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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi

Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi

Isaiah Berlin and the

Enlightenment

edited by
Laurence Brockliss
and Ritchie Robertson

1
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi

3
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi

Foreword
Hermione Lee, President of Wolfson College

The conference on Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment, on which this collection of
essays is based, took place at Wolfson College, in Oxford, from 20 to 22 March 2014,
with the support of Wolfson College, All Souls, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and
Jewish Studies, the Oxford Faculty of Modern Languages, and the Modern Humanities
Research Association. I was very glad to host the conference at the college which Isaiah
Berlin founded and where he was the first president, and which began its life as Wolfson
College fifty years ago, in 1966, dedicated to those principles of liberty, tolerance, pluralism,
and independence of mind in which Berlin so eloquently believed.
Since Berlin’s presidency, Wolfson College has maintained his legacy and posthumous
intellectual life through its involvement with the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust and through
its support of the work of Henry Hardy, Honorary Fellow of the College, in editing
Berlin’s books, essays, lectures, and (with Mark Pottle, Jennifer Holmes, Serena Moore,
and Nicholas Hall) his letters. The fourth and final volume of Berlin’s Letters, Affirming:
Letters 1975–1997, was published in 2015.
Berlin ‘belongs’ to a number of Oxford colleges—Corpus, All Souls, New—but his
creation of Wolfson as a new graduate college in the 1960s was a mark of his belief that
historical institutions need to continue to change, and to incorporate differences, con-
tradictions, and radical developments. The belief applies also to his intellectual work,
and is expressed in this volume’s acknowledgement in its Introduction, that ‘he would
have not have wanted his readings [of the Enlightenment] to be set in stone’. That the
essays from this conference make up a re-evaluation of Berlin as a historian of ideas
‘not intended as an act of piety or an attempt at rehabilitation’, but as a critique which
brings a wide variety of views to bear on his work, is as it should be.
The conference from which these essays arises was supported in part by the Oxford
Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson, a centre for the study of biography, autobiography,
letters, and other forms of life-writing. It’s apt, then, that so many of these essays deal with
the history of ideas and of differing approaches to the Enlightenment through individual
cases: Marx, Meinecke, Hume, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, Hamann, Kant, Mill,
Machiavelli, Vico, Herder, Hess, and Herzen. Berlin approached the Enlightenment as
‘the grounding of our belief in human individuality’, and his approach to history, ideas,
and philosophy was very often through the study of individuals. He was profoundly
suspicious of abstract principles and general theories, and of the sacrifice of the individ-
ual to ‘remote ends’. He rejoiced in the study of heroes, exceptional thinkers, and actors,
and in those influential personages who, as he said of Chaim Weizmann, ‘must perma-
nently transform one’s ideas of what human beings can be or do’. In his essay on Herder
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi

vi foreword

(in Three Critics of the Enlightenment) he proposed that ‘all the works of men are above
all voices speaking . . . and that self-expression is part of the essence of human beings as
such’. This volume takes on, critically and analytically, Berlin’s ‘self-expression’ on
Enlightenment themes, and in doing so makes a significant new contribution to the
study both of Isaiah Berlin and of the Enlightenment.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi

Acknowledgements

This book is the outcome of a conference on ‘Isaiah Berlin’s Enlightenment’, organized

by Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson, and hosted by Wolfson College, Oxford,
from 20 to 22 March 2014. The conference was generously supported by Wolfson’s
Centre for Life-Writing, All Souls College, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish
Studies, the Oxford Faculty of Modern Languages, and the Modern Humanities
Research Association. The conference was first conceived at a meeting of the Besterman
Centre for the Enlightenment, now part of the Enlightenment research programme
within the Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities (TORCH).
We are particularly grateful to Hermione Lee, President of Wolfson, for her enthusiastic
support at every stage of this project, and to Henry Hardy, Isaiah Berlin’s devoted
editor, for his participation in the conference and his willing advice to the editors
and many contributors to this volume. At the conference Henry presented an
audio-recording of Isaiah Berlin’s contribution to the 1975 Wolfson College lectures
on ‘The Enlightenment and its Critics’. This was an absorbing and memorable expe-
rience for all who were fortunate enough to listen to it, and it is hoped that one day a
transcription of the lecture can be published.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi

Contents

List of Abbreviations xi
Notes on Contributors xiii

Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 1

Laurence Brockliss

Part I. An Idea in Context

1. Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, and the Enlightenment 21
David Leopold
2. Berlin’s Conception of the Enlightenment 35
Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson
3. Between Friedrich Meinecke and Ernst Cassirer: Isaiah Berlin’s
Bifurcated Enlightenment 51
Avi Lifschitz

Part II. Enlightenment Thinkers

4. Berlin and Hume 69
P. J. E. Kail
5. Berlin and Montesquieu 79
Karen O’Brien
6. Isaiah Berlin and the Origins of the ‘Totalitarian’ Rousseau 89
Christopher Brooke
7. Rococo Enlightenment? Berlin, Hamann, and Diderot 99
Marian Hobson
8. Sympathy and Empathy: Isaiah’s Dilemma, or How He Let the
Enlightenment Down 113
T. J. Reed
9. Isaiah Berlin, J. S. Mill, and Progress 121
Alan Ryan

Part III. Counter-Enlightenments?

10. Berlin, Machiavelli, and the Enlightenment 137
Ritchie Robertson
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x contents

11. Berlin, Vico, and the Critique of Enlightenment 151

John Robertson
12. ‘Populism, Expressionism, Pluralism’—and God? Herder’s Cultural
Theory and Theology 164
Kevin Hilliard
13. Discovering Isaiah Berlin in Moses Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem176
Ken Koltun-Fromm
14. Isaiah Berlin and the Russian Intelligentsia 187
Derek Offord

Part IV. Berlin’s Legacy

15. Isaiah Berlin’s Neglect of Enlightenment Constitutionalism 205
Jeremy Waldron
16. Second Thoughts of a Biographer 220
Michael Ignatieff

Bibliography 229
Index 245
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi

