The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  It needs more than infatuation with a programme to overthrow some of the most deeply rooted moral and intellectual habits of human beings, whether they be plumbers or historians. We are told that it is foolish to judge Charlemagne or Napoleon or Genghis Khan or Hitler or Stalin for their massacres, that it is at most a comment upon ourselves and not upon ‘the facts’. Likewise we are told that we should not describe as benefactors of humanity those whom the followers of Comte so faithfully celebrated; or at least that to do so is not our business as historians: because as historians our categories are ‘neutral’ and differ from the categories we use as ordinary human beings, as those of chemists undeniably do. We are also told that as historians it is our task to describe, let us say, the great revolutions of our own time without so much as hinting that certain individuals involved in them not merely caused, but were responsible for, great misery and destruction – using such words according to the standards not merely of the twentieth century, which is soon over, or of our declining capitalist society, but of the human race at all the times and in all the places in which we have known it; and told that we should practise such austerities out of respect for some imaginary scientific canon which distinguishes between facts and values very sharply, so sharply that it enables us to regard the former as being objective, ‘inexorable’ and therefore self-justifying, and the latter as merely a subjective gloss upon events – due to the moment, the milieu, the individual temperament – and consequently unworthy of serious scholarship.

  To this we can only answer that to accept this doctrine is to do violence to the basic notions of our morality, to misrepresent our sense of our past, and to ignore some among the most general concepts and categories of normal thought. Those who are concerned with human affairs are committed to the use of the moral categories and concepts which normal language incorporates and expresses. Chemists, philologists, logicians, even sociologists with a strong quantitative bias, by using morally neutral technical terms, can avoid these concepts. But historians can scarcely do so. They need not – they are certainly not obliged to – moralise: but neither can they avoid the use of normal language with all its associations and ‘built in’ moral categories. To seek to avoid this is to adopt another moral outlook, not none at all. The time will come when men will wonder how this strange view, which combines a misunderstanding of the relation of value to fact with cynicism disguised as stern impartiality, can ever have achieved such remarkable fame and influence and respectability. For it is not scientific; nor can its reputation be due entirely to a commendable fear of undue arrogance or philistinism or of too bland and uncritical an imposition of our own dogmas and standards upon others. In part it is due to a genuine misunderstanding of the philosophical implications of the natural sciences, the great prestige of which has been misappropriated by many a fool and impostor since their earliest triumphs. But principally it seems to me to spring from a desire to resign our responsibility, to cease from judging, provided we ourselves are not judged and, above all, are not compelled to judge ourselves; from a desire to flee for refuge to some vast amoral, impersonal, monolithic whole – nature, or history,30 or class, or race, or the ‘harsh realities of our time’, or the irresistible evolution of the social structure31 – that will absorb and integrate us into its limitless, indifferent, neutral texture, which it is senseless to evaluate or criticise, and against which we fight to our certain doom.

  This is an image which has often appeared in the history of mankind, always at moments of confusion and inner weakness. It is one of the great alibis, pleaded by those who cannot or do not wish to face the fact of human responsibility, the existence of a limited but nevertheless real area of human freedom, either because they have been too deeply wounded or frightened to wish to return to the traffic of normal life, or because they are filled with moral indignation against the false values and the, to them, repellent moral codes of their own society, or class, or profession, and take up arms against all ethical codes as such, as a dignified means of casting off a morality which is to them, perhaps justifiably, repulsive. Nevertheless, such views, although they may spring from a natural reaction against too much moral rhetoric, are a desperate remedy; those who hold them use history as a method of escape from a world which has, for some reason, grown odious to them, into a fantasy where impersonal entities avenge their grievances and set everything right, to the greater or lesser discomfiture of their persecutors, real and imaginary. And in the course of this they describe the normal lives lived by men in terms which fail to mark the most important psychological and moral distinctions known to us. This they do in the service of an imaginary science; and, like the astrologers and soothsayers whom they have succeeded, cast up their eyes to the clouds, and speak in immense, unsubstantiated images and similes, in deeply misleading metaphors and allegories, and make use of hypnotic formulae with little regard for experience, or rational argument, or tests of proven reliability. Thereby they throw dust in their own eyes as well as in ours, obstruct our vision of the real world, and further confuse an already sufficiently bewildered public about the relations of morality to politics, and about the nature and methods of the natural sciences and historical studies alike.

  1 Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London, 1948), p. 88.

