.58
Selby-Bigge, L. A. 70 Spencer, Herbert 82, 227
self, the 92 Spender, Stephen 25
and consciousness 103 Spink, J. S. 93
extension of 81 Spinoza, Benedict 9, 43, 142, 158, 169, 175n.57
and revelation 194 Sprigge, C.S.J. 25n.23
understanding of 40, 48 Staël, Madame de 11n.31
self-interest 73–4, 89 Stalin, Josef 126, 166, 188, 226
Seneca state, the 17, 27, 38, 88, 95, 98, 149, 211,
Apocolocyntosis 103 219, 224
index 257
power of 16, 143, 191, 211 and the Enlightenment 11, 51, 58, 61, 65, 202
reason of 140, 147, 149 see also morality, Foreign Office of the 4
political and Realpolitik government of the 98, 122, 125, 127–9
running 81, 139, 141–5 people of 13n.37, 125, 184
Stephen, Fitzjames 127 thinkers/scholarship of 32, 38–9, 54, 93, 152,
Sternhell, Zeev 58n.13, 108 154, 188–9, 193
Stirner, Max 22 United States 4, 37, 48, 64, 207, 209 and n.11,
Stoppard, Tom 218 and n.51, 221, 225
The Coast of Utopia 195 Constitution of the 16, 205, 207 and n.6, 211,
Strachey, John 25n.23 214, 225–6
Strada, Famiano 145 and the Enlightenment 207 and nn.5–6, 214
De bello Belgico decades duae 145 founding of the 6–7, 207, 208n.8,
Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 215n.40, 226
(journal) 13n.36 government of the 98
style 70, 91, 94, 99, 101–2, 104, 107, 110–11, immigrants to the 5, 6n.17
169, 170 and nn.27–8, 171 people of the 6n.18, 207, 213
see also Berlin, Isaiah, style of thinkers/scholarship of the 79, 152, 188, 193
superstition 29, 42, 55 universal principles 56, 65, 75–6, 86, 108, 150,
Sussex University of 223 153, 197, 225
sympathy 24, 74, 78, 113–14, 119 universities 7, 17, 48, 93
utilitarianism 5n.14, 65, 125–6, 130, 141
Talmon, J. L. 6n.16, 9, 14, 94–8 utility 77, 122, 126, 128–9
doctoral thesis 95 Utley, T. E. 96–7
Totalitarian Democracy 6, 37, 95–6 utopianism 38 and n.8, 43, 46, 65, 80, 213
Tawney, R. H. 21, 227 totalitarian 16, 206
Taylor, A. J. P. 90
Taylor, Charles 165 and n.8, 167n.18 Valletta, Giuseppe 157
‘The Importance of Herder’ 164 values 57, 81, 84–5, 122, 125, 139, 150, 160, 162,
Taylor, Harriet 124, 127, 129 177, 191, 202, 205, 207, 218n.52
theodicy 28 incommensurability of 51, 115, 137–9, 221
theology 15, 61n.27, 142, 168, 169 and n.22 Venturi, Franco 160 and n.33, 161, 188
Thirty Years’ War 53 Vico, Giambattista 12, 14–15, 54, 57, 61, 69, 83,
Thomas, Keith 155 151–2, 155n.18, 156–7, 158 and
Thornton Butterworth (publisher) 22 n.26–7, 159, 161–2, 212
thought/thinking 17–18, 56, 61, 73, 85, 99, 101, Autobiography 152, 156
111, 116, 118, 125, 134, 155, 171–4 Berlin’s ideas about 15, 44, 47, 51, 55 and n.7,
Tieck, Ludwig 116 79, 83, 151–3, 154 and n.12, 156,
Times, The 37, 96 158–9, 162–3, 167
Tocqueville, Alexis de 32, 38, 124, 194 Scienza nuova 152, 156, 159, 162
Toland, John 107 Vienna 147
tolerance 88, 115, 119, 222–4, 227 Viennese school, the 3–4 see also logical
Tolstoy, Leo 5, 16, 188, 190–1, 200–1 positivism
totalitarianism 5, 9–10, 16, 40, 66, 88, 90, 96–7, violence 89, 197, 223, 227
106, 206, 219, 225 see also virtue 76, 139, 141, 212, 223, 225, 227
authoritarianism see also morality
Toulmin, Stephen 58, 62 Voltaire 6–7, 9, 11, 13n.36, 26, 30, 32, 39n.11,
Trevor-Roper, Hugh 155 and n.16 42, 46–7, 54, 57, 79, 89, 106–7,
Trotsky, Leon 226 114–15, 119, 141, 158, 162, 206,
Trott, Adam von 62, 160n.32 212–14
truth 61, 104, 110, 153, 173, 220, 222–3 Berlin’s ideas about 53–4
Turgenev, Ivan 5, 113, 188, 191–2, 198, 199n.36 Philosophical Letters 54
Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques 63 voluntarism 74
uniformitarianism see ‘monism’ (Berlin term) Wagner, Richard 90

