Isaiah Berlin

This chapter analyses Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts of national consciousness: “pathological” nationalism and “moderate” national feeling. This distinction is based primarily on the formative German case. Illustrated by the famous “bent twig” metaphor, it is crucial for understanding Berlin’s unique contribution to the study of populist nationalism past and present. However, Berlin's Jewish biography and sense of belonging posited his nuanced acceptance of the Zionist movement and the State of Israel as offsprings of largely moderate nationhood. Finally, Zionism is the most interesting link between Berlin's theory of nationalisms and his concept of negative freedom.

While both Isaiah Berlin and William James are widely seen as pluralists, this paper contends that neither is a pluralist tout court. Berlin certainly is a pluralist when it comes to morality and politics, but he is a monist when it comes to nature. And James is, paradoxically, both a pluralist and a monist as regards all of reality. These claims are advanced by showing how both thinkers’ approaches contrast with those of monists, not least Plato, Hegel, and Nietzsche. They are also shown to be associated with different narrative genres: tragedy in Berlin’s case, and tragicomedy in James’. The paper then concludes with a brief discussion of an alternative approach, one that treads a path in between monism and pluralism and, because of this, favours a particular form of comedy.

Declining levels of political trust and voter turnout, the shift towards populist politics marked by appeals to ‘the people’ and a rejection of ‘politics-as-usual’, are just some of the commonly cited manifestations of our culture of political disaffection. Democratic politics, it is argued, is in crisis. Whilst considerable energy has been expended on the task of lamenting the status of our politics and pondering over recommendations to tackle this perceived crisis, amid this raft of complaints and solutions lurks confusion. This paper seeks to explore the neglected question of what the precise nature of the crisis with which we are confronted involves, and, in so doing, to go some way towards untangling our confusion. Taking my cue from Machiavelli and his value-pluralist heirs, I argue that there is a rift between a morally admirable and a virtuous political life. Failure to appreciate this possibility causes narrations of crisis to misconstrue the moral messiness of politics in ways that lead us to misunderstand how we should respond to disenchantment. Specifically, I suggest that: (i) we think that there is a moral crisis in politics because we have an unsatisfactorily idealistic understanding of political integrity in the first place; and (ii) it is a mistake to imagine that the moral purification of politics is possible or desirable. Put simply, our crisis is not moral per se but primarily philosophical in nature: it relates to the very concepts we employ—the qualities of character and context we presuppose whilst pondering over political integrity.

This paper has two central aims: First, to reappraise Isaiah Berlin’s political thought in a historically contextualized way, and in particular: to pay attention to a central conceptual tensions which animates it between, on the one hand, his famous definition of liberalism as resting on a negative concept of liberty and, on the other, his defense of cultural nationalism in general and Zionism in particular. Second, to see what do we gain and what do we lose by dubbing his philosophy Jewish. The discussion will proceed as follows: after describing the conceptual tension (Section 1), I will examine Berlin’s discussion of nationalism and explain why comparisons between him and Hans Kohn as well as communitarian interpretations of him are incomplete and have limited merit. I will continue with a brief discussion of Berlin’s Jewishness and Zionism (Section 3) and explain why I define this position “Diaspora Zionism”. The two concluding sections will discuss Berlin’s place within a larger Cold War liberal discourse (Section 5) and why I find it problematic to see his political writings as part of a Jewish political tradition (Section 6).
Keywords: Berlin, Isaiah (1909–1997); Kohn, Hans (1891–1971); Namier, Lewis B. (1880–1960); Shklar, Judith N. (1928–1992); nationalism; communitarianism; Cold War liberalism; Jewish political tradition