List of Abbreviations

AC Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry
Hardy, with an introduction by Roger Hausheer (London: Hogarth Press,
1979; repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
AE The Age of Enlightenment: The Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, selected with
introduction and commentary by Isaiah Berlin (New York: Mentor Books,
1956); reprinted with same pagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1979).
CIB Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Peter Halban,
1992).
CTH Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of
Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: John Murray, 1990).
FIB Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty, ed.
Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002).
IBAC Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration, ed. Edna Margalit and Avishai Margalit (London:
Hogarth Press, 1991).
IBCE Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment, ed. Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler,
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 93 (2003), part 5
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003).
KM Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (London: Thornton
Butterworth, 1939).
KM5 Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, 5th edition, ed. Henry Hardy, foreword by Alan
Ryan, afterword by Terrell Carver (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2013).
L Isaiah Berlin, Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002).
LI Isaiah Berlin, Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946, ed. Henry Hardy (London:
Chatto & Windus, 2004).
L II Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, ed. Henry Hardy and Jennifer
Holmes (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009).
L III Isaiah Berlin, Building: Letters 1960–1975, ed. Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle
(London: Chatto & Windus, 2013).
L IV Isaiah Berlin, Affirming: Letters 1975–1997, ed. Henry Hardy and Mark
Pottle (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi

xii list of abbreviations

MH Isaiah Berlin, The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess (Cambridge: W. Heffer
& Sons, 1959).
PI Isaiah Berlin, Personal Impressions, 3rd edn, ed. Henry Hardy, with foreword
by Hermione Lee (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
PIRA Isaiah Berlin, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on
Modern Thought, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006).
POI Isaiah Berlin, The Power of Ideas, 2nd edn, ed. Henry Hardy, with foreword
by Avishai Margalit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
PSM Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, 2nd edn,
ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (London: Vintage, 2013).
RR Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto
& Windus, 1999).
RT Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (London:
Hogarth Press, 1978).
TCE Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, 2nd
edn, ed. Henry Hardy, foreword by Jonathan Israel (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2013).
VH Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London:
The Hogarth Press, 1976).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi

Notes on Contributors

Laurence Brockliss is Professor of Early Modern French History and Fellow of

Magdalen College, Oxford. His books include French Higher Education in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History (1987), Calvet’s Web:
Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France (2002),
Magdalen College: A History (2008), and The University of Oxford: A History (2016).
Christopher Brooke is a University Lecturer in Politics at Cambridge, a Fellow of
Homerton College, and author of Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought
from Lipsius to Rousseau (2012).
Kevin Hilliard is a University Lecturer in German at Oxford, a Fellow of St Peter’s
College, and author of Philosophy, Letters, and the Fine Arts in Klopstock’s Thought
(1987) and Freethinkers, Libertines and ‘Schwärmer’: Heterodoxy in German Literature,
1750–1800 (2011).
Marian Hobson is Professor Emerita of French at Queen Mary University of
London. Her books include The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-
Century France (1982), Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (1998), and Diderot and Rousseau:
Networks of Enlightenment, edited by Kate Tunstall and Caroline Warman (2011).
Michael Ignatieff is President and Rector of the Central European University in
Budapest and author of many books including A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary
in the Industrial Revolution 1750–1850 (1978), The Needs of Strangers (1984), Blood
and Belonging (1993), Isaiah Berlin: A Biography (1998), The Rights Revolution (2000),
Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (2001), The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age
of Terror (2004), and Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics (2013).
P. J. E. Kail is University Lecturer in the History of Modern Philosophy, a Fellow of St
Peter’s College, and author of Projection and Realism in Hume’s Philosophy (2007).
Ken Koltun-Fromm is Professor in the Department of Religion at Haverford
College, Pennsylvania, and author of several books including Moses Hess and Modern
Jewish Identity (2001), Abraham Geiger’s Liberal Judaism: Personal Meaning and
Religious Authority (2006), Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America (2010),
and Imagining Jewish Authenticity: Vision and Text in American Jewish Thought (2015).
David Leopold is an Associate Professor of Political Theory, a Fellow of Mansfield
College, Oxford, and author of The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern
Politics, and Human Flourishing (2007).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi

xiv Notes on Contributors

Avi Lifschitz is a Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at University College

London and author of Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the
Eighteenth Century (2012).
Karen O’Brien is Professor of English and Head of the Humanities Division at
Oxford. She has published Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from
Voltaire to Gibbon (1997) and Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century
Britain (2009).
Derek Offord is Emeritus Professor of Russian at the University of Bristol. His
books include Portraits of Early Russian Liberals: A Study of the Thought of T. N.
Granovsky, V. P. Botkin, P. V. Annenkov, A. V. Druzhinin and K. D. Kavelin (1985), The
Russian Revolutionary Movement in the 1880s (1986), Journey to a Graveyard:
Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing (2006), and (co-edited with
William J. Leatherbarrow) A History of Russian Thought (2010).
T. J. Reed is emeritus Taylor Professor of German at Oxford. His books include
Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition (1974, revised version 1996), The Classical Centre:
Goethe and Weimar 1775–1832 (1980), and Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown
Enlightenment (2015).
John Robertson is Professor of the History of Political Thought at Cambridge and a
Fellow of Clare College. His books include The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia
Issue (1985), The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (2005),
and The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction (2015).
Ritchie Robertson is Taylor Professor of German and a Fellow of the Queen’s
College, Oxford. His books include Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (1985), The
‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749–1939 (1999), Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope
to Heine (2009), and Goethe: A Very Short Introduction (2016).
Alan Ryan, formerly Warden of New College, Oxford, has taught the history of political
thought at Oxford, Princeton, and elsewhere. His books include The Philosophy of John
Stuart Mill (1970), On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the
Present (2012), and The Making of Modern Liberalism (2012). He edited The Idea of
Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin (1979).
Jeremy Waldron, formerly Chichele Professor of Social and Political Thought at
Oxford, is Professor in the School of Law at New York University and author of many
books including The Right to Private Property (1988), God, Locke and Equality (2002),
Torture, Terror and Trade-offs: Philosophy for the White House (2010), and The Harm in
Hate Speech (2012).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/16/2016, SPi

Introduction
Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment

Laurence Brockliss1

Has Isaiah Berlin any relevance today as a living political philosopher and historian of
ideas, or is he primarily a historical figure of the Cold War era whose oeuvre is a reflec-
tion of the challenges and problems of a past age? In the eyes of philosophers and intel-
lectual historians, the answer would seem to be largely the latter. Berlin in recent years
has been the focus of a number of important academic studies,2 and he is the subject of a
forthcoming Cambridge Companion, but his ideas seem to have a limited resonance
among modern philosophers. On the other hand, Berlin remains an enormously
respected thinker among the wider educated public. His works continue to sell well
around the world, the argument of his 1958 inaugural lecture ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’
has become an intellectual commonplace, and the warm reception of Henry Hardy’s
four volumes of collected letters demonstrates that he has a large and loyal following.3
The aim of the present collection of essays is to probe this paradox by focusing on
Berlin and his reputation as an interpreter of the Enlightenment and its critics, two
groups of political and social thinkers of the eighteenth and the first half of the nine-
teenth century who engaged his closest attention. By the end of the book, it will become
clear that Berlin’s commitment in the post-war era to building liberal ethical and polit-
ical thought through a constructive but critical engagement with past philosophers

