Introduction
When the definitive history of political theory in the twentieth century is written, Isaiah Berlin will take his place as one of the most distinguished representatives of the liberal tradition. His was an unorthodox liberalism in both substance and method, and during an era dominated by John Rawls, Berlin's distinctive merits were eclipsed. Today they are becoming more visible. Berlin was less systematic than Rawls, but he reflected more deeply on fundamental alternatives to liberalism, and to the Enlightenment outlook that forms liberalism's customary backdrop. He wrestled more explicitly with the tension between universalism and particular attachments, in the liberal tradition and in human affairs. And although in later years Rawls reconfigured—some believe disfigured—his theory to accommodate the “fact of pluralism,” Berlin went farther, not only in explaining this fact, but also in assessing its value.
Berlin was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1909, the only child of a prosperous merchant and an adoring mother. In 1916 the family moved to Petrograd, where they remained until 1920, when rising political instability and pressure from the new Bolshevik regime sparked their removal to London, where Berlin spent the next eight years. He attended Oxford from 1928 until 1931, spent a year as a tutor at New College, Oxford, and was then elected a fellow of All Souls' College, his intellectual home for decades. He quickly became the center of a philosophic circle that included A. J. Ayer, the enfant terrible of logical positivism, the redoubtable ordinary language philosopher John Austin, and his student/critic Stuart Hampshire. And he began to develop the dense network of social, intellectual, and political relationships that was to characterize the remainder of his life.
For Berlin as for so many others, World War II proved transformative. Starting in 1941, he analyzed American politics and public opinion, first for the British Information Services in New York, and then for the Foreign Office, working out of the Embassy in Washington. His weekly reports circulated officially to a select group that included Prime Minister Churchill, and unofficially in a samizdat version to friends and senior civil servants.Footnote 1
Immediately after the end of the war, Berlin visited Moscow and had a series of momentous encounters with Russian literary figures, including Boris Pasternak and the poet Anna Akhmatova. The atmosphere of pervasive fear he encountered helped propel him into liberal anti-communist circles and accelerated the development of what became characteristic theses—the critique of historical determinism and materialism and the defense of the liberal conception of freedom. In 1958 he delivered the famous “Two Concepts of Liberty” as his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. In 1966, he became the founder and first principal of Oxford's Wolfson College, a role he discharged with panache for nearly a decade. During the last two decades of Berlin's life, Henry Hardy's tireless editorial efforts dispelled the belief that Berlin had talked incessantly but written little, as monographs and essay collections appeared in rapid succession. He died, loved and lauded, on November 5, 1997.Footnote 2
General Outlook
Reflecting on his life, Berlin once remarked that he had been formed by three traditions—British, Russian, and Jewish. From his life and education in Britain, he absorbed not only a respect for decency, civility, and toleration of differences, but also his adopted land's characteristic empiricism. From Russia—and especially from nineteenth-century figures such as Herzen and Turgenev—he drew his complex liberalism, focused on individual liberty and opposed to every kind of determinism. And his Jewish upbringing sensitized him to the importance of ethnic and religious ties. His Judaism was communal rather than creedal, his Zionism instinctive rather than ideological.
His outlook may be summed up in balanced antitheses. To begin, he embraced empiricism but not scienticism.Footnote 3 He rejected the logical positivists' reduction of meaning to verification and deductive inference; philosophy consists of those “queer questions” that neither can settle.Footnote 4 His empiricism extended to moral matters. He stressed the importance of fidelity to moral experience; the point of moral philosophy was to explain, not explain away, phenomena such as rational regret for the loss of value inherent in even the most defensible moral choices.Footnote 5
Another key antithesis: Berlin noted and celebrated cultural variety, but without adopting a full-blown social constructionism. On complex, perhaps even contradictory grounds, he believed in a minimalist but substantive conception of human nature that delimited the range of possible variation among human lives.Footnote 6 In matters of religion, finally, he was a Humean skeptic but not an atheist, and he regarded the Enlightenment's idolatry of secular reason as callow. “Stone-dry atheists,” he once remarked, “don't understand what men live by.”Footnote 7
Approach to Political Theory
Berlin thought of himself as (though not only as) a political theorist, and he espoused a distinctive conception of political theory. At the beginning of his most famous essay, he endorsed the view that political theory is a “branch of moral philosophy” because it “starts from the discovery, or application, of moral notions in the sphere of political relations.”Footnote 8 This proposition contains an explicit ambiguity, the elucidation of which makes a considerable difference. If political theorists simply apply exogenous morality to politics, we have a quasi-Kantian picture in which “all politics must bend its knee before the right.” But if theorists discover moral principles by examining politics as a distinctive sphere of human activity, then political theory may well have a distinctive, though still recognizably moral, content that cannot be derived from non-political morality. It appears that Berlin intended both. On the one hand, we take an understanding of liberty as central to human being and human agency into politics. On the other hand, the practice of politics raises unique questions about the scope of liberty. Obedience and coercion are, he claims, the “central question” of politics, but they are hardly the central question of individual morality.