Isaiah Berlin viewed value conflict as tragic, as it requires the sacrifice of some values for others. It is a mark of maturity, he thought, to accept this tragic truth. This view raises certain conceptual problems that can be attributed to Berlin's subtle departures from the German authors (Kant, Schelling, and Hegel) who originated the doctrine of tragic maturity-figures who had, in turn, transformed the earlier idea that enlightenment is a natural and morally neutral process of maturation. Kant moralized the notion of enlightened maturation by portraying it as contingent on our courage to bring it about, such that we are responsible if we remain immature. This theory of maturity rested on the idea, which would have been uncongenial to Berlin, that we are intelligible creatures inhabiting the noumenal realm, duty bound to exercise moral freedom, even though this duty surpasses our ability to carry it out, as we also inhabit the phenomenal realm, where our natural inclinations tend to make us resist laboring to fulfill our duties. However, according to Kant, the metaphysical limitations we face as individuals can be transcended to an extent, allowing us to make moral progress as a species-so long as we do not lazily persist in our immaturity. Schelling built upon Kant's notion of freedom to bring out the tragic and heroic dimension of individual moral life, where the tragedy is our doomed but noble struggle to exert moral freedom in a world of natural necessity. Hegel turned these metaphysical notions in a more recognizably Berlinian direction by extending Schelling's account of tragic conflict to conflicts of values. But he identified the ultimate tragic hero as an ethical totality that enacts eternal justice by reconciling such conflicts, while Berlin attempted to repudiate both the notion of a historical totality and the possibility of reconciliation on empirical grounds, even though these are metaphysical claims. Thus, Berlin asserted the absolute, trans-historical necessity of tragic value conflict, while the evidence for this assertion was merely his personal conviction that in his particular time and place, specific values were, as a matter of empirical fact, tragically irreconcilable. In this manner he illicitly portrayed Cold War value pluralists (such as himself) as courageously accepting the tragic inevitability of value conflict, while Marxists, the legatees of Hegel and thus German Idealism, immaturely shrank from this reality by embracing the fantasy of total reconciliation.

Intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin saw a totalitarian and dogmatic tendency within the Enlightenment tradition which he called “optimistic monism,” that is, the idea that personal freedom and cultural differences have to be sacrificed for universal goals and the progress of human perfection. Thus, he turned to the proponents of the “Counter-Enlightenment” in order to render the negative traits of enlightened universalism visible. Although the Haskalah would have served well as an example of a pluralistic critique of enlightened monism, it is quite surprising that Berlin hardly wrote anything about the Jewish Enlightenment or its contemporary critics. This paper argues that this is due to a misinterpretation of Moses Mendelssohn as well as to a specific Jewish version of Berlin’s own Counter-Enlightenment, which connects to his Zionism as an answer to the failure of assimilation.

Isaiah Berlin contributed significantly to the study of the history of nationalist ideas in modern Europe, to the revival among political theorists (and others) of interest in nationalism as a theory, and to the articulation of theories of Bliberal nationalism^ in the 1990s. Berlin was also a lifelong Zionist, whose reflections on the impulses behind nationalism owed much to his reflection on the condition of Jews in the diaspora. While Berlin's views on nationalism have long claimed attention, and while there has more recently been excellent work done on his Jewish identity and commitment to Zionism, the connection between both his liberalism and his views on nationalism, and his personal background and experiences, remains to be more fully explored. Deploying biographical reconstruction and textual analysis, I here undertake to draw such connections, emphasizing how Berlin's personal condition and the response to nationalism that it influenced in turn shaped his liberalism. I conclude that Berlin's experiences coming from a specifically Russian-Jewish background, as well as his position in British society, his wartime service in the British government, and his intellectual formation, significantly shaped his views on nationalism. I also suggest that both his response to nationalism and his advocacy of a distinctive liberalism reflect Berlin's commitment (never made fully explicit) to a pluralistic ethos, which itself may be seen as a response to the condition of Jews (and other minorities and migrants) in the modern world. Keywords Isaiah Berlin. Nationalism. Liberalism. Pluralism As a historian and as a man, Isaiah Berlin was acutely sensitive to the power of nationalism, which he regarded as Bnot merely one of the most powerful but, it seems to me, the most powerful of all the influences upon the public life of the West; and today of the entire world.^ And not only the most powerful, but Bperhaps the most destructive factor of our time. If there is a danger of the total annihilation of mankind it is more likely to arise from an irrational Int J Polit Cult Soc

