Isaiah Berlin was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was renowned as an essayist and as the author of many books, among them Karl Marx, Four Essays on Liberty, Russian Thinkers, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, and, from Princeton, Concepts and Categories, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Hedgehog and the Fox, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, and Three Critics of the Enlightenment. Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah Berlin’s literary trustees. He has edited several other volumes by Berlin and is currently preparing Berlin’s letters and remaining unpublished writings for publication.

AGAINST THE CURRENT

ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

By ISAIAH BERLIN, Henry Hardy

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Isaiah Berlin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15610-1

Contents

Foreword by Mark Lilla……………………………………………..ixAuthor’s Note……………………………………………………..xxiEditor’s Preface…………………………………………………..xxiiiNote on References…………………………………………………xxixIntroduction by Roger Hausheer………………………………………xxxiThe Counter-Enlightenment…………………………………………..1The Originality of Machiavelli………………………………………33The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities……………………101Vico’s Concept of Knowledge…………………………………………140Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment………………………………151Montesquieu……………………………………………………….164Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism……………………….204Herzen and His Memoirs……………………………………………..236The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess………………………………….267Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for Identity……………….317The ‘Naivety’ of Verdi……………………………………………..361Georges Sorel……………………………………………………..373Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power…………………………..420Appendix to the Second Edition………………………………………449Index…………………………………………………………….467

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Counter-Enlightenment

I

Opposition to the central ideas of the French Enlightenment,and of its allies and disciples in other Europeancountries, is as old as the movement itself. The proclamation ofthe autonomy of reason and the methods of the natural sciences,based on observation as the sole reliable method of knowledge,and the consequent rejection of the authority of revelation,sacred writings and their accepted interpreters, tradition,prescription, and every form of non-rational and transcendentsource of knowledge, was naturally opposed by the Churchesand religious thinkers of many persuasions. But such opposition,largely because of the absence of common ground between themand the philosophers of the Enlightenment, made relatively littleheadway, save by stimulating repressive steps against the spreadingof ideas regarded as dangerous to the authority of Church orState. More formidable was the relativist and sceptical traditionthat went back to the ancient world. The central doctrines ofthe progressive French thinkers, whatever their disagreementsamong themselves, rested on the belief, rooted in the ancientdoctrine of natural law, that human nature was fundamentallythe same in all times and places; that local and historical variationswere unimportant compared with the constant central corein terms of which human beings could be defined as a species,like animals, or plants, or minerals; that there were universalhuman goals; that a logically connected structure of laws andgeneralisations susceptible of demonstration and verificationcould be constructed and replace the chaotic amalgam of ignorance,mental laziness, guesswork, superstition, prejudice, dogma,fantasy, and, above all, the ‘interested error’ maintained by therulers of mankind and largely responsible for the blunders, vicesand misfortunes of humanity.

It was further believed that methods similar to those ofNewtonian physics, which had achieved such triumphs in therealm of inanimate nature, could be applied with equal success tothe fields of ethics, politics and human relationships in general, inwhich little progress had been made; with the corollary that oncethis had been effected, it would sweep away irrational and oppressivelegal systems and economic policies the replacement ofwhich by the rule of reason would rescue men from political andmoral injustice and misery and set them on the path of wisdom,happiness and virtue. Against this, there persisted the doctrinethat went back to the Greek sophists, Protagoras, Antiphon andCritias, that beliefs involving value-judgements, and the institutionsfounded upon them, rested not on discoveries of objectiveand unalterable natural facts, but on human opinion, which wasvariable and differed between different societies and at differenttimes; that moral and political values, and in particular justiceand social arrangements in general, rested on fluctuating humanconvention. This was summed up by the sophist quoted byAristotle who declared that whereas fire burned both here andin Persia, human institutions change under our very eyes. Itseemed to follow that no universal truths, established by scientificmethods, that is, truths that anyone could verify by the useof proper methods, anywhere, at any time, could in principle beestablished in human affairs.

This tradition reasserted itself strongly in the writings of suchsixteenth-century sceptics as Cornelius Agrippa, Montaigneand Charron, whose influence is discernible in the sentimentsof thinkers and poets in the Elizabethan and Jacobean age. Suchscepticism came to the aid of those who denied the claims of thenatural sciences or of other universal rational schemas and advocatedsalvation in pure faith, like the great Protestant reformersand their followers, and the Jansenist wing of the Roman Church.The rationalist belief in a single coherent body of logicallydeduced conclusions, arrived at by universally valid principles ofthought and founded upon carefully sifted data of observation orexperiment, was further shaken by sociologically minded thinkersfrom Bodin to Montesquieu. These writers, using the evidence ofboth history and the new literature of travel and exploration innewly discovered lands, Asia and the Americas, emphasised thevariety of human customs and especially the influence of dissimilarnatural factors, particularly geographical ones, upon thedevelopment of different human societies, leading to differencesof institutions and outlook, which in their turn generated widedifferences of belief and behaviour. This was powerfully reinforcedby the revolutionary doctrines of David Hume, especially by hisdemonstration that no logical links existed between truths of factand such a priori truths as those of logic or mathematics, whichtended to weaken or dissolve the hopes of those who, under theinfluence of Descartes and his followers, thought that a singlesystem of knowledge, embracing all provinces and answering allquestions, could be established by unbreakable chains of logicalargument from universally valid axioms, not subject to refutationor modification by any experience of an empirical kind.

