The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  The attack upon the world of appearances at times takes surrealist forms: in one of Arnim’s novels the hero finds that he has wandered into a beautiful lady’s dreams, is invited by her to sit in one of her chairs, wishes to escape from the dream that is not his, sees that the chair remains empty, and feels great relief. Hoffmann carried this war upon the objective world, upon the very notion of objectivity, to its outer limits: old women who turn into brass door-knockers, or State Councillors who step into brandy-glasses, are dissipated into alcoholic fumes, float over the earth, then re-coagulate themselves and return to their armchairs and dressing-gowns – these are not innocent flights of fancy but spring from a deranged imagination in which the will is uncontrolled and the real world proves to be a phantasmagoria. After this, the way lies clear for Schopenhauer’s world tossed hither and thither by a blind, aimless, cosmic will, for Dostoevsky’s underground man, and Kafka’s lucid nightmares, for Nietzsche’s evocation of the Kraftmenschen condemned in Plato’s dialogues – Thrasymachus, or Callicles – who see no reason against sweeping aside the cobwebs of laws and conventions if they obstruct their will to power, for Baudelaire’s ‘enivrez-vous sans cesse!’;30 let the will become intoxicated by drugs or pain, dreams or sorrow, no matter by what, but let it break its chains.

  Neither Hoffmann nor Tieck sets out, any more than Pascal or Kierkegaard or Nerval, to deny the truths of science, or even those of common sense, at their own level – that is, as categories required for limited purposes, medical or technological or commercial. This was not the world which mattered; they conceived true reality as distinct from the irrelevant surface of things. The world without frontiers or barriers, within or without, shaped and expressed by art, by religion, by metaphysical insight, by all that is involved in personal relationships – this was the world in which the will is supreme, in which absolute values clashed in irreconcilable conflict, the ‘nocturnal world’ of the soul, the source of all imaginative experience, all poetry, all understanding, all that men truly live by. It is when scientifically minded rationalists claimed to be able to explain and control this level of experience in terms of their concepts and categories, and declared that conflict and tragedy arose only from ignorance of fact, inadequacies of method, the incompetence or ill will of rulers and the benighted condition of their subjects, so that in principle, at least, all this could be put right, a harmonious, rationally organised society established, and the dark sides of life be made to recede like an old, insubstantial, scarcely remembered nightmare – is is then that the poets and the mystics and all those who are sensitive to the individual, unorganisable, untranslatable aspects of human experience tended to rebel. Such men react against what appears to them to be the maddening dogmatism and smooth bon sens of the raisonneurs of the Enlightenment and their modern successors. Nor, despite the brilliant and heroic efforts of both Hegel and Marx to integrate the tensions, paradoxes and conflicts of human life and thought into new syntheses of successive crises and resolutions – the dialectic of history or cunning of reason (or of the process of production), leading to an ultimate triumph of reason and realisation of human potentialities – have the terrible doubts injected by these indignant critics ever been stilled.

  I do not mean that these doubts have in fact prevailed, at least in the realm of ideology. Even if belief in the happy innocence of our first ancestors – Saturnia regna – has largely waned, faith in the possibility of a golden age still to come has remained unimpaired, and indeed spread far beyond the Western world. Both liberals and socialists, and many who put their trust in rational and scientific methods designed to effect a fundamental social transformation, whether by violent or gradual methods, have held this optimistic belief with mounting intensity during the last hundred years. The conviction that once the last obstacles – ignorance and irrationality, alienation and exploitation, and their individual and social roots – have been eliminated, true human history, that is, universal harmonious co-operation, will at last begin is a secular form of what is evidently a permanent need of mankind. But if it is the case that not all ultimate human ends are necessarily compatible, there may be no escape from choices governed by no overriding principle, some among them painful, both to the agent and to others. From this it would follow that the creation of a social structure that would, at the least, avoid morally intolerable alternatives, and at the most promote active solidarity in the pursuit of common objectives, may be the best that human beings can be expected to achieve, if too many varieties of positive action are not to be repressed, too many equally valid human goals are not to be frustrated.