ABSTRACT: A prominent but often neglected feature of historical representation is the presence within it of ‘tensions’ of a sort that cannot be resolved within the limits of historical representation itself. This unresolvability is most readily seen when historians aim to be cognitively responsible in their work and when they are sufficiently skilled and self-aware to be so. Its wider implications have been largely invisible. This article argues that historiography’s most fundamental unresolving tension derives from the opposition between Determinism and Contingency. It also argues that the project of ‘modern’ Western historiography is characterized by two further unresolving tensions, between Present and Past and between General and Particular. The article notes the emergence in Germany from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century of rival traditions of ‘dialectical’ and ‘nondialectical’ (nonresolving) historiography (identified
by Ian Hunter). Reaching from history to practice, the article recommends that historians follow a nondialectical path, attending to history’s unresolving tensions rather than denying them, overlooking them or purporting to resolve them. Finally, it suggests some rules of thumb as indications and reminders of how this would be done.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 22 September 2017; Accepted 27 May 2019. Published online June 26, 2019

This essay suggests that Machiavelli’s claim that the moral vice of hypocrisy is inescapable in politics constitutes a real issue for democratic politics today. Indeed, it concludes that democratic societies are implicated in creating the impetus to hypocritical behaviour. The essay questions the prevalent conviction that a liberal democratic polity should be premised on transparency and candour, not on hypocritical manipulation – a conviction which is paradoxically shared by the dirty hands thesis which is mostly owed to Michael Walzer and which purportedly takes Machiavelli’s insights on the moral messiness of politics seriously. Attempts to deny the necessity of political hypocrisy misconstrue the realities of democratic politics – the messy context in which politicians operate and what is distinctive of political friendships. Democratic politicians operate in a context ridden with conflict and dependence which renders hypocrisy a necessary political virtue and the string that holds together a virtuous political life.

Although the idea of freedom has been well studied as an ideal in political philosophy, relatively little scholarship has focused on the human experience of freedom. Drawing on ethnographic research between 2012 and 2013, I examine how freedom was achieved by people who practice freeganism and freecycling in Hong Kong. I show that the freedom that these people pursue, either individually or collectively, is not a freedom without constraints but a freedom that must be attained through the exercise of deliberation, restraint, and self-discipline. While freegans seek liberation by withdrawing from the world and practicing self-cultivation (chushi asceticism), freecyclers do so by engaging with worldly affairs in order to create social changes (rushi asceticism). In both cases, by reimagining freedom as ethical practices rather than a right that comes naturally with birth, freegans and freecyclers in Hong Kong are able to experience moments of freedom despite inevitable structural constraints.

This paper contests Brian Simpson's claim that HLA Hart's book, The Concept of Law, is that of a 'hedgehog', that is, a monistic thinker. It is not. Hart's work is pluralist both in its explanatory concepts and in its evaluative background. Some conjectures are offered as to why Simpson so misunderstood Hart, and as to why analytic legal philosophy is misunderstood, or distrusted, more generally.

The name ‘pluralism’ frequently rears its head in political philosophy, but theorists often have different things in mind when using the term. Whereas ‘reasonable pluralism’ refers to the fact of moral diversity among citizens of a liberal democracy, ‘value pluralism’ is a metaethical view about the structure of moral practical reasoning. In this paper, I argue that value pluralism is part of the best explanation for reasonable pluralism. However, I also argue that embracing this explanation is compatible with political liberalism’s commitment to avoiding controversial premises. According value pluralism an explanatory role does not entail according it a justificatory one. What’s more, explaining reasonable disagreement in terms of reasonable disagreement about value weights opens up space for direct appeal to substantive values within political liberalism. In particular, promoting a substantive political value when doing so does not conflict with other values is unproblematic. Full text available at: https://rdcu.be/b5vWv

