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Isaiah Berlin Letters #1
Letters, 1928-1946
Isaiah Berlin is one of the towering intellectual figures of the twentieth century, the most famous English thinker of the post-war era, and the focus of growing interest and discussion. Above all, he is one of the best modern exponents of the disappearing art of letter-writing. 'Life is not worth living unless one can be indiscreet to intimate friends, ' wrote Berlin to a correspondent. This first volume inaugurates a long awaited edition of his letters that might well adopt this remark as an epigraph. Berlin's life was well worth living, both for himself and for the world. Fortunately he said a great deal to his friends on paper as well as in person. Berlin's letters reveal the significant growth and development of his personality and career over the two decades covered within them. Starting with his days as an eighteen year old student at St. Paul's School in London, they cover his years at Oxford as scholar and professor and the authorship of his famous biography of Karl Marx. The letters progress to his World War II stay in the U.S. and finally, his trip to the Soviet Union in 1945-6 and return to Oxford in 1946. "Emotional exploitation, cannibalism, which I think I dislike more than anything else in the world." To Ben Nicolson, September 1937 "Valery delivered an agreeable but dull lecture here. He said words were like thin planks over precipices, and if you crossed rapidly nothing happened, but if you stopped on any of them and stared into the gulf you would get vertigo and that was what philosophers were doing." To Cressida Bonham Carter, March 1939 "I never don't moralize." To Mary Fisher, 18 April 1940 "I only feel happy when I feel the solidarity of the majority of people I respect with and behind me." To Marion Frankfurter, 23 August 1940 "Certainly no politics are more real than those of academic life, no loves deeper, no hatreds more burning, no principles more sacred." To Freya Stark, 12 June 1944 "Nobody is so fiercely bureaucratic, or so stern with soldiers and regular civil servants, as the don disguised as temporary government official armed with an indestructible superiority complex." To Freya Stark, 12 June 1944 "My view on this is that you will not find life in the country lively enough for persons of your temperament. Life in the country in England depends entirely on (a) motor cars (b) rural tastes. As you possess neither, it is my considered view that apart from a weekend cottage or something of that sort, life in the country would bore you stiff within a very short time." To his parents, 31 January 1944 "This country is undoubtedly the largest assembly of fundamentally benevolent human beings ever gathered together, but the thought of staying here remains a nightmare." To his parents, 31 January 1944 "I am a hopeless dilettante about matters of fact really and only good for a column of gossip, if that." To W. J. Turner, 12 June 1945 "England is an old chronic complaint: every day in the afternoon in the left knee and the left leg below the kneecap, tiresome, annoying, not bad enough to go to bed with, probably incurable and madly irritating but not necessarily unlikely to lead to a really serious crisis unless complications set in." To Angus Malcolm, 20 February 1946
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
752 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
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About the author
Isaiah Berlin
202 books788 followersSir Isaiah Berlin was a philosopher and historian of ideas, regarded as one of the leading liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. He excelled as an essayist, lecturer and conversationalist; and as a brilliant speaker who delivered, rapidly and spontaneously, richly allusive and coherently structured material, whether for a lecture series at Oxford University or as a broadcaster on the BBC Third Programme, usually without a script. Many of his essays and lectures were later collected in book form.
Born in Riga, now capital of Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, he was the first person of Jewish descent to be elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. From 1957 to 1967, he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. In 1966, he helped to found Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its first President. He was knighted in 1957, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his writings on individual freedom. Berlin's work on liberal theory has had a lasting influence.
Berlin is best known for his essay Two Concepts of Liberty, delivered in 1958 as his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. He defined negative liberty as the absence of constraints on, or interference with, agents' possible action. Greater "negative freedom" meant fewer restrictions on possible action. Berlin associated positive liberty with the idea of self-mastery, or the capacity to determine oneself, to be in control of one's destiny. While Berlin granted that both concepts of liberty represent valid human ideals, as a matter of history the positive concept of liberty has proven particularly susceptible to political abuse.
Berlin contended that under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel (all committed to the positive concept of liberty), European political thinkers often equated liberty with forms of political discipline or constraint. This became politically dangerous when notions of positive liberty were, in the nineteenth century, used to defend nationalism, self-determination and the Communist idea of collective rational control over human destiny. Berlin argued that, following this line of thought, demands for freedom paradoxically become demands for forms of collective control and discipline – those deemed necessary for the "self-mastery" or self-determination of nations, classes, democratic communities, and even humanity as a whole. There is thus an elective affinity, for Berlin, between positive liberty and political totalitarianism.
Conversely, negative liberty represents a different, perhaps safer, understanding of the concept of liberty. Its proponents (such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) insisted that constraint and discipline were the antithesis of liberty and so were (and are) less prone to confusing liberty and constraint in the manner of the philosophical harbingers of modern totalitarianism. It is this concept of Negative Liberty that Isaiah Berlin supported. It dominated heavily his early chapters in his third lecture.
