Appendix to the Second Edition
TO JEAN FLOUD
18 September 19701
Wolfson College
Dear Jean,
About Machiavelli. I see that I have failed to convince you. Let me try again. The usual view (and, I add intolerably, yours) is that Machiavelli was writing how to create durable States – that he spelt out what he regarded as the only efficient method of doing so and that, in the course of this, he simply left out moral considerations, i.e. that he did not mind whether the courses he recommended were moral or immoral, since he was not interested in the subject. The fact that they offended against Christian and generally current European morality may have been clear to him, or it may not, but if it was, he did not bother to say so. It was as if he were interested in building pyramids for pharaohs and pointed out that in order to do so half a million slaves might have to be used up. Was this humane, shocking etc.? This was not the question he put to himself and did not answer. What the implications are for morality is for others to draw, none of his business.
This is what I disagree with so strongly. Machiavelli makes it plain in the Discourses (less clearly in The Prince, but pretty clearly there, too) that the men he admires and wishes the Italians to become like are the citizens of republican Rome, or Periclean Athens, or at least imperial Rome under the ‘good’ emperors. And he wants men who will recreate these conditions – wants them, not merely tells you how to generate them, or what they should be like. His talk of corruption makes quite plain what his morality is and [that] he has one. You do not want to call it morality because you associate this term with rules of a Hebraic, Kantian kind – so do I, but Trotsky, who talked about ‘Kantian-liberal-Quaker-vegetarian nonsense’,1 meant just this, and thought that for a Marxist, for example, there weren’t any such rules. All there was was the ideal society and the kind of human beings whom the society would generate, or who were necessary for the purpose of creating this society, so that everything was judged in terms of its making for or against, promoting or retarding, consciously or unconsciously, individually or collectively, the development of this kind of exfoliation of human reason, potentialities etc., or whatever the Marxist ideal may be; and this was called Marxist morality, quite correctly, it seems to me.
It is in this sense that Machiavelli was a moralist, i.e. he had an ideal of what men should be like in his head, but he did not relate this to some universally acceptable standard – say natural law, which men as such cannot get away from, or some notion of ‘the normal human being’, who is violated by cruelty or exploitation, or enforced ignorance, or the like – or did not derive it from some teleological scheme, whether of a Christian or Aristotelian kind, or from some absolute morality of a biblical or Kantian or G. E. Moore-ish kind, or utilitarianism, or anything else which he supposed men – at least rational men – wherever they were, would be bound to accept ‘after a little reflection’, as Oxford philosophers used to say in the 1920s, because it was true and the recognition of its truth was in a way the test of being rational. He simply advocated this ideal because he believed in it and wanted others to believe in it, and judged men and institutions by it; but he is perfectly aware that it is in collision with Christian virtues and beliefs, at least as normally understood by Christian preachers, and he records this fact without condemning Christianity as being false – contrary to man’s nature, as Hobbes, if he were a little more courageous and sincere, would have had to say; as Spinoza was correctly thought to have believed; as the eighteenth-century materialists quite openly and boldly did say.
The argument between us is, I think, whether Machiavelli can be said to be compounding or at least conveying a moral ideal at all, and I think you have reservations about supposing, say, Aristotelian morality – not that of rules, but that of kinds of human beings whom it is desirable to generate, and who can only be generated, say, in cities of not more than 10,000 citizens – is a morality at all because I think that morality for you is a system of ‘do’s’ and ‘don’t’s’, as I suspect it is for me and for most people we know, if not for, let us say, Nietzsche, who was certainly a moralist, what else? Nor for Marx, who would not have bound his spell on so many if he weren’t one, whatever he may have thought that he was. Neither sociology nor economics are going to send people to their deaths or to kill others, unless they have a very powerful moral component, i.e. hold out an ideal life in the name of which, etc.
But all these people believed that they had found the answers to the question how one should live and what one should do, which excluded any other answers as being false, and their premisses and methods are fairly clear. Machiavelli differed from them in that, although his methods and his premisses are clear enough, he is not concerned to maintain that a rational man must believe what he believes and must act as he recommends, although he is extremely anxious that he should, but if this rational man chooses to listen to Christian preachers he dooms himself to impotence politically, and if he chooses to do that, Machiavelli has nothing to say to him.
