POLITICAL STUDIES: 2000 VOL 48, 1026–1039

© Political Studies Association, 2000. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

Review Article

Isaiah Berlin’s Contribution to ModernPolitical TheoryMichael KennySheffield University

Three recent studies of Isaiah Berlin’s moral and political thought stress the significance of valuepluralism for his oeuvre. Whilst this emphasis enables us to dispense with some rather misleadingcharacterizations of Berlin’s liberalism, it is less apparent that his political thought can be success-fully grounded within moral pluralism. Indeed his liberal beliefs sit rather more awkwardly withinthis ideological family than is usually assumed. Scholars seeking to revive Berlin’s value pluralismin relation to contemporary challenges, such as multiculturalism, have not successfully demon-strated the utility of his thinking in relation to such problems, and have developed their argumentsby downplaying the geo-political contexts which shaped his intellectual purposes. Yet his criticshave neglected the fertility and range of his thought, aspects of which remain pertinent for thosestudying political thought in general and liberalism in particular.

The nature of Isaiah Berlin’s impact upon intellectual life in Britain and beyond isstill keenly disputed. That this is so is evident from the reception accorded toseveral recent studies of his life and work and two newly published collections ofhis essays, broadcasts and lectures (Ignatieff, 1998; Galipeau, 1994; Gray, 1995;Berlin, 1996; 1998a; 1999). Berlin attracted a large number of admirers, a testamentto his bravura performances as a historian of ideas, philosopher, public lecturer andbroadcaster. Though even some of his devotees have been sceptical about parts ofhis oeuvre, others continue to regard him as one of the greatest and morallyinsightful liberal thinkers. The grandeur of such claims has been matched by, andhas perhaps helped generate, a pronounced scepticism about the style andsubstance of his thought in other quarters. This sentiment is apparent from thereception accorded in some quarters to Michael Ignatieff’s biographical study(McLynn, 1999; Hitchens, 1998).

The dichotomous reaction to Berlin as an intellectual figure finds echoes in thepraise and criticism with which analysts of political ideas and practitioners of politi-cal philosophy have received his work. One source of these conflicting judgementsis the varying expectations that critics have of the roles of the public intellectualand the philosopher. Though Berlin was undeniably both, he fulfilled these rolesin rather ambiguous ways. He rejected the vision of the philosopher seeking thetruth outside the cave, constructing the perfectly harmonious moral system – arecurrent delusion, he believed, underpinning much philosophical inquiry. Yet inmany of his essays he adopted a highly philosophical mode of discourse and asingular conceptual idiom to articulate his particularist and pluralist convictions(Collini, 1999). Simultaneously, through his popular and accessible broadcasts onthe BBC and his many public lectures, he became one of the best-known British

intellectuals of the post-war years. On occasions he played an important politicalrole, undertaking intelligence work in Washington and Moscow during the 1940s(Ignatieff, 1998, pp. 109–47; Berlin, 1998b). Yet this was a public intellectual whooffered counsel and guidance on few issues of his day and displayed a remarkablecapacity for disengagement on questions eliciting strong moral responses in others.The accusation that he upheld certain ideals in his work but not in his lifecontinues to surface in commentary upon Berlin.

Value-pluralismThe interpretations of his political and ethical ideas offered in two recent studies ofhis thought, by Claude Galipeau (1994) and John Gray (1995), present Berlin as arather sober, cerebral figure. Their reconstructions of his thinking depend upon thediscovery of a cogent logic within his disparate writings. In slightly different waysthese books urge political theorists to return to his troubling yet fertile legacy. Amore balanced and less immediately partisan re-assessment of Berlin is undoubt-edly made possible by the appearance of these important studies, and due to there-publication of some of his finest essays. All of these texts shift debate aboutBerlin away from his role as an intellectual servant of the liberal state towards thebroader question of precisely which parts of his thinking – if any – are most suitablefor contemporary revival.

The assessment of his contribution to the study and interpretation of political ideasis actually hampered by a number of obstacles stemming from his preferred modeof intellectual enquiry. Though he wrote and spoke frequently about major politi-cal thinkers and philosophers, there is no single text, notwithstanding his short andidiosyncratic study of Marx (1960), around which his interpretations and norma-tive contributions can be organized. The service performed by Henry Hardy, aformer student of Berlin’s, is therefore considerable: Hardy has undertaken thearduous mission of sorting through his tutor’s voluminous papers, lecture manu-scripts and unfinished writings, and has brought to light many previously unseenofferings which can now be read alongside the widely known essays (Hardy,1996, pp. ix–xi; Hardy, 1998a). A more complex and multi-dimensional ‘Berlin’ isundoubtedly taking shape through these writings and the recent commentaryupon his life and thought. But we ought to ponder whether the impressive studiesproduced by Ignatieff, Galipeau and Gray offer us a picture of the ‘real’ IsaiahBerlin or in fact contribute to a subtle ‘re-invention’ of his thought in accordancewith today’s intellectual tastes and political concerns.