This negative liberty is central to the claim for toleration due to incommensurability. This concept is mirrored in the work of Joseph Raz.
Berlin's espousal of negative liberty, his hatred of totalitarianism and his experience of Russia in the revolution and through his contact with the poet Anna Akhmatova made him an enemy of the Soviet Union and he was one of the leading public intellectuals in the ideological battle against Communism during the Cold War.
Born in Riga, now capital of Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, he was the first person of Jewish descent to be elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. From 1957 to 1967, he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. In 1966, he helped to found Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its first President. He was knighted in 1957, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his writings on individual freedom. Berlin's work on liberal theory has had a lasting influence.
Berlin is best known for his essay Two Concepts of Liberty, delivered in 1958 as his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. He defined negative liberty as the absence of constraints on, or interference with, agents' possible action. Greater "negative freedom" meant fewer restrictions on possible action. Berlin associated positive liberty with the idea of self-mastery, or the capacity to determine oneself, to be in control of one's destiny. While Berlin granted that both concepts of liberty represent valid human ideals, as a matter of history the positive concept of liberty has proven particularly susceptible to political abuse.
Berlin contended that under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel (all committed to the positive concept of liberty), European political thinkers often equated liberty with forms of political discipline or constraint. This became politically dangerous when notions of positive liberty were, in the nineteenth century, used to defend nationalism, self-determination and the Communist idea of collective rational control over human destiny. Berlin argued that, following this line of thought, demands for freedom paradoxically become demands for forms of collective control and discipline – those deemed necessary for the "self-mastery" or self-determination of nations, classes, democratic communities, and even humanity as a whole. There is thus an elective affinity, for Berlin, between positive liberty and political totalitarianism.
Conversely, negative liberty represents a different, perhaps safer, understanding of the concept of liberty. Its proponents (such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) insisted that constraint and discipline were the antithesis of liberty and so were (and are) less prone to confusing liberty and constraint in the manner of the philosophical harbingers of modern totalitarianism. It is this concept of Negative Liberty that Isaiah Berlin supported. It dominated heavily his early chapters in his third lecture.
This negative liberty is central to the claim for toleration due to incommensurability. This concept is mirrored in the work of Joseph Raz.
Berlin's espousal of negative liberty, his hatred of totalitarianism and his experience of Russia in the revolution and through his contact with the poet Anna Akhmatova made him an enemy of the Soviet Union and he was one of the leading public intellectuals in the ideological battle against Communism during the Cold War.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 7, 2010
The story of the youth of a happy man, who becomes successful by means of the war - from his first fan letter to GK Chesteron from at school to his friendships with Elizabeth Bowen, Stuart Hampshire, Stephen Spencer, the Felix Frankfurters, the Chaim Weizmanns - he made himself welcome and useful to most people he met, and spent an interesting war doing public diplomacy in the US, with a special remit for the Jews, blacks and other sub-groups.
"I do think [Virginia Woolf:] is the most beautiful person I've ever seen. I can also imagine what she looks like when she goes mad,as I believe, she occasionally does....She is really a most godlike person whom it is a pity that anyone should know intimately." Berlin Aet. 24, 1934.
Other memorable bits - a long set-piece likening the British regime in 1930s Palestine to a third rate prep school
Popular boys are the Arabs – high-spirited, good at games, likely to break out at a rag; then there’s Jewish House – parents give them too much spending money, unfairly work hard, rude, conceited, ugly, ostentatious , collect stamps and cheat oee another in trading them. The Masters are British officials, uncertain of their own class so likely to be snobs.
There is a visit of Gerturde Stein to Balliol when she speaks with shocking clarity and good sense about complex topics having to do with Whitehead - can't you be a bit more obscure so we can boast that we've seen you, he thinks?
Henry James had an insatiable appetite for vivid description of all sexual activities whatever. According to Hugh Walpole – everyone told him what they could but he could never get enough.
Writing to Elizabeth Bowen on James: He is admirable but even proust, not to mention Tolstoy, Flaubert, Balzac have so much more courage – even the passe chatter of how their characters speak about "honor" saves them fro the “possessed, jittering” nature of James characters, all of whom fear that their private world may be taken away from them but which cannot be defended. The other 19c writers, and even Kafka, saw that what was lost and undefensible you could do without – even in defeat they didn’t live in a consnant world of fear of defeat, becuase they could write it off.
“We, the sensitivites, the intlellectuals, we who observe, are cripples,” able to peer from weird angles a tthe world “but thereby depriving us of the right to life,” which James and Forster only accord to normal – in EMF’s case, “near Nazi" figures at the edge of the canvas. Tolstoy and the unfashionable Vicytorians were right – you can give yourself wholly and lose nothing irrecoverable. But it does not seem like Isaiah ever really did.