1
In writing this chapter I am greatly indebted to the invaluable assistance as a reader and critic of my
co-editor, Ritchie Robertson.
2
E.g. John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (London: Harper Collins, 1995), reprinted as Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation
of his Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1998); Mark Lilla et al., The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (New York: New York
Review of Books, 2001); George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (Cambridge: Polity, 2004);
Neil Burtonwood, Cultural Diversity, Liberal Pluralism, and Schools: Isaiah Berlin and Education (London:
Routledge, 2006); Arie Dubnov, Isaiah Berlin. The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan 2012); Joshua Cherniss, A Mind and its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); David Bruce Baum and Robert Nichols (eds), Isaiah Berlin and the
Politics of Freedom: ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ Fifty Years Later (London: Routledge, 2015).
3
Details of all publications by Berlin mentioned here and in other chapters will be found in the
Bibliography. Berlin’s main works are cited as explained in the list of abbreviations.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/16/2016, SPi

2 Laurence Brockliss

was inevitably destined to fall foul of an ever-expanding academic world which

encouraged and valued disciplinary compartmentalization and painstaking research. It
will also be clear that Berlin’s work as a historian of ideas is of continuing value.
Whatever its deficiencies, his oeuvre stands as an important contribution to our under-
standing of the era of the Enlightenment. Since the Second World War, the West has
tended to see the legacy of the movement in black and white. As a philosophy of subver-
sion that liberated the individual from traditional constraints and prioritized fulfilment
in this life rather than the next, it has been considered as either a force for good or a
force for evil.4 Berlin’s approach was more nuanced. In his view, the novel emphasis that
the Enlightenment placed on the freedom of the individual was to be heartily welcomed,
and its leading lights were ‘liberators’ with whom he identified. But he also recognized
that the movement had a darker side: its supporters inevitably had to explore how far
individual liberty should be constrained in the name of the common good, which often
led to authoritarian conclusions. At the same time, Berlin’s concern for liberty placed
the Enlightenment debates over its limits at the centre of modern political thinking. As
he believed that there was a continual tendency for all states to restrict the freedom of
the individual in the name of the common good, the liberty that the Enlightenment
championed had to be continually defined, defended, and promoted in each generation
or it would atrophy. The Enlightenment was thus an ongoing and living movement.

When Isaiah Berlin went up to Corpus Christi College as an undergraduate in 1928,

Oxford University was still little changed from the late nineteenth century. Although it
was theoretically open to all, the vast majority of its junior and senior members were
male, public-school educated, Protestant, and Anglo-Saxon. Oxford remained an
undergraduate university dominated by the arts where few dons were committed to
research or interested in new intellectual developments on the Continent. It was a uni-
versity too with its own peculiar raison d’être which it shared with Cambridge. An
undergraduate, whatever the subject he read—and despite the existence of women’s
colleges, many people assumed that an undergraduate was normally male—was sup-
posed to emerge from Oxford a better and wiser man ready to take on the burdens of
imparting civilization and Christianity to benighted souls at home and abroad; an
Oxford education was a moral as well as an intellectual training.5 Between the wars,

4
The term ‘the Enlightenment’ is a historical construct. Eighteenth-century philosophers often talked
about themselves as being enlightened, and the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1784 set a famous essay ques-
tion for debate entitled ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’ But no one talked about ‘the’ Enlightenment until the late
nineteenth century, when German intellectuals began to use the term to group together thinkers in the
period before the French Revolution who sought to reconfigure the state so that it could be used as a vehi-
cle for moral and material improvement.
5
The seriousness with which the university was wedded to this mission had meant that new subjects
could only be introduced into the undergraduate curriculum if they could demonstrate their moral and
mental credentials. It was for this reason that courses in English and modern languages were built around
philology, which was thought to be sturdy and masculine, rather than literature, which was seen as soft and
feminine. Science courses on the other hand supposedly demonstrated the same commitment to Bildung
by eschewing any reference to the practical utility of their study: engineering for instance was only able to
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/16/2016, SPi

Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 3

continuity rather than change was the university’s hallmark. But beneath the surface,
the university was beginning to stir, to the dismay of many of the more contented
­college fellows, and radical developments in the 1930s would lay the foundations
for the university’s intellectual pre-eminence in the years after 1945. Scientific and
medical research, greatly strengthened by an influx of Jewish refugees from Germany,
began to flourish as never before, while a number of precocious young arts dons began
to challenge the existing orthodoxies.
The discipline which was particularly affected was Classics, or Literae Humaniores
(Lit. Hum.) as it was known at Oxford, which was the flagship faculty not just in the
arts but in the university as a whole. As a four-year undergraduate course, Lit. Hum.
comprised the study of classical literature in the first two years, and ancient history and
philosophy in the latter two.6 Even more than any other faculty, its study was a course
in active citizenship.7 In the 1930s young Turks in the faculty began to challenge the
traditional paradigm. Maurice Bowra at Wadham, following in the footsteps of Walter
Pater in the late nineteenth century, set out to use classical literature to subvert rather
than sustain the status quo, and deliberately lured the most gifted undergraduates of
the day into his circle of sybaritic acolytes.8 More importantly, a band of young philos-
ophers, led by the Christ Church tutors Gilbert Ryle and Alfred (Freddie) Ayer, came
under the influence of the Viennese school of logical positivism and turned their back
on the great questions of human existence. Instead, they began to forge a new and more
restricted science of philosophy based on the analysis of language, which was heralded
in 1936 with the publication of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic.
The young Berlin was an immigrant and a Jewish outsider, as well as a brilliant
undergraduate reading first Lit. Hum. and then the new combined school of
Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE).9 Unsurprisingly, he was a member of
Bowra’s circle by the beginning of his fourth year. The great man, having learnt of his
existence, lured Berlin into his web by getting him to check a translation of a Russian

become an Oxford undergraduate course in 1909 when its promoters promised it would remain a theoretical
study. The claim that all undergraduate courses had the same underlying aim was made the more plausible
by the fact that Oxford was a collegiate university where the values of an Oxford education were also incul-
cated through common living and sport: Laurence Brockliss, The University of Oxford: A History (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016), esp. ch. 10, sect. A.
6
The first part of the course was examined in Moderations (or Mods) taken after five terms, the second
in Schools: the first was a more sophisticated version of a pass-qualifying exam where candidates might sit
for honours or a simple pass, the second equivalent to finals.
7
See Brockliss, University of Oxford, pp. 334–6 and 485–9; Peter Slee, ‘The Oxford Idea of a Liberal
Education: The Invention of Tradition and the Manufacture of Practice’, History of Universities, 7 (1988),
pp. 61–87; Heather Ellis, ‘Efficiency and Counter-Revolution: Connecting University and Civil Service
Reform in the 1850s’, History of Education, 42:1 (2013), pp. 23–44. Lit. Hum. remained the most prestigious
of Oxford undergraduate schools until 1945, even if its numbers dwindled.
8
Leslie Mitchell, Maurice Bowra: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); also Maurice Bowra,
Memories 1898–1939 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966).
9
Berlin took a first in Lit. Hum. Schools in 1931, then turned to PPE, where he gained a second first after only
a year's study. PPE was established in 1920. It was known as ‘Modern Greats’ in that it allowed undergraduates
to concentrate entirely on modern philosophers and contemporary economic and political systems. Traditional
‘Greats’ (i.e. Lit. Hum. Schools) did allow students to read Kant and Mill as well as Plato and Aristotle.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/16/2016, SPi