One of the principal virtues of the texts written by Galipeau and Gray is theirfocus upon the epistemological and ethical commitments at the root of hisintellectual praxis, and the impact of these upon his political thinking. Thesestudies show exactly how ‘value-pluralism’ shaped and ordered Berlin’s differ-ent intellectual interventions. Both authors are, to some degree, motivated by asense that he has not quite received the credit he deserves as an ethical andpolitical thinker. Yet neither are hagiographic, as they point to some importanttensions within the scaffolding and at the interface of the different levels of histhought.

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How are we to regard Berlin’s notoriously elusive belief in ‘value-pluralism’, thestarting-point for the interpretative narratives offered by Galipeau and Gray? Thelatter characterizes this position as follows:

ultimate human values are objective but irreducibly diverse … they areconflicting and often uncombinable, and … sometimes when they comeinto conflict with one another they are incommensurable; that is, theyare not comparable by any rational measure. (1995, p. 8)

The principle of incommensurabilty suggests that there is no external standard, no‘super-value’, according to which values can be rationally ranked. Incommensur-ability entails recognition of the futility of the notion of a universal goal towardswhich ‘all human projects should contribute or tend, and against which they mightbe evaluated’ (Gray, 1995, p. 8). We should cease to presume that values likejustice, liberty and equality can be combined in a harmonious system; they are ‘onthe contrary … permanently liable to come into conflict with each other’ (Crowder,1994, p. 293). We are continually required to choose between competing ethicalvalues and to recognize the incommensurabilty of different elements of singlevalues that we hold dear. The choices that we make are, therefore, betweenabsolutes, involving loss, sacrifice and compromise and based partially upon ourreasoning capacities as well as our experience and history. This is a meta-ethicalposition, founded upon the belief that within any particular moral code or systemof belief, ‘there will arise conflicts among the ultimate values of that morality,which neither theoretical nor practical reasoning about them can resolve’ (Gray,1995, p. 4). Gray emphasizes the impact upon Berlin of Herder’s commitment tothe unique destiny of rival national cultures and a much broader sense of incom-mensurability across cultural systems, though other philosophers have interpretedHerder, and his significance for Berlin, in a different way (Taylor, 1991). Both Grayand Galipeau see Berlin’s embrace of value-pluralism and determination to groundmodern liberalism upon this meta-value, as opposed to the rationalistic anduniversalistic philosophies favoured by other liberal intellectuals, as the site of hisoriginality and significance.

What is the basis for Berlin’s commitment to value-pluralism? Gray highlights hisaccount of individual agency and the ‘radical indeterminacy’ which stems from thecelebration of individual expression through choice-making. Berlin was, above all,convinced that choosing between values, and conflicting elements within singlevalues, was both inevitable and likely to issue in moral disharmony:

… choices have to be made. If you choose one value, you must sacrificeanother. Sacrifices can be agonizing, but unless you refrain from choos-ing (which would make you inhuman, because making choices isintrinsic to being a human being), unless you cancel that, you have tochoose and therefore you have to sacrifice something, namely the valuesyou don’t realize. (Berlin, 1998b, p. 101)

This commitment shaped his antipathy to the encroachment of forms of explan-atory logic associated with the ‘natural sciences’ into the study of social andpolitical behaviour, themes famously expounded in the essays he penned on ‘The

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Concept of Scientific History’ (1998a, pp. 17–58) and ‘Historical Inevitability’(1998a, pp. 119–90). Human history could only be understood through attentionto the numerous ‘concepts and categories’ forged as a response to and guide for ourirreducible moral capacity. In Galipeau’s gloss, ‘Historical knowledge is abouthuman agency, or collective and individual behaviour, or the meaning of acts andinstitutions; and because of this, intentions, motives, and purposes are essential tounderstanding and explaining history’ (1994, p. 49). This ontological convictionoffered the foundations for Berlin’s pluralism. Though he remained committed tothe notion of the plasticity of many aspects of our natures and to our profoundcapacities for self-transformation, he also believed that our most central anddistinguishing attribute was the exercise of moral agency. Following Kant, heregarded free will as constitutive of human identity; without some such conceptionit is meaningless to interpret behaviour through the assumption of the responsi-bility of individuals for their acts. Yet he departed from Kant in his understandingof the sources of this moral agency and on occasions professed to reject a prioriethical theorizing altogether (Hampshire, 1991, p. 129). A major influence on thesepreferences was the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, and particularly hisconception of our capacity for imaginative sympathy – fantasia. This quality enablesus to learn from our encounters with others that we possess trans-subjective moralcapacities. It is this attribute that, in Berlin’s mind, permitted the development ofa discernible common horizon to human values and a limit upon the ‘goods’ thathuman beings could meaningfully hold.