  But a course demanding so much skill and practical intelligence – the hope of what would be no more than a better world, dependent on the maintenance of what is bound to be an unstable equilibrium in need of constant attention and repair – is evidently not inspiring enough for most men, who crave a bold, universal, once-and-for-all panacea. It may be that men cannot face too much reality, or an open future, without a guarantee of a happy ending – providence, the self-realising spirit, the invisible hand, the cunning of reason or of history, or of a productive and creative social class. This seems borne out by the social and political doctrines that have proved most influential in recent times. Yet the romantic attack on the system-builders – the authors of the great historical libretti – has not been wholly ineffective. Whatever the political theorists may have taught, the imaginative literature of the nineteenth century, and of ours too, which expresses the moral outlook, conscious and unconscious, of the age, has (despite the apocalyptic moments of Dostoevsky or Walt Whitman) remained singularly unaffected by Utopian dreams. There is no vision of final perfection in Tolstoy, or Turgenev, in Balzac or Flaubert or Baudelaire or Carducci. Manzoni is perhaps the last major writer who still lives in the afterglow of a Christian-liberal, optimistic eschatology. The German romantic school and those it influenced, directly and indirectly – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner, Ibsen, Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, the existentialists – whatever fantasies of their own they may have generated, do not cling to the myth of an ideal world. Nor from his wholly different standpoint does Freud. Small wonder that they have all been duly written off as decadent reactionaries by Marxist critics. Some indeed, and those not the least gifted or perceptive, are justly so described. Others were, and are, the very opposite: humane, generous, life-enhancing, openers of new doors.

  One is not committed to applauding or even condoning the extravagances of romantic irrationalism if one concedes that, by revealing that the ends of men are many, often unpredictable, and some among them incompatible with one another, the romantics have dealt a fatal blow to the proposition that, all appearances to the contrary, a definite solution of the jigsaw puzzle is, at least in principle, possible, that power in the service of reason can achieve it, that rational organisation can bring about the perfect union of such values and counter-values as individual liberty and social equality, spontaneous self-expression and organised, socially directed efficiency, perfect knowledge and perfect happiness, the claims of personal life and the claims of parties, classes, nations, the public interest. If some ends recognised as fully human are at the same time ultimate and mutually incompatible, then the idea of a golden age, a perfect society compounded of a synthesis of all the correct solutions to all the central problems of human life, is shown to be incoherent in principle. This is the service rendered by romanticism, and in particular by the doctrine that forms its heart, namely, that morality is moulded by the will and that ends are created, not discovered. When this movement is justly condemned for the monstrous fallacy that life is, or can be made, a work of art, that the aesthetic model applies to politics, that the political leader is, at his highest, a sublime artist who shapes men according to his creative design – a fallacy that leads to dangerous nonsense in theory and savage brutality in practice – this at least may be set to its credit: that it has permanently shaken the faith in universal, objective truth in matters of conduct, in the possibility of
a perfect and harmonious society, wholly free from conflict or injustice or oppression – a goal for which no sacrifice can be too great if men are ever to create Condorcet’s reign of truth, happiness and virtue, bound ‘by an indissoluble chain’;31 an ideal for which more human beings have, in our time, sacrificed themselves and others than, perhaps, for any other cause in human history.

  1 Cf. p. 222 above, note 3.

  2 Critique of Pure Reason, A466/B494; A536/B564.

  3 Cf. p. 195 above, note 2.

  4 Schillers Werke (op. cit., p. 260 above, note 3), vol. 20, p. 303, line 13; vol. 21, p. 46, line 30; ibid., p. 52, line 28; vol. 20, p. 196, line 6.

  5 op. cit. (p. 16 above, note 1), vol. 5, p. 97, line 19.

  6 Schillers Werke (op. cit., p. 260 above, note 3), vol. 21, p. 50, line 11.

  7 op. cit. (p. 252 above, note 1), Vol. 29, P. 366.

  8 loc. cit. (p. 353 above, note 1).

