The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  The answer to this was given more than a century ago by the Russian radical Alexander Herzen. In his essay From the Other Shore, which is in effect an obituary notice of the revolutions of 1848, he said that a new form of human sacrifice had arisen in his time – of living human beings on the altars of abstractions – nation, Church, party, class, progress, the forces of history – these have all been invoked in his day and in ours: if these demand the slaughter of living human beings, they must be satisfied. These are his words:

  If progress is the goal, for whom are we working? Who is this Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding them, draws back; and as a consolation to the exhausted and doomed multitudes, shouting ‘morituri te salutant’, can only give the … mocking answer that after their death all will be beautiful on earth. Do you truly wish to condemn the human beings alive today to the sad role … of wretched galley-slaves who, up to their knees in mud, drag a barge … with … ‘progress in the future’ upon its flag? … a goal which is infinitely remote is no goal, only … a deception; a goal must be closer – at the very least the labourer’s wage, or pleasure in work performed.2

  The one thing that we may be sure of is the reality of the sacrifice, the dying and the dead. But the ideal for the sake of which they die remains unrealised. The eggs are broken, and the habit of breaking them grows, but the omelette remains invisible. Sacrifices for short-term goals, coercion, if men’s plight is desperate enough and truly requires such measures, may be justified. But holocausts for the sake of distant goals, that is a cruel mockery of all that men hold dear, now and at all times.

  VI

  If the old perennial belief in the possibility of realising ultimate harmony is a fallacy, and the position of the thinkers I have appealed to – Machiavelli, Vico, Herder, Herzen – are valid, then, if we allow that Great Goods can collide, that some of them cannot live together, even though others can – in short, that one cannot have everything, in principle as well as in practice – and if human creativity may depend upon a variety of mutually exclusive choices: then, as Chernyshevsky and Lenin once asked, ‘What is to be done?’ How do we choose between possibilities? What and how much must we sacrifice to what? There is, it seems to me, no clear reply. But the collisions, even if they cannot be avoided, can be softened. Claims can be balanced, compromises can be reached: in concrete situations not every claim is of equal force – so much liberty and so much equality; so much for sharp moral condemnation, and so much for understanding a given human situation; so much for the full force of the law, and so much for the prerogative of mercy; for feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, sheltering the homeless. Priorities, never final and absolute, must be established.

  The first public obligation is to avoid extremes of suffering. Revolutions, wars, assassinations, extreme measures may in desperate situations be required. But history teaches us that their consequences are seldom what is anticipated; there is no guarantee, not even, at times, a high enough probability, that such acts will lead to improvement. We may take the risk of drastic action, in personal life or in public policy, but we must always be aware, never forget, that we may be mistaken, that certainty about the effect of such measures invariably leads to avoidable suffering of the innocent. So we must engage in what are called trade-offs – rules, values, principles must yield to each other in varying degrees in specific situations. Utilitarian solutions are sometimes wrong, but, I suspect, more often beneficent. The best that can be done, as a general rule, is to maintain a precarious equilibrium that will prevent the occurrence of desperate situations, of intolerable choices – that is the first requirement for a decent society; one that we can always strive for, in the light of the limited range of our knowledge, and even of our imperfect understanding of individuals and societies. A certain humility in these matters is very necessary.

  This may seem a very flat answer, not the kind of thing that the idealistic young would wish, if need be, to fight and suffer for, in the cause of a new and nobler society. And, of course, we must not dramatise the incompatibility of values – there is a great deal of broad agreement among people in different societies over long stretches of time about what is right and wrong, good and evil. Of course traditions, outlooks, attitudes may legitimately differ; general principles may cut across too much human need. The concrete situation is almost everything. There is no escape: we must decide as we decide; moral risk cannot, at times, be avoided. All we can ask for is that none of the relevant factors be ignored, that the purposes we seek to realise should be seen as elements in a total form of life, which can be enhanced or damaged by decisions.

  But, in the end, it is not a matter of purely subjective judgement: it is dictated by the forms of life of the society to which one belongs, a society among other societies, with values held in common, whether or not they are in conflict, by the majority of mankind throughout recorded history. There are, if not universal values, at any rate a minimum without which societies could scarcely survive. Few today would wish to defend slavery or ritual murder or Nazi gas chambers or the torture of human beings for the sake of pleasure or profit or even political good – or the duty of children to denounce their parents, which the French and Russian revolutions demanded, or mindless killing. There is no justification for compromise on this. But on the other hand, the search for perfection does seem to me a recipe for bloodshed, no better even if it is demanded by the sincerest of idealists, the purest of heart. No more rigorous moralist than Immanuel Kant has ever lived, but even he said, in a moment of illumination, ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.’3 To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed-in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity. We can only do what we can: but that we must do, against difficulties.

  Of course social or political collisions will take place; the mere conflict of positive values alone makes this unavoidable. Yet they can, I believe, be minimised by promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium, which is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair – that alone, I repeat, is the precondition for decent societies and morally acceptable behaviour, otherwise we are bound to lose our way. A little dull as a solution, you will say? Not the stuff of which calls to heroic action by inspired leaders are made? Yet if there is some truth in this view, perhaps that is sufficient. An eminent American philosopher of our day once said, ‘There is no a priori reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting.’ It may be enough if it is truth, or even an approximation to it; consequently I do not feel apologetic for advancing this. Truth, said Tolstoy, ‘has been, is and will be beautiful’.4 I do not know if this is so in the realm of ethics, but it seems to me near enough to what most of us wish to believe not to be too lightly set aside.

  1 Voltaire’s conception of enlightenment as being identical in essentials wherever it is attained seems to lead to the inescapable conclusion that, in his view, Byron would have been happy at table with Confucius, and Sophocles would have felt completely at ease in quattrocento Florence, and Seneca in the salon of Madame du Deffand or at the court of Frederick the Great.

  2 A. I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow, 1954–66), vol. 6, p. 34.

  3 Kant’s gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1900– ), vol. 8, p. 23, line 22.

  4 Sevastopol in May, chapter 16.

  THE CONCEPT OF SCIENTIFIC HISTORY

  HISTORY, ACCORDING TO Aristotle, is an account of what individual human beings have done and suffered. In a still wider sense, history is what historians do. Is history then a natural science, as, let us say, physics or biology or psychology are sciences? And if not, should it seek to be one? And if it fails to be one, what prevents it? Is this due to human error or impotence, or to the nature of the subject, or does the very problem rest on a confusion between the concept of history and that of natural science? These have been questions that have occupied the minds of both philosophers an
d philosophically minded historians at least since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when men became self-conscious about the purpose and logic of their intellectual activities. But two centuries before that Descartes had already denied to history any claim to be a serious study. Those who accepted the validity of the Cartesian criterion of what constitutes rational method could (and did) ask how they could find the clear and simple elements of which historical judgements were composed, and into which they could be analysed: where were the definitions, the logical transformation rules, the rules of inference, the rigorously deduced conclusions? While the accumulation of this confused amalgam of memories and travellers’ tales, fables and chroniclers’ stories, moral reflections and gossip might be a harmless pastime, it was beneath the dignity of serious men seeking what alone is worth seeking – the discovery of the truth in accordance with principles and rules which alone guarantee scientific validity.

  Ever since this doctrine of what was and what was not a science was enunciated, those who have thought about the nature of historical studies have laboured under the stigma of the Cartesian condemnation. Some have tried to show that history could be made respectable by being assimilated to one of the natural sciences, whose overwhelming success and prestige in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries held out the promise of rich fruit wherever their methods were applicable; others declared that history was indeed a science, but a science in some different sense, with its own methods and canons, no less exacting, perhaps, than those of the sciences of nature, but resting on foundations different from them; there were those who defiantly declared that history was indeed subjective, impressionistic, incapable of being made rigorous, a branch of literature, or an embodiment of a personal vision – or that of a class, a Church, a nation – a form of self-expression which was, indeed, its pride and justification: it laid no claim to universal and eternal objectivity and preferred to be judged as an interpretation of the past in terms of the demands of the present, or as a philosophy of life, not as a science. Still others have tried to draw distinctions between sociology, which was a true science, and history, which was an art or, perhaps, something altogether sui generis, neither a science nor an art, but a discipline with its own structure and purposes, misunderstood by those who tried to draw false analogies between it and other intellectual activities.

  In any case, the logic of historical thought and the validity of its credentials are issues that do not preoccupy the minds of the leading logicians of our day. The reasons for this are not far to seek. Nevertheless it remains surprising that philosophers pay more attention to the logic of such natural sciences as mathematical physics, which comparatively few of them know well at first hand, and neglect that of history and the other humane studies, with which in the course of their normal education they tend to be more familiar.

  Be that as it may, it is not difficult to see why there has been a strong desire to regard history as a natural science. History purports to deal with facts. The most successful method of identifying, discovering and inferring facts is that of the natural sciences. This is the only region of human experience, at any rate in modern times, in which progress has indubitably been made. It is natural to wish to apply methods successful and authoritative in one sphere to another, where there is far less agreement among specialists. The whole trend of modern empiricism has tended towards such a view. History is an account of what men have done and of what has happened to them. Man is largely, some would say wholly, a three-dimensional object in space and time, subject to natural laws: his bodily wants can be studied empirically as those of other animals. Basic human needs for, say, food or shelter or procreation, and his other biological or physiological requirements, do not seem to have altered greatly through the millennia, and the laws of the interplay of these needs with one another and with the human environment can all in principle be studied by the methods of the biological and, perhaps, psychological sciences. This applies particularly to the results of man’s collective activities, unintended by the agent, which, as the Historical School has emphasised since the days of Bossuet and Vico, play a decisive part in influencing his life, and which can surely be explained in purely mechanistic terms as fields of force, or causal or functional correlations of human action and other natural processes. If only we could find a series of natural laws connecting at one end the biological and physiological states and processes of human beings with, at the other, the equally observable patterns of their conduct – their social activities in the wider sense – and so establish a coherent system of regularities, deducible from a comparatively small number of general laws (as Newton, it is held, had so triumphantly done in physics), we should have in our hands a science of human behaviour. Then we could perhaps afford to ignore, or at least treat as secondary, such intermediate phenomena as feelings, thoughts, volitions, of which men’s lives seem to themselves to be largely composed, but which do not lend themselves easily to exact measurement. If these data could be regarded as by-products of other, scientifically observable and measurable, processes, then we could predict the publicly observable behaviour of men (what more can a science ask for?) without taking the vaguer and more elusive data of introspection much into account. This would constitute the natural sciences of psychology and sociology, predicted by the materialists of the French Enlightenment, particularly Condillac and Condorcet and their nineteenth-century followers – Comte, Buckle, Spencer, Taine – and many a modern behaviourist, positivist and ‘physicalist’ since their day.

  What kind of science would history constitute? The traditional division of the sciences is into the inductive and the deductive. Unless one claimed acquaintance with a priori propositions or rules, derived not from observation but from knowledge, based on intuition or revelation, of the laws governing the behaviour of men and of their goals, or of the specific purposes of their creator – and few historians since the Middle Ages have openly professed to possess such knowledge – this science could not be wholly deductive. But is it then inductive? It is difficult or impossible to conduct large-scale experiments on human beings, and knowledge must therefore largely rest on observation. However, this disability has not prevented astronomy or geology from becoming a flourishing science, and the mechanists of the eighteenth century confidently looked forward to a time when the application of the methods of the mathematical sciences to human affairs would explode such myths as those of revealed truth, the inner light, a personal deity, an immaterial soul, freedom of the will, and so forth; and so solve all social problems by means of a scientific sociology as clear, exact and capable of predicting future behaviour as, to use Condorcet’s phrase, the sciences that study the societies of bees or beavers.1 In the nineteenth century this claim came to be regarded as too sweeping and too extravagant. It became clear that the methods and concepts of the mechanists were not adequate for dealing with growth and change; the adoption of more complex vitalistic or evolutionary categories and models served to demarcate the procedures of the biological from those of the purely physical sciences; the former seemed clearly more appropriate to the behaviour and development of human beings. In the twentieth century psychology has begun to assume the role that biology had played in the previous century, and its methods and discoveries with regard both to individuals and to groups have in their turn transformed our approach to history.

  Why should history have had so long to wait to become a science? Buckle, who believed in the science of history more passionately, perhaps, than any man who ever lived, explained this very simply by the fact that historians were inferior in mental power to the mathematicians and physicists and chemists. He declared that those sciences advanced fastest which in the first instance attracted the attention of the cleverest men, and their successes naturally in their turn attracted other able heads into their service. In other words, if men as gifted as Galileo or Newton, or even Laplace or Faraday, had devoted themselves to dealing with the disordered mass of truth and falsehood that went by the name of histo
ry, they could soon have set it to rights and made a firmly built, clear and fertile natural science of it.2 This was a promise held out by those who were, very understandably, hypnotised by the magnificent progress of the natural sciences of their day. Intelligent and sceptical thinkers like Taine and Renan in France, not to speak of really passionate positivists like Comte, and, in some of their writings, Engels and Plekhanov, profoundly believed in this prospect. Their hopes have scarcely been fulfilled. It may be profitable to ask why this is so.

  Before an answer to this question is attempted, two further sources of the belief that history can, at least in principle, be transformed into a natural science may be noted. The first is perhaps conveyed best by the metaphors that, at any rate since the nineteenth century, all educated men have tended to use. When we speak of rational as opposed to Utopian policies, we tend to say of the latter that they ignore, or are defeated by, the ‘inexorable logic of the (historical) facts’ or the ‘wheels of history’, which it is idle to try to stay. We speak of the futility of defying the ‘forces of history’, or the absurdity of efforts to ‘put the clock back’ or to ‘restore the past’. We speak of the youth, the maturity, the decay of peoples or cultures, of the ebb and flow of social movements, of the rise and fall of nations. Such language serves to convey the idea of an inexorably fixed time-order – the ‘river of time’ on which we float, and which we must willy-nilly accept; a moving stair which we have not created, but on which we are borne, obeying, as it were, some natural law governing the order and shape of events – in this case, events consisting of, or at any rate affecting, human lives, activities and experiences. Metaphorical and misleading though such uses of words can be, they are pointers to categories and concepts in terms of which we conceive the ‘stream of history’, namely, as something possessing a certain objective pattern that we ignore at our peril. It is a short step from this to conclude that whatever has a pattern exhibits regularities capable of being expressed in laws; and the systematic interconnection of laws is the content of a natural science.