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Vol. 41, No. 2 / October 2022

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Left to right: Prince Bernhard, Marguérite Yourcenar, Leszek Kolakovski and Isaiah Berlin. Erasmus Prize,
Amsterdam, 27 October 1983. Photo: Rob C. Croes (ANEFO)

Books September 2009

Left to right: Prince Bernhard, Marguérite Yourcenar, Leszek Kolakovski and Isaiah Berlin. Erasmus Prize,
Amsterdam, 27 October 1983. Photo: Rob C. Croes (ANEFO)

Back to Berlin
by Roger Scruton
A review of Isaiah Berlin: Letters 1928-1946 (v. 1) by Isaiah Berlin.

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 he mark of a great letter writer isM Enot the Snumber of letters   but the
sent,

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number subsequently kept. By this measure Isaiah Berlin must surely count
among the most noteworthy correspondents of the modern era. His letters were
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sent to, and kept by, people as interesting and highly placed as himself, so that
these private communications are also valuable public records, giving a unique
perspective on the post-war events in Britain, America, and the wider world. They
are full of gossip, of course, and—as in his published writings—Berlin touches on
the big questions without always wrestling with them. But they are a pleasure to
read and have been edited to a high standard by Berlin’s devoted executor Henry
Hardy, with the help of Jennifer Holmes. 1  Not a name has gone untraced, nor a
reference left incomplete. The reader is transported to post-war Oxford, at the very
moment when Oxford, thanks to the Labour Party, was taking over Britain.

Berlin was a famously garrulous person, whose conversation fascinated and

charmed his audience. He was also both deeply interested in other people and
affectionately disposed towards them. Indeed, if there is one positive quality above
all others that comes across from these letters, it is that of constantly renewed
affection—for which Berlin was rewarded in life by the enormous circle of his
friends, and in death by the devotion of those who seek to keep his memory alive.
He was not uncritical, and the letters contain some striking pages of demolition—
of G. D. H. Cole (Berlin’s predecessor as the Chichele Professor of Social
Thought), the loathsome Isaac Deutscher, Michael Postan, and E. H. Carr—in
which Berlin’s very real antipathy to the Soviet apologists comes to the surface. Nor
was he entirely free from duplicitousness—writing an unctuous protestation of
friendship to A. L. Rowse, for example, while expressing to other correspondents
his heartfelt loathing for the man. But, as Berlin himself concedes, he was plagued
by “an excessive desire to please,” a desire which is everywhere apparent in the
letters, and which might indeed have been his principal fault as a human being—
since it caused him not to speak out in defense of the liberal values which are now
associated with his name—had it not also been so deeply necessary to his irenic
personality.
 The period covered
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painful by the Labour Government and dangerous by the Marxists and fellow
travelers who had emerged in the ancient universities, and whose primary loyalty
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was to the Soviet Union. Two factors served to inoculate Berlin against the
communist disease: his war-time experiences in the British Embassy in
Washington, which had made him profoundly aware of the depth and importance
of the “special relationship”; and his own Russian and Baltic connections (he was
born in Riga). Berlin spoke fluent Russian and had visited the Soviet Union after
the war in the course of his diplomatic duties, meeting the poet Anna Akhmatova
who profoundly influenced his view of the Soviet “experiment.” He had relatives in
the Soviet Union and for this reason hesitated to expose them to danger by
speaking out. But for the same reason, he experienced a deep suspicion towards
those who felt free to praise the great killing machine from their secure positions in
the West.

These people occupied high places in the diplomatic, academic, and political
establishment, and Berlin could have avoided them only by renouncing his
gregarious way of life. He learned to move adroitly in leftist circles, and knew when
to add his voice to the collective denunciation of “right-wing anti-communist
reactionaries,” and when to remain discreetly silent. To a conservative of my cast,
brought up in the 1960s, and experiencing the Thatcherite revolution as a breath of
fresh air, this aspect of Sir Isaiah aroused no sympathy. He appeared to me during
the 1980s and 1990s as a weak and somehow bloodless apologist for the old left-
liberal status quo. I described him as such in the Times of London, in an article that
quickly became notorious and which I came as quickly to regret. Looking back on
it, I see that my article was hurtful and unjust. I was ignoring the qualities Berlin
had needed when it fell to him to steer the British elite away from Soviet
sympathies and back into the transatlantic camp.

