The conflict of right and right
Raymond Carr
ISAIAH BERLIN by John Gray HarperCollins, f18, pp. 224 The blurb of this book advances the claim that Isaiah Berlin is `the nation's greatest thinker'. Few would dispute this, except Berlin himself, since he always claims that he is the most overestimated man alive. How, given this reputation, John Gray asks, do we explain that Berlin's cen- tral message `has been little understood and surprisingly neglected by the academic world'.
This cannot be attributed to any stylistic obscurity, even if the richness of his histori- cal and cultural reference may sometimes overwhelm his readers. His writings are crystal clear, and, like Gray, he enforces clarity by reflective repetition. His cursus honorum (Fellow of All Souls, headship of an Oxford College — not that this counts much nowadays — President of the British Academy and 0.M.), might seem to make him a paid-up member of the establish- ment. Yet his message is not comforting to conventional liberal establishment suscepti- bilities. As this book insists, it is deeply subversive. Gray finds in Berlin's `value pluralism' the leitmotif of all his writings. Ultimate human values, Berlin insists, are conflictive; they cannot be reconciled by rational calculation since they are not mea- surable, least of all can they be reconciled by what Gray dismisses as `the desiccated discourse of Anglo-American philosophy', which Berlin abandoned as incapable of solving anything of impor- tance to us as human beings, at worst a game of juggling with words, at best a species of mental arithmetic dispelling patent confusions.
Tragic is the conflict, Hegel wrote, not between right and wrong, but between right and right, or as Berlin puts it, `the necessity of choosing between absolute claims is an inescapable characteristic of the liuman condition'. This is put at its clearest in a fine essay on Machiavelli. He is not a mere realpolitiker writing a handbook, coun- selling princes how to achieve and maintain themselves in power. His message is much more disturbing. There are the manly, patriotic virtues necessary for the health of a Roman republic; there are the Christian virtues of other-worldliness and cheek- turning. But they cannot be combined; they are irreconcilable. You cannot hedge your bets. You must plump, and your choice, as all choices must, entails loss.
It is Berlin's critique of the 18th-century Enlightenment, particularly in its French embodiment, that offers the most conge- nial approach to his thought. It all goes back to Descartes: purge the mind of all irrational inheritances and it can be put together again on rational foundations. For the men of the Enlightenment — even for Hume and Gibbon — men were all of a piece, cut from the same cloth; in the polit- ical anthropology of the Enlightenment there was a single, uniform, natural man with the same basic needs. Thus, once men rejected prejudice and superstition (or in Rousseau's case, cast off the corruptions of civilisation) it should be rationally possible to conceive a society where all genuine human needs were met in a perfect, har- monious society. Berlin's rejection of monism, the single solution that has haunt- ed us since Plato, is absolute; that way lies Jacobin totalitarianism. Berlin, like Herder before him, therefore delivers a body blow to
the classical philosophy of the West, to which the notion of perfection — the possibility, at least in principle, of universal and timeless solutions of problems of value — is essential.
It is not only that a perfect society is inconceivable. There is an immense diversi- ty of societies each with its own history, its customs, its language and its artistic creations. Diversity is a good thing. This was the message of the thinkers whom Berlin has resurrected for us: Vico, the for- gotten Neapolitan who invented the con- cept of a culture; Herder and Hamman, pious Germans who like the later Roman- tics, rejected the facile assumptions of the French philosophes. Each culture is a unique and irreplaceable cluster of values which its members have chosen, within lim- its it is true, to live by. It can only be under- stood on its own terms by a leap of the sympathetic imagination. `One nation can understand and sympathise with the institu- tions of another', Berlin writes, `because it knows how much its own mean to itself. Cosmopolitanism is the shedding of all that makes one most human, most oneself. I don't know Berlin's views on a federal, united Europe. Might it be that he would regard it as a philosophe's essay in abstract `But of course I went to a private prison.' cosmopolitanism, a cultural monstrosity, lacking historical, cultural and emotional foundations, destined for shipwreck on the rocks of nationalism?
Berlin, Gray argues, accepts, as did 19th-century liberals like J. S. Mill, that nationalism may be `an important sense of social solidarity and of the political stability of a liberal society'. But Berlin is acutely aware of the pathology of nationalism, of the distortions of fin-de-siecle Romantic voluntarism that lie at the root of Nazi paganism. I first read Herder in a seminar organised by Nazi students at Freiburg in 1938, and it soon became clear to me that Herder's volksgeist — the spirit of a nation — could be stretched to cover a dangerous doctrine of racial supremacy. Herder's insistence on the primacy of language as the untransferable encapsulation of a culture has likewise been stretched to justify the official imposition of a language in order to create a nation state; those who reject the 'official' language are marginalised, excluded from the national community.
Berlin's rejection of determinism is as resolute as his rejection of monism and of the Enlightenment's illusion that there was a possible science of society as there was a science that gave laws to the physical world. We know we have a choice. It is what distinguishes human beings from animals. So resolute is Berlin's rejection of determinism that he is prepared to main- tain, in conversation, that if a brick had dropped on Lenin's head there would have been no Bolshevik revolution. He likewise. Gray maintains, rejects the now fashion- able rights liberalism of Rawls, Dworkin et al who accept value pluralism as an inescapable fact of life but maintain that justice and rights are, as it were, neutral, value free regulative principles that set the terms on which competing goods can be pursued. Rights liberalism may be, like the old doctrine of the social contract, a useful fiction as a defence of liberty against the claims of the state. Berlin sees freedom preserved by value pluralism itself; given diverse and incompatible values, the state has no claim to impose a unique value. The trouble with rights liberalism is that there are conflictive liberties, incompatible demands of justice. Value pluralism, as it were, goes all the way down.
Time and time again, the quality of Berlin's mind reminds one of Hume, as possessing that humane scepticism that made the Enlightenment 'one of the best and most hopeful episodes in the life of humanity'. Berlin's liberalism is a liberalism of moderation and compromise: it implies a series of trade offs between competing values. So much liberty to be sacrificed for so much justice. The avoidance of intolera- ble choices is the `first requirement of a decent society'. Thus a multi-culturalism that takes the form of exclusive ethnic claims must be adjusted to preserve, I repeat, `an important source of social soli- clarity'. No one who has read Arthur Schlesinger's recent book on the disuniting of America can avoid this conclusion, immensely difficult in practice though the necessary adjustments may be.
Some of the less philosophically inclined may find this book tough going, when con- fronted, for example, with the proposition that 'liberal principles of justice and liberty are deontic principles'. It is not a biography of Berlin but a heroic endeavour to iron out the tensions in his thought. Given its structure, it inevitably, as Gray laments, robs Berlin's work of the brilliance of its imaginative insights into minds as diverse as those of Herzen, de Maistre, Montesquieu, Disraeli, Moses Hess, Dostoevsky and Verdi. But it does admirably expound his 'unique and perma- nent achievement' as a latter-day Job demolishing the metaphysical consolation to which we cling: that there is peace 'when our lives abound in deep conflicts and hard choice'.
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