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PDF FormatA consequence of this is Berlin’s famous distinction between “positive liberty” and “negative liberty.” Positive liberty is the consummation of one value system or another, whereas negative liberty is emancipation from oppression.59 Berlin favored negative liberty and condemned every form of positive liberty on the grounds that every consummation of a value system involves aggressive intolerance by those who consummate it against those who have no interest in doing the same.
An ethos that allows only negative freedom, however, is not pluralism but liberalism. Let us return to the practical conclusion that Berlin drew from his ethic: “If destructive conflict is to be avoided compromises have to be effected, and a minimum degree of toleration, however reluctant, becomes indispensable.” That is to say, the only acceptable regime is a regime of conflict-neutralizing arrangements. Such a regime makes the rules of the game to which every value system of every group or community in the country must be subject. It is a “tolerant” regime only towards those who obey it; it is intolerant of any other alternative. Only liberal democracy is legitimate; only the world of negative liberty is justifiable.
Berlin’s reputation as a political philosopher may derive from the fact that he said the right thing at the right time. He addressed himself to an audience that had been traumatized by Nazism, Bolshevism, and Fascism, and that found in his anti-totalitarian message a declaration that there was no need to delve into its meaning in order to adopt it enthusiastically. But what sounded like the very voice of moral reason to ears that were still ringing from World War II sounds evasive to our ears.
Not all liberal philosophers or liberal regimes of the last few generations are afflicted with lack of clarity. The present global struggle between the United States and Islamic extremists is not a struggle between pluralists (foxes) and dogmatists (hedgehogs), but between hedgehogs and hedgehogs—between two irreconcilable ideologies. Not for a moment has the current American government persuaded itself or its voters or the rest of the world that it is fighting its enemies under the banner of pluralism. The liberal superpower employs a non-pluralistic ambition to impose the liberal-democratic worldview on the entire world, a dogmatic faith in its rightness, a missionary sense of saving the world, a messianic ambition.
This ideological candor that typifies the non-hypocritical policy of the United States in its struggles against the enemies of liberalism—this direct admission that liberalism is as aggressive as any other ethos that purports to represent truth and justice—is absent from Berlin’s “pluralistic” writings. The philosophical challenge of justifying liberalism arises when the liberal is no longer a victim of despotic regimes complaining about the wrong done to him and persuading himself that his complaint is moral philosophy; it arises when he becomes a member of the ruling camp who bears moral responsibility. Only then does the contradiction between slogans about “pluralism” and the sincere ambition for ideological and political hegemony become clear to a liberal.
We would look in vain for Berlin to tackle the question of a liberal’s responsibility that arises when liberalism rules. Berlin’s consciousness was shaped by the biography of a victim; the Bolsheviks who persecuted well-to-do families like his, and the Nazis who persecuted Jews like him, accustomed him to see the political from the simple and conceptually comfortable viewpoint of being helpless—that is, not responsible. The category that encompasses “totalitarianism” excused Berlin from a discerning discussion of the anti-liberal ideologies in Russia, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Is there no difference between the totalitarian ideology that was influenced by the rationalist utopianism of the Enlightenment (Bolshevism) and the totalitarian ideology that championed the values of the counter-Enlightenment (Fascism)?
According to Berlin, apparently not. We therefore have no way of knowing if the opposite of pluralism, in Berlin’s doctrine, is rationalist universalism or irrationalist chauvinism. There is nothing in common between the enemies of pluralism against whom Berlin spoke, except radicalism. But radicalism is a temperament receptive to any content—not only to a rationalist-utopian “hedgehogish” content. Hitler and Mussolini were not hedgehogs but foxes, if being a fox means being opposed to the rationalist-utopian vision of the Enlightenment. “There are indeed dangers in the hedgehog, but we must not forget that there are dangers in the fox as well,” Ronald Dworkin reminds us. “Moral crimes have been justified by appeal to the opposite idea, that important political values necessarily conflict, that no choice among these can be defended as the only right choice.”60
Thus the dichotomies proposed by Berlin—hedgehog/fox, monism/pluralism, positive liberty/negative liberty—are charming in the harmful sense of the word. Their charm is ostensibly the charm of generalities that muddy the conceptual waters. When you free Berlin’s “pluralistic” argument from the spellbinding, rhetorical flow of his essays and attempt to summarize it, you discover his moral and political pallor. He does not equip us properly for the war we are in, but precisely for this reason it is important to remember him. He reminds us of what the West ignored in the second half of the twentieth century, when it was complacent and fell asleep at its post.
