Berlin: A Belief That Man Could Be Better

Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford philosopher who died recently at age 88, was most famous for drawing the distinction between negative liberty--a realm where no one can tell us what to do--and positive liberty--the notion that to fully realize our potential, we sometimes need help and guidance. But Berlin was also an erudite practitioner of the history of ideas. Latvian by birth, he introduced Russian writers such as Alexander Herzen to English-speaking audiences. He had a knack for finding value in the most obscure, and sometimes the most reactionary, political thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries. As we ponder Berlin’s legacy for a century he will never see, we are forced to ask whether a thinker can be considered great who never believed in greatness.

It is true, but insufficient, to remember Berlin as a determined opponent of totalitarianism. Those who aspired to straighten what Immanuel Kant called “the crooked timbre of humanity” were, in Berlin’s view, prisoners of the false idea that one particular objective--communism’s promised equality or Nazism’s promised racial purity--should be pursued to the exclusion of all other goals. What made totalitarianism doubly dangerous, however, was not its radical evil, but its seductiveness. For in laying claim to the notion that all human society can and ought to be guided toward one end, totalitarian regimes taught us uncomfortable truths about systems of thought and structures of power organized for good purposes as well as bad.

It was only natural, in the aftermath of World War II, to look back at the excesses of totalitarianism and conclude our only hope lay with reason. To avoid political polarization, emotional turmoil and violence, we were best off using our heads rather than listening to our hearts. Planning would replace the ups-and-downs of economic fluctuations. Social democracy would give us the benefits of both capitalism and socialism without their faults. Experts would rely on the latest social-science findings as an alternative to prejudice and crowd psychology.

Berlin’s most powerful idea was that this rational alternative to totalitarianism itself betrays totalitarian temptations. Belief in rationality above all else is not that different from belief in the volk above all else. (Berlin was fond of quoting the chilling dictum of philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, that no one has rights against reason.) Any system can be abused if persuaded it alone is in possession of the one great secret that will improve the world. Experts can easily convince themselves that those who reject their advice are not just ignorant, but so misguided that the expert has a moral duty to overrule their objections.

Berlin not only distrusted grand ideas, he also distrusted the way they were expressed. One of Marxism’s greatest problems, in his view, was Karl Marx. Inspired by Prometheus, who defied Zeus by giving fire to man, Marx saw himself as a Romantic hero, an epic poet of revolution, single-minded in his determination to impose a world he invented in his head on the reality around him. Everything about the way Marx presented his ideas to the world conveyed his romantic narcissism. His huge tomes--demanding in detail, apocalyptic in pronouncement--were meant to impress as well as persuade. Writing as he did, Marx left the inevitable impression that he and history were one and the same. It is as if Marx was determined to take all human experience and capture it in three volumes.

No wonder Berlin wrote essays rather than complete books. One cannot criticize the urge to systematize systematically. Those who lament that Berlin never wrote a great treatise miss the point. Society, he believed, was stubborn, incremental and multidimensional. Given what he had to say, the elegiac essay was the best way to say it.

“There is no substitute for a sense of reality.” Berlin once wrote. Against the sensuality of the romantic, Berlin offered the sobriety of the realist. He admired Machiavelli for recognizing that sometimes our ends are mutually exclusive and for facing that fact unblinkingly. By forcing us to confront that our dilemmas have no permanent answers, Machiavelli, for all his faults, prepared us to live in a world without certainties.

Committed to reality and distrustful of utopia, Berlin, at first glance, would seem to have little to offer to the passionate heirs of the 1960s. Yet, there is not much in his thought that can be called conservative; indeed, conservatives, who often have systematic plans of their own, tend not to include themselves among Berlin’s great admirers. Perhaps they sense he is anything but a philosopher of resignation. Instead of a system, Berlin offered a sensibility. And his is a sensibility that, in its own way, inspires us to reach for what is best in ourselves.

There is more than one way to make the world a better place. Utopians believe otherwise. Convinced of the justice of their world view, they spend as much time attacking rival conceptions of the good society as they do aiming to bring their own version into being. This single-minded insistence of the rightness of their grand idea can, in the case of a Vladimir I. Lenin or Adolf Hitler, change the world, usually in the wrong direction. But far more common than dubious successes of utopian schemers are unnoticed failures. Too busy being right, they lose touch with the world whose faults they would straighten. They produce no version of the good society. Indeed, they produce no credible version of any society.

Berlin did offer an answer to Lenin’s famous question “What is to be done?” In this world, our best hope lay in thinking clearly about the alternatives; balancing their various ends and means, and choosing, with humility, among them, fully aware that our choices could turn out wrong. “This may seem a very flat answer,” he wrote, “not the kind of thing that the idealistic young would wish, if need be, to fight and suffer for, in the cause of a newer and nobler society.”

Still, there is one thing for which we can strive. Rather than longing for the good society, why not try to create the decent society? A decent society, in Berlin’s view, was one that would try to minimize suffering and avoid putting people into positions where they faced intolerable choices.

A realist about society, Berlin was also a realist about himself. He knew exactly who he was. Berlin wrote with great self-confidence, as if the very modesty of his world view gave him the courage to speak with authority. All too many of this century’s political thinkers reverse Berlin’s sensibility: They assert grand ideas in a manner conveying the kind of insecurity that must be cloaked in dogma and intolerance. Berlin, it has been said, often with a slight sneer, was a great conversationalist who enjoyed life to the fullest. That is what made him a great political thinker.