Isaac & Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic by David Caute (review)

David Caute’s Isaac & Isaiah begins atypically and dramatically. On an early March day in 1963, during the “idle half-hour after lunch” at All Souls College, Oxford, Isaiah Berlin discretely sought the counsel of David Caute, then a young fellow at the college. What, he asked, “in principle,” should disbar someone from holding a senior academic post? (p. 1). The philosopher was not asking for abstract purposes; he had in mind the very specific case of the renowned but controversial historian Isaac Deutscher.

This long-ago conversation — reproduced almost verbatim by Caute decades later — constitutes the prologue for a study of intellectual enmity. Both Jewish emigres from Tsarist Russia, born two years and a few hundred miles apart, Isaac Deutscher and Isaiah Berlin clashed in print, and stood on opposing sides of intellectual discourse about the Cold War and the Soviet Union. The enmity was not symmetrical. Deutscher, it seems, wrote and thought little of Berlin. Berlin, on the other hand, appears to have felt “an unrelenting animosity towards Deutscher” for more than a decade: one that he acted upon in March 1963, within days (or perhaps hours) of his conversation with Caute (p. xiii).

Berlin, at that point in time, served on the academic advisory board of Sussex University. In the previous week he had been contacted by the university’s vice chancellor, who sought Berlin’s approval to expedite Deutscher’s hiring to a senior faculty post. Imagine the vice-chancellor’s dismay when Berlin wrote back that Deutscher was “the only man whose presence in the same academic community as myself I should find morally intolerable” (p. 279). Berlin’s condemnation effectively dashed Deutscher’s last opportunity for an academic appointment.

A reader may initially wonder whether this striking episode — as much as it may mar Berlin’s memory — merits an entire book. Yet Isaac & Isaiah is not so much a study of the Sussex incident, or even of the relationship between Berlin and Deutscher (who did not correspond with one another and who seem to have had minimal contact), as it is a dual intellectual biography chronicling the divergence of two men born into similar circumstances.

Although both men were Jewish emigres from the former Russian empire, Berlin and Deutscher arrived at fundamentally different outlooks. Berlin, whose family fled the Bolshevik Cheka, ever after decried the dangers of political dogma. Deutscher fought for socialism in interwar Poland; expelled from the Polish Communist Party after warning of the dangers of Nazism, he moved to the Polish Socialist Party. His entire family perished in the Holocaust. Deutscher continued his struggle for the socialist cause — however idiosyncratically — in British exile.

Caute offers a remarkably subtle portrait of these two thinkers, making neither the object of hagiography. Berlin, vehement on the subject of communist repression, was notably silent about questions of empire and civil rights. Hungary engaged him; Vietnam and apartheid did not. Deutscher, a prolific researcher and inordinately gifted writer, struggled with the implications of Lenin and Stalin’s terror. He was no Stalin apologist, but was ever tempted to find reasonable purpose behind the state’s violence and, after Stalin’s death, to detect evidence of a Soviet political thaw. Deutscher was at his worst when he lashed out at novels and novelists who called his utopia into question — Boris Pasternak and George Orwell among them. Caute cautions his readers to distinguish between Deutscher the historian and Deutscher the polemicist.

To read Isaac & Isaiah is to be catapulted backward into time, into the stark, divisive arguments about communism that shaped intellectual life in the early Cold War. Deutscher struggled with the evidence of Soviet anti-Semitism and repression in Eastern Europe, sometimes condemning it, sometimes rationalizing it. Berlin affiliated with the cia-funded Congress of Cultural Freedom and its magazine spinoff, Encounter, and quietly stood by the publication after its funding sources were exposed in the 1960s...