Isaiah Berlin was blessed with exceptional good luck, and he always had the generosity to acknowledge it. His early years were spent in Riga and Petrograd in times of revolution and war, but he enjoyed a serene and happy childhood within his wealthy Jewish family, chattering away in Russian and German and reading whatever he liked from his father's excellent library. When they all moved to England in 1921, the 11 year old Berlin had astonishingly little trouble adjusting to life in the London suburbs, or launching himself into the mysteries of British boyhood, public school, and the English language. St Paul's and Oxford did what was expected of them and after 11 years the gawky little immigrant had been turned into a well-made Englishman-a young gentleman of rather old-fashioned cut, recognisable by a mannered vocal style which, despite elusively foreign speech-rhythms, was unmistakably posh and British.
Berlin was damned clever too. His Oxford education, in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (girl's greats as it was known) was not particularly gruelling-in fact, his biographer Michael Ignatieff reports that Berlin's tutors at Corpus Christi College advised him that the best way to prepare for the politics exams was by reading the leading articles in The Times. The tutorial system worked its mysterious magic, however, and in 1932 Berlin got his first-class degree and walked straight into a job (no formal application, no interview, pure word-of-mouth) as a tutor in philosophy at New College. A month or two later, with only a little more formality, he became the first Jew to be elected a Fellow of All Souls.
He was just 23, and could well have been about to enter a lifelong decline into Oxfordian cattiness, pedantry and coterie-building. Academically things did not go particularly well for him. He hung around with philosophically ambitious colleagues like Gilbert Ryle, JL Austin and AJ Ayer, but was a follower rather than a leader in their attempts to give British philosophy a linguistic turn. He soon discovered that his appetite for philosophy was strictly limited, and he was easily bored by the aggressive pettiness of its practitioners, not to mention their philistinism and cultural insularity. ("More of your tunes, Isaiah?" Ryle reportedly shouted when he spotted him going off to a concert.) Instead of sulking, Berlin began to rediscover Russian literature and, through All Souls, started making his way into the inner circles of the British political class.
The war was a lucky break too, taking him to America with the ministry of information. When he returned to Oxford in 1946 he had reinvented himself as a historian of political thought rather than a nit-picking academic philosopher. But as far as the rest of the world was concerned he was an exuberant public performer, delivering set-piece speeches and public lectures and, best of all, philosophical talks on the BBC's Third Programme. It was the voice that did it. Berlin's delivery was rapid and stormy. He became a kind of Thomas Beecham of the mind, a frequently quoted and much imitated wit, the peg for all sorts of anecdotes, and the kind of personality that journalists call "larger than life." In 1957, when knighted on the recommendation of Harold Macmillan, it was said to have been for services to conversation.
There was some surprise in 1957 when Oxford decided to appoint Berlin, still in his forties, to succeed GDH Cole as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory. For all his celebrity as a talker, a character and a fixer, Berlin had little standing as an original thinker or scholar. By today's standards, he was not even "research active": he had published nothing substantial, his only book being an uninspired study of Marx which had come out before the war. But when he gave his inaugural lecture "Two Concepts of Liberty" at the end of October 1958, he vindicated the university's choice triumphantly. The lecture was an exploration of the distinction between two kinds of freedom-freedom in the liberal, relaxed and easy-going English sense of being able to do what you like without unnecessary interference, and freedom in the romantic, demanding and totalitarian sense of realising your true or better self by doing what you should. In a way it was little more than an inverted theme from Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, but the treatment had a kind of brassy appeal that made "Two Concepts" not only Berlin's masterpiece, but also one of the classic lectures of the 20th century.
Anyone coming across "Two Concepts" today is liable to be puzzled by its canonical status. It has a catchy subject, but key ideas are poorly focused and basic arguments not worked through. The language is clumsy, the structure unclear-somehow brief and baggy at the same time. Perhaps it is precisely its looseness that made the lecture a classic-it flaps like a great flag, regardless of which way the ideological wind is blowing. In many ways it was a companion piece to CP Snow's diatribe on the "Two Cultures" which was presented at Cambridge University a few months after Berlin gave "Two Concepts" at Oxford (see Geoffrey Wheatcroft p62). Both lecturers invested themselves with a certain personal sublimity, as if they were graciously descending from a cloudy eminence to sort out the great dilemmas of their time. If Snow was an emblematic plebeian technocrat who also made a career as a novelist, Berlin was an archetypal cosmopolitan intellectual who had fallen in love with British cultural and political traditions. Both of them won a reputation as bold partisans-Snow on the side of scientific culture, Berlin on the side of what he called liberal or negative liberty. But having postulated their great dichotomies, they both went on to call for compromise and tolerance rather than taking sides.