It was through this framework that Berlin offered his many unusual insights intowestern intellectual history. His interventions in this field were organized aroundhis conflation of the ethical commitment to the pluralism of human values and thehistoricist stress upon the particularity of cultures. The latter recognition wasshaped not only by Herder, whose writing he admired greatly, but by his acquain-tance with a raft of romantic German critics and celebration of some of the leadingRussian intellectuals of the nineteenth century. From these sources he derived thebelief that national cultures were unique in terms of the packages of culturalmeaning they offered for their citizens and in their particular developmentaltrajectories, an insight that made him highly critical of the cosmopolitan visions ofliberal intellectuals writing in the wake of Kant.

Value-pluralism was thus expressed through a particular kind of historical anthro-pology as well as in his normative arguments. Through his many essays on avariety of topics in the history of western thought, there emerges a continuousobjection to ‘monistic’ models of normative and philosophical thought. And in theminds of some of his devotees, it is this critique of ‘monism’ that establishesBerlin’s standing as a philosopher of some significance. Both the category ofmonism, and the grounds upon which he offered a critique of it, remain under-determined in his thought, however. He in fact collected numerous claims underthe heading of monism, including: the belief that a single answer to questions oftruth and meaning can be discovered; the conviction that human ends are ulti-mately fixed and possible to rank using critical reason; and the notion that thevarious principles according to which human society ought to be ordered are com-patible or indeed commensurable. Yet it is not clear that the concept of monismprovides us with anything other than a rather blunt conceptual instrument with

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which to make sense of trends and traditions in western thought. This highlyexpansive category was the complement of a mode of argumentation whichinvolved tracing continuities of metaphysical assumption across vast expansesof time. His tendency to employ dualistic categorizations (another well-knownfavourite included classifying thinkers as ‘foxes’ or ‘hedgehogs’, and his well-known distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ liberty) led him to countermonism with the category of pluralism and to allocate thinkers into either of theseconceptual boxes.

A crucial difference between the two categories stemmed from his belief thatpluralism ‘conforms to our knowledge of moral life and the cultural differencesamongst civilizations’ (Galipeau, 1994, p. 49). This claim produced some potenttensions within Berlin’s thought. The ‘truth’ of value-pluralism arose both fromour experiences of the world and the sense that we make of these, principallythrough our moral intuitions. Yet he simultaneously believed that we cannot gainaccess to truth either through reason alone or pure experience. We gain under-standing of ourselves and the world around us, as well as a profound sense of ourown ‘identity’, through the deployment and refinement of vocabularies forgedfrom concepts and categories which express the various meanings at the heart ofdifferent cultural systems. Sceptics have long objected that incommensurabilityslides into relativism, a position Berlin explicitly rejected. His writings reveal aconsistent commitment to the ‘objective’ character of value-pluralism. There aredifferent ways in which the objectivity of value-pluralism can and has beenunderstood (Weinstock, 1997). Steven Lukes (1995) has traced some of the differ-ent senses in which this claim has been advanced, noting Berlin’s own ambiguityon this score. Yet if value-pluralism is objective in character, then monism wouldseem to represent an ultimately false claim about our moral natures. To sustainsuch a story about Western intellectual development, however, Berlin would havehad to demonstrate far more fully why this ‘truth’ took so long to emerge. Not untilMachiavelli, in some of his writings (1998a, pp. 269–325), and the German roman-tics of the late eighteenth century in others, is the truth of moral pluralism fullyarticulated (1996, pp. 168–93). Equally, this intermingling of historical and philo-sophical argument begs the question of what exactly has made the monistic fallacyso psychologically as well as intellectually appealing.