4 Laurence Brockliss

poem. Berlin’s introduction to Wittgenstein and the Viennese school came a few
months later when he listened to a paper on the Tractatus given by Ayer at Christ
Church. Both encounters were to prove formative moments of his life.10 Once elected
to a prize fellowship at All Souls in November 1932, he became one of the university’s
most prominent bowristas, while his rooms became the gathering point for Oxford’s
growing band of analytic philosophers.11 Berlin, however, always remained his own
man. As he later confessed, his friendship with Bowra gave him a new confidence to be
himself and in company to express his ideas, however controversial, openly. But he
never embraced the hedonistic lifestyle of Bowra’s coterie whose members deliberately
set out to shock, though in public he always asserted that Bowra was a force for good.
Nor did Berlin ultimately commit himself wholeheartedly to Oxford analytic
philosophy. He wrote and delivered a number of significant and original papers but he
was never fully engaged in creating the new school. Indeed, he spent his time as a prize
fellow writing a book on Marx for a series, the Home University Library, at the request
of H. A. L. Fisher, the Warden of New College. This in itself was a radical undertaking.
In the Oxford of the 1930s many middle-aged dons had broken with Christianity after
their experiences in the trenches, but there were few materialists and scarcely any who
thought Marx worthy of serious study.12 Berlin accepted the commission because he
recognized Marxism’s contemporary influence and importance and wanted to under-
stand why Marx had so many followers. As Michael Ignatieff also suggests, Berlin, like
many others, was intrigued by the industrial and cultural achievements of the Soviet
Union and felt a desire to ‘take the measure of the challenge that [Marxism] repre-
sented to his own inchoate liberal allegiances’.13 Nonetheless, writing a critical account
of a philosopher who claimed to know the end of human history and how it would be
achieved seems an inappropriate venture for someone at the cutting edge of Oxford
philosophy. Its completion demonstrated that Berlin was one analytic philosopher
who continued to take the big questions seriously.
The Second World War confirmed Berlin in his nascent belief that iconoclasm in
whatever form and however fruitful was insufficient to build a life or frame a philoso-
phy. The fate of European Jewry, the four years spent working for the British Foreign
Office in the much more egalitarian, liberal, and pluralistic United States, and his visit
to Moscow in 1945 convinced him that western democracy, for all its faults, was the
system of government best suited to humankind as it was. It alone could give individu-
als the space to practise their many beliefs and fulfil their myriad needs, and allow
philosophers like himself the freedom to develop the life of the mind. As a result, Berlin
returned to Oxford in 1946 determined to explore and promote the political and social

Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), pp. 50–1.
10

For Berlin’s account of the weekly discussions that began in his rooms in 1936–7, see ‘J. L. Austin and
11

the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy’, in PI 101–15.

12
Most anti-Christian sceptics were idealists, like the Magdalen tutor and Kantian Thomas Weldon,
who believed in the possibility of building the New Jerusalem using reason and good will. One of the few
ardent Marxists was his history colleague, the medievalist K. B. McFarlane.
13
Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, p. 70.
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Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 5

conditions in which the liberty of the individual could best be preserved and enhanced.
This was to be done principally, not by looking at liberty in the abstract, but by building
on his earlier analysis of Marx and critically elucidating the works of past philosophers,
poets, and novelists who had taken the individual and the liberty of the individual as
their theme. The approach was to be historical, but not historicist. Initially, Berlin
appears to have intended to concentrate on nineteenth-century Russia, an obvious
choice given his background and his enthusiasm for Pushkin, Turgenev, and Tolstoy.14
But at the beginning of the 1950s he turned his attention to the thinkers of the
Enlightenment and their opponents and thereafter immersed himself ever more
deeply in their writings. This was a natural decision in the light of his self-­appointed
task. For most of the Christian era, philosophers had accepted the account of man and
his end that was given in Scripture as unimpeachably true. What they argued about
was how far this was consistent with the vision of man developed by the Greeks and
Romans, and to what extent it could be substantiated by reason or was a simple matter
of faith. It was only in the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement conventionally
associated with the eighteenth century but stretching both backwards and forwards in
time, that philosophers began to construct an independent science of s­ ociety and poli-
tics built on a purely secular account of human psychology. The Enlightenment was the
logical starting point for a philosopher devoted to charting the history of mankind’s
independent study of itself.
In the post-war era, Berlin was not the only historian of ideas giving the movement a
primary role in the making of the western world. The most important study of the
Enlightenment between the wars was written by Ernst Cassirer, a Hamburg professor
forced to flee Hitler’s Germany who eventually moved to the United States. His
Philosophie der Aufklärung, published in 1932 just before he left, offered a clear and
positive account of a movement whose intellectual origins he traced to Newtonian
­science; he saw it as the beginning of the modern liberal age which, in the Germany of
1932, desperately needed defending against the forces of unreason and barbarism.
A decade later two other German philosophers, members of the Frankfurt School of
unorthodox Marxists, also in exile in the United States, took a diametrically opposite
view. According to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung, which first
appeared in 1944 and then in a revised edition three years later, the Enlightenment had
been an unmitigated disaster: its blind confidence that reason could ensure the
­conquest of nature and the beneficent restructuring of society had paved the way for
twentieth-century totalitarianism.15 Cassirer’s position had a second airing in 1951
when his book was translated into English and published by Princeton, but the

14
Not all of the great Russian nineteenth-century novelists found favour with Berlin. In general, he
disliked Dostoevsky’s moral conservatism. On the other hand, he fully sympathized with the anti-utilitar-
ianism of Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov: see his letter to George Kennan, 13 Feb. 1951, on Karamazov’s
defence of the sanctity of human life, in L II 215.
15
Now available as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical
Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmidt Noerr, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
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6 Laurence Brockliss