  9 op. cit. (p. 220 above, note 3), vol. 2, p. 256.

  10 ibid., p. 263.

  11 ibid., pp. 264–5.

  12 ibid., p. 263.

  13 ibid., vol. 6, p. 383.

  14 ibid., vol. 7, p. 374.

  15 ibid., vol. 2, p. 269.

  16 ibid., p. 303.

  17 ibid., p. 288.

  18 He goes on: ‘it is this “craving void” which drives us to Gaming – to Battle – to Travel – to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of any description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.’ Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand (London, 1973–94), vol. 3, p. 109. This was written in a letter of 1813 (6 September, to Annabella Milbanke). Half a century earlier the Scottish writer Adam Ferguson made of this ‘craving void’ and of the love of danger and of war, of hatred of ennui, one of the principal points of his attacks against contemporary morality and against the psychology of the French raisonneurs. His famous Essay on the History of Civil Society of 1767, which contrasted the Homeric virtues with the domesticated character of modern society, enjoyed widespread currency in Germany the following year in the translation made of it by Christian Garve.

  19 Lara, Canto I. 18, lines 313, 315.

  20 loc. cit. (p. 260 above, note 1).

  21 ‘Jerusalem’, plate 64, line 20: ibid., vol. 1, p. 555.

  22 loc. cit. (p. 260 above, note 2).

  23 op. cit. (p. 250 above, note 4), vol. 6, p. 492, line 9.

  24 loc. cit. (p. 257 above, note 1).

  25 ‘The Hero as Prophet’: pp. 40 and 39 in Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History, ed. Michael K. Goldberg and others (Berkeley etc., 1993).

  26 loc. cit. (p. 258 above, note 2).

  27 Hyperion, vol. 1, book 1: p. 118 in Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Norbert v. Hellingrath and others (Berlin, 1943), vol. 2.

  28 In Réflexions sur la violence (1908), chapter 4, section 3.

  29 loc. cit. (p. 573 above, note 4).

  30 ‘Enivrez-vous’ (1864), Petits poèmes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris) No 33.

  31 loc. cit. (p. 136 above, note 1).

  NATIONALISM

  Past Neglect and Present Power

  I

  THE HISTORY OF ideas is a rich but, by its very nature, an imprecise field, treated with natural suspicion by experts in more exact disciplines, but it has its surprises and rewards. Among them is the discovery that some of the most familiar values of our own culture are more recent than might at first be supposed. Integrity and sincerity were not among the attributes which were admired – indeed, they were scarcely mentioned – in the ancient or medieval worlds, which prized objective truth in matters of theory, and getting things right in matters of both theory and practice. The view that variety is desirable, whereas uniformity is monotonous, dreary, dull, a fetter upon the freely-ranging human spirit, ‘Cimmerian, corpse-like’,1 as Goethe described Holbach’s Système de la nature, stands in sharp contrast with the traditional view that truth is one, error many, a view scarcely challenged before – at the earliest – the end of the seventeenth century. The notion of toleration, not as a utilitarian expedient to avoid destructive strife, but as an intrinsic value; the concepts of liberty and human rights as they are discussed today; the notion of genius as the defiance of rules by the untrammelled will, contemptuous of the restraint of reason at any level – all these are elements in a great mutation in Western thought and feeling that took place in the eighteenth century, the consequences of which appear in various counter-revolutions all too obvious in every sphere of life today. This is a vast topic which I shall not directly discuss: I wish to draw attention to, at most, only one corner of it.

  II

  The nineteenth century, as we all know, witnessed an immense growth of historical studies. There are many explanations of this: the revolutionary transformation of both life and thought brought about by the rapid and triumphant development of the natural sciences, in particular by technological invention and the consequent rise of large-scale industry; the rise of new States and classes and rulers in search of pedigrees; the disintegration of age-old religious and social institutions, at once the cause and the consequence of the Renaissance and the rise of secularism and the Reformation; all this riveted attention upon the phenomena of historical change and novelty. The fillip given to historical and, indeed, to all genetic studies, was incalculably great. There was a new sense of continuous advance, or at any rate of movement and change in the life of human society. It is not, therefore, surprising that major thinkers in this period set themselves to discover the laws which governed social change. It seemed reasonable to suppose that the new methods of the natural sciences, which proved capable of explaining the nature and the laws of the external world, could perform this service for the human world also. If such laws could be discovered at all, they must hold for the future as well as for the past. Prediction of the human future must be rescued from mystical prophets and interpreters of the apocalyptic books of the Bible, from the astrologers and dabblers in the occult, and become an organised province of scientific knowledge.

  This hope spurred the new philosophies of history, and brought into being an entire new field of social studies. The new prophets tended to claim scientific validity for their statements about both the past and the future. Although much of what some of them wrote was the fruit of luxuriant and unbridled and sometimes egomaniacal imaginations, or at any rate highly speculative, the general record is a good deal more respectable than is commonly supposed. Condorcet may have been too optimistic in prophesying the development of a comprehensive and systematic natural science of man, and with it the end of crime and folly and misery in human affairs, due to indolence and ignorance and irrationality. In the darkness of his prison in 1794 he drew a glowing picture of a new, virtuous and happy world, organised by the application of scientific method to social organisation by intellectually and morally liberated men, leading to a harmonious society of nations, unbroken progress in the arts and sciences, and perpetual peace. This was plainly over-sanguine, yet the fruitfulness of applying mathematical, and in particular statistical, techniques to social problems was a prophecy at once original and important.

  Saint-Simon was a man of genius who, as everyone knows, predicted the inevitable triumph of a technocratic order. He spoke of the coming union of science, finance and industrial organisation, and the replacement, in this new world of producers aided by scientists, of what amounted to clerical indoctrination by a new race of propagandists – artists, poets, priests of a new secular religion, mobilising men’s emotions, without which the new industrial world could not be made to function. His disciple, Auguste Comte, called for and predicted the creation of an authoritarian élite to educate and control a rational, but not a democratic or liberal, society and its scientifically trained citizens. I will not enlarge upon the validity of this prophecy: the combination of technological skills and the absolute authority of a secular priesthood has been realised only too successfully in our day. And if those who believ
ed that prejudice and ignorance and superstition, and their embodiment in irrational and repressive laws, economic, political, racial and sexual, would be swept away by the new enlightenment, have not had their expectations realised, this does not diminish the degree of their insight into the new paths which had opened in Western European development. This was the very vision of a rational, swept and garnered, new order, heralded by Bentham and Macaulay, which troubled Mill and Tocqueville and deeply repelled Carlyle and Disraeli, Ruskin and Thoreau, and, before them, some among the early German romantics at the turn of the nineteenth century. Fourier, in his turn, together with much nonsense, thundered against the evils of trade and industry, engaged in unbridled economic competition, tending to wanton destruction or adulteration of the fruits of human labour by those who wished to increase their own profits; he protested that the growth of centralised control over vast human groups led to servitude and alienation, and advocated the end of repression and the need for the rational canalisation of the passions by careful vocational guidance which would enable all human desires, capacities, inclinations to develop in a free and creative direction. Fourier was given to grotesque fantasies: but these ideas were not absurd, and much of what he predicted is now conventional wisdom.

  Everyone has recognised the fatal accuracy of Tocqueville’s uneasy anticipation of the conformity and the monotony of democratic egalitarianism, whatever may be thought of the nostrums by which he sought to modify its effects. Nor do I know of anyone who would deny that Karl Marx, whatever his errors, displayed unique powers of prognosis in identifying some of the central factors at work in his day that were not obvious to his contemporaries – the interdependence of technological change and culture, the concentration and centralisation of the means of production in private hands, the inexorable march of industrialisation, the rise and vast development of big business, then in its embryo, and the inevitable sharpening of social and political conflicts that this involved. Nor was he unsuccessful in unmasking the political and moral, philosophical and religious, liberal and scientific disguises under which some of the most brutal manifestations of these conflicts and their social and intellectual consequences were concealed.