However understood, Berlin's practice reflected the proposition that morality is central to political theory. He was far more interested in the ends of politics—ways of life constituted by distinct conceptions of what is right, good, or important—than in the means of politics—constitutions, institutions, and public policy. Consistent with this, his liberalism was a general orientation, not a precise theory of justice or anything else. He would have been skeptical about designating any single value tout court as the “first virtue of social institutions.”Footnote 9
Because morality was central, political theory could not avoid the imprecision inherent in moral argument. However useful they might be in other fields of inquiry, Berlin warned against the application of abstract logical structures and minute analysis to politics. There can be no “unity of method” in philosophy. The method should be suited to the subject, not imposed upon it. The subject-matter of politics is unstable and mutable, and its concepts are blurry-edged. In this respect, though not many others, Berlin's approach was Aristotelian. Had it been presented to him, he would have endorsed Aristotle's dictum that “it is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness in each sphere which the nature of the particular subject admits” (NE 1094b23).
Berlin believed in the power of political ideas to change the world. While hardly blind to the influence of our circumstances on our conceptions, he was a relentless critic of what he dubbed “vulgar historical materialism.” Ideas, he insisted, are anything but epiphenomenal. They are at the heart of what makes us human, and they reflect our primordial liberty to shape (and reshape) our lives. If so, theorizing about politics is not purely contemplative but represents a form of political action. At least in the case of politics, Berlin could not have accepted Ludwig Wittgenstein's claim that philosophy “leaves everything as it is.”Footnote 10 (For his part, Wittgenstein might have regarded this fact as sufficient evidence that political theory was not and could not be philosophical.)
Berlin's Liberalism
In calling the limits of permissible coercion and mandatory obedience the central question of politics, Berlin fell squarely within the classical liberal tradition. And the answer that he returned to that question rested on premises more widely accepted in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth. In “Two Concepts of Liberty,” he distinguished between negative and positive liberty, noncoercion and self-mastery, identifying the former with liberalism and the latter with political doctrines that evolved in antiliberal directions. “The fundamental sense of freedom,” he declared, “is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor.”Footnote 11 So understood, freedom is negative because the prisoner need not have an affirmative conception of what he would do if unchained; he resists confinement as evil in itself, not only because it thwarts the achievement of this or that goal. In an essay on Hegel, Berlin insisted, “The essence of liberty has always lain in the ability to choose as you wish to choose, because you wish so to choose, uncoerced, unbullied, not swallowed up in some vast system. … That is true freedom, and without it there is neither freedom of any kind, nor even the illusion of it.”Footnote 12
Berlin was at pains to decouple the definition of negative liberty from actual desires an individual may have; to purge oneself of unattainable desires may conduce to greater happiness or security but not, he thought, to greater liberty. Freedom is not the absence of frustration, but rather the “absence of obstacles to possible choices and activities.” The issue is not whether I wish to walk through a door, but whether it is open.Footnote 13 When the jailer unlocks the cell and tells the prisoner that he is free to go, he enjoys negative freedom, whether or not he wishes to leave. Berlin distinguished, as well, between the freedom to do something and the ability to do it. I lack the physical capacity to run a four-minute mile, but it would be absurd to say, on that account, that I am unfree to do so. I lack the material resources to stage a hostile takeover of a large corporation, but I am not unfree to do that either. Inability becomes unfreedom when it results from human arrangements that are designed to preclude, or have the foreseeable result of precluding, certain choices. (Whether poverty amounts to unfreedom depends on the best account of the causes of poverty in specific circumstances.)