Berlin’s Political ThoughtGalipeau and Gray contend that pluralism is the principal backdrop to Berlin’spolitical thinking. This emphasis is beneficial in revealing some of most obviousmisconceptions about Berlin’s work that are still in circulation – the mistakenaccusation of relativism for instance. But if the best defence of his thought is tolocate him in a tradition of ‘agonistic’ liberalism, as suggested by Gray, it istroubling that such a ‘grand’ commitment meets with a rather shallow articulationin the realm of political thought. The mis-match between the grandeur of his moralunderstanding and the banality of some of his political prescription is ratherstriking. Berlin reiterated his preference on several occasions for a governmentalprogramme that would pursue a social liberalism in the style of the New Deal, butgave little indication that such a position arose from his own ethics.1 But the essayscollected in these and other volumes, together with these recent studies, point to a

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number of interesting agendas and questions that arise from assessment of thepolitical dimension of his thinking. Several of these come more clearly into viewif we consider his relationship with liberal political thought. These issues have infact been obscured by the tendency to regard Berlin as a paradigmatic ‘classicalliberal’. This label, which has been challenged on both analytical (Freeden, 1996,pp. 141–77) and historical (Vincent, 1990) grounds, renders his thinking and intel-lectual legacy far less ambiguous and interesting than is in fact the case.

The presentation of a dualistic model of liberty – divided into ‘negative’ and ‘posi-tive’ inflections in his widely cited essay ‘The Two Concepts of Liberty’ – has been theobject of and starting-point for considerable philosophical reflection. This con-ceptualization remains somewhat elusive however. The categories are defined withsuch breadth that they conflate rather different senses of liberty, and critics haveundermined the boundary between them. Berlin’s own relationship with these dif-ferent concepts changed in subtle ways as circumstances altered, though in thebroadest sense he retained the beliefs that negative liberty was a necessary, if insuf-ficient, condition for positive liberty, and that citizens had to be protected from theconsequences attendant upon overzealous pursuit of the latter (Arblaster, 1971).

Numerous commentators have succumbed to the temptation to regard the negativeconception (which Berlin clearly favoured when he first articulated the ‘twoconcepts’ model) as the paradigmatic articulation of the liberal understanding ofnegative liberty. Yet this is rather misleading. One problem arises from the verydifferent claims implied by ‘positive liberty’. Berlin deployed the latter to indicatethe teleological understanding of liberty as the fulfilment of a particular way of life,liberty understood as self-mastery, and liberty defined as the realization of one’sintrinsic nature, the eternal dictates of reason, or the destiny of the ‘tribe’ or class.For conservative critics Berlin offered a dangerous cocktail of quasi-anarchist andromantic doctrine, producing a purely one-dimensional account of liberty as theunrestricted exercise of the will which could only be legitimately constrained by apublic authority acting to prevent harm to others or oneself. From the left, negativeliberty has been rejected as an ‘exercise’ rather than an ‘opportunity’ concept, andfor its assumption that individuals possess liberty and the capacity to exercise itprior to their existence within social contexts. And many liberal philosophersremain equally unconvinced by its validity. For some, Berlin’s conception of thehuman personality was weakened due to the absence of a more complete accountof a self that is capable of making choices and recognizing its own preferences.Other critics are right to detect metaphysical propositions underpinning negativeliberty as well as its ‘positive’ counterpart (Ivison, 1997).

Though his notions of negative and positive liberty remain in intellectual currency,it is doubtful whether this model provides the most plausible justification forreturning to Berlin. Indeed there is evidence to suggest that he has not been wellserved by the widespread presumption that the essays on liberty represent theheart of his philosophical contribution. A different picture of his thought emergesif we take another route into it, following the pluralist signposts erected byGalipeau and Gray. The creation of the conditions in which the individual’s libertywill flourish cannot, on pluralist grounds, be the sole end of good government: ‘Heis concerned that other admirable ends be met and satisfied, especially a sense of

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belonging to a culture, speaking a particular language, being tied to a people bycommon bonds of history and locality’ (Galipeau, 1994, p. 151). On this reading,recognition of the individual’s need for identity, understood in relation to thecultures and groups to which she belongs, underpins his attachment to negativeliberty. Galipeau extrapolates from Berlin’s writings to generate an account of theself possessing the moral capacity to choose because of its constitutive loyalties andbackgrounds, as well as between these. In this light Berlin’s immersion in romanticideas is telling. His reading of some of the leading German authors of the eighteenthcentury led him to stress the paradigmatic nature of Fichte’s model of the ‘active,dynamic and imaginative self’ (1999, p. 93). On the basis of this conception, a dis-tinctive world-view took shape around the notion that what is most worthwhile inlife is ‘the exfoliation of a particular self, its creative activity, its imposition of formsupon matter, its penetration of other things, its creation of values, its dedication ofitself to those values’ (Berlin, 1999, p. 95). There are some interesting suggestionsin his recently re-published Mellon lectures on romanticism that this conception ofa desiring, creative and ever-changing self approximates in certain respects to the(pluralist) ‘truth’ about our moral nature. Read alongside Galipeau’s arguments,a proto-communitarian Berlin begins to emerge; a figure less familiar from themany references to him as an exemplar of the tradition that holds to an asocial orahistorical model of the self.

