The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  It is part of the same tendency to maintain that, even if total freedom from moralising is not to be looked for in this world (for all human beings inevitably live and think by their own varying moral or aesthetic or religious standards), yet in the writing of history an effort must be made to repress such tendencies. As historians it is our duty only to describe and explain, not to pronounce verdicts. The historian is, we are told, not a judge but a detective; he provides the evidence, and the reader, who has none of the professional responsibilities of the expert, can form what moral conclusions he likes. As a general warning against moralising history this is, particularly in times of acute partisan emotion, timely enough. But it must not be interpreted literally. For it depends upon a false analogy with some among the more exact of the natural sciences. In these last, objectivity has a specific meaning. It means that methods and criteria of a less or more precisely defined kind are being used with scrupulous care; and that evidence, arguments, conclusions are formulated in the special terminology invented or employed for the specific purpose of each science, and that there is no intrusion (or almost none) of irrelevant considerations or concepts or categories, that is, those specifically excluded by the canons of the science in question.

  I am not sure whether history can usefully be called a science at all, but certainly it is not a science in this sense. For it employs few, if any, concepts or categories peculiar to itself. Attempts to construct special sets of concepts and special techniques for history21 have proved sterile, for they either misdescribed – over-schematised – our experience, or they were felt not to provide answers to our questions. We can accuse historians of bias, or inaccuracy, or stupidity, or dishonesty, as we can accuse one another of these vices in our ordinary daily intercourse; and we can praise them for the corresponding virtues; and usually with the same degree of justice and reason. But just as our ordinary speech would become fantastically distorted by a conscious effort to eliminate from it some basic ingredient – say, everything remotely liable to convey value judgements, our normal, scarcely noticed, moral or psychological attitudes – and just as this is not regarded as indispensable for the preservation of what we should look upon as a normal modicum of objectivity, impartiality and accuracy, so, for the same reason, no such radical remedy is needed for the preservation of a reasonable modicum of these qualities in the writing of history. There is a sense in which a physicist can, to a large degree, speak with different voices as a physicist and as a human being; although even there the line between the two vocabularies is anything but clear or absolute. It is possible that this may in some measure be true of economists or psychologists; it grows progressively less true as we leave mathematical methods behind us, for example, in palaeography, or the history of science or that of the woollen trade; and it comes perilously near an absurdity when demanded of social or political historians, however skilled in the appropriate techniques, however professional, however rigorous. History is not identical with imaginative literature, but it is certainly not free from what, in a natural science, would be rightly condemned as unwarrantably subjective and even, in an empirical sense of the term, intuitive. Except on the assumption that history must deal with human beings purely as material objects in space – must, in short, be behaviourist – its method can scarcely be assimilated to the standards of an exact natural science.22 The invocation to historians to suppress even that minimal degree of moral or psychological insight and evaluation which is necessarily involved in viewing human beings as creatures with purposes and motives (and not merely as causal factors in the procession of events) seems to me to spring from a confusion of the aims and methods of the humane studies with those of natural science. Purely descriptive, wholly depersonalised history remains, what it has always been, a figment of abstract theory, a violently exaggerated reaction to the cant and vanity of earlier generations.

  v

  All judgements, certainly all judgements dealing with facts, rest on – embody – generalisations, whether of fact or value or of both, and would make no sense save in terms of such generalisations. This truism, while it does not seem startling in itself, can nevertheless lead to formidable fallacies. Thus some of the heirs of Descartes who assume that whatever is true must be capable of being (at any rate in principle) stated in the form of scientific (that is, at least quasi-mathematical or mathematically clear) generalisations conclude, as Comte and his disciples did, that the generalisations unavoidable in historical judgements must, to be worth anything, be capable of being so formulated, that is, as demonstrable sociological laws; while valuations, if they cannot be stated in such terms, must be relegated to some ‘subjective’ lumber-room, as ‘psychological’ odds and ends, expressions of purely personal attitudes, unscientific superfluities, in principle capable of being eliminated altogether, and must certainly be kept out so far as possible from the objective realm in which they have no place. Every science (we are invited to believe) must sooner or later shake itself free of what are at best irrelevances, at worst serious impediments, to clear vision.

  This view springs from a very understandable fascination with the morally ‘neutral’ attitude of natural scientists, and a desire to emulate them in other fields. But it rests on a false analogy. For the generalisations of the historians differ from those of the scientists in that the valuations which they embody, whether moral, political, aesthetic or (as they often suppose) purely historical, are intrinsic, and not, as in the sciences, external, to the subject-matter. If I am a historian and wish to explain the causes of the great French Revolution, I naturally assume or take for granted certain general propositions. Thus I assume that all the ordinarily accepted physical laws of the external world apply. I also assume that all or most men need and consciously seek food, clothing, shelter, some degree of protection for their persons, and facilities for getting their grievances listened to or redressed. Perhaps I assume something more specific, namely, that persons who have acquired a certain degree of wealth or economic power will not be indefinitely content to lack political rights or social status; or that human beings are prey to various passions – greed, envy, lust for power; or that some men are more ambitious, ruthless, cunning or fanatical than others; and so forth. These are the assumptions of common experience; some of them are probably false; some are exaggerated, some confused, or inapplicable to given situations. Few among them are capable of being formulated in the form of hypotheses of natural science; still fewer are testable by crucial experiment, because they are not often sufficiently clear and sharp and precisely defined to be capable of being organised in a formal structure which allows of systematic mutual entailments or exclusions, and consequently of strictly logical or mathematical treatment. More than this: if they do prove capable of such formulation they will lose some of their usefulness; the idealised models of economics (not to speak of those of physics or physiology) will be of limited use in historical research or description. These inexact disciplines depend on a certain measure of concreteness, vagueness, ambiguity, suggestiveness, vividness and so on, embodied in the properties of the language of common sense and of literature and the humanities. Degrees and kinds of precision doubtless depend on the context, the field, the subject-matter; and the rules and methods of algebra lead to absurdities if applied to the art of, say, the novel, which has its own appallingly exacting standards. The precise disciplines of Racine or Proust require as great a degree of genius, and are as creditable to the intellect (as well as to the imagination) of the human race, as those of Newton or Darwin or Hilbert, but these kinds of method (and there is no theoretical limit to their number) are not interchangeable. They may have much or little to learn from each other; Stendhal may have learnt something from the Sensationalists of the eighteenth century, or the Idéologues of his own time, or from the Code Napoléon. But when Zola seriously contemplated the possibility of a literally ‘experimental novel’, founded directly on, and controlled by, the results of scientific method and conclusions, the idea remained l
argely stillborn, as, for similar reasons, the collective novel of the early Russian communist theorists still remains: and that not because we do not (as yet) know a sufficient number of facts (or laws), but because the concepts involved in the worlds described by novelists (or historians) are not the artificially refined concepts of scientific models – the idealised entities in terms of which natural laws are formulated – but a great deal richer in content and less logically simple or streamlined in structure.

  Some interplay there is, of course, between a given scientific ‘world-picture’ and views of life in the normal meaning of this word; the former can give very sharp impulsions to the latter. Writers like H. G. Wells or Aldous Huxley would not have described (or so egregiously misunderstood) both social and individual life as at times they did, had they not been influenced by the natural sciences of their day to an excessive degree. But even such writers as these do not actually deduce anything from scientific generalisations; do not in their writings use any semblance of truly scientific methods; for this cannot be done outside its proper field without total absurdity. The relation of the sciences to historical writing is complex and close: but it is certainly not one of identity or even similarity. Scientific method is indispensable in, say, such disciplines as palaeography, or epigraphy, or archaeology, or economics, or in other activities which are propaedeutic to history, and supply it with evidence, and help to solve specific problems. But what they establish can never suffice to constitute a historical narrative. We select certain events or persons because we believe them to have had a special degree of ‘influence’ or ‘power’ or ‘importance’. These attributes are not, as a rule, quantitatively measurable, or capable of being symbolised in the terminology of an exact, or even semi-exact, science. Yet they can no more be subtracted or abstracted from the facts – from events or persons – than physical or chronological characteristics; they enter even the driest, barest chronicles of events: it is a truism to say this. And is it so very clear that the most obviously moral categories, the notions of good and bad, right and wrong, so far as they enter into our assessments of societies, individuals, characters, political action, states of mind, are in principle utterly different from such indispensable ‘non-moral’ categories of value as ‘important’, ‘trivial’, ‘significant’ and so forth? It might perhaps be maintained that views of what is generally regarded as ‘important’ – the conquests of Alexander or Genghis Khan, or the fall of the Roman Empire, or the French Revolution, or the rise and fall of Hitler – embody relatively more stable assessments than more obviously ‘ethical’ valuations, or that there would be more general agreement about the fact that the French or Russian Revolutions are ‘major’ events (in the sense in which the tune which I hummed yesterday afternoon is not) than about whether Robespierre was a good man or a bad one, or whether it was right or wrong to execute the leaders of the National Socialist regime in Germany. And no doubt some concepts and categories are in this sense more universal or more ‘stable’ than others.23 But they are not therefore ‘objective’ in some absolutely clear sense in which ethical notions are not. For our historical language, the words and thoughts with which we attempt to reflect about or describe past events and persons, embody moral concepts and categories – standards both permanent and transient – just as deeply as other notions of value. Our notions of Napoleon or Robespierre as historically important, as worthy of our attention in the sense in which their minor followers are not (as well as the very meaning of terms like ‘major’ and ‘minor’), derive from the fact that the part of the former in forwarding or retarding the interests or the ideals of a great many of their contemporaries (with which our own are bound up) was very considerable; but then so do our ‘moral’ judgements about them. Where to draw the line – where to exclude judgements as being too subjective to be admitted into an account which we desire to make as ‘objective’ as possible, that is, as well supported by publicly discoverable, inspectable, comparable facts as we can make it – that is a question for ordinary judgement, that is to say, for what passes as such in our society, in our own time and place, among the people to whom we are addressing ourselves, with all the assumptions which are taken for granted, more or less, in normal communication.

