From Radio Waves to the Printed Page, Theories of Six Thinkers

FREEDOM AND ITS BETRAYAL

Six Enemies of Human Liberty

By Isaiah Berlin

Edited by Henry Hardy

Princeton University Press

198 Pages, $24.95

Imagine turning on the radio and hearing a brilliant, immensely erudite man speaking extemporaneously at breakneck pace for a full hour about the ideas of an 18th century philosopher. Not a likely prospect, even on NPR. Yet in austerity Britain of 1952, people tuning in to the BBC were surprised to hear the voice of a 43-year-old Oxford don, Isaiah Berlin, doing just that. In fact, the radio audience was treated not merely to one, but six hourlong broadcasts on influential thinkers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Contrary to current nostrums about the need to aim low to attract an audience, people “tuned in expectantly each week and found themselves mesmerized.” Now, half a century later, the lectures are finally available in written form, assiduously edited from rough transcripts by Henry Hardy, one of Berlin’s literary trustees.

Berlin chose these six thinkers because he felt the issues they grappled with were still enormously relevant. All addressed the central question: “Why should anyone obey anyone else?” Berlin’s lectures attempt to demonstrate how these men--some of them devoted to the cause of freedom and all but one of them, Joseph de Maistre, devoted to the betterment of mankind--generated ideas that may have actually contributed to the diminution of human liberty.

Indeed, readers familiar with Berlin’s work will find in these spirited lectures the seeds of his later thinking. Already we see his distrust of grand schemes that sound promising, but generally end up depriving individuals of their freedom.

In the rationalist French philosopher Claude Adrien Helvetius, Berlin finds the direct ancestor of modern utilitarianism. Helvetius proposed that government exists to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. But, since the majority of people are not sufficiently clearsighted about what is in their own best interest, Helvetius argued that an enlightened elite should make such decisions for them, thus (in Berlin’s opinion) providing the groundwork for communist dictatorships.

Unlike Helvetius, countryman Jean-Jacques Rousseau distrusted experts, scientists and intellectuals. What mattered to him was personal liberty. But rather than conceiving of such liberty as the freedom to make mistakes as well as wise choices, Rousseau understood it as the ability and willingness to do that which is natural, good and harmonious. Those who do not make healthy choices are not “free,” hence society can force them to be free for their own good. Once you define freedom this way, Berlin argues, Robespierre, Mussolini, Lenin and Hitler can use it to justify their coercive methods.

In discussing the German idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Berlin notes that Fichte, like Rousseau, begins with absolute respect for the individual soul. But from this (perhaps in order to avoid anarchy), he arrives at a theory that the true inner self is linked to the larger idea of one’s fellow countrymen; hence romantic nationalism and hero worship. Rather unfairly perhaps, Berlin brands Fichte’s philosophy as the kind of thinking that paved the way for Napoleons and Hitlers, even though Fichte explicitly denounced Napoleon as a false hero.

Critiquing German thinker Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Berlin is on much stronger ground. Hegel postulated the notion of history as the manifestation of an inexorable spiritual power. Wars, massacres, oppression, rebellion: All these were necessary steps in the unfolding of its grand, presumably progressive, scheme. Such an outlook naturally tended to justify history’s victors while generating little if any sympathy for those unfortunate enough to be its victims.

Berlin’s essay on Claude-Henri Saint-Simon is in many ways the most delightful. Here, too, he has criticisms, but one also senses a genuine affection and admiration for the man. This engaging French aristocrat fought in the American Revolution and behaved with almost Sydney Carton-like gallantry in the French Revolution. Berlin saw him as a prophet of the modern welfare state and technocracy. And unlike many other thinkers, Saint-Simon understood the need to judge things in the proper historical context and to refrain from universal theorizing.

Berlin’s final essay, on Maistre, details the scary “modernity” of his reactionary views with a kind of ghoulish glee. Appalled by the chaos of the French Revolution, Maistre set out to demolish the 18th century thinking that led up to it. Ironically, in his determination to throw out babies along with bathwater, he was exactly like the most radical members of the revolution he hated so much.

On his hit list were not only the notions of liberty, equality and fraternity, but science, knowledge and reason itself. Darkness, ignorance, fear, war and slavery were, in his view, the necessary condition of mankind. If Maistre is, in Berlin’s view, the true ancestor of Nazism, why then does Berlin also cast blame for it on thinkers whose ideas Maistre hated: men like Helvetius, Rousseau, Fichte and Saint-Simon? Because he wants to show how even benign-sounding ideas can unwittingly have a malign effect.

Berlin’s favorite paradox--that some defenders of liberty may turn out to be its enemies--seems to have had a pervasive influence on other anti-totalitarian and neo-conservative writers like John Lukacs and Paul Johnson.

Reading these essays, I was reminded of the latter’s vitriolic, ad hominem portraits of left-wing thinkers, including Rousseau, in his book “Intellectuals.” Where Johnson launches into fierce attacks on the characters of his subjects, Berlin pretty much assumes that his six thinkers meant well. His focus is on exposing the flaws in their works. The contrast between Berlin’s nimble criticism and Johnson’s blunt rancor is sharply instructive, and may also go to show how any salutary-seeming approach can go askew over time.