There is another sense in which his standing as a spokesman for a putative‘classical’ liberalism ought to challenged. This concerns his treatment of the rela-tionship between liberalism and pluralism. Berlin believed that the truth of value-pluralism was closely bound up with liberal doctrine and liberal democraticpolities. But he was less clear, as George Crowder (1994) has demonstrated, aboutwhich particular intermediate value secures this relationship as a necessary one. Anumber of familiar candidates have been proposed – most notably toleration,autonomy and the maximization of choice. But Berlin himself was crucially vagueon this point, implying rather different answers at different points.

His (and Bernard Williams’ (1994)) response to Crowder is revealing. Rejectingpurely formal treatments of this theme, they suggested that this is better regardedas a historically concrete question. Like many liberals, Berlin regarded modernsociety as a unique historic configuration of ideas, human capacities and socialforces which has, among other achievements, rendered possible the constructionof a liberal political order. Yet he simultaneously regarded the modern historicalera as a period which gave birth to the deeply irrationalist impulse that spun outof the German romantic protest against Enlightenment rationalism (Steinberg,1996). This idea informed his ‘tragic’ understanding of modern European history.Modernity was in some senses distinguished by the widespread recognition of thetruth of moral pluralism as monistic (philosophical and theological) perspectives beganto lose their hold. But it also harboured a fateful irrationalist impulse that emergedin the wake of romanticism through the conflation of the notion of the Fichtean selfwith the cult of the leader as the embodiment of the will of the nation or people:

This can have its political implications, as I hinted, if the self is nolonger identified with the individual but with some super-personalentity, such as a community or a Church or a State or a class, which then

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becomes a huge intrusive forward-marching will, which imposes its par-ticular personality both upon the outside world and upon its own con-stituent elements, which might be human beings, who are thereby reducedto the role simply of ingredients of, or parts in, some much bigger, muchmore impressive, much more historically persistent personality. (Berlin,1999, p. 95)

Within the modern period there had developed a political form – liberal democracy– which could alleviate the dangers of such irrationalism through the institu-tionalization of a political order designed to reflect the co-existence of the manydifferent conceptions of individual fulfilment and self-realization which floweredin the romantic movement. This form of political community offered fairly robustfoundations for pluralism, he believed. But beneath such a conclusion there lurkedthe dangers posed by quintessentially modern currents of thought that derived fromthe romantic celebration of the irrational – radical scepticism, nihilism and relativism.This ambivalence both drew him to a continual preference for liberal democraticpolitics, flaws and all, yet also prevented Berlin from resolving his own uncertaintiesabout the status of liberalism vis-à-vis non-liberal cultures, values and societies.Many of the conflicts characterizing liberal societies stem from the existence ofgoods and life-choices associated with communities and groups that do notconform to liberal values. Indeed, the emergence of liberal doctrines can in part beunderstood against the background of fierce and bloody conflicts between theadvocates of contesting doctrines. Yet a notable absence from Berlin’s philosophyis any distinction between conceptions of the good that are more or less reasonableor amenable to compromise with others (a key feature of recent attempts to con-struct a ‘political liberalism’ (see for instance Larmore, 1990)). With his deploymentof the overarching category of positive liberty, Berlin denied liberals a frameworkthrough which such distinctions might be made, encouraging the conflation underone heading of very different kinds of normative belief.

Should we regard Berlin as the purveyor of principles that he believed to beapplicable beyond the particular historical setting within which he wrote, or did headhere to a historicist conception of liberal democracy as the expression of aparticular moral culture which cannot be rationally shown to be superior to non-liberal forms? This remains one of the most significant and interesting debatesabout Berlin’s thought. Gray makes a powerful case for the latter judgement. Butit is hard to conclude that Berlin was not a universalist. He adhered to the notionof a minimal moral horizon common to all human societies and believed that thisplaced a finite limit upon the range of values which humans could meaningfullyhold. As with other liberal pluralists, his ‘thin’ conception of human nature implieda minimum content of morality – a necessary but insufficient precondition for thepursuit of the good. In this sense Weinstock (1997) is right to observe that Berlin’svalue-pluralism is more moderate in kind than Gray’s reading suggests. In Berlin’sview, it was rights – the insitutionalization of the principle of negative liberty – thatoccupied this minimal space and constituted the overriding commitment sustainingliberalism. For ‘the liberal tradition … only rights can be regarded as absolute; …and … there are frontiers not artificially drawn, within which men should beinviolable’ (Berlin, 1969, p. 165). As with other liberal thinkers (notably Rawls),his interpretation of what is primary in the liberal value-set was procedural in kind,

