Isaiah Berlin: A Postscript

10 Historically Speaking January/February 2007 Isaiah Berlin: A Postscript James Cracraft The year 2007 marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Isaiah Berlin (born 1909), the celebrated philosopher of freedom and cultural pluralism. Much acclaimed as he has been, bodi in his own lifetime and since, he has also had his detractors . This may be an appropriate moment to consider some of their claims, whether for their critical value or simply as an act of remembrance. For Berlin's intellectual legacy, as I have suggested elsewhere , extends with a special relevance to historians struggling to keep their bearings in die present, postmodernist climate of debate—to historians of ideas, perhaps most especially, but also to the rest of us.1 In his recently published memoirs, Richard Pipes, the well known Russian historian, tells how as a graduate student at Harvard in 1949 he and Berlin, a visiting professor from Oxford "who was considerably to influence my intellectual development," formed a "friendship that lasted for nearly half a century." Pipes found Berlin to be an "extraordinarily versatile intellectual" and a "wonderful conversationalist ," and seems to have relished their time together in Cambridge, New York, Rome, London, and Oxford, where Berlin "was always available." Yet "for all my admiration and friendship," Pipes confesses , Berlin eventually "disappointed me." "He seemed emotionally detached from events of our time, so full of tragedy," he was "loath to commit himself politically," he "never commented on my histories of the Russian Revolution"—"I suppose because they were too uncompromisingly hostile to the intellectual left in Russia and Western Europe"; and their friendship waned. Looking back, Pipes could find no "major ideas diat [Berlin] contributed: for the contrast between 'hedgehogs' and 'foxes' he borrowed from a minor Greek writer, and the distinction between two kinds of liberty strikes me as muddled." In short, the "encomia lavished on him after his deadi" were "grossly exaggerated."-' Pipes's recollection of Berlin skillfully evokes die shimmering personality that he indisputablywas, the mentor and friend of wondrous wit and extraordinary intellectual gifts remembered by countless odier former students and colleagues. Indeed, I would argue that Berlin's remarkably cosmopolitan and empathetic, even compassionate, character, his sheer breaddi of experience and wealth of knowledge , whether encountered direcdy or vicariously, through his voluminous writings and die testimony of odiers, imbue his "agonistic liberalism" (the term isJohn Gray's) with a singular authority.' Pipes seems not to have met this larger Berlin, or to have made the connection between the work and die man. Instead he slights, in an oddly offhand way, Berlin's two most famous writings. The first is the essay on Tolstoy initially published as a book in 1953, whose tide, The Hedgehog and the Fox, was taken from a fragment of ancient Greek poetry (the full extent, fully acknowledged, of the borrowing) which was then converted by him into a potent (and since much borrowed) metaphor for two types of thinker: one, the obsessive monist (Plato, Hegel, Marx, among others), the other, the panoptic pluralist (like Tolstoy). It was Tolstoy's tragedy, Berlin argues here, to be a superb fox who Isaiah Berlin. Courtesy of the Literary Trust, Wolfson College , Oxford, http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/. yearned nonedieless to be a hedgehog, as witness the passages of his masterful War andPeace in which he lays out a quite jejune philosophy of history drawn from thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment. The metaphor has entered die slang of our culture. Utopian hedgehogs and foxy realists surely haunt the academic world, not least die halls of history, to this day. The second work in question is Berlin's even more influential Two Concepts of Liberty (1958), widi its distinction between "negative" and "positive liberty ," the one signifying freedom from interference or coercion by others and die mark as such of a liberal society, the odier to mean the supposedly higher freedom of enlightenment and control, and ever liable as such to perversion into tyranny. Two Concepts of Liberty, later expanded to Four Essays on Liberty (1 969) and dien to the posdiumously published Liberty (2004), has engendered a large, and still growing, critical literature. Does Berlin go too far in his...