The relationship between pluralism and liberalism has been at the center of recent considerations of Isaiah Berlin's thought. In particular, liberal theorists have asked whether the value pluralism Berlin endorses actually undermines his liberalism. A common interpretive approach resolves this problem by presenting Berlin's pluralism as “limited” rather than “radical,” and therefore capable of serving as a moral foundation authorizing liberalism. I challenge this re-construction of Berlin's work, arguing that such readings are premised on a conception of judgment Berlin does not share. While many of his readers believe that a judgment on behalf of liberalism requires the identification of a transcontextual ground, Berlin invites us to see human judgment as a meaningful practice that occurs in the absence of absolutes yet does not simply mirror local norms. Berlin's defense of liberalism models this kind of judgment—a judgment that is neither mandated, nor ruled out, by pluralism.

Isaiah Berlin’s pluralism continues to be relevant because of the compelling account of tragic loss that it provides. I advance this argument through a series of four central questions, using them to think with Berlin, but also beyond Berlin, about the promise of pluralism and loss in our political present: Why must there be loss? What makes loss difficult? Why should we expect loss to occur? How does loss orient action? Ultimately, I suggest that the expectation and recognition of tragic loss can alert us to, and help guard us against, the fanaticism, distortion of values, and self-deception that may result from even the most well-meaning and good-faith pursuit of political ideals.

This paper examines the relationship between rainfall-related events and trends, livelihood and food security and migration in rural upland communities in Thailand. The study was conducted as one of eight case studies within the framework of the “Where the Rain Falls” Project. The paper is based on empirical research in four villages in the Province Lamphun, Northern Thailand. The households’ livelihood in the research area is characterized by high level of on and off-farm diversification, integration into national and global market structures. Migration – internal as well as international – is widespread. Based on data gathered in a multi-method field based research design, the study observed that while households are exposed to various rainfalls related stressors, such as the extreme rainfall in 2011 which resulted in heavy floods in Central Plain of Thailand, migration is not considered as a primary coping and risk mitigation strategy. Environmental factors are furthermore not the primary explanatory factor for pattern of mobility. The study highlights the complex relation between environmental factors including rainfall and migration beyond determinism notions of environmental migration. The study points out that while migration might not be caused by rainfall related events and trends, through mechanisms of translocality the social resilience of exposed households and communities can be strengthen through migration.

What is the role of language in human cognition? Could we attain self-consciousness and construct our civilisation without language? Such were the questions at the basis of eighteenth-century debates on the joint evolution of language, mind, and culture. Language and Enlightenment highlights the importance of language in the social theory, epistemology, and aesthetics of the Enlightenment. While focusing on the Berlin Academy under Frederick the Great, Avi Lifschitz situates the Berlin debates within a larger temporal and geographical framework. He argues that awareness of the historicity and linguistic rootedness of all forms of life was a mainstream Enlightenment notion rather than a feature of the so-called 'Counter-Enlightenment'.

Enlightenment authors of different persuasions investigated whether speechless human beings could have developed their language and society on their own. Such inquiries usually pondered the difficult shift from natural signs like cries and gestures to the artificial, articulate words of human language. This transition from nature to artifice was mirrored in other domains of inquiry, such as the origins of social relations, inequality, the arts and the sciences. By examining a wide variety of authors - Leibniz, Wolff, Condillac, Rousseau, Michaelis, and Herder, among others - Language and Enlightenment emphasises the open and malleable character of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. The language debates demonstrate that German theories of culture and language were not merely a rejection of French ideas. New notions of the genius of language and its role in cognition were constructed through a complex interaction with cross-European currents, especially via the prize contests at the Berlin Academy.

Gegen politische und religiöse Fundamentalisten verteidigt Claus Dierksmeier die Idee der Freiheit als Leitwert der Globalität. Individuelle Freiheit schließt aber Verantwortung für ihren sozial und ökologisch nachhaltigen Gebrauch ein. Dabei müssen wir abwägen, welche und wessen Freiheiten jeweils Vorrang erhalten sollen. Und hierbei, so zeigt Dierksmeier in historisch-systematischer Grundlegung, kommt es zuerst auf die Qualität – und nicht die Quantität – unserer Freiheiten an. Denn Freiheit heißt nicht, die Optionen einiger weniger zu maximieren, sondern die Chancen aller Weltbürger zu optimieren.