  Because there is no hard and fast line between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’, it does not follow that there is no line at all; and because judgements of ‘importance’, normally held to be ‘objective’, differ in some respects from moral judgements, which are so often suspected of being merely ‘subjective’, it does not follow that ‘moral’ is tantamount to ‘subjective’: that there is some mysterious property in virtue of which those quasi-aesthetic or political judgements which distinguish essential from inessential, or crucial from trivial, are somehow intrinsic to our historical thinking and description. It does not follow that the ethical implications, concerned with responsibility and moral worth, can somehow be sloughed off as if they constituted an external adjunct, a set of subjective emotional attitudes towards a body of commonly accepted, ‘hard’, publicly inspectable facts; as if these ‘facts’ were not themselves shot through with such valuations, as if a hard and fast distinction could be made, by historians or anyone else, between what is truly factual and what is a valuation of the facts, in the sense in which such a valuation truly would be an irrelevant and avoidable intrusion in, say, such fields as physics or chemistry (and doubtfully so in economics or sociology), where ‘facts’ can and should, according to the rules of these sciences, be described, as far as possible, with no moral overtones.

  VI

  When everything has been said in favour of attributing responsibility for character and action to natural and institutional causes; when everything possible has been done to correct blind or over-simple interpretations of conduct which fix too much responsibility on individuals and their free acts; when in fact there is strong evidence to show that it was difficult or impossible for men to do otherwise than as they did, given their material environment or education or the influence upon them of various ‘social pressures’; when every relevant psychological and sociological consideration has been taken into account, every impersonal factor given due weight; after ‘hegemonist’, nationalist, and other historical heresies have been exposed and refuted; after every effort has been made to induce history to aspire, so far as it can without open absurdity, after the pure, wertfrei condition of a science; after all these severities, we continue to praise and to blame. We blame others as we blame ourselves; and the more we know, the more, it may be, are we disposed to blame. Certainly it will surprise us to be told that the better we understand our own actions – our own motives and the circumstances surrounding them – the freer from self-blame we shall inevitably feel. The contrary is surely often true. The more deeply we investigate the course of our own conduct, the more blameworthy our behaviour may seem to us to be, the more remorse we may be disposed to feel; and if this holds for ourselves, it is not reasonable to expect us necessarily, and in all cases, to withhold it from others. Our situations may differ from theirs, but not always so widely as to make all comparisons unfair. We ourselves may be accused unjustly, and so become acutely sensitive to the dangers of unjustly blaming others. But because blame can be unjust and the temptation to utter it too strong, it does not follow that it is never just; and because judgements can be based on ignorance, can spring from violent, or perverse, or silly, or shallow, or unfair notions, it does not follow that the opposites of these qualities do not exist at all; that we are mysteriously doomed to a degree of relativism and subjectivism in history, from which we are no less mysteriously free, or at any rate more free, in our normal daily thought and transactions with one another.

  Indeed, the major fallacy of this position must by now be too obvious to need pointing out. We are told that we are creatures of nature or environment, or of history, and that this colours our temperament, our judgements, our principles. Every judgement is relative, every evaluation subjective, made what and a
s it is by the interplay of the factors of its own time and place, individual or collective. But relative to what? Subjective in contrast with what? Made to conform as it does to some ephemeral pattern as opposed to what conceivable timeless independence of such distorting factors? Relative terms (especially pejoratives) need correlatives, or else they turn out to be without meaning themselves, mere gibes, propagandist phrases designed to throw discredit, and not to describe or analyse. We know what we mean by disparaging a judgement or a method as subjective or biased – we mean that proper methods of weighing evidence have been too far ignored; or that what are normally called facts have been overlooked or suppressed or perverted; or that evidence normally accepted as sufficient to account for the acts of one individual or society is, for no good reason, ignored in some other case similar in all relevant respects; or that canons of interpretation are arbitrarily altered from case to case, that is, without consistency or principle; or that we have reasons for thinking that the historian in question wished to establish certain conclusions for reasons other than those constituted by the evidence, according to canons of valid inference accepted as normal in his day or in ours, and that this has blinded him to the criteria and methods normal in his field for verifying facts and proving conclusions; or all, or any, of these together; or other considerations like them. These are the kinds of ways in which superficiality is, in practice, distinguished from depth, bias from objectivity, perversion of facts from honesty, stupidity from perspicacity, passion and confusion from detachment and lucidity. And if we grasp these rules correctly, we are fully justified in denouncing breaches of them on the part of anyone; why should we not?