Assaf Inbari is an essayist and literary critic.
Notes
1. Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (London: Penguin, 1994).
2. Isaiah Berlin, “Empirical Propositions and Hypothetical Statements,” Mind 59, pp. 289-312; “Logical Translation,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 50 (1949-1950), pp. 157-188; Isaiah Berlin, “Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century,” Foreign Affairs 28 (1950), pp. 351-385; “Socialism and Socialist Theories,” Chambers’s Encyclopedia, vol. 12 (London: Newnes, 1950), pp. 638-650.
3. Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), p. 4.
4. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life, p. 4.
5. Among Berlin’s occasional forays into side issues, it is worth noting his essays “The ‘Naïveté’ of Verdi,” in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton, 2001), pp. 287-295; “Artistic Commitment: A Russian Legacy,” in The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), pp. 194-231, and also the cameo essay that he wrote about Einstein, Churchill, Roosevelt, Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, Aldous Huxley, J.L. Austin, and others, most of which were incorporated in an anthology, Personal Impressions, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Hogarth, 1980).
6. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), pp. 3-4. Berlin took the graphic contrast between “foxes” and “hedgehogs,” as he himself states in the opening sentence of the essay, from the ancient Greek poet, Archilochus, who wrote: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” See Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, p. 3.
7. In fact, there is no need for any more metaphorical animals in order to understand the superficiality of the distinction between “hedgehogs” and “foxes,” for there are many types of “hedgehogs” and many types of “foxes”; the differences between “hedgehog” and “hedgehog” and the differences between “fox” and “fox” are not great and are of less importance than the differences between each “hedgehog” and each “fox.” Steven Lukes, for instance, pointed out that it is possible to divide Berlin’s hedgehog into at least four separate divisions: “positivists,” “universalists,” “rationalists,” and “monists”; Steven Lukes, “An Unfashionable Fox,” in The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin, eds. Mark Lilla, Ronald Dworkin, and Robert Silvers (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), pp. 43-57.
8. Jacob L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Sphere Books, 1970). According to Talmon’s introduction, he came up with the idea for the book ten years previously. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury, 1972).
9. Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton, 1966).
10. Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton, 1999),
pp. 17-18.
pp. 17-18.
11. Isaiah Berlin, “The Romantic Revolution: A Crisis in the History of Modern Thought,” in The Sense of Reality, p. 170.
12. Berlin, “The Romantic Revolution,” p. 171.
13. Berlin, “The Romantic Revolution,” p. 172.
14. Moreover, Antigone in fact depicts a conflict between three absolute values, because the burial of the brother (Polinyces) is mandatory not merely because of the absolute value of family loyalty, but also because of the absolute value of honoring a decree of the gods. We are therefore faced with a double conflict: (a) between the familial duty and the civic duty; and (b) between the religious duty and the civil duty. This double conflict between two opposing values is presented not only in the dramatic confrontation between Antigone and Creon but also in the internal dilemma of each of the two, for both belong to the same family, the same city, and the same religion. In other words, the three conflicting values are perceived as absolute values, each in its own right, in the eyes of both Antigone and Creon.
15. “A grievous ill it is not to consent [to slaughter his daughter Iphigenia],” shouts Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, “and grievous too if I must slay my child, the jewel of my home, defiling at the altar-side a father’s hands in streaming blood from a stricken virgin’s throat! Is either course not full of misery?” “Agamemnon,” The Plays of Aeschylus, trans. Walter Headlam and C.E.S. Headlam (London: George Bell and Sons, 1909), p. 160. “Is either course not full of misery?” Morally it is impossible. The absolute values are not compatible.