­ essimists responded immediately. In 1952 the ideas of Adorno and Horkheimer were
p
echoed in J. L. Talmon’s Totalitarian Democracy, published in London, which specifi-
cally blamed the philosophes for the excesses of the French Revolution.16 Thereafter the
pessimists seemed to make the running to such an extent that yet another, but younger,
German exile living in the United States, Peter Gay, decided to dedicate the first half of
his academic career to defending the Enlightenment’s liberal credentials.17 In 1959 he
began the campaign appropriately with a study of Voltaire’s politics which emphasized
the philosopher was no idle dreamer but deeply engaged with concrete issues. This was
followed five years later with a collection of essays on the philosophes called The Party
of Humanity, which made his allegiance clear in its title. This in turn formed a taster
and a prelude to his two-volume magisterial The Enlightenment: An Interpretation,
which appeared in 1966 and 1969.18
Like Cassirer, Gay, a professor of history at Columbia, saw the Enlightenment as an
unqualified good, accepting Kant’s belief that the movement signalled mankind’s
release from immaturity. What gave the book its strength was its attempt to place the
Enlightenment in its historical context. Whereas Cassirer had been content to look at
Enlightenment thinkers as discrete authors, feeding off one another while contribut-
ing to an emancipatory project, Gay placed them squarely in their contemporary
milieu and discussed them as part of a much larger and pan-European network of
writers and critics who targeted the abuses and absurdities of their own day. In his
view, what distinguished the Enlightenment philosophers from their peers, a Voltaire
from a Samuel Johnson, was their rejection of their Christian inheritance. They were
self-consciously modern pagans, building a new science of man on the same empirical
foundations that Newton had built the new science of multiple-force physics. As such,
however much they might differ in their conclusions, they formed a family whose cen-
tral location was Paris.19 Gay, too, was not content to describe the Enlightenment as a
movement of ideas. Enlightenment philosophers sought to change their own world
and were frequently close to political power. The Enlightenment, then, was not just the
harbinger of modern liberalism; it helped to bring the modern liberal world into being
through its influence on the founding fathers of the new United States. Cassirer’s book

16
Reprinted in 1961 and 1970. Talmon reactivated a debate which went back to Edmund Burke and the
French Catholic abbé Barruel in the 1790s. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s work would not appear in English
until 1979. Talmon was born in Poland.
17
Gay (1923–2015) had escaped with his family from Germany in 1939 to Cuba. From there he moved
to the United States, where he attended university. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the socialist philosopher
Eduard Bernstein, who in the 1890s proposed a major revision of Marxism, before turning his attention to
the Enlightenment in the early 1950s.
18
Gay believed that the Americans’ view of the Enlightenment was particularly formed by Carl Becker,
whose Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, which treated the philosophes as dreamers,
had been also published in 1932 by Yale. In 1956 Becker’s work was the subject of a symposium: Carl
Becker’s Heavenly City Revisited, ed. R. O. Rockwood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958). See in par-
ticular Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. vii.
19
Gay here distanced himself from the French historian Paul Hazard, who in La Pensée européenne au
XVIIIe siècle: de Montesquieu à Lessing (Paris: Boivin, 1946; English translation, London: Hollis & Carter,
1954) had subsumed within the Enlightenment critics of all kinds, even Augustinian Christians.
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Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 7

ended with Kant, whom he saw as the culmination of Enlightenment debate. Gay’s
ended with the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution.20
Gay’s account of the Enlightenment gave the liberal university elites of the Anglo-
American world a suitably flattering pedigree, and they immediately succumbed to its
charm. For the rest of the twentieth century, Gay was the first port of call for anglo-
phone students of the Enlightenment and his arguments were largely taken on trust.
Historians concentrated on probing more deeply the contextual side of his argument
rather than challenging his account of the Enlightenment as idea. Was his distinction
between the family of the philosophes and the more mainstream, largely Christian,
critics of the status quo as clear-cut as he had imagined? How far was this family a
self-conscious coterie or was its coherence and unity a construction of its enemies?
Was the movement Paris-centred or multi-centred, its practitioners stretching not just
across Europe but the globe? And most importantly, if the movement was an immedi-
ate and political force, how were Enlightenment thinkers accessed and absorbed, and
what was their contribution to other revolutions, especially the French? These ques-
tions were ardently and creatively pursued by a large number of Anglo-American
­historians after 1970 but their work never seriously damaged Gay’s synthesis.21 The
leading exponent of the social turn in Enlightenment studies has been the Princeton
historian Robert Darnton, who has used his unrivalled knowledge of the French under-
ground book trade to argue that the influence of the great Enlightenment writers in
undermining the Ancien Régime was essentially indirect: the French bourgeoisie was
politicized not by Voltaire and Rousseau but by reading pornography and scurrilous
political satires written by second-rate thinkers who had absorbed the ideas of the great
minds and were jealous of their social success. But Darnton has never challenged Gay’s
narrative. His Enlightenment remains a Paris-based, liberal, and liberationist event.22
Gay’s argument, however, did not completely escape unscathed and by the end of
the twentieth century it was beginning to look tired. From the 1980s a growing num-
ber of historians of ideas had begun to challenge the idea that there was a single
Enlightenment. The critics might accept that the Enlightenment’s supporters shared a

20
Gay’s argument in the second volume of his study had been anticipated a few years earlier by the
Harvard professor of American history Bernard Bailyn. See Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American
Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).
21
The best introduction to the many-faceted developments in Enlightenment studies since the publica-
tion of Gay’s Enlightenment is Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Geneaology (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2010). See also Vincenzo Ferrone, The Enlightenment: History of an Idea, tr. Elisabetta
Tarantino (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
22
Darnton did his doctoral thesis at Oxford with the historian of the French Revolution Richard Cobb:
‘Trends in Radical Propaganda on the Eve of the French Revolution (1782–1788)’ (1964). His position is
most completely stated in his Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1995).
His earliest statement appeared shortly after the publication of Gay’s two volumes in Past and Present, 51
(1971), pp. 81–115. In the same year, he wrote a lengthy review of Gay’s work, which was hostile only inso-
far as he felt that the author had not successfully shown how the Enlightenment was taken up: ‘In Search
of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas’, Journal of Modern History, 43
(1971), pp. 11–62. His continuing support for Gay’s narrative was summarily stated in his ‘George
Washington’s False Teeth’, New York Review of Books, 27 March 1997, pp. 35–8.
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8 Laurence Brockliss

