Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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price that must be paid for recognition of the true nature of one's freedom: the individual's right to self-direction, as opposed to direction by state or church or party, is plainly of supreme importance if one holds

that the diversity of human goals and aspirations cannot be evaluated by

any universal criteria, or subordinated to some transcendent purpose.

But he maintains that, although this belief is implicit in some humanist

and liberal attitudes, the consequences of consistent pluralism are so

painful and disturbing, and so radically undermine some of the central

and uncritically accepted assumptions of the western intellectual tradition, that they are seldom fully articulated. In seminal essays on Vico, Machiavelli and Herder, and in 'Historical Inevitability', he has shown

that those few thinkers who spelt out the consequences of pluralism

have been consistently misunderstood, and their originality undervalued.

In his Four Essays on Liberty he suggests that pluralist visions of the

world are frequently the product of historical claustrophobia, during

periods of intellectual and social stagnation, when a sense of the intolerable cramping of human faculties by the demand for conformity generates a demand for 'more light', an extension of the areas of

individual responsibility and spontaneous action. But, as the dominance

of monistic doctrines throughout history shows, men are much more

prone to agoraphobia: and at moments of historical crisis, when the

necessity of choice generates fears and neuroses, men are eager to trade

the doubts and agonies of moral responsibility for determinist visions,

conservative or radical, which give them 'the peace of imprisonment, a

contented security, a sense of having at last found one's proper place in

the cosmos'. He points out that the craving for certainties has never

been stronger than at the present time; and his Four Essays on Liberty

are a powerful warning of the need to discern, through a deepening

of moral perceptions-a 'complex vision' of the world-the cardinal

fallacies on which such certainties rest.

Like many other liberals Berlin believes that such a deepening of

perceptions can be gained through a study of the intellectual background to the Russian Revolution. But his conclusions are very different from theirs. With the subtle moral sense which led him to radically

new insights into European thinkers, he refutes the common view that

the Russian intelligentsia were, to a man, fanatical monists: he shows

that their historical predicament strongly predisposed them to both

types of vision of the world, the monist and the pluralist-that the

fascination of the intelligentsia derives from the fact that the most

INTRODUCTION

sensitive among them suffered simultaneously, and equally acutely,

from historical claustrophobia and from agoraphobia, so that at one

and the same time they were both strongly attracted to messianic

ideologies and morally repelled by them. The result, as he reveals, was

a remarkably concentrated self-searching which in many cases produced

prophetic insights into the great problems of our own time.

The causes of that extreme Russian agoraphobia which generated a

succession of millenarian political doctrines are well known: in the

political reaction following the failure of the revolution of 1 825, which

had sought to make Russia a constitutional state on the western model,

the small westernised intellectual elite became deeply alienated from

their backward society. With no practical outlet for their energies, they

channelled their social idealism into a religiously dedicated search for

truth. Through the historiosophical systems of Idealist philosophy,

then at the height of its influence in Europe, they hoped to find a

unitary truth which would make sense of the moral and social chaos

around them and anchor them securely in reality.

This yearning for absolutes was one source of that notorious consistency which, as Berlin points out, was the most striking characteristic of Russian thinkers-their habit of taking ideas and concepts to their

most extreme, even absurd, conclusions: to stop before the extreme

consequences of one's reasoning was seen as a sign of moral cowardice,

insufficient commitment to the truth. But Berlin emphasises that there

was a second, conflicting motivation behind this consistency. Amongst

the westernised minority, imbued through their education and reading

with both Enlightenment and romantic ideals of liberty and human

dignity, the primitive and crushing despotism of Nicholas I produced a

claustrophobia which had no parallel in the more advanced countries

of Europe. As a result the intelligentsia'ssearch for absolutes began with a

radical denial of absolutes-of tradi tiona! and accepted faiths, dogmas and

institutions, political, religious and social; since these, they believed,

had distorted man's vision of himself and of his proper social relations.

As Berlin shows in his essay 'Russia and 1 848', the failure of the

European revolutions in 1 848 had the effect in Russia of accelerating

this process : it resulted among the intelligentsia in a profound distrust of

western liberal and radical ideologues and their social nostrums. For the

most morally sensitive among the intelligentsia, intellectual consistency

implied above all a process which they called 'suffering through' the

truth, the stripping off, through a painful process of inner liberation, of

all the comforting illusions and half-truths which had traditionally

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concealed or justified forms of social and moral despotism. This led to

a critique, with far-reaching implications, of the unquestioned assumptions at the base of everyday social and political conduct. This consistency, with the tensions engendered by its compound of faith and scepticism, and the insights to which it led, is the central theme of

Berlin's essays on Russian thinkers.

In a number of vivid portraits of individual thinkers, he shows that

the most outstanding members of the intelligentsia were continually

torn between their suspicion of absolutes and their longing to discover

some monolithic truth which would once and for all resolve the problems of moral conduct. Some surrendered to the latter urge: Bakunin began his political career with a famous denunciation of the tyranny of

dogmas over individuals, and ended it by demanding total adherence to

his own dogma of the wisdom of the simple peasant; and many of the

young 'nihilist' iconoclasts of the 186os accepted without question the

dogmas of a crude materialism. In other thinkers the battle was more

serious and sustained. The critic Belinsky is often cited as the archexample of the intelligentsia's inhuman fanaticism: from Hegelian principles he deduced that the despotism of Nicholas I was to be

admired, contrary to all the instincts of conscience, as the expression of

cosmic harmony. But Berlin points out, in an intensely moving study

of Belinsky, that if the longing for faith led him briefly to defend such

a grotesque proposition, his moral integrity soon drove him to reject

this blinkered vision for a fervent humanism which denounced all the

great and fashionable historiosophical systems as molochs, demanding

the sacrifice of living individuals to ideal abstractions. Belinsky