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and ‘trumped’ the pursuit of any particular substantive value. Such a framework issuggestive of an implicit ethical universalism. Equally it is a mistake to deduce ananti-Enlightenment intent from Berlin’s penchant for writing about non- and anti-liberal currents and trends in political and cultural thought. He was quite explicitabout the intellectual merits of paying attention to such sources:

What is interesting is to read the enemy, because the enemy penetratesthe defences, the weak points, because what interests me is what iswrong with the ideas in which I believe – why it may be right to modifyor even abandon them. (Berlin, 1998b, p. 90)

But Gray is correct in observing a marked ambiguity about Berlin’s capacity todemonstrate rationally the superiority of liberal over non-liberal societies. Thelatter’s liberal beliefs sit rather more awkwardly within this ideological family thanis usually assumed. On the one hand his historicism encouraged a conception ofliberalism as a partisan, non-neutral doctrine, founded upon its own conceptionsof moral personality and particular values. Yet from the postulated relationshipbetween liberalism and the ‘truth’ of value-pluralism, one can derive from Berlin’swriting a sense of the historical and political uniqueness of the liberal project, animplied commitment to the non- or trans-ideological character of liberaldemocratic polities. Viewed in this way, liberalism takes on some of the universaland ‘neutral’ attributes sought more explicitly for it by other liberal philosophers.

Given his rather ambiguous ideas about liberalism and pluralism, it is perhapsironic that some see this as the most formidable part of his legacy. Ignatieff (1998,pp. 285–6) suggests that it is his sensitivity to cultural pluralism and the incom-mensurability of human values that makes his thought especially pertinent toliberal states in which conflicts associated with cultural, ethnic and linguisticdifference have moved to the centre of the political stage. It is certainly plausible todeduce from Berlin’s pluralism the outline of a politics of negotiation andcompromise, premised upon the recognition that no polity can ever be groundedupon ‘unassailable first principles’ (Steinberg, 1996, p. 370). This is a liberalism ofhumility which teaches its citizens that the achievement of any moral ordernecessarily involves the loss and defeat of some fundamental human values. Nega-tive liberty appears as the necessary, though insufficient, condition for such a politywhich would institute a kind of via negativa in which ‘individuals are protectedfrom the dangers of political visionaries ready to sacrifice others on the altar of anintellectual fetish like “historical inevitability”’ (Lilla, 1998, pp. 6–7).

But Ignatieff’s assertion is problematic in part because Berlin’s writings betray amarked lack of interest in the political and constitutional dimensions of liberty infavour of the meta-ethical standpoint. In this sense he in fact disengaged fromimportant parts of the liberal tradition. His scattered political observations andresponses suggested a confidence in the actually existing institutional pattern ofliberal democratic states that was, on the whole, unwarranted. In particular, onecan find little help in Berlin’s writing on the fundamental question of whetherpluralism may undermine rather than bolster political forms of liberalism (Bellamy,1999). Value-pluralism merely tells us that we have to choose between competinggoods; it cannot circumscribe the choices we make. The problem for liberalpluralists is that value-pluralism cannot prevent us choosing values beyond the

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liberal value-set. Indeed it implicitly requires us to do so. Liberal pluralists aretherefore required to accept the validity of anti-pluralist and anti-liberal conceptionsof the good. Once they do so, it is less clear that the liberal polity is the most appro-priate regulative framework within which the competing claims of these groups canbe managed. Berlin’s response to this logical difficulty was to maintain the commit-ment to pluralism alongside the belief that one way of life (the liberal value-set)was of greater value than the others, though exactly why remained elusive.

The critical appraisal of his political ideas remains broadly divided between thejudgement that they amount to little more than a gloss upon the status quo, andhence useless either for gaining critical purchase upon current practices or for justi-fying them more rigorously, and the view that his beliefs actually threaten to erodethe moral foundations of the liberal state. Commentators of the latter persuasion,influenced by some of liberalism’s most potent critics like Michael Oakeshott andCarl Schmitt, have argued that Berlin’s liberalism contributes to the underminingof the problematic of legitimacy at the root of the modern liberal state. NoelO’Sullivan (1999), for example, criticizes Berlin for his failure to conceive legiti-mately constituted authority as the pre-condition for individual liberty. On thisreading the celebration of pluralism and particularism threatens to issue into arelativistic epistemology and to justify the dissolution of the political order as anincreasingly divisive political contest between rival groups takes shape.