common belief in the possibility of moral and material improvement, but they doubted
its deeper homogeneity. Some historians argued for the existence of a series of national
Enlightenments with their own intellectual antecedents, characteristics, and centres of
concern. Historians of the German Enlightenment in particular were alienated by
Gay’s thesis, which removed from the narrative all German thinkers before the mid
eighteenth century because they were influenced by Descartes, Leibniz, and the latter’s
disciple Christian Wolff, rather than by Newton.23 Other historians, unwilling to
accept that the movement was a clear-cut pagan event, began to identify a Socinian
and even a Catholic Enlightenment.24 Gay’s thesis also came under attack from femi-
nists and other groups dissatisfied with the late twentieth-century status quo. Whereas
Gay had seen it as a positive movement that laid the foundations for the post-war lib-
eral state, radicals saw it as an ideology that supported a particular form of liberalism
and individualism that only emancipated one part of the population. Enlightenment
thinkers took a limited interest in other races, women, the working-class, and sexual
minorities, and when they did take a stand, they usually supported mainstream opin-
ion. In consequence, Gay’s book, which had nothing to say about the limits of
Enlightenment thought, was celebrating a form of liberalism that was already being
superseded when it appeared. It was not a radical manifesto for the present but could
easily seem like a cosy account of the intellectual underpinnings of the best of all possi-
ble educated white male worlds.25
To save the Enlightenment’s radical and progressive credentials, Gay’s thesis had to
be reworked. This was finally done at the beginning of the present century in three
monumental studies by Jonathan Israel.26 Israel, an English historian now based at

23
The first hint of the reaction against Gay’s cosmopolitan Enlightenment in English appeared in Roy
Porter and Mikuláš Teich’s The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981) but the editors did not pursue the point with much rigour in their introduction. For a recent
English-language account of the German Enlightenment which maintains Gay’s emphasis on the liberal
significance of the movement while demonstrating how Gay has been superseded, see T. J. Reed, Light in
Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Other
historians continue to insist on the unity of the Enlightenment: see John Robertson, The Case for the
Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
24
E.g. John Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants,
Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). For a recent
refinement and critique of the Catholic Enlightenment, see Mark Curran, Atheism, Religion and
Enlightenment in Pre-Revolutionary France (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012), chs 7 and 8; see also
Ulrich L. Lehner and Michael Printy (eds), A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe (Leiden:
Brill, 2010).
25
The limits of the Enlightenment are summarized in Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995). Among critics, the French philosopher Michel Foucault went so far as
to see the liberal agenda of the philosophes as imposing a new form of control: in the name of humanity, the
supervised prison replaces the gallows and the structured hospital random but personal care at home,
while sex between men and women is liberated but all other forms of sex demonized.
26
Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1659–1750 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001); id., Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man,
1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and id., Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy,
Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
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Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 9

Princeton, had already forged an impressive reputation as a historian of the early

­modern Netherlands. His first volume reflected his scholarly past in that he sought the
origins of the Enlightenment, not in Newton, but the Dutch philosopher Spinoza,
whose intellectual progenitor was Descartes, Newton’s philosophical enemy as an apri-
oristic systematizer rather than a cautious empiricist. As a result what now defined
membership of the Enlightenment was not the rejection of Christianity and the Bible
as the privileged word of God but the positive endorsement of Spinozan materialism.27
In the first book such materialists were everywhere, except perhaps Spain, and virtu-
ally anybody who raised a critical voice was placed in their camp. Membership of the
Enlightenment was no longer confined to a family, but was an expanding tribe for
whom Paris had no particular significance. In his second and third book, Israel gave
fewer hostages to fortune and accepted that the Spinozists were relatively thin on
the ground, but they continued to play a central role in his argument. Supporters of the
Enlightenment were now divided into two non-Christian groups: the deists and the
atheists. The former, philosophes such as Voltaire and Rousseau, were moderates who
had limited objections to the society of Ancien Régime Europe. The latter, particularly
the coterie around Helvétius, were radicals who anticipated the agenda of the modern
left through their views on democracy, republicanism, secularism, racial equality, and
female emancipation. As a result, the Enlightenment remained a movement with great
resonance for the present, pace its radical critics, provided it was no longer seen as a
unitary but as a fractured movement. Only the Spinozist materialists carried the flag
for modernity.28
The conception of the Enlightenment that Isaiah Berlin developed in the course of
the 1950s and 1960s was noticeably different from the one that Gay was constructing
over the same period. Like Gay, Berlin saw the Enlightenment as a progressive and
modernizing movement but his verdict was much less positive. While he was always
careful not to align himself with Talmon and other critics, he shared their belief that
the Enlightenment had a totalitarian edge.29 The philosophes were engaged in a project
to liberate human beings from the control of organized religion and build a new politi-
cal society where everyone would be happy and fulfilled. This was something Berlin
applauded. On the other hand, they saw human nature as no different from nature tout

27
Israel was not the first to highlight the role of the United Provinces at the turn of the eighteenth
c­ entury in the creation of the Enlightenment: see Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists,
Freemasons and Republicans (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981). When it was published, Jacob’s book received
mixed reviews: some thought Jacob was too quick to see freemasons as godless radicals.
28
Israel hammered home the point in a much shorter book published in 2010, which looked at the
political and social ideas of the French materialists in the decades before the Revolution: see A Revolution
of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2010).
29
Cf. Berlin’s letters to Herbert Elliston and Jacob Talmon, 30 Dec. 1952 (L II 349, 354–5). Berlin has left
no substantive comment on Gay’s work. Cassirer’s work, however, was known to him. He had had some
contact with Cassirer when the latter had temporarily found a billet at All Souls on coming out of Germany
in 1933. It is not known if he read his book at this juncture but he definitely knew the 1951 English version,
which he accused of naiveté: see chapter 3 in this volume.
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10 Laurence Brockliss