Berlin was not entirely hostile to positive liberty, understood as self-mastery. He understood that inner subjection to desire, addiction, ignorance, delusion, or weakness of will could be experienced as constraint—indeed, just as constraining as subjection to any external force. Berlin's fear was that any distinction between a higher and lower self, between the rational self and unreasoning desire, between true and false consciousness, would open the door for some groups to dominate others. Sympathetic critics have wondered whether this points to a necessary relationship between concept and outcome, or rather to historical contingency. Positive liberty, they object, need not deny individualism or promote coercion. Besides, is it reasonable to describe persons in the grip of psychosis as free, even if they have not been institutionalized? Human freedom tacitly includes some conception of normal human agency, which has internal as well as external preconditions.Footnote 14
Berlin understood the force of these objections. In part, his thesis was empirical and political rather than conceptual or philosophical. The perversion of the notion of positive liberty into its opposite, he wrote, “has for a long while been one of the most familiar and depressing phenomena of our time. For whatever reason or cause, the notion of ‘negative’ liberty … has not historically been twisted by its theorists as often or effectively into anything so darkly metaphysical or socially sinister as its ‘positive’ counterpart.” As a practical matter, then, it was more pressing to expose and oppose the aberrations of the latter.Footnote 15
But Berlin's defense of negative liberty was more than tactical, because it went to the heart of his conception of humanity. As he wrote in a terse profession of faith, “The central thought of common thought and speech seems to me to be that freedom is the principal characteristic that distinguishes man from all that is non-human; that there are degrees of freedom, degrees constituted by the absence of obstacles to the exercise of choice; the choice being regarded as not itself determined by antecedent conditions, at least not as being wholly so determined. It may be that common sense is mistaken in this matter, as in others; but the onus of refutation is on those who disagree.”Footnote 16 It is suggestive, though, that in this passage Berlin moves seamlessly from freedom as the absence of external obstacles to the exercise of choice to the choice itself as free in a more internal and metaphysical sense. While he approvingly cited Hobbes and Bentham, he could not follow them all the way.
By giving pride of place to negative liberty, Berlin aligned himself against Communism and with the liberal tradition. But in other respects Berlin's liberalism was anything but orthodox. Liberalism is usually (and not unjustly) linked to the Enlightenment, and Berlin once declared that “fundamentally I am a liberal rationalist. The values of the Enlightenment … are deeply sympathetic to me.”Footnote 17 But he departed, nonetheless, from the Enlightenment in a number of crucial respects.
In the first place, as Avishai Margalit has observed, “Though Berlin was a great believer in the morality of liberalism, he never trusted its psychology, especially not that which derived from the psychology of the Enlightenment, which he found downright silly.”Footnote 18 He found the standard liberal psychology—self-interest trammeled by reason and a sense of justice—woefully inadequate. We must, he thought, bring psychological complexity—the passions and emotions, the evil and destructive side of human motives, even the unconscious—to bear on the theory and practice of politics.
Although Berlin was a staunch defender of individual liberty, he was uncomfortable, as well, about what he saw as the Enlightenment's excessive individualism. Human beings, he thought, have a natural desire to divide into affinity groups, and he cautioned against underestimating the force of the simple desire to belong. Group-oriented particularism, he argued, is not antithetical to liberalism. Far from being an oxymoron, “liberal nationalism” denotes a viable form of contemporary politics. Berlin was both a Zionist and a liberal, and he saw no necessary contradiction between them.
Nor could Berlin accept the ahistorical thrust of Enlightenment-based liberalism. Not only is history a powerful force in human affairs, it partly constitutes what being human means in particular communities and epochs. This is not to say that human existence is historical through and through, but it is to caution against the easy belief that the aspect of our humanity that endures, unchanged, is more important than what is mutable.