If Berlin's argument was not particularly original, there was at least something memorable about the way he packaged it. Like his philosophical colleagues at Oxford, he believed in paying respectful attention to the common-sense distinctions that are implicit in ordinary forms of speech; but unlike them he was ready to accept that such distinctions can often be diverse, discrepant and ultimately irreconcilable with each other. Hence, as he rather brilliantly observed, the universality of tragedy: the interminable cacophony of our various conceptual instruments meant that tragic predicaments could "never wholly be eliminated from human life." The word liberty, for instance, expressed dozens of discordant concepts apart from the two he happened to be lecturing about; in a heady moment, indeed, Berlin claimed that it had more than 200 senses. His celebrated relativism (or pluralism, as his disciples prefer to call it) comes down to the claim that all concepts have their uses and that none is intrinsically more legitimate than any other. As he saw it, the root of philosophical evil lay not so much in employing erroneous concepts or making false judgements as in failing to see that alternative concepts and differing judgements might be just as viable as your own. The origin of theoretical error, in Berlin's view, lay in a kind of stiff-necked mental isolationism, an inflexible belief that your ideas represent the all-conquering truth, and that anyone who disagrees with you is a chuckle-headed miscreant.
"Two Concepts" is a classic source for what has become a standard manoeuvre against all kinds of threat to the conceptual status quo. The trick is to accuse the challenger of pig-headedness-of overweening dogmatism and addiction to a single pattern of explanation. Berlin unveiled the tactic in his first paragraph, deriding "those who put their faith in some immense, world-transforming phenomenon, like the final triumph of reason or the proletarian revolution." The trouble with rationalists and Marxists and other enemies of liberal freedom, he seemed to suggest, was not so much that they were mistaken as that they were crashing bores, always worrying at the same old worn-out bone. Berlin invited us to smile with him at all the one-track thinkers with their sickly fixations on "some super-personal entity-a state, a class, a nation, or the march of history itself," or "some single formula... whereby all the diverse ends of men can be harmoniously realised."
Berlin's confidence deserted him, however, when he tried to explain exactly what was wrong with conceptual monism. He declared that it was "not reconcilable with the principles accepted by those who respect the facts," or again, that it was "not compatible with empiricism." This was a feeble ploy, however, and a question-begging one: facts and experience cannot speak for themselves, and Berlin's boring monomaniacs would always be able to claim them for their side rather than his. Appeals to "the world that we encounter in ordinary experience," and warnings against anything that "it would be eccentric to say" cannot have much authority when deep or even tragic differences are in play. Berlin's mountainous labours have produced a plaintive little mouse, imploring us to respect traditions, especially when they are, as he put it, "so long and widely accepted that their observance has entered into the very conception of what it is to be a normal human being." "Two Concepts" was a magisterial performance, but not without pathos: by the end of it the master is left intellectually becalmed, up a conceptual creek without a paddle.
The lecture is said to have taken two years to prepare, but although Berlin managed to fit a great deal of repetition into a small and resonant space, he seems not to have noticed a salient paradox. His philippic against everyone else's "single true solution" to all the problems of political thought was itself bidding to become Berlin's own single true solution to all the problems of political thought. If no one spotted this point then, it may be that they were distracted by Berlin's approach-by his broad-minded attitude to history. Political thinkers always have some orientation towards the past, and probably some regard for a small clutch of classics, principally Plato, Aristotle and Locke. Berlin, however, evidently believed in surveying everything that had ever been thought and said about his problems, and Saint-Simon, Heine, Fichte, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Helv?tius, Marx, Hobbes, Bentham, Locke, Mill, Tocqueville, Smith, Belinsky, Constant, Jefferson, Burke, Paine, Lassalle, Erasmus and Occam had all made an appearance before he was a few minutes into his lecture. The sheer range of the allusions in "Two Concepts" was a way of making a point, for Berlin's commitment to history ran against the grain of 20th-century British philosophy-in the Oxford of the 1950s it must have seemed a kind of heresy.
Not that "Two Concepts" itself stands up as a work of historical exploration. Well-wrought texts are treated not as complex works of intellectual imagination calling for interpretation, still less as invitations to conceptual self-examination. The art of reading as Berlin practised it amounted to little more than trawling the high seas of European literature for quotes-Chekhovian quips that would serve as illustrations of points that were meant to be self-evident.