The Berlinian LegacyThese and other intellectual problems have sustained a body of critical commen-tary that has succeeded in relegating his work to the margins of the study of con-temporary political thought. Berlin did not offer a ‘formal’ treatment of the characterof liberal precepts in the manner of other contemporary liberal philosophers. Andif he failed to pass muster as a political philosopher in many eyes, it is clear thatas a historian of ideas Berlin lacked the rigour and methodological awarenessencouraged by the work of figures like Quentin Skinner and John Pocock. Manyof Berlin’s interpretations of particular thinkers amount to sophisticated glossesand have a distinctly one-dimensional quality to them. His approach to earlier textsis in stark contrast with the practice of many current historians, with their focus onthe detailed textual analysis of a corpus of work and its location in the discoursesand practices of the age. Indeed the lack of methodological self-consciousness isapparent throughout his essays. Many of the arguments within them rely upon animplicit, though causally underspecified, presumption of thematic continuity betweenauthors and an erosion of any sense of the particular character of the dilemmaswhich authors faced. Contexts occasionally appear in Berlin’s writing but are onthe whole thinly sketched and somewhat arbitrarily introduced. His mode of argu-mentation typically involved utilizing (and often distorting) the arguments of par-ticular authors – an act of intellectual ventriloquism that impressed and annoyedin equal measure (Collini, 1999, p. 97). Berlin wrote in this way partly because heregarded specific theorists’ arguments as less important than the general outlook ofa thinker or tradition, ‘and the origins of ideas less interesting than their echoes’;as Perry Anderson also observes, ‘As much as the statement of a method, this is theexpression of a temperament’ (1992, p. 231).

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Yet it would be unfortunate to conclude that Berlin can be quietly forgottenbecause he fails the tests set by contemporary schools of interpretation. A differentresponse to his thought is made possible if we engage more fully with the particularcharacter of his theorizing. This emerged from his conception of philosophy, his-tory and politics as closely interrelated, a position that stemmed from his appro-priation of an idealist philosophical tradition. His arguments about particulartraditions of thought were also mediated by his highly aestheticized (and fre-quently poetic) commitment to narrative forms, a combination that frequently ledhim to interpret periods of human history through the clash of contrasting philo-sophical paradigms. His thinking about politics and political ideas developed againstthe backdrop of his sense of the lengthy and often buried lineages of metaphysicaland philosophical thought that unfolded over time. The study of ideas from thepast was therefore inevitably informed by contemporary concerns and offered avital clue to our collective self-understanding. Reading the impressive collections ofhis many essays and lectures, one is struck by the irony that at the momentwhen several leading scholars were bemoaning the demise of political thought,Berlin was in the middle of a purple patch of writing in this area. His intellectualmission in these years was to demonstrate that the study of political ideas is bothan indispensable part of our recognition of the different traditions that make up oursense of our western ‘civilization’ and a precondition for a more mature under-standing of how we, the inhabitants of the ‘modern’, have come to be who we are(Collini, 1999, p. 206).

From this perspective, Berlin might be regarded as an important figure in a trad-ition of political theorizing that has been marginalized by the bifurcation ofapproaches to the study of political ideas typical of the Anglo-American com-munity of political thought. Returning to the essays he penned over the last fourdecades, it becomes clear that the hegemony of certain kinds of political philosophyover the study of political thought has, to some degree, involved a narrowing of theagenda of this field of study. This has happened both because of the widespreadconcentration upon the principles which ought to constitute the notion of the‘right’ and the tendency to regard ontological, moral and theological ideas as ofequal conceptual standing. Berlin’s sweeping historical and cultural scope led himto alight on a number of topics and traditions that rarely figure in the writing ofpolitical theorists today. He remained convinced that ‘[n]ormative questions andconflicts over the evaluations of ends and models of human nature and society areconstitutive of political life’ (Galipeau, 1994, p. 41); and he taught generations ofstudents the importance of attending to non- and often anti-liberal arguments andtraditions. He developed this rather reflective and paradoxical mode of inquirywith the particular aim of probing some of the presuppositions and first principlesof liberal belief from unusual angles. Not surprisingly, he was dismissive of recenttrends in political and ethical theorizing. Berlin preferred to confront theories withthe facts of moral and social complexity and to draw more widely from the ‘well’of insight within the traditions of western thought than contemporary moraltheorists, many of whom had, in his eyes, turned their backs on the ‘richness anddepth of moral life’ (Gray, 1995, p. 64).

