Berlin!  Berlin!

Isaiah Berlin, The Power of Ideas, Edited by Henry Hardy, Chatto & Windus, (Random House), £20

Most of us remember Sir Isaiah Berlin, if at all, as a gnomelike figure being vigorously nodded over by Michael Ignatieff on BBC2.

A Nabokov character: born in Riga, witness to the Russian Revolution, educated at St Paul’s School and Corpus Christi College Oxford, Fellow of All Souls.  His status as a celebrity intellectual of the Encounter type is not in question.  How lasting his legacy will be is more doubtful.

Isaiah Berlin, the “visitor from the future”, met the poetess Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad in the autumn of 1945.  The appearance of Randolph Churchill in the courtyard shouting up to the window: “Berlin!  Berlin!” must have given the Soviet secret police something to think about.

When soon after Akhmatova received an ovation on her return to give a poetry reading in Moscow this was taken as a rare sign of opposition to the regime.  “Who organised this ovation?” snapped Stalin, thereby launching Andrei Zhdanov on his well-known career as a literary critic.

Akhmatova believed this episode was one of the causes of the Cold War.

Isaiah Berlin died in 1997.  This collection of nineteen articles from different periods spread across fifty years of his career was already in the works.  Henry Hardy’s Preface makes clear it was his project rather than Berlin’s, adding worryingly, “I have… filleted out or adapted a handful of passages”.

It is Chatto & Windus’s ‘Lead Book’ their Press Release states.

For a philosopher Isaiah Berlin writes reasonably clearly.  He sticks to the point.  There is little sophistry.  This does tend to reveal the often commonplace nature of what he has to say.  “Eggs are certainly broken - never more violently or ubiquitously than in our times - but the omelette is far to seek, it recedes into an infinite distance.”  Indeed!

He weighs the thinkers of the Enlightenment, smiles at rationalism, speaks up for “reflective men [!] in general”.  Here and there a boastful note enters, as in ‘My Intellectual Path’: “what later came to be called Oxford Philosophy began in my rooms in the evenings”.

He has nothing new to say about the philosophy of Karl Marx and on ‘Realism in Politics’ the following assertion is nothing short of banal: “it seems plain that situations do sometimes arise in which groups of men possessed by intense beliefs, given favourable conditions (too various to specify), can cause vast changes to occur.”

Fancy that.  These… men now, who would you be thinking of?  Well apparently Lenin and Robespierre were ideologues, hence unworldly and bad, Lincoln, Bismarck and Roosevelt idiot savants, successful though they knew not what they did.

Perhaps philosophers should stick to generalities.  Berlin’s claim is transparently untrue.  All three “pragmatic” leaders he referred to had very pronounced ideologies and said so, loudly and often.

Machtpolitik, free labour, internationalism and reform politics are just as much ideological positions as collective ownership of the means of production.

The difference seems to be that Berlin approves of one but not the other.

Thought-provoking, sometimes just provoking, this book is likely to tell you more about Giambattista Vico, Vissarion Belinsky and Chaim Weizmann than any other this season.

Tribune,  24 March 2000