Later, writing to Ben Nicolson from Venice, "this most unnatural town in the world," makes him remember how much he hates HJ: the city and the novelist “are not dissimilar, his characters also possess the appalling characteristic of not having anything happen to them; they have to dig, scratch for experience, to absorb and accumulate like vampires, with a perpetual haunting fear that they the stream will run dry, fall short, and worst of all, they don’t live through their sought-after experience at all, they avoid.
When the war started, the best remark about the war was by the wife of a Cambridge don: “The war has shown up all foreigners as such.”
A great portrait of AA Berle, who knew Alger Hiss was a spy and forgot to tell anyone, and is the father of Peter Berle whom many know. "A very clever man with a tortuous mind, a modest megalomaniac who has to be humored."
– great portrait of FDR:
The president really is very queer – not at all what you think he is. I have reached the conclusion that despite the gay and generous nature and all the manners and sweep of an old-established landowning squire he is (a) absolutely cold, (b) completely ruthless, (c) has no friends, (d) becoming a megalomaniac and is pulling our Mr Churchill along rather than vice versa. This may work out quite well as far as the world in genral is concerned, since his intentions are humane and decent, but the idea that one can trust him or look on him as a sort of Gladstone is completely false He does not like the rich, it is true, but neither does he like the poor or really anyone. …His wife is the opposite in every respect, a sentimental, gushing, heavy liberal, with a great deal of native shrewdness which the very ugly often develop.
"I do think [Virginia Woolf:] is the most beautiful person I've ever seen. I can also imagine what she looks like when she goes mad,as I believe, she occasionally does....She is really a most godlike person whom it is a pity that anyone should know intimately." Berlin Aet. 24, 1934.
Other memorable bits - a long set-piece likening the British regime in 1930s Palestine to a third rate prep school
Popular boys are the Arabs – high-spirited, good at games, likely to break out at a rag; then there’s Jewish House – parents give them too much spending money, unfairly work hard, rude, conceited, ugly, ostentatious , collect stamps and cheat oee another in trading them. The Masters are British officials, uncertain of their own class so likely to be snobs.
There is a visit of Gerturde Stein to Balliol when she speaks with shocking clarity and good sense about complex topics having to do with Whitehead - can't you be a bit more obscure so we can boast that we've seen you, he thinks?
Henry James had an insatiable appetite for vivid description of all sexual activities whatever. According to Hugh Walpole – everyone told him what they could but he could never get enough.
Writing to Elizabeth Bowen on James: He is admirable but even proust, not to mention Tolstoy, Flaubert, Balzac have so much more courage – even the passe chatter of how their characters speak about "honor" saves them fro the “possessed, jittering” nature of James characters, all of whom fear that their private world may be taken away from them but which cannot be defended. The other 19c writers, and even Kafka, saw that what was lost and undefensible you could do without – even in defeat they didn’t live in a consnant world of fear of defeat, becuase they could write it off.
“We, the sensitivites, the intlellectuals, we who observe, are cripples,” able to peer from weird angles a tthe world “but thereby depriving us of the right to life,” which James and Forster only accord to normal – in EMF’s case, “near Nazi" figures at the edge of the canvas. Tolstoy and the unfashionable Vicytorians were right – you can give yourself wholly and lose nothing irrecoverable. But it does not seem like Isaiah ever really did.
Later, writing to Ben Nicolson from Venice, "this most unnatural town in the world," makes him remember how much he hates HJ: the city and the novelist “are not dissimilar, his characters also possess the appalling characteristic of not having anything happen to them; they have to dig, scratch for experience, to absorb and accumulate like vampires, with a perpetual haunting fear that they the stream will run dry, fall short, and worst of all, they don’t live through their sought-after experience at all, they avoid.
When the war started, the best remark about the war was by the wife of a Cambridge don: “The war has shown up all foreigners as such.”
A great portrait of AA Berle, who knew Alger Hiss was a spy and forgot to tell anyone, and is the father of Peter Berle whom many know. "A very clever man with a tortuous mind, a modest megalomaniac who has to be humored."
– great portrait of FDR:
The president really is very queer – not at all what you think he is. I have reached the conclusion that despite the gay and generous nature and all the manners and sweep of an old-established landowning squire he is (a) absolutely cold, (b) completely ruthless, (c) has no friends, (d) becoming a megalomaniac and is pulling our Mr Churchill along rather than vice versa. This may work out quite well as far as the world in genral is concerned, since his intentions are humane and decent, but the idea that one can trust him or look on him as a sort of Gladstone is completely false He does not like the rich, it is true, but neither does he like the poor or really anyone. …His wife is the opposite in every respect, a sentimental, gushing, heavy liberal, with a great deal of native shrewdness which the very ugly often develop.
March 17, 2015
Fun! Reading Mr. Berlin's letters to his parents and friends... An example of a way we wish we all could write. It's good for you.
April 27, 2008
Read this book if you want to learn how letters, even emails should really be written!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews