SAIAH BERLIN's favourite quotation is Immanuel Kant's aside that out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made. Indeed, part of humanity's very crookedness is its search for truths which will allow it to be straightened, and this book is much concerned with Marxism, the most intellectually coherent of such searches.
Marxism in Berlin's description effected a decisive historical break dividing humanity into classes between whom no discourse could fruitfully be attempted. While religious and other movements had sought to win over the other side, no such missionary work was countenanced by Marxism and the notion of a debating democracy was denounced as another bourgeois deceit. This division of humanity into a damned bourgeoisie and a proletariat destined to be saved by history is, in Berlin's view, a derivative of Calvinism which makes liquidation of the damned at once historically justified and inevitable.
As history worked itself out, it was Marxism and not capitalism which "acted as its own grave digger". Bismarck's welfare provisions indicated a path which labour leaders in the advanced economies preferred to follow, seeking amelioration within the system rather than its overthrow. The essays on Marxism included here were written between thirty and forty years ago but Berlin's rejection of the teleological view of history (the belief that history has inevitable outcomes) has been given empirical force by the collapse of the Soviet system, regarded by Marxist theoreticians as history moving towards destiny.
Berlin shares with Marx a liking for duality - liberalism and pluralism, negative and positive liberty, Enlightenment and Counter Enlightenment. He traces two concepts of society which have been in conflict throughout the history of political thought. The first of these, for which he is one of the most eloquent advocates, is the liberal belief in an open market for ideas, a system in which equilibrium is maintained by an unending series of adjustments. The other, traceable to Plato and the Stoics, holds that liberal equilibrium is a diseased condition where health would consist "in unity, peace, the elimination of the very possibility of disagreement, the recognition of only one end ..." Marx brought this line of thought to its highest point through his theory of praris, the unity of theory and practice.
Few of us achieve resolved political and philosophical positions, instead, we move continually from the Enlightenment to what Berlin has termed the Counter Enlightenment and back again. The latter had its roots in Vico and Pascal but reached fruition with the Romantics. Berlin's sympathy with the Counter Enlightenment follows from his conviction that the existence of incommensurable concepts of the good and the consequent need to make choices between them undermines the Enlightenment faith in a rational morality, towards which societies would converge.
Yet he is equally eloquent in articulating the dangerous potential inherent in the Romantic elevation of motive and will over achievement and performance: "this subjectivism leads to a reversal of values: worship of integrity and purity as against effectiveness or capacity for discovery and knowledge; freedom against happiness; conflict, war, self immolation against compromise, adjustment, toleration; the wild genius, the outcast, the suffering hero ..." Art becomes confused with life and the Napoleonic Empire becomes a symphony. "This is the doctrine that has underlain nationalism, Facism, and every movement that rests on a morality in which the model of freedom derived from artistic creation, or from self realising, vital drives, has been substituted for the older model of science or rational happiness or knowledge; and which conceives freedom as making free with all that resistance.
The antidote to Romantic subjectivism is not, however, a theory of history which seeks to match the certainties of the natural sciences. In an elaboration on the epilogue to War and Peace, Berlin offers a view of the historian's task which shares with the novelist a nuanced flexibility capable of embracing every human possibility and which, in contrast to the scientist's search for similarity, seeks to establish that which is unique in what it describes. Alas, neither history nor psychology, neither Hegel nor Marx, or Jung, can show us the view from Pisgah.