And finally, Berlin spent decades arguing against the hopeful thesis, which many Enlightenment thinkers embraced, that the goods of human life are compatible with one another or tend to become so over time. The things that we value are plural and inharmonious, a brute fact that history is powerless to rectify. Liberalism is not, cannot be, about universal harmony. If the great liberal dream of “perpetual peace” is to be achieved, it is not through the convergence of the human species on the same concepts and values, but rather through the effective management of enduring differences.
The belief in universal harmony was one aspect of what Berlin saw as the Enlightenment's excessive faith in the power of reason, which shaded over into a rationalism that could and often did undermine liberty, and equality and tolerance as well. If what is truly good for human beings can be known with certainty, then those who possess that knowledge can claim authority over those who do not. And if the human good is everywhere and always the same, then moral truth and human diversity stand opposed, and truth-based authority may seek to repress the error that diversity represents. While Enlightenment thinkers criticized what they regarded as the obscurantism of the Catholic Church, they were anything but united in opposition to secular political despotism. The famous Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert praised the rule of the mandarin class in China, and Voltaire bluntly stated the underlying rationale: “The people are cattle, and what they need is a yoke, a goad and fodder.” It is fair to observe, as Mark Lilla does, that major Enlightenment figures such as Mendelssohn and Lessing advocated tolerance for other cultures and religions.Footnote 19 Nonetheless, Berlin was not wrong to discern a link between rationalism and the homogenizing use of political authority.
The Sources of Berlin's Heterodoxy
Berlin saw dangers to liberty, not only in dogmatic rationalism, but also in the reaction—the Counter-Enlightenment—that it sparked, and he devoted decades to studying the leading representatives of that movement. In so doing, he exemplified the liberal mind at its best—open, undogmatic, willing to consider even the deepest challenges to one's beliefs and hopes. As Michael Ignatieff puts it, “Berlin was the only liberal thinker of real consequence to take the trouble to enter the mental worlds of liberalism's sworn enemies.”Footnote 20
Of all the “enemies of human liberty,” it was perhaps the Catholic monarchist Savoyard Joseph de Maistre who most influenced Berlin's political outlook. Maistre inveighed against the Enlightenment and what he took to be its logical consequence, the Great Terror into which the French Revolution had descended. The root of the disaster, he argued, was a blindly optimistic view of the human species. Human beings are neither rational nor good. On the contrary (Berlin's summary), “Man is by nature vicious, wicked, cowardly, and bad. What the Roman Church says, what Christianity says, about original guilt, original sin, is the truest psychological insight into human nature. Left alone, human beings will tear each other to pieces.”Footnote 21 Humanity is not set apart from the rest of nature, which is the arena of ceaseless competition, brutality, and killing. Neither reason nor a voluntary social contract can protect human beings from one another, only authority backed by coercion, authority whose sources and claims cannot withstand rational scrutiny but which is, nonetheless, necessary and justified by the destructive irrationality that it restrains.
It is hard to imagine a starker antithesis to the tolerant civility Berlin preached and practiced. Nonetheless, Berlin prized Maistre as the prophet of, and guide to, the kinds of forces that will always threaten human liberty. The characteristic vice of liberalism is a shallow optimism, the belief that economic and social contrivances can eliminate, or permanently override, the darker aspects of our nature. A deeper and more sustainable liberalism must construct its domestic institutions and conduct its foreign relations with these harsher realities firmly in view. Liberal orders that do not understand this will be startled, perhaps overwhelmed, by new forms of antiliberalism. That is one reason why Berlin insisted that liberty needed its critics as well as its supporters, and why the defenders of liberalism must study their adversaries even more carefully than their friends.
In Berlin's account of nineteenth-century intellectual history, the Counter-Enlightenment critique of reason laid the foundation for the Romantic Movement and for nationalism. Romanticism emphasizes the power of the human will to create reality, especially the will of the rare creative genius. Nationalism, in turn, is the collective manifestation of the romantic will.Footnote 22 Individuals belong to particular and separate cultural groups, united by shared understandings and a common language, organized organically rather than mechanically. Nationalism provides a political home for cultural groups and their freedom and unity to the status of supreme values. So conceived, the nation becomes the primary focus of personal identification, its interests serve as the basis of moral justification, and its goals may be promoted by force. Despite the defeat of the most extreme manifestations of nationalism—fascism and Nazism—during the twentieth century, it persists as a long-term, perhaps permanent, feature of the human condition.