If you read the last chapter of The Prince, which is the most passionate prayer for a saviour of Italy, or if you consider his fury and contempt for bunglers and fumblers, his lamentations about the perpetual possibility of decadence and corruption, his view that only the strongest medicines can possibly cure people of the backsliding and downward slope to which they are, alas, constantly addicted – strong men with ruthless methods can just keep them from it. Cesare Borgia might just do it. You will surely agree that he is not interested simply in what makes States function well, but mainly in how one could get back to the glories of Rome or Athens, because only in such a framework can men develop what he regards as the most desirable, the most glorious, the best kind of life, although Christians evidently do not agree, and if so, down with them, they obstruct what he wants to see done. Telling people that if what he regards as the ultimate repository of values – the patria – is in danger, then nothing is noble or ignoble, good or bad, any method is allowed. Men will forget ordinary values and throw in everything they have to save the only thing worth living for – citizenship of the city.
What is this if not moral exhortation of the most passionate kind? You can call it political morality if you like, but there is for him no other, in fact he thinks that morals are, so to speak, a branch of politics, exactly as Aristotle did. There is no non-political morality, at least none that he is interested in (he knows there is one, of course, the Christian one). Why is this not an intensely moral position? To enunciate that, tell people that what they have been taught for ages is not compatible with the only thing that is worth achieving, a glorious pagan State, and that common morality is not compatible with the only life worth leading for a fully developed man. My God! That is what people choose not to look at, even at the present, because people like to think that all good things can somehow be combined by skill, by good fortune, if not in this life, somewhere else, and this is what, if what Machiavelli says is true, cannot be so.
There now, have I convinced you? I expect not.
Yours,
[IB p.p. G. Hylton-Potts]
TO A. J. P. TAYLOR
10 November 1971 [carbon]
[Headington House]
Dear Alan,
Thank you very much for your letter of 27 October. You are perfectly right – anyone who read the Discourses without wanting to assimilate them to some pet philosophy of their own could have seen what you and I see without difficulty, namely, the vivid contrast between pagan or Roman virtues and Christianity, and their total incompatibility. However, if someone with the fantastic influence of Croce over all Italians (have you ever known any other case of a thinker who hypnotised the whole of a country – all its thinkers from right to left – to the degree to which this not very first-rate philosopher managed to do? I cannot) keeps talking about the anguished humanist, and how painful Machiavelli found it that men were not better than they were, it is obvious that people will believe anything. Your proposition about British historian schoolmasters demonstrates this: they also thought that Plato and the colonial office were saying the same things. H. W. B. Joseph certainly did; so did that great thinker Lionel Curtis. But do not let us go on.
Now, about your disagreement. I do not think that you are quite right about Machiavelli and the non-Roman community. He certainly believed in social virtues and only these: all his thoughts were about politics, power, glory, vitality etc. But I do not think that what he contrasts it with was a rival community – Christendom or the Church – but the unworldly virtues of believing Christians, which he thought were fatal to the kind of edifice he wanted to see. He knew perfectly well that, if not Christians, then at least Stoics or Epicureans in Athens, or at any rate before Rome, were precisely what you speak of, men who repudiate all loyalty to the community, or at any rate ignore the community, or think that duties towards it are of a very secondary kind. This is more or less what Zeno said. The Romans then turned all this into civic virtue, much as the Victorian schoolmasters did with Christian ethics, but the original Stoics were pure individualists.
All the Stoic and Epicurean teachers were after is methods of how not to mind things. And the gist of their doctrines is that you can only do this if you exclude everything you cannot control, e.g. public life. The Stoics thought that you could take part in it if you did not really mind whether you were a success or not; Epicurus thought it was better to keep out of it altogether if you were to escape depression, fear, going to pieces.
But I agree with you that real subversion of the public ideal only gets going after the Reformation. I agree with you again that it is colossally liberating. I only wish that I could believe that you were right. Do you not think that all this passionate nationalism of the Africans and Asians – not just the Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese – and the millions of Koreans, Siamese etc., and the similar sentiments of Latin American Marxists, or the young men who think they are, is not ‘organic’, is not anti-American, or anti-Western, or anti-somebody nationalism? Apart from Russia in 1917, has any social movement of a radical kind succeeded except arm-in-arm with national sentiment? I wish I could believe that what you said really is advancing with huge steps. It seems to me, alas, that apart from our corner of the world, where what you say is perfectly true about intellectuals, most people with loyalty to groups, movements, race, colour are more violent than ever – I am sure you would agree if you listened to the Latin American revolutionaries, or the Arabs I met in New York. Any evidence you had to the contrary would be, to me at any rate, enormously welcome.