As these letters reveal, Berlin would have had no influence at all had he defended
free markets, constitutional monarchy, the English common law, or hereditary
elites from his ivory tower in All Souls. What our country needed at the time, and
what it obtained in Sir Isaiah, was the brilliant outsider, who could speak the new
language of history and its discontents as fluently as the Marxists, who could call
 on the extracurricular
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could move effortlessly in the upper reaches of society, with an eloquent flow of
ideas that would never be regarded as dogmatic or finger-wagging.
September 2009 september 2009  

T
he difficulty of Berlin’s position as a symbol of the post-war Oxford establishmen
is apparent throughout these letters. He worries constantly that he might be
offending members of the elite; he unflinchingly dismisses as confused,
irrelevant, or evil those figures on the “right” who had been singled out for attack
by the leftists—including Evelyn Waugh, Karl Jaspers, Michael Oakeshott,
Friedrich Hayek, Michael Polanyi, and Kingsley Amis, with all of whom he ought
to have agreed; he passionately declares (to his friend the philosopher Morton
White) his steadfast loyalty to left-wing causes and his urge to close ranks against
anti-Communists of the Mortimer Adler kind; and he is adamant that we should
not oppose Communism with some rival system of belief, or quasi-religious
commitment, but only with the armory that is provided by our free institutions and
our open minds.

But Berlin’s thoughts constantly drift in another direction. He is fascinated by

Tolstoy’s philosophy of soul and soil; he is drawn to de Maistre, ostensibly as a case
study, but in fact as the leading voice of the counter-Enlightenment; he invokes the
sophistication of nineteenth-century society, and he frequents a Proustian world of
high connections and Bohemian charm. He cooperates with Irving Kristol in the
Encounter venture, which involves setting up an anti-Communist organ of culture
in London (funded, as it happens, by the CIA). He accepts a knighthood from the
Queen (describing lunch with Her Majesty in a most witty letter to Edmund
Wilson), and in the 1960 election he even votes Conservative—excusing himself to
Sir Maurice Bowra in self-abasing terms, describing how he felt ashamed to be on
the side of the “ghastly line of Tory MPs,” and in general groveling in a manner all
the more unnecessary given the contempt that he himself had expressed for Bowra
(his predecessor as the icon of upper-class Oxford) in a letter to John Sparrow of
six years before.
 All this makes for
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erudition make him vividly present to the reader—a character both charming and
authoritative, securely on top of things, and at the same time endearingly
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vulnerable. Incidental observations are often highly penetrating—notably his

descriptions of Toscanini’s conducting, and his touching portrait of Chaim
Weitzmann, Israel’s first president and a personal friend. Berlin’s powers of
observation are never more acute than when directed at himself, and it is clear that
he was not a confident member of any of the milieus in which he hoped to shine.
The letters were composed during the intellectual reign of J. L. Austin, Gilbert
Ryle, and P. F. Strawson and, writing to Morton White on Austin’s death in 1960,
Berlin pays profound tribute to the man who, for him, symbolized more than any
other the rigor and achievement of Oxford post-war philosophy. Berlin spent much
time in America, invited to give distinguished lectures at Harvard, Princeton, and
elsewhere. But his heart was in Oxford and in his rooms at All Souls, which he
exchanged for a house only after his marriage to Aline Halban, in 1955. It is
testimony to Berlin’s social adroitness that he was so successful a college man,
despite the disability—which, from the point of view of leftist orthodoxy, bordered
on crime—of heterosexual inclinations. Admittedly Berlin was not, from the sexual
point of view, so fired up as to make a show of things. Nevertheless, in one
unusually honest letter to Alice James (William James’s daughter-in-law) he
expresses his discomfort at the gay collegiate culture. He was the kind of shy
heterosexual who recoils from the predatory and innuendo-filled air of the
homosexual hothouse, and many of his letters to women suggest a constant desire
for the mother figure who will firmly close the bedroom door.