Nationalism makes most liberals uncomfortable, and for good reason. Liberalism tends toward universalism, prizes reason, and strives for peace; nationalism rests on particularism, promotes unreasonable group self-preference, and tends toward war. Berlin, nonetheless, saw no outright contradiction between liberalism and nationalism. He had some sympathy for Maistre's notorious denunciation of liberal universalism: “In the course of my life, I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians. … But as for man, I declare that I have never met him in my life; if he exists, he is unknown to me.”Footnote 23 Human beings gain identity through particularity; what we have in common does not define us, at least not fully enough so that we can recognize ourselves.
Understood organically, cultural groups can be antithetical to individual liberty, a fact of which Berlin was painfully aware. If individuals are conceived as “parts,” it is natural to regard them as inferior in dignity to the “whole.” But this pointed, not to the intrinsic evil of cultural groupings, but rather the need for political limits on the power of groups to coerce their members. As Michael Walzer suggests, Berlin advocated “liberal nationalism” as the best way of combining particular attachments and general principles in the political realm. This form of nationalism embodies a measure of equality and reciprocity, endorsing self-determination not only for one's own group but for others as well. It is no more oxymoronic than are parents who wish the best for their children while accepting a framework of common rules for grading and college admissions.Footnote 24
For both Walzer and Berlin, liberals who seek to expunge group attachments from politics are doomed to disappointment because these attachments are deeply rooted in our moral emotions. We all want a sense of belonging and a place (like “home”) where we are accepted for what we are. More than that: We all want self-determination and an end to the sense of humiliation that living under another's boot evokes. We all want to feel normal and live normally, which in modernity requires state structures that express cultural identities or at least allow for such expression. Berlin's lifelong Zionism reflected these emotions and expressed his conviction that within limits they were both honorable and conducive to human flourishing.
It was from Johann Gottfried Herder, above all, that Berlin derived his understanding of cultural identity and its importance. Summarizing Herder, Berlin declares that the right life for human beings is to live in “natural units” constituted by common cultures whose language expresses the group's collective experience.Footnote 25 To imitate other cultures is to live artificially, unnaturally. Each culture has its own center of gravity, its own principles and norms; each has its own unique merits; each must be judged in its own terms, not those of other cultures. We should not grade cultures, but rather understand and celebrate each one as a distinctive manifestation of the human spirit.
Berlin's emphasis on cultural diversity was rooted, not only in the thought of Counter-Enlightenment figures such as Herder, but also in his study of Giambattista Vico, the eccentric eighteenth-century Neapolitan writer whose reputation Berlin did much to revive. Vico revolted against Descartes's belief in the unity of scientific method, which he argued was inapplicable outside a limited sphere. The natural sciences could describe mechanical phenomena clearly and precisely, from the outside. But the human sciences required us to understand their subject-matter from the inside, because human conduct is intentional and purposive. Entering imaginatively into the interior lives of others is essential. To do this, we must learn how to interpret linguistic and cultural signs. And we must not assume that others are just like us beneath the skin. Human beings think and act differently in different historical epochs. We cannot hope to understand them unless we take history seriously. History is not a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. Rather, as Berlin put it, Vico conceived of history as “stages in the pursuit of an intelligible purpose—man's effort to understand himself and his world, to realize his capacities in it.”Footnote 26 The nature and capacities of the human species must be understood genetically as well as statically, and what changes from one epoch to the next is at least as important as what does not.
