Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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,

between incompatible but equally desirable values.

This permanent possibility of moral uncertainty is, in his view, the