W hat should we make of Isaiah Berlin? We should surely forgive him his
posture in the face of the Left establishment: what appears now as
pusillanimity was probably, at the time, the only effective anti-Communist tactic,
even if it did serve to entrench the left-liberal attitudes which have since dominated
British intellectual life. His defense of negative liberty (liberty as personal
sovereignty) is of enduring value, as is his critique of the “positive” alternative—the
idea of liberty as “empowerment”—which comes to the fore whenever egalitarians
seek to “liberate” us from our traditional freedoms.
 Many praise Berlin, too, for his defense of “pluralism,” attributing to  him the view
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that human beings have different and incommensurable values, for which no
ultimate or shared foundation can be provided. This idea does indeed play a large
September 2009 september 2009  

part in Berlin’s later and more long-winded writings, and has been made part of a
“Berlin liberalism” by its principal defenders, Michael Ignatieff and John Gray. But
it is not at all clear what it means, or how Berlin himself would have wished to
defend it. After all, Berlin was an advocate of basic humanitarian values; he believed
in the rule of law and the pursuit of impartial justice; he had no time for murderers
or their apologists, and he was a severe critic of cruelty in all its forms. How this
amounts to “pluralism” I do not know, and if it is compatible with a variety of
stances on other and less vital issues that does not differentiate Berlin from the rest
of us.

Introducing him to the audience at the first Auguste Comte Memorial Lecture at
the London School of Economics, in May 1953, Michael Oakeshott mischievously
described Berlin as “one of the great intellectual virtuosos of our time, a Paganini of
ideas.” This spiteful jibe is not altogether without truth, and Berlin recalled the
episode (on one of the tapes transcribed in this volume) with evident distress. But,
just as Paganini left that one immortal idea (Caprice No. 24), built into sublime sets
of variations by Schumann, Brahms, Rachmaninov, and others, so taking his place
among the second rank of the musical immortals, so did Berlin produce that one
great distinction between negative and positive liberty, upon which subsequent
thinkers have built their many fertile variations, and which has conferred on him a
small but permanent place in the philosophical pantheon.

  Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, Volume 2, by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes; Chatto &
1.
Windus, 864 pages, $95.

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Roger Scruton (1944–2020) was an English philosopher and writer who first
contributed to The New Criterion in 1982.

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 28 Number 1, on page 61

Copyright © 2022 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2009/9/back-to-berlin

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Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin: Letters 1928-1946 (v. 1)
Cambridge University Press, 752 pages, $107.00

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Illogical alliances
September 2009 september 2009  

by Sol Stern
A review of Why Are Jews Liberals? by Norman Podhoretz.

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W ere I the editor of this timely and thought-provoking book, I would have
suggested that one short word be added to the title—thus changing it to
Why Are Jews Still Liberals? After all, as Norman Podhoretz himself acknowledges,
during most of their history on these shores American Jews had the best of reasons
to support the forces of political liberalism. Millions of poor and previously
oppressed European Jews began arriving in America in the late nineteenth century,
 believing fervently, almost religiously, that this liberal republic would become their

“goldene medine” (golden land)—and it was the big-city Democratic machines that
welcomed Jewish support and inclusion. The Democrats stood for Jewish-friendly
policies such as opening up the professions and the universities and pushing for
expansive immigration policies. Republicans and conservatives were tainted by
association with the country’s nativist and...

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Norman Podhoretz
Why Are Jews Liberals?
Doubleday, 352 pages, $27.00

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Two takes on the Common Core

Aligned with liberty

Anti-Semitic symbiosis

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C. P. Snow. Photo: CricketMASH.

Books September 2009

C. P. Snow. Photo: CricketMASH.

In that dawn
by John Derbyshire
A review of The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the
Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes.

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M ay 7th this year marked the fiftieth anniversary of C. P. Snow’s “Two

Cultures” speech in Cambridge, England. There were some scattered
commemorations. Roger Kimball, writing in the February 1994 issue of The New
Criterion, had already noted the naïveté and incoherence of Snow’s arguments, yet
 allowed that there
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irrationalism in Western culture that regularly manifests itself in anti-scientific
biases of one sort or another. Certain varieties of romanticism belong here.”
September
  2009 september 2009  

That qualifier is well placed: “Certain varieties.” Romanticism, for all its emphasis
on sensation over ratiocination, on heart over head, on the felt over the observed,
shares a part of the human imagination with science. That imaginative region,
properly stimulated, can inspire either a hypothesis or a sonnet equally well.
Indeed, there...

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Terror of Science
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PO PUL AR RIGHT NOW

I
Affirmative action, democracy & the Supreme Court
by Glenn Harlan Reynolds

II
Adjudicating the racial racket

III
The American affirmative-action regime
by Frank Resartus

IV
The old Schell game
by Victor Davis Hanson

V
An agenda for Congress
by Gail Heriot

Topics:
B O O K S

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