Given the recent and ongoing economic crisis and high levels of consumer debt, the teaching of financial literacy in elementary and secondary schools has received widespread support. Too often, however, financial literacy education policy documents promote the individualization of economic risk and privilege the autonomy of the consumer or consumer-citizen over that of the critical citizen. This article argues for the necessity of a critical financial literacy education aimed at supporting critical citizens by providing a Marxist critique of the dominant liberal and neoliberal notions of freedom and responsibility reproduced in financial literacy education policy documents. The choice highlighted here is not between financial illiteracy and financial literacy but between accommodating oneself to neoliberal capitalism’s needs so as to remain in perpetual competition with others or understanding and collectively altering an economic system that promotes alienation, insecurity and exploitation.

Co-Authored with Grit Straßenberger.

Generally, Mouffe’s political theory is labeled as a radical democratic concept. We are going to challenge this common view by showing that Mouffe derives her theory from the tradition of a conflictive liberalism. Coping with the political problems of the present, she re-narrates the history of democracy in order to generate a normative foundation of society that likewise acknowledges its own contingency. In sharp contrast to the commonalities of enlightenment liberalism and socialism, the acceptance of contingency makes clear that liberal democracy must always be both conceptually incomplete and nevertheless actively defended. Re-narrating democracy, Mouffe therefore encourages a liberal connection of pluralism and conflict. Both function as the antibodies to the threats of liberal democracy, debunked by Carl Schmitt. We reconstruct the intellectual references for Mouffe’s conflictive liberalism and finally propose to reconsider the relationship between liberalism and republicanism from this point of view.

- peer reviewed -

This essay provides a general introduction to the special number on Jacob L. Talmon (1916-1980). The essay sketches the outlines of Talmon's intellectual biography, beginning with his study of the origins of totalitarian democracy, moving through his analysis of nationalism and political messianism, and ending with his study of the ideological clash of the 20th century. The essay raises the question of whether Talmon should be seen as a thinker wishing to defend existing traditions (i.e. a "priest"), or as a radical anti-authoritarian skeptic (i.e. a "jester"). Moreover, being both an anti-nationalist liberal, and a zionist at the same time, Talmon, the essay shows, was aware of the fact his own stance was problematic and at times even paradoxical. The last section of the essay presents the seven essays, which are included in the special issue.

Berlin’s famous defense of negative liberty has enjoyed remarkable staying power in the contemporary West, which some commentators attribute to its compatibility with the individualism that lies at the heart of market economics. Shapiro and Steinmetz propose an alternative account that is rooted in the intellectual context of the Cold War. Drawing on the wealth of new evidence that has become available due to the publication of Berlin’s letters over the past decade, they show that Berlin’s defense of negative over positive liberty was indeed rooted in the antipathy for the Soviet Union that he shared with such contemporaries as Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, and George Kennan. But Berlin’s account was distinctive in that he also explored the underlying insecurities that rendered people susceptible to positive liberty’s allure. This exploration left him skeptical that negative liberty would triumph once communism collapsed unless the sources of that insecurity could be addressed – a salutary warning that continues to be relevant in the post-Cold War era.

One of the largest contemporary debates in political theory revolves around the question of how pluralists can justify their political commitments.  Isaiah Berlin, one of the first to face this problem, was a self-proclaimed liberal, whose justification of his views has led to controversy.  In this paper I take up the issue of how Berlin’s use of the essay genre contributes to his defense of liberalism given his pluralist beliefs.  I argue that while his reliance upon the essay as a mode of communication generates particular interpretive problems, it need not defeat his defense of liberalism.  As I argue, Berlin’s defense of liberalism involves a rhetorical attempt to discredit alternatives to liberalism while drawing attention to suggestive ties between history, political judgment, and liberalism.