None the less, those who attended Berlin's lecture in 1958 would have been left in no doubt that he hoped to be taken seriously as a historian. He appeared to have read everything, after his fashion, and if he had not published any sustained historical work, he was known for his historical lectures-especially a set of six one-hour monologues entitled Freedom and its Betrayal, which were broadcast on the Third Programme late in 1952. They were a repetition of a series of lectures given earlier in the year at Bryn Mawr College under the title "Political Ideas in the Romantic Age," and the skilfully edited tapes apparently gave a remarkable impression of unstudied spontaneity. A recording of the second programme, on Rousseau, has been preserved in the National Sound Archive, and anyone who hears it will know why the lectures are regarded as a landmark in the history of broadcasting. Even in the spare luxury of a listening carrel at the new British Library, you can recapture some of the excitement listeners must have felt when they tuned in their wireless sets on Bonfire Night 50 years ago and settled down to listen to an hour-long lecture on Rousseau. You soon get used to the way his vowels all sound much the same: that a "pin" is what you write with, and that Rousseau "ippirintly" expected "pisins" to be "hippy" under the rule of reason. The voice is tuneful and variegated, and the gasps, stumbles and occasional misspeakings are marshalled to reinforce the listener's sensation of pace and urgency.
But the rhetorical style of the programme has not worn well. Berlin was fond of Churchillian roll-calling and balladeering repetition, and his famous tone of engagement sounds more like the avuncularism of Children's Hour or a po-faced version of the Just So Stories than philosophical inquiry. And if the rhetoric rings hollow, the argument too sounds thin and often shrill. As in "Two Concepts," Berlin made use of an all-purpose accusation of obsession. Rousseau, he tells us is like "a maniac who suddenly sees a cosmic solution vouchsafed to him alone, somebody who for the first time in history has suddenly found the answer to a riddle which had for centuries tormented the whole of humanity." Rousseau is consumed by an "inner, burning, lunatic vision," in which the simple, natural life is identified with "a certain kind of knowledge-that is the key to all the problems." He equates nature with truth, says Berlin, thus ignoring the fact that there are at least 60 senses in which the word "nature" is used in the 18th century.
The real protagonist of his radio lecture on Rousseau was nothing less than the 18th century, as it fought its losing battle with the 19th. Berlin's 18th century was predictably the property of France and the philosophes, and its "great premise," was the harmoniousness of nature-an assumption which Rousseau shared. But at the same time, Rousseau "suffers from a deep resentment of intellectuals"; he is indeed the father of "anti-intellectual" romanticism and he "deeply affected the consciousness of the next century." Without Rousseau, it seems, the 19th century would not have taken place.
It must have been entrancing to hear Berlin's six programmes when they were transmitted on a succession of Wednesday nights in the cold winter of 1952. There were lectures on Helv?tius, Fichte, Hegel, Saint-Simon and Maistre as well as Rousseau, and they are still remembered with emotion by people who were lucky enough to hear them. The Times itself granted them a fulsome first leader, praising Berlin for demolishing the dream of "Utopian harmony." Berlin, according to the Thunderer, had rehabilitated a simple, homely conception of liberty, helping provide the 20th century with the political philosophy it needed-not "a new political faith (it has had too many)" but "a firm foundation for political doubt." Berlin had definitely arrived.
On the other hand he was unwilling to revise his scripts for Freedom and its Betrayal and prepare them for publication. "It is one thing to say a lot of things in a general fashion to an audience," he explained, "and a very different one to commit words to cold print." He was to be similarly reticent about the dozens of manuscripts, reviews and lecture texts that he produced up to his death in 1997. He was not a particularly skilful writer, and he found his pleasures in talking and lecturing, and in his remarkable work as founding president of Wolfson College in Oxford.
If he had followed his inclinations then his writings would have been sunk into oblivion; but in 1974 he was taken in hand by a talented young editor called Henry Hardy, who persuaded him to publish or republish and be damned. Hardy has now put together no less than 13 volumes of Berliniana, and has recently embarked on the Himalayan task of editing his correspondence. The latest fruit of Hardy's industry is an edition, published by Chatto & Windus, of those famous radio talks from 1952 based on written transcripts prepared by the BBC at the time. With his usual discretion, Hardy tidied up lax quotations and inaccuracies, and supplied the footnotes that Berlin could never be bothered with. The posthumous makeover could not have been neater.
There is nothing in the resurrected Freedom and its Betrayal, however, to plug the notorious gaps in "Two Concepts." Berlin anticipates himself with an allusion to "the two notions of liberty," the French and the German, but when the philosophical action ought to begin, he calls it off, decreeing that "to ask which of them is true, and which of them is false, is a shallow and unanswerable question." Even at the time of his greatest intellectual self-confidence, Berlin allowed himself no theoretical resources beyond appeals to "human experience" and the opinions of "the average human being" and "all morally sensitive persons." The familiar cardboard cutouts are there too. The "great German romantic philosophers" of the 19th century are still doing their best to destroy the 18th century, while Hegel, Helv?tius and the rest persist in imagining that they have discovered "a vast, single, all-embracing reason" or "a single principle which was to define the basis of morality." Anyone hoping for a confrontation between history, philosophy and politics will be disappointed: they pass like ships in the night. But if Freedom and its Betrayal has nothing new to say about political philosophy, it is a nice relic of intellectual life in Britain in the 1950s, and a fine memorial to Isaiah Berlin's remarkable good luck.