Nevertheless, no matter how deeply relativity about humanvalues or the interpretation of social, including historical, factsentered the thought of social thinkers of this type, they tooretained a common core of conviction that the ultimate endsof all men at all times were, in effect, identical: all men soughtthe satisfaction of basic physical and biological needs, such asfood, shelter, security, and also peace, happiness, justice, theharmonious development of their natural faculties, truth, and,somewhat more vaguely, virtue, moral perfection, and what theRomans had called humanitas. Means might differ in cold andhot climates, mountainous countries and flat plains, and nouniversal formula could fit all cases without Procrustean results,but the ultimate ends were fundamentally similar. Such influentialwriters as Voltaire, d’Alembert and Condorcet believed thatthe development of the arts and sciences was the most powerfulhuman weapon in attaining these ends, and the sharpest weaponin the fight against ignorance, superstition, fanaticism, oppressionand barbarism, which crippled human effort and frustrated men’ssearch for truth and rational self-direction. Rousseau and Mablybelieved, on the contrary, that the institutions of civilisation werethemselves a major factor in the corruption of men and theiralienation from nature, from simplicity, purity of heart and the lifeof natural justice, social equality, and spontaneous human feeling;artificial man had imprisoned, enslaved and ruined natural man.Nevertheless, despite profound differences of outlook, there wasa wide area of agreement about fundamental points: the realityof natural law (no longer formulated in the language of orthodoxCatholic or Protestant doctrine), of eternal principles by followingwhich alone men could become wise, happy, virtuous andfree. One set of universal and unalterable principles governed theworld for theists, deists and atheists, for optimists and pessimists,puritans, primitivists and believers in progress and the richestfruits of science and culture; these laws governed inanimate andanimate nature, facts and events, means and ends, private life andpublic, all societies, epochs and civilisations; it was solely by departingfrom them that men fell into crime, vice, misery. Thinkersmight differ about what these laws were, or how to discover them,or who were qualified to expound them; that these laws werereal, and could be known, whether with certainty, or only probability,remained the central dogma of the entire Enlightenment.It was the attack upon this that constitutes the most formidablereaction against this dominant body of belief.

II

A thinker who might have had a decisive role in this countermovement,if anyone outside his native country had read him,was the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico. Withextraordinary originality Vico maintained, especially in the lastwork of his life, the Scienza nuova, that the Cartesians were profoundlymistaken about the role of mathematics as the scienceof sciences; that mathematics was certain only because it was ahuman invention. It did not, as they supposed, correspond to anobjective structure of reality; it was a method and not a body oftruths; with its help we could plot regularities – the occurrenceof phenomena in the external world – but not discover why theyoccurred as they did, or to what end. This could be known only toGod, for only those who make things can truly know what theyare and for what purpose they have been made. Hence we do not,in this sense, know the external world – nature – for we have notmade it; only God, who created it, knows it in this fashion. Butsince men are directly acquainted with human motives, purposes,hopes, fears, which are their own, they can know human affairs asthey cannot know nature.

According to Vico, our lives and activities collectively andindividually are expressions of our attempts to survive, satisfyour desires, understand each other and the past out of which weemerge. A utilitarian interpretation of the most essential humanactivities is misleading. They are, in the first place, purely expressive:to sing, to dance, to worship, to speak, to fight, and theinstitutions which embody these activities, comprise a vision ofthe world. Language, religious rites, myths, laws, social, religious,juridical institutions, are forms of self-expression, of wishing toconvey what one is and strives for; they obey intelligible patterns,and for that reason it is possible to reconstruct the life ofother societies, even those remote in time and place and utterlyprimitive, by asking oneself what kind of framework of humanideas, feelings, acts could have generated the poetry, the monuments,the mythology which were their natural expression. Mengrow individually and socially; the world of men who composedthe Homeric poems was plainly very different from that of theHebrews to whom God had spoken through their sacred books,or that of the Roman Republic, or medieval Christianity, orNaples under the Bourbons. Patterns of growth are traceable.

Myths are not, as enlightened thinkers believe, false statementsabout reality corrected by later rational criticism, nor ispoetry mere embellishment of what could equally well be statedin ordinary prose. The myths and poetry of antiquity embody avision of the world as authentic as that of Greek philosophy, orRoman law, or the poetry and culture of our own enlightenedage – earlier, cruder, remote from us, but with its own voice, aswe hear it in the Iliad or the Twelve Tables, belonging uniquelyto its own culture, and with a sublimity which cannot bereproduced by a later, more sophisticated culture. Each cultureexpresses its own collective experience, each step on the ladderof human development has its own equally authentic means ofexpression.