  2 This was written in 1953.

  3 Bernard Berenson, Rumour and Reflection: 1941:1944 (London, 1952), p. 116 (entry dated 11 January 1943).

  4 The London School of Economics and Political Science.

  5 I do not wish here to enter into the question of what such procedures are, for example, what is meant by speaking of history as a science – whether the methods of historical discovery are inductive, or ‘deductive-hypothetical’, or analogical, or to what degree they are or should be similar to the methods of the natural sciences, and to which of these methods, and in which of the natural sciences; for there plainly exists a greater variety of methods and procedures than is usually provided for in textbooks on logic or scientific method. It may be that the methods of historical research are, in at least some respects, unique, and some of them are more unlike than like those of the natural sciences; while others resemble given scientific techniques, particularly when they approach such ancillary enquiries as archaeology or palaeography or physical anthropology. Or again they may depend upon the kind of historical research pursued – and may not be the same in demography as in history, in political history as in the history of art, in the history of technology as in the history of religion. The ‘logic’ of various human studies has been insufficiently examined, and convincing accounts of its varieties with an adequate range of concrete examples drawn from actual practice are much to be desired.

  6 Indeed, the very notion of great men, however carefully qualified, however sophisticated, embodies this belief; for this concept, even in its most attenuated form, would be empty unless it were thought that some men played a more decisive role in the course of history than others. The notion of greatness, unlike those of goodness or wickedness or talent or beauty, is not a mere characteristic of individuals in a more or less private context, but is, as we ordinarily use it, directly connected with social effectiveness, the capacity of individuals to alter things radically on a large scale.

  7 We are further told that we belong to such wholes and are ‘organically’ one with them, whether we know it or not; and that we have such significance as we do only to the degree to which we are sensitive to, and identify ourselves with, these unanalysable, imponderable, scarcely explicable relationships; for it is only in so far as we belong to an entity greater than ourselves, and are thereby carriers of ‘its’ values, instruments of ‘its’ purposes, living ‘its’ life, suffering and dying for ‘its’ richer self-realisation, that we are, or are worth, anything at all. This familiar line of thought should be distinguished from the no less familiar but less ethically charged supposition that men’s outlooks and behaviour are largely conditioned by the habits of other past and present members of their societ
y; that the hold of prejudice and tradition is very strong; that there may be inherited characteristics both mental and physical; and that any effort to influence human beings and to judge their conduct must take such non-rational factors into account. For whereas the former view is metaphysical and normative (what Karl Popper calls ‘essentialist’), the latter is empirical and descriptive; and while the former is largely found as an element in the kind of ethical or political anti-individualism held by romantic nationalists, Hegelians and other transcendentalists, the latter is a sociological and psychological hypothesis which doubtless carries its own ethical and political implications, but rests its claim on observation of empirical facts, and can be confirmed or refuted or rendered less or more plausible by it. In their extreme forms these views contradict each other; in their softer and less consistent forms they tend to overlap, and even coalesce.

  8 Or, some prefer to say, Engels.

  9 No one has demonstrated this with more devastating lucidity than Karl Popper. While he seems to me somewhat to underestimate the differences between the methods of natural science and those of history or common sense (Hayek’s The Counter-Revolution of Science seems, despite some exaggerations, to be more convincing on this topic), he has, in his The Open Society and its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism, exposed some of the fallacies of metaphysical ‘historicism’ with such force and precision, and made so clear its incompatibility with any kind of scientific empiricism, that there is no further excuse for confounding the two.

  10 Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (London, 1726), sermon 7, p. 136 [§ 16].

  11 I do not, of course, wish to imply that metaphors and figures of speech can be dispensed with in ordinary utterance, still less in the sciences; only that the danger of illicit ‘reification’ – the mistaking of words for things, metaphors for realities – is even greater in this sphere than is usually supposed. The most notorious cases are, of course, those of the State or the Nation, the quasi-personification of which has rightly made philosophers and even plain men uneasy or indignant for over a century. But many other words and usages offer similar dangers. Historical movements exist, and we must be allowed to call them such. Collective acts do occur; societies do rise, flourish, decay, die. Patterns, ‘atmospheres’, complex interrelationships of men or cultures are what they are, and cannot be analysed away into atomic constituents. Nevertheless, to take such expressions so literally that it becomes natural and normal to attribute to them causal properties, active powers, transcendent properties, demands for human sacrifice, is to be fatally deceived by myths. ‘Rhythms’ in history occur, but it is a sinister symptom of one’s condition to speak of them as ‘inexorable’. Cultures possess patterns, and ages spirits; but to explain human actions as their ‘inevitable’ consequences or expressions is to be a victim of misuse of words. There is no formula which guarantees a successful escape from either the Scylla of populating the world with imaginary powers and dominions, or the Charybdis of reducing everything to the verifiable behaviour of identifiable men and women in precisely denotable places and times. One can do no more than point to the existence of these perils; one must navigate between them as best one can.

  12 ‘Let us calculate’: e.g. Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin, 1875–90), vol. 7, p. 200. Condorcet, in particular, had the same attitude.

  13 Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, ed. O. H. Prior and Yvon Belaval (Paris, 1970), p. 228.

  14 Determinism is, of course, not identical with fatalism, which is only one, and not the most plausible, species of the vast determinist genus. The majority of determinists seem to maintain that such distinctions as those between voluntary behaviour, or between acts and mechanical movements or states, or what a man is and what he is not accountable for, and therefore the very notion of a moral agent, depend on what is or could be affected by individual choice, effort or decision. They hold that I normally praise or blame a man only if, and because, I think that what occurred was (or might at any rate in part be) caused by his choice or the absence of it; and should not praise or blame him if his choices, efforts etc. were conspicuously unable to affect the result that I applaud or deplore; and that this is compatible with the most rigorous determinism, since choice, effort etc. are themselves causally inevitable consequences of identifiable spatio-temporal antecedents. This (in substance the classical ‘dissolution’ of the problem of free will by the British empiricists – Hobbes, Locke, Hume and their modern followers Russell, Schlick, Ayer, Nowell-Smith, Hampshire etc.) does not seem to me to solve the problem, but merely to push it a step further back. It may be that for legal or other purposes I may define responsibility, moral accountability etc. on some such lines as these. But if I were convinced that although acts of choice, dispositional characteristics etc. did affect what occurred, yet were themselves wholly determined by factors not within the individual’s control (including his own motives and springs of action), I should certainly not regard him as morally praiseworthy or blameworthy. In such circumstances the concept of worth and desert, as these terms are now used, would become empty for me.

  The same kind of objection seems to me to apply to the connected doctrine that free will is tantamount to capacity for being (causally) affected by praise, blame, persuasion, education etc. Whether the causes that are held completely to determine human action are physical or psychical or of some other kind, and in whatever pattern or proportion they are deemed to occur, if they are truly causes – if their outcomes are thought to be as unalterable as, say, the effects of physical or physiological causes – this of itself seems to me to make the notion of a free choice between alternatives inapplicable. On this view ‘I could have acted otherwise’ is made to mean ‘I could have acted otherwise if I had chosen’, i.e. if there were no insuperable obstacle to hinder me (with the rider that my choice may well be affected by praise, social disapproval etc.); but if my choice is itself the result of antecedent causes, I am, in the relevant sense, not free. Freedom to act depends not on absence of only this or that set of fatal obstacles to action – physical or biological, let us say – while other obstacles, e.g. psychological ones – character, habits, ‘compulsive’ motives etc. – are present; it requires a situation in which no sum total of such causal factors wholly determines the result – in which there remains some area, however narrow, within which choice is not completely determined. This is the minimal sense of ‘can’ in this context. Kant’s argument that where there is no freedom there is no obligation, where there is no independence of causes there is no responsibility and therefore no desert, and consequently no occasion for praise or reproach, carries conviction. If I can correctly say ‘I cannot help choosing thus or thus’, I am not free. To say that among the factors which determine the situation are my own character, habits, decisions, choices etc. – which is, of course, conspicuously true – does not alter the case, or render me, in the only relevant sense, free. The feeling of those who have recognised free will as a genuine issue, and are not deceived by the latest efforts to interpret it away, turns out, as so often in the case of major problems which have plagued thoughtful men in every generation, to be sound as against philosophers armed with some all-conquering simple method of sweeping troublesome questions out of sight. Dr Johnson, as in other matters affecting common-sense notions, here, too, seems to have been guided by a sound linguistic sense. It does not, of course, follow that any of the analyses so far provided of the relevant senses of ‘can’, ‘freedom’, ‘uncaused’ etc. is satisfactory. To cut the knot, as Dr Johnson did, is not to untie it.

  15 What can and what cannot be done by particular agents in specific circumstances is an empirical question, properly settled, like all such questions, by an appeal to experience. If all acts were causally determined by antecedent conditions which were themselves similarly determined, and so on ad infinitum, such investigations would rest on an illusion. As rational be
ings we should, in that case, make an effort to disillusion ourselves – to cast off the spell of appearances; but we should surely fail. The delusion, if it is one, belongs to the order of what Kant called ‘empirically real’ and ‘transcendentally ideal’. To try to place ourselves outside the categories which govern our empirical (‘real’) experience is what he regarded as an unintelligible plan of action. This thesis is surely valid, and can be stated without the paraphernalia of the Kantian system.

  16 This desperate effort to remain at once within and without the engulfing dream, to say the unsayable, is irresistible to German metaphysicians of a certain type: e.g. Schopenhauer and Vaihinger.

  17 See, for example, the impressive and influential writings of E. H. Carr on the history of our time.

  18 I do not, of course, mean to imply that the great Western moralists, e.g. the philosophers of the medieval Church (and in particular Thomas Aquinas) or those of the Enlightenment, denied moral responsibility; nor that Tolstoy was not agonised by problems raised by it. My thesis is that their determinism committed these thinkers to a dilemma which some among them did not face, and none escaped.