As for Machiavelli, I do not really agree: I do not think it is against other communities that he was asserting the claims of the patria. He thought the Church in Italy was abominable because it did prevent Italian unity and liberty; but he did not mind it in other States – in France, or Germany, where it did not have this effect (he supposed). What he was defending the State against, I think, is the lack of virtù, the least degeneracy or weakness on the part of individuals, or otherworldliness, which seemed to him just as fatal. Any strong organisation – a republic, a monarchy, a Church (e.g. as founded by Moses), any fighting unit was OK – what would not do is the lack of guts, apathy, lack of public spirit, boredom with public affairs, the kind of weakening of strenuous civic feeling which you acclaim, and which I, a little more hesitantly perhaps, also welcome. Do you not agree?
Yours ever,
[Isaiah]
TO JOSEPH ALSOP
11 November 1971
Wolfson College
Dear Joe,
[…] As for Machiavelli, I am sure you are right: Machiavelli preferred a vigorous republic, but certainly preferred a vigorous and successful despotism to a feeble and degenerate State. What he wanted was a secular State of a glorious Roman kind, and not chaos, mess, fumbling and bungling, and religious cant. Do you think that he began writing the Discourses – then was exiled – wrote The Prince and came back to the Discourses? This sandwich theory has certainly been defended. Myself, I do not see the enormous incompatibilities involved: I agree with what I think is your opinion, namely that, even if he was a republican by conviction, what he wanted was a strong and united Italy, or at least a strong and united Florence – means would differ in accordance with the situation.
As for micro-States, Machiavelli did, of course, admire France, Spain etc. – macro-States in his world – and the last chapter of The Prince does want the invader out of the whole of Italy and not his bit of it alone. Nevertheless, you are right. There is something altogether blind – historically – about Machiavelli. I do say in my piece […] that he knows nothing about economics, is wrong about his military views (it is not by citizen armies that great States are won and held), and is altogether unaware of either the religious or the technological changes in his world, which are about to ring the knell of the little city-States and usher in the huge national States. As for the Lord Shang, I did read an essay about him and, indeed, a comparison between him and Machiavelli which someone drew in a journal in New York three or four years ago. Shang seems to me a good deal more fascist than Machiavelli.
Oddly enough, I had a letter from A. J. P. Taylor telling me that Machiavelli was out of date because he was interested in battles between communities or States or societies, whereas what is happening now is that the whole notion of loyalty to institutions – the State, the Empire, the Church – is on the way out; that it is plainly bankrupt in the Soviet Union, that China is making a last stand for it, that nobody in Europe believes in this at all, nor in the United States, and that this is splendid. I do not believe anything of the kind – Africa, Latin America, Asia are on a mounting curve of nationalism and loyalty to huge, impersonal wholes, etc., and not at all on the path towards enlightened individualist self-interest (fancy Taylor praising that! he just hates public schools, I think, and the fact that Victorian schoolmasters identified Christianity and the British Empire is what eats him, I think). The American Husak? I daren’t pronounce the name, or my letter might blow up in your hands. He disapproves of Nixon’s overtures to China at the moment, and is in a state of particular happiness towards the end of his long life. But if it came to that … he would be an arch-liquidator. Of course, one makes a last stand. But it won’t come to it in your time or mine and, by the time it does, it will probably be some very decadent Russo-Americans, a Montezuma–Cleopatra regime against the highly civilised set of Chinese Romans, governed by some new Lord Shang. But long after us, believe me.
Yours ever,
Isaiah
TO OMAR HALIQ
25 November 1971 [carbon]
[Wolfson College, Oxford]
Dear Dr Haliq,
[…] As you know, Hess’s Zionism – although it was not called that – was not aggressively nationalistic in any way. He did regard the Jews as a nation and agreed with you and me that land is essential for nationhood. Hess, I ought to explain, was not a rabbi – Marx occasionally called him that in a mocking manner to indicate Hess’s incurable attachment to his people (from which Marx managed to detach himself completely), and, perhaps, as an ironical reference to his religious temperament and moral outlook, neither of which Marx, as you may imagine, cared for. Whatever his views, Hess, although descended from a religious family, was not a conforming member of the Jewish or any other religion.
You naturally ask what Hess thought about the fate of the Palestinian Arabs. I imagine that at the time at which he wrote – the 1860s – there was no Palestinian nationality. The Arabs were a subject people governed by Turks and occupied large territories, of which Palestine was one of the least populated compared to Egypt or even Syria, at least in the fertile crescent. I have no doubt that if the question of the future of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine had been brought to his notice, he would have abhorred the idea of conquest, and assumed, as a good many people did, that although the Jews were entitled to a country of their own, and although their sense of nationhood was inextricably bound up with memories and symbols of Jerusalem and Palestine, [and] they could therefore, in Hess’s somewhat Hegelian vision, only obtain normal realisation in the land to which they had remained attached in so astonishing a manner for so many centuries – [he] would have assumed that some peaceable arrangement with the Arab natives of the country could have been arrived at, either through a bi-national or multi-national State, or voluntary exchanges of population with generous compensation to those displaced, always provided they had voluntarily agreed to it, or something of this kind.
No doubt this was impracticable: in the age of growing nationalism mild, rational and peaceful solutions were in general growing less likely. Nevertheless, I think this is what he might have hoped for, unlike his hero Marx (to whom he remained loyal until the end), who regarded nationhood in general as a by-product of economic structures of capitalist society – at least in modern days – and would have regarded the whole problem of nationality, whether this or that population was entitled to this or that piece of land, as a piece of bourgeois nonsense. After all, he approved of the annexation of Danish territory by the Prussians, and Engels thought that it was as well that the Czechs be absorbed in a higher German culture – there is a good deal of contempt for, and desire to abolish, tiresome small nationalities which blocked the way to centralised progress.
All this was not part of Hess’s outlook, and it is one of the main differences between him and orthodox Marxism. I think he would have been very distressed, as you must be and I certainly am, by the present situation. I think that he would have agreed with those who say that solutions are impossible where there is a genuine collision of genuine rights – and that all one wants to promote is a situation entailing the least degree of injustice. What this is there might be disagreement about – but if the principle is accepted, murderous clashes can surely be avoided. At least that is my feeling.
I was much taken aback by the fact that you wondered whether I could even hesitate to reply to your enquiry, because you are a Palestinian Arab. I am not a barbarian, and to have reacted as you supposed I might would have been barbarous and odious. And let me assure you that there are a great many people who think as I do (I mean hold the kind of opinions that you can easily recognise in my essay on Moses Hess), and who would be equally offended if it were suggested that they harboured ill-will against Palestinian Arabs who were compelled to leave their country by recent events. You really must not think this: if ever you come to England and wish to come and see me, I should of course welcome you. If even the sharpest collisions of rights – let alone opinions – were to lead to indelible hatreds, humanity would deserve to perish from the face of the earth; or, if not humanity, at any rate those who deliberately nurse hatreds in their breasts. I fear that I am now talking in a Hess-like manner, and I only hope you will not disapprove of me as strongly as Marx did of poor idealistic Hess.
Yours sincerely,
Isaiah Berlin
FROM DAVID CECIL
18 September 1979 [manuscript]
Red Lion House, Cranbourne, Dorset
[…] I have read a great deal about Disraeli in my time – as well as being a fan of his novels. I think that your 15 or so pages are easily the best & most penetrating things about him, explain him better, & pluck the heart out of his mystery more revealingly – than all the work of Monypenny & Buckle & Blake & Maurois1 etc put together – For you discriminate the essential sincerity & profound perceptiveness that went along with all that flamboyant, barely-disguised, sham jewellery with which he decks out his pronouncements, also with his open “unscrupulousness” in pursuing his personal glory – In spite of all this, his religion was real; so was his feeling for history and aristocracy, even his veneration for Queen Victoria. My father, a comic contrast – for he was a sort of model of upright chivalrous virtue – whose conscience worried him with a Tolstoyan intensity – knew Disraeli when he was old & loved & revered him – & the account he gave of him wholly fits in with yours – though of course he could not explain it as you have done & show how it was rooted in his relation to his race & ancestry. As far as I know, no one has done this as you have done – I repeat, it is far the most illuminating thing I have ever read on Disraeli. […]
TO SIDNEY MORGENBESSER
1 April 1980
Headington House
Dear Sidney,
