Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism

Key Contemporary Thinkers (Polity)

by George Crowder

Isaiah Berlin was one of the leading political thinkers of the twentieth century, and his work continues to attract admiration and debate. In Isaiah Berlin: Liberty, Pluralism and Liberalism , George Crowder provides both an accessible introduction to Berlin's ideas and an original contribution to political theory. Berlin's range of interests and learning was vast but united by a single overarching project: the uncovering of the conceptual roots of twentieth-century totalitarianism. He traces these through three levels of analysis: the distortion of the concept of freedom by thinkers such as Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel and Marx; the scientism of the Enlightenment and irrationalism of the Counter-Enlightenment and romanticism; and moral monism, the idea that all ethical questions can be answered by reference to a single moral law. Against monism, Berlin asserts the claims of value pluralism, which he aligns with a politics of liberal moderation. In this new assessment, Crowder argues that Berlin's critique of the modern enemies of liberty is exciting and powerful, but also that the coherence of his thought is threatened by a tension between its liberal and pluralist elements. Crowder goes on to suggest how that tension can be resolved by appeal to arguments that go beyond the case actually presented by Berlin but which remain within the spirit of his general outlook.

Genres: Philosophy

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 19, 2004

Reviews

[Dr G · Rating 5 out of 5]

Isaiah Berlin was a significant public intellectual mainly operating in Britain from the end of the second world war, until the end of the century, although he is little mentioned these days. He taught at Oxford as a philosopher, and, for a time, in the USA. He was born in Latvia which was then part of the USSR, and his family subsequently moved to Petrograd; as a young boy, he observed traumatising events in the 1917 revolution. Shortly afterwards, his family moved to England. He always expressed gratitude to England for the life it gave him, but he would describe himself as a Russian Jew. He was a major mid-century critic of totalitarianism.
I bought this book in the hope that I could erase some of my ignorance about an important thinker of my era. Unfortunately, it might not have been the best book for the purpose. I should, perhaps, have begun by reading some of his work first-hand. This is, however, not straight-forward, since Berlin favoured lecturing over book-writing, and much of his published work is in the form of transcribed lectures. There is the further problem that Berlin was, professionally, a philosopher working in the British tradition; whereas, I ain’t. The final complication for me was that my main interest in Berlin was in his analysis of twentieth century totalitarianism. In terms of Berlin’s philosophical thought, that is but one strand.
George Crowder’s Isaiah Berling. Liberty and Pluralism seeks to provide both an introduction (which I needed) and an analysis (which I did not need, and about which I was, as a philosophophobe, nervous).
Crowder suggests that there were three principal themes in his work. I can do no better than quote at length:
“First, Berlin finds the origins of totalitarian thinking most immediately in what he calls ‘the betrayal of freedom’. This is the idea not of a simple rejection of liberty but of a systematic distortion of what freedom truly is. Negative liberty, the absence of coercive interference, is contrasted with positive liberty, the freedom of self-mastery, where a person is ruled not by arbitrary desires but by the ‘true’ or authentic self. While both negative and positive ideas represent genuine and important aspects of liberty, history shows that the positive idea of freedom is peculiarly vulnerable to abuse. That is because it leaves open the possibility that the person’s authentic wishes may be identified with the commands of some external authority, for example, the state or the Party. Freedom is then defined as obedience, and in effect is twisted into the very opposite of freedom. Berlin does not reject positive liberty entirely, but he warns against its potential for distortion. He recommends negative liberty, which he sees as the characteristically liberal conception of freedom, as the safer option.
“The second of Berlin’s major themes is the conflict between the Enlightenment on one side and the ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ and romanticism on the other.… Romanticism is the cradle of modern nationalism, and of the irrationalism with which it combined in the right-wing totalitarianisms of Berlin’s time.… But certain strains of Enlightenment thought take the claims of reason and science to utopian extremes, and these play a significant part in the genesis of the totalitarianism of the left, which is Berlin’s principal target. For Berlin, Stalinism can be traced back to Marx, and from him to the hyper- optimistic scientism of well-meaning eighteenth-century philosophes.
“Berlin’s third theme, the opposition between monist and pluralist conceptions of morality, is his deepest. The scientistic, utopian side of the Enlightenment is really a modern instance of a more deep-seated tendency in Western thought as a whole. This is to suppose that somehow, at some level, all genuine moral values must fit together in a single coherent system capable of yielding a single correct answer to any moral problem. This is moral ‘monism’. Its political implication is utopian: that the true moral system, once known, will enable us to iron out all political conflicts and make possible a perfected society in which there will be universal agreement on a single way of life. Such a view, Berlin protests, does not do justice to the depth and persistence of conflict in the moral experience of human beings. That experience teaches that we are frequently faced with choices among competing goods, choices to which no clear answers are forthcoming from simple monist rules. Moreover, the monist outlook is positively dangerous. To suppose that moral and political perfection is possible, even in principle, is to invite the thought that its realisation justifies the employment of any efficient means. There is a distinct, historically detectable association, Berlin believes, between moral monism and political totalitarianism by way of utopianism.
