Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

'Fathers and Children', the Romanes Lecture for I 970, was published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in 1972 (reprinted with corrections, 1973), and has also appeared in the New York Review of

Books ( 1 B October, 1 and 15 November, 1973) and as the introduction to Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, translated by Rosemary Edmonds (Harmondsworth, 197 5: Penguin). I am grateful to the

publishers concerned for allowing me to reprint these essays.

'A Remarkable Decade', 'Russian Populism' and 'Tolstoy and

Enlightenment' have been left without references, as they originally

appeared. A few passages- chiefly translations- were rewritten by

the author for this volume. Otherwise, apart from necessary corrections, and the addition of missing references, the essays are reprinted essentially in their original form.

Those who know the author's work in this field will notice that two

important items are missing. The first is the introduction to an

English translation of Alexander Herzen's From the Other Shore and

The Russian People and Socialism (London, 1956; revised edition,

Oxford, 1979); the second is the introduction to Constance Garnett's

translation of Herzen's memoirs, My Past and Thoughts (London and

New York, 1968). Both of these pieces overlap to some extent with

the two essays on Herzen in this volume. The first does not appear in

any of the five volumes; the second is included in Against the Current,

where it is equally at home.1

1 Readers may like to have a list of other pieces in this area which do not

appear here. There are three radio talks: 'The Man Who Became a Myth'

(Belinsky), Listener 38 (1947); 'The Father of Russian Marxism'

X

EDI T ORIAL PREFACE

I have many debts of gratitude, and can mention only the weightiest here. First and foremost, the great bulk of the detailed editorial work on this volume was undertaken by Dr Aileen Kelly, without

whose specialist knowledge of the Russian language and of

nineteenth-century Russian culture my task would have been impossible. During an unusually busy time she devoted many hours to the search for answers to my queries, and my obligation and gratitude to her are very great. Isaiah Berlin himself was unfailingly courteous, good-humoured and informative in response both to my

persistent general advocacy of the whole project, which he regarded

throughout with considerable, and mounting, scepticism, and to my

often over-meticulous probings into points of detail. Lesley

Chamberlain gave valuable help with 'Herzen and Bakunin on

Individual Liberty'. Pat Utechin, Isaiah Berlin's secretary, was an

indispensable source of help and encouragement at all stages.

HENRY HARDY

February 1994

P OSTSCRIPT 1997

Since the above Preface was written I have edited two further volumes

of essays by Isaiah Berlin: The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas

and their History (London, 1996; New York, 1997), which mainly

comprises previously unpublished work; and The Proper Study of

Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, co-edited with Roger Hausheer

(London, 1997), a selection drawn from previous volumes which aims

to represent the best of Berlin's work, across its whole range.

H.H.

(Piekhanov), Listmer 56 ( 1956); and ' The Role of the Intelligentsia', Listmer

79 ( 1968). There are three contributions to Foreign Affairs on modern Russia,

which, though they do not strictly belong in this company, have many points

of contact with the essays included here: these pieces are 'Generalissimo

Stalin and the Art of Government', Foreign Affairs 30 ( 1952), and two articles

in Foreign Affairs 36 ( 1957), ' The Silence in Russian Culture' and ' The Soviet

Intelligentsia'. 'Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956', mainly

about Akhmatova and Pasternak, is to be found in Pmonallmpt7!ssions. For

book reviews and other smaller pieces, I refer readers to the bibliography

already cited.

Introduction

A COMPLEX VISION

Aileen Kelly

Do not look for solutions in this book-there

arc none; in general modern man has no solutions.

Alexander Herzen, Introduction to From the Other Shore

In an attempt to explain the Russian revolution to Lady Ottoline

Morrell, Bertrand Russell once remarked that, appalling though

Bolshevik despotism was, it seemed the right sort of government for

Russia: 'If you ask yourself how Dostoevsky's characters should be

governed, you will understand.'

The view that despotic socialism was no more than Russia deserved

would be accepted by many western liberals as not unjust, at least with

regard to the 'devils' of Dostoevsky's novel, the Russian radical

intelligentsia. In the degree of their alienation from their society and

of their impact on it, the Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth

century were a phenomenon almost sui generis. Their ideological

leaders were a small group with the cohesivenes-; and sense of mission

of a religious sect. In their fervent moral opposition to the existing

order, their single-minded preoccupation with ideas, and their faith in

reason and science, they paved the way for the Russian revolution, and

thereby achieved major historical significance. But they are all too

often treated by English and American historians with a mixture of

condescension and moral revulsion; because the theories to which they

were so passionately attached were not their own, but borrowed from

the west and usually imperfectly understood; and because in their

fanatical passion for extreme ideologies they are held to have rushed,

like Dostoevsky's devils, to blind self-destruction, dragging their

country, and subsequently much of the rest of the world, after them.

The Russian revolution and its aftermath have done much to strengthen

xiii

R U S SIAN THIN K E R S

the belief, deeply entrenched in the Anglo-Saxon outlook, that a

passionate interest in ideas is a symptom of mental and moral disorder.

One liberal voice has strongly and consistently dissented from this

view of the Russian intelligentsia-a voice of remarkable distinction.

Isaiah Berlin is one of the most outstanding liberal thinkers of this

century: his Four Essays 011 Libtrty are contributions of the first importance to the study of the fundamental problems of political philosophy.

His originality as a thinker derives from a combination of a liberalism

in the English tradition with a wholly European fascination with ideas

and their effects on political practice: his writings are penetrated with

the conviction that liberal values are best understood and defended by

those who seek to understand the part played by ideas in action, and in

particular the intellectual and moral attractions of what he calls the

'great despotic visions' of the right and left. His distinctive contribution

to English intellectual life has been an effective opposition to the last

half-century of relative indifference to intellectual movements in

Europe. In essays and lectures, masterpieces of vivid and lucid exposition, he has acquainted a wide audience with great European intellectual traditions, with the ideas and personalities of some of the most original thinkers of the post-Renaissance world, and, in the -essays

collected together for the first time in this book, with the phenomenon

of the Russian intelligentsia.

Isaiah Berlin's approach to the intelligentsia has been directed by his

interest in the way in which ideas are 'lived through' as solutions to

moral demands. In contrast to the majority of studies on this subject,

which set out to j udge political solutions in the light of historical hindsight, he is above all concerned with the social and moral questions which the intelligentsia posed, the dilemmas that they sought to resolve.

Though his essays on Russian subjects stand by themselves, with no

need of philosophical annotation or cross-reference, they are also a

substantial contribution to the central theme of all his writings on

intellectual history, and their originality can best be appreciated if they

are approached within this wider framework.

The central concern of Berlin's writings has been the exploration of

what he sees as one of the m_ost fundamental of the open issues on

which men's moral conduct depends: are all absolute values ultimately

compatible with one another, or is there no single final solution to the

problem of how to live, no one objective and universal human ideal?

In wide-ranging studies he has explored the psychological and historical

roots and consequences of monist and pluralist visions of the world.

xiv

INT R ODUCTION

He has argued that the great totalitarian structures built on Hegelian

and Marxist foundations are not a terrible aberration, but rather a

logical development of the major assumption in all the central currents

of western political thought: that there is a fundamental unity underlying all phenomena, deriving from a single universal purpose. This can be discovered, according to some, through scientific inquiry,

according to others, through religious revelation, or through metaphysical speculation. When discovered, it will provide men with a final solution to the question of how to live.

Though the most extreme forms of this faith, with their dehumanising visions of men as instruments of abstract historical forces, have led to criminal perversions of political practice, he emphasises that the faith

itself cannot be dismissed as the product of sick minds. It is the basis of

all traditional morality and is rooted in 'a deep and incurable metaphysical need', arising from man's sense of an inner split and his yearning for a mythical lost wholeness. This yearning for absolutes is

very often the expression of an urge to shed the burden of responsibility

for one's fate by transferring it to a vast impersonal monolithic whole­

'nature, or history, or class or race, or the "harsh realities of our time",

or the irresistible evolution of the social structure, that will absorb and

integrate us into its limitless, indifferent, neutral texture, which it is

senseless to evaluate or criticise, and against which we fight to our

certain doom'.

Berlin believes that precisely because monistic visions of reality

answer fundamental human needs, a truly consistent pluralism has been

a comparatively rare historical phenomenon. Pluralism, in the sense in

which he uses the word, is not to be confused with that which is

commonly defined as a liberal outlook-according to which all extreme

positions are distortions of true values and the key to social harmony

and a moral life lies in moderation and the golden mean. True

pluralism, as Berlin understands it, is much more tough-minded and

intellectually bold: it rejects the view that all conflicts of values can be

finally resolved by synthesis and that all desirable goals may be reconciled. It recognises that human nature is such that it generates values which, though equally sacred, equally ultimate, exclude one another,

without there being any possibility of establishing an objective hierarchical relation between them. Moral conduct therefore may involve making agonising choices, without the help of universal criteria,