Over the course of his life he negotiated a dizzying array of traditions and ideas, anattribute which has rightly encouraged his biographer, Ignatieff (1998), to stress his

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singularity. Yet it is also worth considering his connections with and similarity toother theorists. He can be usefully compared with thinkers who have interpretedthe political forms associated with liberalism in relation to the priority of negatingthe political realization of our hubristic collective fantasies. He thus regarded liberaldemocracy as an imperfect system that could nevertheless sustain a civil society inwhich basic fears and insecurities are kept at bay. Precursors in this traditioninclude Constant and Montesquieu though he might also be usefully comparedwith some modern American thinkers – Judith Shklar (1984) for example.

Standing at the intersection of the elite cultures of a number of national traditions,Berlin became increasingly fascinated by the phenomenon of nationalism itself.Several scholars have begun to explore his political and personal relationship withthe Zionist political leadership in the years leading up to the foundation of the stateof Israel, as well as his sharp views on Israeli politics in recent years (Ignatieff,1998, pp. 170–88, 292–5; Hampshire, 1991). His own theoretical and political con-ception of nationhood is an important theme in his writings, and may have abearing upon some of the tensions affecting his account of liberalism and pluralism.There is much more to be said about these less known areas in his work, and,indeed, about the more familiar traditions he engaged. In relation to British thoughtand culture, he has been fruitfully compared with two other emigré opponents of‘totalitarian’ politics who also made Britain their home – Karl Popper and Friedrichvon Hayek. But Berlin developed a slightly different, more intimate relationshipwith British thought and culture, and to a degree drew upon indigenous traditionsin ways that they did not. He described his own political ideas as ‘English com-monplaces’ yet the route by which he arrived at these was in some ways quiteforeign. This ambiguity is reflected in his experiences within Britain’s elite culture.Ignatieff offers a portrait of an outsider anxious to fit into the host culture, yetuncertain that he had ever successfully established himself within it. An interestingquestion that arises in terms of his intellectual impact is whether Britain’s elite cul-ture found particular uses for Berlin as an eloquent and ‘exotic’ legitimator of theindigenous polity, as much as he found inspiration in British intellectual sources.

There are, therefore, good analytical and normative reasons for a renewed engage-ment with Berlin. Yet mild scepticism about his intellectual contribution ought tomediate such an encounter. A return to his thought is, in the end, hard to justifyin terms of the application of his philosophy to the problems of today. It is certainlydifficult to accept the claim that changing political and economic circumstancesmake his thinking more not less pertinent. There is a tendency in recent writingabout him to disconnect his thought from the acute dilemmas posed by the geo-political contexts and crises that he experienced – on occasions as an engaged andpartisan political actor. The problem with such readings is that they downplay theextent to which his thinking was moulded by his visceral opposition to particulartraditions and ideologies – Marxist thought and socialist politics above all.2 It is, forinstance, tempting to regard his penchant for dichotomous categorizations –negative against positive liberty above all – as the normative internalization of the‘us’ and ‘them’ logic animating the Cold War.

Rather than regarding Berlin as the harbinger of the more complex politics of‘difference’ that characterizes the post-Cold War world, we would do better to

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justify re-engagement with his ideas by considering him as a particular kind of‘ethical liberal’. As such, he articulated an urgent sense of the modern subject’squest for security and recognition, and stressed the need for moral humility amongthe citizenry of modern democracies. These constitute the most profound political-ethical lessons of his disparate and idiosyncratic oeuvre. However, if we want todeepen our understanding of the principles and political arrangements by whichthe citizens of contemporary liberal democracies ought to live together, we willneed to seek guidance beyond Berlin’s work.

(Accepted: 18 May 2000)

About the Author

Michael Kenny, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, Northumberland Road, Elmfield,Sheffield S10 2TU, UK; email: M.Kenny@Sheffield.ac.uk

AcknowledgementsI am grateful for the comments on an earlier draft of this essay supplied by Anthony Arblaster, MarkBevir, David Dessler, Matthew Festenstein, Andrew Gamble, Duncan Kelly, Nick Stevenson and GeraintWilliams. I would also like to express my gratitude to Martin Birch for the original invitation to producethis essay and Paul Kelly for his subsequent advice and co-operation.

Notes1 Some of his essays on political events and figures are among his finest, however; see, for instance,

‘Winston Churchill in 1940’ (1998a, pp. 605–27) and ‘President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’ (1998a,pp. 628–37).

2 A timely reminder of the way in which Berlin’s opposition to ‘monism’ was regarded as a weapon inthe anti-Communist crusade of the second Cold War is apparent in a recent homage penned by StrobeTalbott, the US Deputy Secretary of State (2000).

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