Through Berlin's interpretation, which has not gone undisputed, Vico becomes the forerunner of the progressive historicism of Hegel and Marx. But Berlin did not accept the idea of progress, and he did not see history as teleological. In this respect, he opted for Herder's nonprogressive pluralism. Herder emphasized, not the superiority of later over earlier epochs, but rather cultural variety. And his understanding of culture was organic rather than mechanical. Each culture is an ensemble of beliefs and practices in complex relation to one another, balanced against one another like a Calder mobile. We cannot construct our individual plans of life by breaking different cultures into their atomic parts and engaging in existential bricolage. However much we may admire Achilles, the Homeric virtues are inextricably linked to the brutality of a warrior society. Plutarch's Lives may move us, but even George Washington, America's greatest public classicist, had to refract the Roman virtues through the prism of an individualist and egalitarian society.
Value Pluralism
Berlin's determination to understand cultures, and their characteristic thinkers, on their own terms has given rise to the suspicion that he was a relativist. He was not. He distinguished between pluralism, which he espoused, and relativism, which he repudiated. The grounds on which he did so were varied, complex, and sometimes opaque. To follow his thought in this matter, I must now lay out his theory of value pluralism, one of the contributions to modern moral and political thought for which he is best known.
Berlin argued against what he called moral monism—the view that “all ethical questions have a single correct answer, and that all these answers can be derived from a single coherent moral system.”Footnote 27 His opposition was in part practical; he was convinced that monistic claims had helped bolster modern tyrannies. It was in part historical, derived from his study of different cultures and thinkers, above all Machiavelli. It was also empirical. He insisted that ordinary experience reveals the reality of deep moral conflicts rooted not in confusion but rather in the clash of worthy goods, and he refused to sacrifice the phenomena of moral life to the demands of theoretical coherence.
Berlin denied that there is a single highest value, that there is a single metric by which all values can be ranked, and that the many goods and principles we regard as worthy form a harmonious whole. Berlin was no subjectivist in moral matters; he believed that fundamental values spoke to objective features of the human species and the circumstances in which we are placed. But the things we rightly value are multiple, incommensurable, and in conflict with one another. In practice (and often in theory), to realize one value is to subordinate another. And not just in individual lives; cultures and moral codes constitute clashing ensembles of goods and principles. Pagan antiquity represented one moral outlook, Christianity another. There is much to be said for magnanimous pride, and also for reverent humility; for an ethics that gives pride of place to citizenship and for one that focuses on the well-being of the soul. But they cannot be made to cohere with one another; we must choose between them.
This necessity has led some interpreters to regard Berlin as an existentialist, advocating (or at least resigned to) radical ungrounded choice, the moral equivalent of a leap of faith. While Berlin offers some verbal ammunition for this view, it seems inconsistent with the main thrust of his thought. At various junctures he gestures toward a form of moral particularism. Even if we cannot choose among abstract moral concepts, we can make reasoned choices among goods and principles in particular circumstances when we are well acquainted with the facts of the case. In context, reasonable observers open to fact and argument will be able to agree that one option sacrifices too much along one dimension of value compared to what is gained along another and that the alternative course of action represents a better balance among competing but worthy claims.
Still, there are countervailing currents in Berlin's moral theory. At various points he invokes the language of human dignity, inviolable rights, minimal freedoms that we must not trade off against other goods. There is, he insisted, a common human horizon of basic categories in terms of which we understand human experience and the human species. It is these categories that enable us to communicate, however imperfectly, across lines of cultural difference, and also to render moral judgments. Indeed, Berlin insisted, the possibility of human understanding, communication, and judgment “depends upon the existence of some common values, and not on a common ‘factual’ world alone.” There is empirical madness, and also moral madness: “Those who are out of touch with the external world are described as abnormal, and, in extreme cases, insane. But so also—and this is the point—are those who wander too far from the common public world of values. … Acceptance of common values (at any rate some irreducible minimum of them) enters into our conception of a normal human being.”Footnote 28 This is the commonsense core of doctrines of natural law and universal rights, and the reason why we speak with confidence of the summum malum—the great evils of the human condition—even though we cannot specify a universally binding summum bonum. We need not be able to rank human communities and cultures from top to bottom to reach the judgment that Hitler's Germany was beyond the human pale.
