BOOK REVIEW : No Missing Pieces in Cosmic Jigsaw Puzzle : THE CROOKED TIMBER OF HUMANITY; Chapters in the History of Ideas <i> by Sir Isaiah Berlin</i> , <i> edited by Henry Hardy</i> , Knopf $22, 296 pages

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity,” wrote Kant, “no straight thing was ever made.”

Sir Isaiah Berlin invokes these words in both the title and the text of his latest collection of essays, a work of history that also serves as an instrument of moral inquiry.

Berlin reminds us that the grain of history is twisted and knotty, and that the intellectual and spiritual artifacts of humankind are marked by flaws and eccentricities. Berlin himself is driven by an urgent need to make sense of it all, to put together what he calls “the cosmic jigsaw puzzle.”

“If we are to hope to understand the often violent world in which we live, we cannot confine our attention to the great impersonal forces, natural and man-made, which act upon us,” Berlin writes.

“The goals and motives that guide human action must be looked at in the light of all that we know and understand; their roots and growth, their essence, and above all their validity, must be critically examined with every intellectual resource that we have.”

Each of the eight essays collected in “The Crooked Timber of Humanity” is a short course in the history of ideas and, perhaps more to the point, the idea of history itself. Berlin’s intellectual footwork is breathtaking: He dances through two or three millennia of human civilization, ranging from Heraclitus to Hobbes to Hitler, from Plato to Paine to Pol Pot, sometimes in a single breathtaking leap.

“To exercise their proper function, historians require the capacity for imaginative insight, without which the bones of the past remain dry and lifeless,” he explains. “To deploy it is, and always has been, a risky business.”

Berlin convinces us that drawing lines between unlikely points of reference is not only the essence of history, but of civilization itself. The essays in “Crooked Timber,” spanning nearly 30 years of Berlin’s distinguished academic career, amount to the catechism of a truly civilized mind: “Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from,” he muses, “how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.”

What these essays have in common is Berlin’s insistent caution against cant and dogma. Humankind has struggled to achieve perfection, he warns, but always with unfortunate and sometimes catastrophic results.

“No perfect solution is . . . possible in human affairs,” Berlin writes, “and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure.” Or worse: the real destination of the twisted path toward Utopia, Berlin seems to suggest, is Auschwitz.

The point is made in the long essay, “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism,” that serves as the centerpiece of Berlin’s book. First published in 1960, the essay offers a fresh reading of the 18th Century reactionary propagandist who is often dismissed (if he is remembered at all) as a kind of intellectual freak, an “apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of Pope, King, and Hangman.”

Berlin pushes aside the conventional wisdom on Maistre, penetrates to the dark heart of Maistre’s often bizarre rhetoric (“The whole earth . . . is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end”), and finds an augury of the very worst excesses of the 20th Century.

“The facade of Maistre’s system may be classical, but behind it there is something terrifyingly modern,” Berlin argues. “The doctrine of violence at the heart of things, the belief in the power of dark forces . . . the appeal to blind faith against reason, the belief that only what is mysterious can survive . . . the doctrine of blood and self-immolation--surely we have heard this note since. In a simpler and no doubt much cruder form, but in substance precisely as Maistre taught it, it is the heart of all totalitarian doctrines.”

Now in his 80s, Berlin is a venerable figure--a knight, literally enough, on a moral quest--but he is free of the strutting intellectual arrogance that sometimes characterizes the work of professional historians.

“Crooked Timber” is challenging in more than one sense--if you’ve lost your notes from History 101, a desk encyclopedia may come in handy--but never tedious. Indeed, what is most appealing about Berlin’s essays are the common sense, clear prose, and sly humor that shine through the dense and weighty scholarship.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Silent Day in Tangier” by Tahar ben Jelloun (HBJ).