16. Nathan Spiegel, The History of Ancient Ethics (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1985), p. 43. [Hebrew]
17. See, for example, the anthology Tragic Themes in Western Literature, ed. Cleanth Brooks (New Haven: Yale, 1955), which includes articles on the tragic elements in Shakespeare, Racine, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and
T.S. Eliot.
T.S. Eliot.
18. Berlin, “The Romantic Revolution,” p. 175.
19. Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, p. 12.
20. Berlin, “The Romantic Revolution,” p. 183.
21. Berlin, “The Romantic Revolution,” p. 182.
22. The Chinese and the Indians possess, according to their doctrine, complete and perfect eternal knowledge. Taoist law on the “Five Principles” of nature and on the two opposite and complementary powers—yin and yang—that operate universally, and Confucian law that regulates all familial and social relationships were integrated by the Chinese into a general philosophy that is all-knowing and all-resolving. Shankara, Patanjali, and other Hindu philosophers based the Brahmin rituals in an omniscient metaphysics (at the center of which was the transcendental “Absolute,” the Brahmin, of which the entire “relative” world of phenomena is an offshoot) and on an all-resolving meditation that brings anyone who practices it correctly and assiduously to perfect “enlightenment” that is perfect wisdom and perfect happiness. Every aspect of life, even sex, is a subject of technical exercise on the path to perfect accomplishment.
23. Berlin, “The Romantic Revolution,” pp. 185-186.
24. Berlin, “The Romantic Revolution,” p. 187.
25. Berlin, “The Romantic Revolution,” p. 187.
26. Berlin, “The Romantic Revolution,” p. 190.
27. Berlin, “The Romantic Revolution,” p. 191.
28. Berlin himself noted this, but instead of insisting on the difference between existentialism and Romanticism, he argued that existentialism was no more than the modern continuation of Romanticism, see Berlin, “The Romantic Revolution,” p. 190.
29. A few examples from English poetry: Coleridge’s poem “Frost at Midnight” (1798), Byron’s poem “Darkness” (1816), Shelley’s poem “To Night” (1821) and Keats’s poems “Sleep and Poetry” (1816), “In Drear-Nighted December” (1817), “Bright Star” (1819), “Why Did I Laugh Tonight?” (1819), and “To Sleep” (1819).
30. Existence is not cosmic intelligence (as claimed by philosophers from Plato to Hegel), but a cosmic ego as claimed by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. Roderick Chisholm (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), or cosmic will as Arthur Schopenhauer contends; see Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1958). In Schopenhauer, this concept of cosmic will took on a monstrous character; a crushing force, irrational and immoral, that can only be submitted to or avoided by spiritual self-castration, as the Buddhists do.
31. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1991), p. 54.
32. This is why, for the Romanticists, poetry became a paradigm of all literary writing. Fiction had to become poetic, and in the hands of Friedrich Schlegel even philosophy became a form of fragmentary, poetical expression, reflective poetry.
33. The word “sublime” got its terrifying meaning which became central in the Romantic period, from Edmund Burke. See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful: And Other Pre-revolutionary Writings, ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin, 1998), and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).
34. Avishai Margalit, “The Crooked Timber of Nationalism,” in The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin, p. 150.
35. Richard Wollheim, “Berlin and Zionism,” in The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin, p. 168.
36. Isaiah Berlin, “The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton, 1990), p. 245.
37. Berlin, “The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism,” p. 254.
38. As Avishai Margalit says: “For Berlin the emotional underpinnings of nationalism are the most important element in nationalism, more important than the set of beliefs that nourishes it.” In other words, for Berlin, nationalism is emotion, not a worldview; see Margalit, “The Crooked Timber,” p. 150.