Vico’s theory of cycles of cultural development becamecelebrated, but it is not his most original contribution to theunderstanding of society or history. His revolutionary move isto have denied the doctrine of a timeless natural law the truthsof which could have been known in principle to any man, atany time, anywhere. Vico boldly denied this doctrine, whichhas formed the heart of the Western tradition from Aristotleto our own day. He preached the notion of the uniquenessof cultures, however they might resemble each other in theirrelationship to their antecedents and successors, and the notionof a single style that pervades all the activities and manifestationsof societies of human beings at a particular stage of development.Thereby he laid the foundations at once of comparativecultural anthropology and of comparative historical linguistics,aesthetics, jurisprudence; language, ritual, monuments, andespecially mythology, were the sole reliable keys to what laterscholars and critics conceived as altering forms of collectiveconsciousness. Such historicism was plainly not compatible withthe view that there was only one standard of truth or beauty orgoodness, which some cultures or individuals approached moreclosely than others, and which it was the business of thinkers toestablish and men of action to realise. The Homeric poems werean unsurpassable masterpiece, but they could spring only from abrutal, stern, oligarchical, ‘heroic’ society, and later civilisations,however superior in other respects, did not and could not producean art necessarily superior to Homer. This doctrine strucka powerful blow at the notion of timeless truths and steadyprogress, interrupted by occasional periods of retrogression intobarbarism, and drew a sharp line between the natural sciences,which dealt with the relatively unaltering nature of the physicalworld viewed from ‘outside’, and humane studies, which viewedsocial evolution from ‘inside’ by a species of empathetic insight,for which the establishment of texts or dates by scientific criticismwas a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition.

Vico’s unsystematic works dealt with many other matters,but his importance in the history of the Enlightenment consistsin his insistence on the plurality of cultures and on the consequentlyfallacious character of the idea that there is one and onlyone structure of reality which the enlightened philosopher cansee as it truly is, and which he can (at least in principle) describein logically perfect language – a vision that has obsessed thinkersfrom Plato to Leibniz, Condillac, Russell and his more faithfulfollowers. For Vico, men ask different questions of the universe,and their answers are shaped accordingly: such questions, andthe symbols or acts that express them, alter or become obsoletein the course of cultural development; to understand the answersone must understand the questions that preoccupy an age or aculture; they are not constant, nor necessarily more profoundbecause they resemble our own more than others that are lessfamiliar to us. Vico’s relativity went further than Montesquieu’s.If his view was correct, it was subversive of the very notion ofabsolute truths and of a perfect society founded on them, notmerely in practice but in principle. However, Vico was little read,and the question of how much influence he had had before hisNew Science was revived by Michelet a century after it was writtenis still uncertain.

If Vico wished to shake the pillars on which the Enlightenmentof his times rested, the Königsberg theologian and philosopherJ. G. Hamann wished to smash them. Hamann was brought upas a pietist, a member of the most introspective and self-absorbedof all the Lutheran sects, intent upon the direct communion ofthe individual soul with God, bitterly anti-rationalist, liable toemotional excess, preoccupied with the stern demands of moralobligation and the need for severe self-discipline. The attemptof Frederick the Great in the middle years of the eighteenthcentury to introduce French culture and a degree of rationalisation,economic and social as well as military, into East Prussia,the most backward part of his provinces, provoked a peculiarlyviolent reaction in this pious, semi-feudal, traditional Protestantsociety (which also gave birth to Herder and Kant). Hamannbegan as a disciple of the Enlightenment, but, after a profoundspiritual crisis, turned against it, and published a series ofpolemical attacks written in a highly idiosyncratic, perverselyallusive, contorted, deliberately obscure style, as remote as hecould make it from the, to him, detestable elegance, clarity andsmooth superficiality of the bland and arrogant French dictatorsof taste and thought. Hamann’s theses rested on the convictionthat all truth is particular, never general; that reason is impotentto demonstrate the existence of anything and is an instrumentonly for conveniently classifying and arranging data in patternsto which nothing in reality corresponds; that to understand isto be communicated with, by men or by God. The universe forhim, as for the older German mystical tradition, is itself a kind oflanguage. Things and plants and animals are themselves symbolswith which God communicates with his creatures. Everythingrests on faith; faith is as basic an organ of acquaintance withreality as the senses. To read the Bible is to hear the voice of God,who speaks in a language which he has given man the grace tounderstand. Some men are endowed with the gift of understandinghis ways, of looking at the universe, which is his book no lessthan the revelations of the Bible and the fathers and saints ofthe Church. Only love – for a person or an object – can revealthe true nature of anything. It is not possible to love formulae,general propositions, laws, the abstractions of science, the vastsystem of concepts and categories – symbols too general to beclose to reality – with which the French lumières have blindedthemselves to concrete reality, to the real experience which onlydirect acquaintance, especially by the senses, provides.
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