This paper contrasts five contemporary political philosophies – neutralism, postmodernism, pluralism, anarchism, and patriotism – and argues that the latter is superior. This is because of how patriotism relates to the various political ideologies, including liberalism, conservatism, socialism, nationalism, feminism, and so on. A new, patriotic conception of the political spectrum is then advanced, one based on how people should respond to conflict: those on the left would have us do so with conversation; those in the centre with negotiation; and those on the right with force.

This is a new version of the paper originally published in Public Affairs Quarterly 15, no. 3 (July 2001): 193–217; and as chapter 1 of my Patriotic Elaborations: Essays in Practical Philosophy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009).

This essay challenges the influential view that Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt played a central role in inaugurating an ‘anti-utopian age’. While the two thinkers certainly did their share to discredit the radical utopian inclination to portray a political blueprint in the abstract, I show that neither was straightforwardly anti-utopian. On the contrary, both thinkers’ writings display a different kind of utopian thinking, consisting in an imaginative and idealized reconstruction of existing polities. Schematically put, Berlin’s utopia was England reconstructed as a quintessential liberal society, whereas Arendt’s utopia was America reconstructed as a quintessential modern free republic. Those two polities differ from each other in important respects, but they share two essential features in common: they are claimed to be exempt from the rise of totalitarianism; and they allegedly give men and women the decent chance to live a fulfilling life. To illustrate Berlin’s and Arendt’s overlapping and yet differing visions, I consider their contrasting responses to the upheaval of 1968 – a possible utopian moment in the late 20th century. While their responses could scarcely be more different, they were informed by their shared desire to imagine an ideal polity in what both regarded as the darkest century in human history.

I apply Karl Popper’s conception of critical rationality to the question of personal fulfilment. I show that such fulfilment normally depends upon the person achieving positive freedom, and that positive freedom requires negative freedom, including freedom of expression. If the state has legitimacy, its central duty must be the enforcement of those rules that provide the best prospects for personal fulfilment for the people under its jurisdiction. The state is therefore morally debarred from suppressing freedom of expression. I consider and rebut arguments from falsity, harm, offence, and democratic principles, which are intended to show that the state should prohibit the expression of some types of content. I go on to argue that common university speech codes are incompatible with the aims of an institution of higher education.

John Rawls’ gamification of justice leads him – along with many other monist political philosophers, not least Ronald Dworkin – to fail to take politics seriously enough. I begin with why we consider games frivolous and then show how Rawls’ theory of justice is not merely analogous to a game, as he himself seems to claim, but is in fact a kind of game. As such, it is harmful to political practice in two ways: one as regards the citizens who participate directly in it, and the other as regards those who do no more than follow it. Similar harms, I then argue, come from taking politics too seriously, which is the attitude I ascribe to pluralist political philosophers such as Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams. To them, the plural, incommensurable nature of values means that they cannot be reconciled and so that politics must be a matter of negotiating dirty, and often tragic, compromises. What we need instead, I conclude, is a third way, one that is neither monist nor pluralist but in-between the two extremes.

A review of Ronald Beiner's Political Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). In affirming political philosophy as a clash of epic theories, Beiner aestheticizes it, since he treats it as a kind of competitive game. A shorter version of this review was published in the The Review of Politics 78, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 307–308

In Crowder’s reformulation of Berlin’s argument, not only does value pluralism provide support for liberalism, it actually suggests a version of liberalism that promotes the public use of personal autonomy. For Crowder, personal autonomy is a necessary element given value pluralism as it allows the individual to choose between a plurality of incommensurable options. In order to advance personal autonomy, Crowder advocates a robust account of freedom of exit coupled with a form of autonomy-facilitating education. To this effect Crowder posits that it is acceptable to intervene in the lives of non-liberals in order to promote individual autonomy as a public ideal. However, I argue that despite the positive implications that a pro-autonomy account of liberalism may have for both the individual and the state, it will limit range of acceptable values within the liberal state and thus undermine certain aspects of value pluralism.