United Kingdom 15, 37, 90n.3, 194, 213, 224, Waldron, Jeremy 16, 87, 89, 221, 224–6, 228
227 see also England and Scotland war 14, 149, 226 see also individual conflicts
culture of the 23, 25 (e.g., Cold War)
258 index
Washington D. C. 16, 39 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 61n.27,

National Gallery of Art 11n.32 62n.27
Washington, George 207n.5 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 4, 35, 155
Webb, Beatrice 21 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 4
Webb, Sidney 21 Wokler, Robert 88, 151
Webster, Charles 178 Wolf, Lucien 176, 178–9
Weldon, Thomas 4n.12 Wolff, Christian 8, 54–5, 171
Wesley, John 145n.32 Wollheim, Richard 69, 71, 90
western world, the 4–5, 12, 39, 57, 114n.6, women 9, 49, 104, 109–10, 225
187–9, 192 and n.9, 194 and n.15, Wood, Gordon 207
195–7, 202, 218 see also Anglo- ‘The American Enlightenment’ 207
American world and democracy, Wordsworth, William 124
western and liberalism, modern World War I 92
western World War II 4, 34–5, 59, 94, 133, 160–1,
intellectual traditions of 10, 40, 138, 154 189, 218
William of Orange 146
Williams, Bernard 127, 176 Yale University 40n.16
Moral Luck 127 Young, Edward 55 and n.7
Wilson, Edmund 152
Wilson, James 207 Zionism 176, 178–9, 181, 185

Isaiah Berlin and The Enlightenment

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Isaiah Berlin and The Enlightenment

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi

Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment

Isaiah Berlin and the

This book is the outcome of a conference on ‘Isaiah Berlin’s Enlightenment’, organized

Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 1

Part I. An Idea in Context

Part II. Enlightenment Thinkers

Part III. Counter-Enlightenments?

11. Berlin, Vico, and the Critique of Enlightenment 151

Part IV. Berlin’s Legacy

xii list of abbreviations

Laurence Brockliss is Professor of Early Modern French History and Fellow of

xiv Notes on Contributors

Avi Lifschitz is a Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at University College

was inevitably destined to fall foul of an ever-expanding academic world which

When Isaiah Berlin went up to Corpus Christi College as an undergraduate in 1928,

Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 3

Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 5

Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 7

Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 9

Princeton, had already forged an impressive reputation as a historian of the early

10 Laurence Brockliss

Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 11

12 Laurence Brockliss

s­ystematizers; while seminal figures of his Counter-Enlightenment, like Herder,

Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 13

14 Laurence Brockliss

Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 15

16 Laurence Brockliss

Described in detail in Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, ch. 5.

Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 17

18 Laurence Brockliss

22 David Leopold

Knowledge’ published by Thornton Butterworth. The series had attracted some

Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, and the Enlightenment 23

theory of history as a narrative of human self-realization.12 And, in 1978 (the fourth

The Marx Book

24 David Leopold

Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, and the Enlightenment 25

26 David Leopold

Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, and the Enlightenment 27

28 David Leopold

Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, and the Enlightenment 29

whereas he is better understood as engaging with German incarnations of Enlightenment

Marx and the Enlightenment

KM 35/. Later editions have stylistic changes. See KM /29.

30 David Leopold

Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, and the Enlightenment 31

32 David Leopold

Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, and the Enlightenment 33

34 David Leopold

The Genesis of an Idea

36 Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson

Berlin’s Conception of the Enlightenment 37

38 Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson

Berlin’s Conception of the Enlightenment 39

40 Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson

Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment

Berlin’s Conception of the Enlightenment 41

know Marx’s forerunners, he began reading the French Encyclopaedists, beginning

42 Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson

Plekhanov’s influence helps to explain the disproportionate weight Berlin always

Berlin’s Conception of the Enlightenment 43

Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 1

11. Berlin, Vico, and the Critique of Enlightenment 151

systematizers; while seminal figures of his Counter-Enlightenment, like Herder,