39. Three thousand years ago—if our reference point is the establishment of David’s kingdom. It is possible to choose an earlier reference point (the period of the judges or even the period of the fathers, if the period of the fathers is not a biblical myth), or a later reference point (the period of Isaiah ben Amotz, or the period of the return to Zion under the leadership of Ezra and Nechemia), and we might well ask, who created whom—the people of Israel the Bible or the Bible the people of Israel. One way or the other, the self-definition of the biblical people of Israel (and Jews down the generations) was and remains a national definition—not tribal, not racial, not political citizenship, not communal, and not religious in the non-national sense of other religions.
40. Esther 3:8.
41. In this context, attention should be paid to the arguments of Anthony D. Smith, who remarked that the Hebrews of the biblical period, together with the Armenians and perhaps even the Japanese and the Koreans of the Middle Ages represented pre-modern “social formations” that closely approximated the standard modern definition of “nation.” See Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 190.
42. Ethiopia, Egypt, and Canaan sprang from the loins of Ham, according to Genesis 10:6-14.
43. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 5-6.
44. Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1964), p. 168.
45. Berlin himself stressed this point in a letter he wrote on January 23, 1959 in response to Ben-Gurion’s question, “Who is a Jew?” “We should make a man to be a Jew, if he were in most respects identified with a Jewish community, despite the fact that his mother may be an unconverted non-Jewess,” wrote Berlin to Ben-Gurion; see Who is a Jew? An Anthology of Responses of the Sages of Israel (Tel Aviv: Ben-Gurion House), p. 80. Berlin was one of five Jewish intellectuals to whom Ben-Gurion sent a letter in which he asked them to give their opinion concerning the national status of a man born to a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother (a question that in hindsight acquired the title “Who is a Jew?”), after the resignation from his government of religious ministers in the summer of 1958 in protest over the interior minister’s decision to register those seeking citizenship as “Jews” on the basis of a simple declaration, without requiring them to submit proof, as they had previously been required to do. Berlin’s reply is instructive for our purposes, since it shows that he considered Jewish identity to be dependent on a conscious belonging and not a factual-biological one.
46. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904), pp. 11-12.
47. Of the 13 million Jews alive today, 5.7 million live in the United States, 5 million in Israel, and the remainder (2.3 million) are dispersed in other countries. English is the language of 6.5 million Jews (Americans, Canadians, English, Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans), which is to say that 50 percent of Jews living today are English speakers, 38.5 percent of them are Hebrew speakers, and the remainder (11.5 percent) speak other languages (the most prominent of these being Russian, French, and Spanish).
48. The Hellenist Empire, the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, the Carolingian Empire, and the supra-national royal dynasties.
49. The USSR, the Eastern Bloc, the UN, NATO, the EEC, and globalization.
50. Isaiah Berlin, “Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power,” in Against the Current, p. 337.
51. Berlin, “The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism,” p. 243.
52. Berlin, “The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism,” p. 251.
53. As Aileen Kelly points out: “His reaction against the despotic consequences of historical teleologies rooted in Enlightenment thought led him to identify too closely with the Counter-Enlightenment in the form of Vico, Herder, and Hamann; his sympathy for these irregulars having blinded him to irreconcilable differences between their irrationalism and his own liberal pluralism.” Aileen Kelly, “A Revolutionary Without Fanaticism,” in The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin, p. 4. And as Mark Lilla puts it: “The fundamental core of the Counter-Enlightenment actually was its hostility to enlightenment—as such. And therefore it was hostile to the basic moral and political values which Berlin himself defended.” Mark Lilla, “Wolves and Lambs,” in The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin, p. 38. That is to say: Berlin was a liberal, and as such he was the successor of the Enlightenment (which he deprecated), and not the successor of the counter-Enlightenment (which he lauded).
54. Roger Hausheer, Introduction to Against the Current, p. xiii.
55. Norman Podhoretz, “A Dissent on Isaiah Berlin,” Commentary (February 1999), p. 34.
56. Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: P. Halban, 1992), p. 45.
57. Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, p. 44.
58. Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, pp. 142-143.
59. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford, 1969), pp. 118-172.
60. Ronald Dworkin, “Do Liberal Values Conflict?” in The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin, p. 75.