We might then depict Berlin's view of the moral universe as an indistinct space divided by a horizontal line—universality below the line, pluralism above. If so, the real argument concerns the location of the line. Berlin does not seem to have regarded forms of government as falling below the line. He could imagine, for example, relatively decent and rights-regarding autocracies, and also populist democracies that systematically invade the private sphere.Footnote 29 Similarly, while liberty and decency require an economic minimum, they do not dictate socialism, or even social democracy. (Berlin's own inclinations were moderately center-left; Ignatieff characterizes him—plausibly—as a liberal social democrat.) In Berlin's view, the matters reserved, not to theory, but to individual or collective choice were those that defined the key differences among human beings and communities—a zone of indeterminacy wide enough to rule out most forms of paternalism and cultural condescension without placing manifest evil beyond the scope of moral condemnation.
Berlin's value pluralism has come in for its share of criticism. Proponents of monistic moral theories—Kantian, utilitarian, and others—are not persuaded that rigor and coherence should yield to moral intuitions, however strongly felt. While regret may be the emotional concomitant of much moral choice, it is not ipso facto “rational.” Ronald Dworkin argues that Berlin was too quick to diagnose a clash of basic values: before we conclude that liberty and equality conflict, we should do our best to construct the most attractive conceptions of those values, a process in which integrity among values is itself a value.Footnote 30 Bernard Williams retorts on Berlin's behalf that not all moral (or legal) questions have single right answers and that recognizing this fact helps us take politics seriously as the best way of dealing with pluralism, and also to treat our fellow citizens with respect as the bearers of views different from, but not necessarily inferior to, our own.Footnote 31 It is always sensible, Charles Taylor suggests, to look for ways to relax the tension among basic goods, or at least to achieve tradeoffs and balance among them at a higher level.Footnote 32 Berlin would have regarded this, I believe, as a friendly amendment, but easier to state in theory than to realize in practice.
Berlin was a value pluralist in morals and a liberal in politics, a conjunction that has given rise to a burgeoning literature. At one end of the continuum stands John Gray, who argues that Berlin's pluralism rules out liberalism as a universally valid account of political ideals; liberalism is at most one among many acceptable political options, the choiceworthiness of which depends on local circumstances rather than on general features of morality or human existence.Footnote 33 At the other end is George Crowder, who argues that Berlin's pluralism leads, not just to liberalism, but to Enlightenment liberalism that gives pride of place to the value of personal autonomy.Footnote 34 My own view is that value pluralism functions as a principle of estoppel in moral and political argument, defeating claims that one way of life above the line is unequivocally preferable to others above the line, and that the space for individual and political choice remaining once we have ruled out such claims is roughly congruent with the liberty that liberalism seeks to defend.Footnote 35 This argument is unlikely to end anytime soon, but for those theorists and citizens who regard pluralist morality and liberal politics as the most plausible points of departure, it is an important and inescapable zone of contention.Footnote 36
Conclusion: Berlin's Enduring Contribution to Moral and Political Thought
Although much of what made Berlin so distinctive was rooted in his personal biography and circumstances, he made contributions to moral and political thought that future scholars are likely to ponder, and some to emulate. His characteristic mode of analysis fused history and philosophy, at once making history philosophical and philosophy historical. His lively sense of time and place never overrode the larger significance of the great minds whose thought he traced. He exercised to a remarkable degree what one of his intellectual heroes, Giambattista Vico, called fantasia—the capacity for entering into and imaginatively reconstructing the thoughts of individuals very different from ourselves, living in cultures whose basic premises may seem odd, even repellant.
Turning from method to substance, Berlin's clarification of the differing dimensions of liberty and their practical consequences has often been criticized but never dismissed. His distinction between monism and pluralism retraces what Plato called the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry. Berlin dared to suggest that philosophic inquiry itself may vindicate the poetic focus on conflict and mystery rather than the “philosophical” presumption of harmony and intelligibility. And while the great totalitarian movements of the twentieth century have receded into history, Berlin showed why the totalitarian temptation is an enduring feature of the human mind. Judge Learned Hand once commented that “the spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” Berlin agreed, but with the caveat that living with uncertainty is difficult and uncomfortable, a hard-won achievement for both individuals and communities that we must never take for granted.