court and subject to immutable laws which could be uncovered by the same scientific
methodology. Consequently, they had a one-dimensional view of human needs and
desires which encouraged many among them to follow Rousseau in envisaging a
frightening future where we would all be constrained for our own good to do what our
peers or the technocrats and visionaries deemed appropriate.
Berlin’s earlier work on Marx was crucial for his understanding of the Enlightenment.
From Marx he worked back to the progressive philosophes of mid eighteenth-­century
Paris, admiring their commitment to liberty but repelled by what he c­ onsidered their
excessive tidy-mindedness, their view that humanity was essentially uniform and
could have all its problems resolved by the determined application of reason. This
over-confidence in reason had led, via Marxism, to the delusions of Communism,
which was in practice incompatible with any robust conception of liberty. So when
Berlin later wrote about the Enlightenment, the looming shadow of Communism
always qualified his professed admiration for the movement. His interpretation of the
Paris philosophes (whom Berlin tends to identify with the Enlightenment) also needs
to be seen against the background of the Cold War. Berlin was tracing the genealogy
both of the liberal values upheld by the West and of the illiberalism, however well-­
intentioned in its origins, whose triumph he had witnessed in the Soviet Union. Part of
his achievement, as Stefan Collini has pointed out, was to give liberal values a ground-
ing in intellectual history and thus present them with much more depth and subtlety
than the more shrill and shallow spokespeople of the time. ‘During these years there
was no shortage of Cold War liberals in the West ready to denounce (certain kinds of)
oppressive political systems, but there were few, if any, who could make such a position
seem the natural outcome of a properly reflective, properly sensitive engagement with
the great minds of the Western intellectual tradition.’30
The project of forcing people to be happy was anathema to Berlin’s liberalism. In
Berlin’s eyes we all had our individual desires and goals and should be free to make a
mess of our lives as long as we did not harm other people. For this reason, he came
to feel increasing warmth for the under-studied contemporary opponents of the
Enlightenment, who emphasized that human beings were irrational, unpredictable,
and idiosyncratic, or that their common desires, to the extent they could be identified,
were the product of their historical context. These thinkers, whom he eventually
dubbed the Counter-Enlightenment, frequently had their totalitarian side as well: De
Maistre with his veneration of the executioner was an obvious monster. But for Berlin
the more moderate offered an extremely important corrective to the one-dimensional
view of humanity promoted by the philosophes. Their critique ensured that the think-
ers of the first half of the nineteenth century who, in his eyes, laid the foundations of
the modern liberal state of the West, such as Benjamin Constant and J. S. Mill, were

30
Stefan Collini, English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
p. 206.
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Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 11

much more alive to the nobility, sanctity, and perversity of the individual than their
predecessors.31
After 1970 Berlin’s account of the Enlightenment received limited attention from
historians of thought working on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was
Gay’s version that became canonic. There were several reasons for this. To begin with,
Berlin was deliberately present-orientated. The philosophes and their opponents were
the point of departure for our modern world with all its hopes and horrors. We needed
to know what they had to say to understand ourselves. Gay was just as committed (as
were Cassirer and Israel) but he was far less open about it and aimed to place the philos-
ophes and their programme in their historical context: he was an historian not a
polemicist. Berlin always viewed political and social thought of the eighteenth and the
first half of the nineteenth century in the light of his own liberal predispositions, in
particular his contrast between negative and positive liberty. His own concerns as a
political philosopher transparently affected how he approached individual thinkers
and coloured how he represented them.
More importantly, Berlin never produced a properly footnoted book-length study of
social and political thought across the long eighteenth century, though he contracted
to do so on several occasions. His only book-length publication which could be said to
constitute an overview was an anthology of Enlightenment thought, published in 1956.
And this seems nothing if not eccentric with its emphasis on a largely anglophone
Enlightenment, with copious extracts from Locke, Hume, and Berkeley but only a brief
extract from Voltaire and nothing by Lessing or Kant. What Berlin produced was a con-
stant stream of private letters, public lectures, radio broadcasts, and insightful essays
where his basic idea of the two Enlightenments was explored and refined through indi-
vidual cases. His work was highly approachable, his style urbane and engaging, but
there was nothing solid to stand beside Gay’s two-volume synthesis. Indeed, it was only
once Henry Hardy, in the mid-1970s, singlehandedly took upon himself the task of col-
lecting together Berlin’s oeuvre that his ideas became widely accessible to the public.32
Moreover, once they did so, they struck a younger generation of historians and literary
critics as already outdated. In the 1950s and 1960s the number of scholars working in
the field of Enlightenment thought, high or low, was relatively small. In the last three
decades of the twentieth century, research on the movement in Britain, Europe, and
North America exploded and Berlin’s simple distinction between the philosophes and
their opponents seemed trite and forced in the light of much more careful textual study.
Key members of his Enlightenment, such as Hume, could not be reduced to rationalist

31
The Swiss Constant who opposed Napoleon and strove to create a liberal France after the Restoration
was one of Berlin’s liberal heroes: see L II 353 (to Denis Paul, 30 Dec. 1952) and 644 (to Gladwyn Jebb,
1 Sept. 1958); L III 151 (to Steven Lukes, 4 Apr. 1963). Constant knew only too well through his troubled
relationship with Madame de Staël how difficult it was for human beings to know what they wanted. The
inconstancy of human beings is explored in his novel Adolphe (1816).
32
His Roots of Romanticism for instance first appeared in print after his death in 1999, but it had
begun life in 1965 as the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.
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12 Laurence Brockliss

s­ystematizers; while seminal figures of his Counter-Enlightenment, like Herder,

appeared mislabelled. Berlin’s tendency to associate the Enlightenment with France,
and the Counter-Enlightenment with Germany, seemed equally unhelpful. The reality,
be it in regard to individual authors or countries, was far more complex than Berlin
had believed.
It would be wrong, however, to dismiss Berlin’s contribution as outdated and
unworthy of consideration in the early twenty-first century. His insistence on seeing the
Enlightenment as a dialectical movement or a dialogue between two opposing sides
might appear perverse and empirically challengeable but the approach has been and
continues to be fruitful. On the one hand, it introduced Anglo-Americans to three lead-
ing philosophers of the eighteenth century who had been hitherto largely ignored: Vico,
Hamann, and Herder. On the other, it destabilized the comfortable division of European
thought in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century into two successive
ages: the age of Enlightenment and the age of Romanticism. Berlin’s belief that the
Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment were contemporaneous rather than suc-
cessive movements of thought may be open to question, but it forces us to think more
deeply about a traditional periodization, which still prevails. This periodization made
sense when the French Revolution was considered the break between Europe’s Ancien
Régime and the modern world. Today, when many historians think in terms of a long
eighteenth century which is only brought to an end as industrialization gathers pace on
the Continent about 1850, it makes sense to consider whether the ­history of thought
over the previous century and a half should also be seen as more of a unity.
This book begins from the assumption that a historian of ideas whose view of the
Enlightenment has served to focus attention on neglected thinkers and unsettle our
conception of its boundaries is deserving of attention, irrespective of his scholarly limi-
tations.33 Where, as with Berlin, the historian has also a large educated following—
indeed, one that seems to be growing thanks to the efforts of Henry Hardy—the need to
take his contribution seriously is all the greater. Far more people have learnt and will
learn about the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment from Berlin’s essays than
have dipped into or will ever open Gay and Israel. This does not mean that this book is
intended to as an act of piety or an attempt at rehabilitation. It aims rather to give both
Berlin’s fans and foes a deeper understanding of his work on eighteenth- and early
­nineteenth-century thought by placing it in the context both of present-day scholarship
and the author’s own intellectual and historical milieu. The book is an evaluation of Berlin,
not as a philosopher or defender of western liberalism, but as a historian of ideas.34

