Isaiah Berlin's intellectual legacy is to be found in his life-long argument with the Enlightenment. He applauded the desire of Enlightenment thinkers to stamp out ignorance and superstition, serving-as they do-to sustain cruel and unjust social arrangements. But Berlin warned against the methods they advocated, which in our own century have taken the harshest forms-rationality applied like a cold bare steel to the warm stuff of human sensibility. In particular he argued that the Enlightenment emphasis on reason as sovereign in human affairs was misplaced; not because reason is an unworthy god-far from it-but because it oversimplifies when complexity and difference are irreducible.
Berlin believed that striving for a science of human phenomena was not just a theoretical misconception, but could lead to real disaster-to war and persecution prompted by dogma. Berlin, when young, witnessed the revolutionary effects of ideology in Russia; in his maturity, as a diplomat during the second world war, he had a seat at the ringside of statesmanship. The library was not the only place where his ideas were nourished.
Berlin believed that there were no clear answers to the important human dilemmas; we have to think things through case by case, somehow balancing the conflicts of interest and value they involve. The most controversial of Berlin's views in political philosophy was an acceptance of what David Wiggins has called "the plurality and mutual irreducibility of things good": the belief that the social debate is one of constant negotiation between unresolvably competing standpoints. This value pluralism can look dangerously like relativism. (This weakness was diligently probed by Steven Lukes in Berlin's last published interview in the October issue of Prospect.) In the face of bitter conflict, such as in Bosnia, value pluralism can even seem like a counsel of despair. It certainly opened him to the criticism that he was a spokesman for the "honourable muddle" of liberal sentiment, never knowing where to draw the line against the many illiberal forces in the modern world.
But Berlin's liberalism is the outcome of his historical investigations; he was a historian of ideas first and a political philosopher second. His brand of liberalism followed from his historical observations. Value pluralism is a stubborn fact, an indigestible lump in history's craw. The problem for Berlin was not one of reducing plurality to uniformity, but of finding ways to give a focus, a meaning, to the open-ended nego-tiations which constitute pluralistic societies. For Berlin, liberal ideals of freedom, autonomy, reason and reasonableness-the positive Enlightenment virtues-provided that focus, and with it the best hope that value pluralism will not prove fatal to humankind.