“The truer and safer view of the deep nature of morality is that of ‘value pluralism’. There are many human goods, we can know objectively what these are, and some of them are universal. But they are sometimes ‘incommensurable’, meaning that they are so different from one another that each has its own character and force, untranslatable into the terms of any other. When they come into conflict, as they often do, the choices between them will be hard choices, in part because in choosing one good we necessarily forgo another, and also because we will not be able to apply any simple rule that reduces the rival goods to a common denominator or that arranges them in a single hierarchy that applies in all cases. For example, liberty and equality are incommensurables on Berlin’s view. Each is valuable for its own sake, on its own terms; no amount of one entirely compensates for any amount of the other. When they collide in particular cases, we are consequently faced with difficult, perhaps tragic, choices. Those choices cannot be resolved by a neat decision procedure such as utilitarianism, since ‘utility’, however understood, is simply another incommensurable good potentially in competition with liberty and equality. This does not mean that choices among incommensurables are necessarily non-rational or that no such choice can be more justified than any other, as I shall argue later. It does mean that pluralist choices tend to be complex and often painful.”
Interestingly, Crowder explains Berlin’s thinking on a critique of the Enlightenment. In brief, the explanation is that Berlin applauds the Enlightenment for its replacement of religion with empirical science as the medium of explaining our cosmos. However, Berlin then sees the Enlightenment as going too far in promoting the power of scientific thought: “he insists that the methods of the natural sciences have serious limitations. They can describe the outward behaviour of human beings, but they cannot account for the inner purposes which make that behaviour human; for that we need the ‘inside view’ of the historical and cultural imagination.” This error of exaggerated reliance on science leads to a conviction that behaviour can be scientifically managed and morality can be scientifically described. This is then posited as the basis of totalitarianism and, particularly, Soviet communism.
Crowder explains Berlin’s championing of pluralism over “moral monism” or the “view that there is a single right way of answering any moral or political question”. “The moral world we know is better captured by the idea of value pluralism. According to pluralism, basic human goods are not always compatible, rankable or commensurable, but rather irreducibly multiple, frequently conflicting, and sometimes incommensurable with one another. This is a world of disagreement and dilemma. If goods are ultimately incompatible, then there is no possibility, even in principle, that all of them can be realised simultaneously.… Consequently, there is no possibility in a pluralist world of moral or political perfection, or ‘final solution’ to all moral and political problems.” He was also insistent that any examination of such matters should be pursued in the “historical context of ideas”, not as isolated streams of thought. Interestingly, he also had some time for the concept of dialectic, “the idea that historical progress is not linear but proceeds by way of successive states of conflict, the resolution of which leads to a new and higher level of conflict”, but “he is highly suspicious of any attempt to impose law -like patterns on history.” Crowder quotes Berlin: “ ‘The nineteenth century contains many remarkable social critics and revolutionaries no less original, no less violent, no less dogmatic than Marx, but not one so rigorously single-minded, so absorbed in making every word and every act of his life means towards a single, immediate, practical end, to which nothing was too sacred to sacrifice… His rigid belief in the necessity of a complete break with the past, in the need for a wholly new social system, as alone capable of saving the individual, who, if left to himself, will lose his way and perish, places him among the great authoritarian founders of new faiths, ruthless subverters and innovators who interpret the world in terms of a single, clear, passionately held principle, denouncing and destroying all that conflicts with it.’”
One is reminded, in reading Crowder’s excellent book, that we have moved, in the last century or so away from discourse that values respect for opposing views, and rational thinking, and towards polarised, tribal polemic. But then, perhaps that move started earlier than I allow: “On the left, Berlin has been seen as a one-dimensional Cold Warrior in the service of the United States, an apologist for the Vietnam war, a complacent supporter of the capitalist status quo, a diner at high tables who was less concerned with speaking truth to power than with ingratiating himself with the powerful. On the right, he has been condemned as a moral relativist, unable or unwilling to use his position as a prominent public intellectual to stand up against the erosion of civilised standards, in society and in the Academy, that began in the 1960s. From both left and right he has been criticised for his silence on the fraught subject of Israel and Palestine”
Certainly, Crowder gives both a dispassionate and surely fair account of Berlin’s thought, and a valuable explanation of how his ideas fitted together. And certainly, we are the poorer for Berlin’s disappearance from the radar.