33
Berlin’s approach has not just encouraged interest in significant and original thinkers who doubted
the Enlightenment project. He has also more recently inspired studies of more mundane opponents.
Darrin McMahon has gone so far as to suggest these people actually helped to create the Enlightenment by
identifying their antagonist and thus conferring unity on it: see his Enemies of the Enlightenment: The
French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
34
There has only been one attempt hitherto to look at Berlin in this way: see Joseph Mali and Robert
Wokler (eds), Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003).
As the book’s title emphasizes, most of the contributors are interested in only one side of Berlin’s two
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Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 13

This book, then, is a critique not a panegyric, though the editors feel that Berlin
would appreciate its intention. Berlin’s own narrative of the Enlightenment was shaped
by his obsession with human freedom, the peculiar circumstances of his life, his intel-
lectual milieu and voracious reading of the disparate primary and secondary sources
he had to hand. As an enterprise, it was also initially a lonely venture, for few Oxford
philosophers or historians had been traditionally very interested in the history of ideas
beyond the Renaissance.35 Before the rise of the Nazis, the history of modern ideas had
been monopolized by German scholarship. Unsurprisingly, then, as the following
pages will show, Berlin’s reading of individual authors and his conception of the
movement as a whole often appear one-sided and unsophisticated to most modern
scholars. He was a lone soldier with a personal agenda: they are part of a vast army of
dix-huitièmistes with their own journals and foundations, anxious to grasp the text
‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’, and armed with a panoply of hermeneutic tools com-
pletely unknown to their predecessors. However, the criticisms levelled against his
work today would not have troubled Berlin. Believing as he did that all intellectual
enquiry was an ongoing and eternal debate that only dictators shut down, he would
not have wanted his readings to be set in stone. He would have seen modern scholar-
ship as his legacy and been particularly pleased that so much of it is related to Oxford
through the Voltaire Foundation.36 We believe that a book that treats Berlin’s
Enlightenment as a point of departure and his work as the beginning of a debate
would command his respect.37
This book is divided into four sections. The first, An Idea in Context, is a commen-
tary from different perspectives on Berlin’s conception of the two Enlightenments. The
second and third sections examine and critique Berlin’s account of individual authors
from Machiavelli to J. S. Mill, whom Berlin saw as important representatives of the two
movements. The individuals in question form a cross-section of thinkers in whom
Berlin took an interest. They include figures he studied in detail, philosophers he res-
cued from obscurity, and thinkers to whom he frequently referred but never analysed

Enlightenments. The essays show little appreciation that Berlin thought both Enlightenments gave birth to
the modern world and that both had their strengths and weaknesses; Berlin tends to be viewed as a
Counter-Enlightenment man drawn to outsiders and only comfortable within his tribe for all his
cosmopolitanism.
35
This reflected the bias of the undergraduate curriculum: courses in modern (!) history, modern lan-
guages, and English literature privileged the study of the Middle Ages. And politics in PPE before the
Second World War was largely taught by historians and linguists. The most important study of political
ideas to appear by an Oxford don in the first half of the twentieth century was R. W. Carlyle’s History of
Medieval Political Theory in the West, 6 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1903–36).
36
Founded in 1976 as a result of a bequest from the Genevan scholar Theodore Besterman. Besides
undertaking a new edition of the complete works of Voltaire, through the Studies and other initiatives it
provides a forum for current cross-disciplinary Enlightenment scholarship.
37
This is not to deny that in old age Berlin liked to present himself as a lone English wolf even when
there was a pack of hungry juniors nibbling at his heels: see L I 489 for a quotation from a radio interview
of 1979 where Berlin pretends the history of thought is still not widely pursued.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/16/2016, SPi

14 Laurence Brockliss

closely. They are all thinkers with whom Berlin expressed an affinity, if not absolutely.
The final section of the book explores Berlin’s legacy as a historian of ideas.
The opening essay of the first section by David Leopold documents Berlin’s initial
encounter with the Enlightenment in his intellectual biography of Marx, where the
movement was generally explored positively. This is followed by an essay by the two
editors which charts the development of Berlin’s mature view of the Enlightenment
and Counter-Enlightenment in the 1950s and 1960s and introduces the reader to its
quirks and limitations. The final essay of the section by Avi Lifschitz shows that Berlin’s
division of political and social thought into two hostile camps was not completely
his own invention. On the contrary, Berlin’s conception of the Enlightenment and
Counter-Enlightenment was anticipated in the work of the German historian of ideas
of the first half of the twentieth century, Friedrich Meinecke, who had already grasped
the importance of Vico as a critic of Descartes and his followers’ treatment of human
nature as timeless and human beings as rational.
The second section deals with philosophers that Berlin placed within his
Enlightenment. It begins with an essay by Peter Kail on Hume, where the author shows
that the Scottish philosopher had a much more relativist view of human nature than
Berlin had understood. As a result, Hume and Berlin had a lot in common and were
potential allies. The next essay, by Karen O’Brien, is devoted to Montesquieu, one of the
philosophes who, in Berlin’s eyes, escaped the straitjacket of Enlightenment monism to a
degree. As O’Brien shows, Berlin was attracted to Montesquieu as an Enlightenment
thinker who rejected utopianism: he appreciated that Montesquieu continued to recog-
nize an absolute standard value embodied in natural law, but he viewed the Frenchman
with approval as supposedly the one philosophe who understood that man’s desires and
goals were complex and varied and reflected their historical milieu. In contrast, the
third essay, by Christopher Brooke, looks at the one Enlightenment figure Berlin
claimed to be unable to situate: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. On the one hand, he accepted
that Rousseau was a genuine libertarian; on the other, he distrusted the Genevan’s view
of the general will.38 According to Brooke, Berlin’s reading of Rousseau was heavily
influenced by the earlier accounts given by Plekhanov, Irving Babbitt, and Talmon, plus
his own background in analytic philosophy which meant he had little time for philo-
sophical idealism. Berlin’s real difficulty with Rousseau, however, stemmed from the
fact he could not reconcile the rational and emotional elements in the philosophe’s
thought. The essay on Diderot and Hamann by Marian Hobson then takes us on to a
central Enlightenment figure whom Berlin all but ignored. For Hobson, in this essay,
Diderot represents the playful, sceptical, and instinctual side of the Enlightenment. By
showing how much Diderot and Hamann, an icon of Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment,
have in common, she illustrates particularly clearly why many modern-day literary crit-
ics as well as historians of ideas have difficulty in accepting Berlin’s monist conception of

38
Berlin commented on the difficulty with getting to grips with Rousseau in a number of letters: e.g.
letter to Jakob Huizinga, 21 Nov. 1972 (L III 511–13).
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