Having re-read the review in the NYRB by M[orgenbesser] and L[ieberson]1 at least twice, I feel more than ever grateful. There is nothing like getting more than one’s due: I have received a large measure of this all my life, and still it surprises, delights and embarrasses me – the last, truly. But in the case of the review I cannot help feeling a degree of pride (to which I dare say I am not entitled) at the fact that my writings could have generated so full, interesting and beautifully written an essay. I know that you must have been particularly careful of my excessive sensitiveness, as you know it to be; nevertheless, I cannot help believing that some of the favourable things are true. ‘I believe X, though it may not be true’ – is one allowed to say that? I am also clear that you have substantially added to my sum of happiness. The fact that I suspect that this was done intentionally does not diminish this sum. It will last me for a while; then the old sense of inadequacy and attacks of guilt will, of course, begin again. But for the moment I feel fine. Thank you both very, very much. […]
You say ‘if it is an “inescapable characteristic” of our lives that we make choices among absolute claims […] then are we not in some sense unconstrained, undetermined, “free”?’ Then you quite correctly refer to ‘“pluralist” insights’ which I commend in various thinkers.1
I think there is a non sequitur here. The fact that we are faced with the need to make choices between absolute claims does not entail that we are not ‘determined’, any more than it does in the case of any other choices determined (so it has been maintained) by the weather, genes, environment, education, ideology etc. etc. – all the old pre-Marxist, pre-Freudian causes. If consciousness of freedom to choose (God, do I have to have Friedman as an ally?) is itself a mere psychological fact, causally determined as, let us say, Hobbes or Skinner or Ernest Nagel hold, determinist theories will, for these theorists, account for choices between absolute claims as easily as for the choices of those whose activity is dominated by a conscious or unconscious faith in a hierarchy of harmonious values. It is possible to hold that some choices are determined, some are not, but incompatibility between ultimate values seem to me to throw no light on this distinction; consequently, ‘the important consequences’ […] do not seem to me to ‘follow’ either. Similarly […], it does not seem to me to follow from the fact that men choose among incompatible alternatives (are not all alternatives incompatible?) that behaviour cannot be explained by general laws. Why not? Men must choose; choices might be predictable by an outside observer armed with a general law. I do not believe this, of course, but I do not think it follows from incommensurability, incompatibility etc. of either ends or means. Please tell me if I am mistaken about this.
Yours ever,
Isaiah
[…]
TO SIDNEY HOOK
9 July 1980
Headington House
Dear Sidney,
Your piece on Against the Current in Commentary1 has just reached me, and I have every reason to thank you for it: it is courteous and kind, based on wide and solid knowledge of the issues with which I tried to deal; the criticisms it makes are penetrating and often just; but above all you truly understand what it is that I am trying to say – for that alone I am, like everyone who tries to say something, deeply grateful.
There are three or four points, however, on which, I think, I evidently failed to make myself clear. I do not believe that in fact we differ about them, but I think you sometimes misinterpret what I endeavoured to say. Your review is so kind and generous that I do not want to write a letter to Commentary – I would much rather address myself to you in order to find out whether we do not in fact, as I suspect, agree. It may be that we do not, but I doubt if the readers of the periodical could be expected to take a lively interest in what are, in any case, not central disagreements (no need to answer – I do this only for the private record between us).
[…] You rightly say ‘How can we test the truth of an insight or attribution of motives without ultimate reference to behaviour? But they are not here explored.’ My only comment on this is that Vico, whom I am discussing, does indeed seek to test the truth of his insights precisely by studying behaviour – whether burial customs, linguistic usage, physical ritual or activity – art, gestures – or whatever. Before Marx, he certainly assumed, if he did not explicitly state, the unity of theory and practice. The historian’s first duty, if I read Vico aright, is to grasp what attitudes, conception of the world, etc. the various types of behaviour of primitive men, etc. embody and express – much more that than questions of explicit belief or self-descriptive verbal data on the part of individuals and societies, the behaviour of which he seeks to interpret.
[…] in connection with Machiavelli, you ask, very reasonably, why we do not experience ‘the same horror and revulsion when we immerse ourselves in the study of antiquity as when we read Machiavelli’s advice to those who would rule the State’. Also why traditional classical education does not induce this reaction in its beneficiaries. It seems to me that what Machiavelli did was to select the most (to us) morally unpalatable aspects of the pagan world, and exaggerate these enormously; and then contrast them with the moral and political beliefs of men ostensibly brought up as Christians, at any rate as professed. When one actually studies the classical world it does not in fact present that spectacle of continuous violence, treachery, mendacity or, for that matter, virility, self-assertiveness which Machiavelli extols. I do not look on him as a dependable historian of antiquity: if men were as he describes them, it is difficult to understand how societies could have come into existence at all. Nevertheless, there is enough contrast between Christian, or even Judaeo-Christian, ethics and some of the values held up by pagan authors to entail that the idea of a Christian State – as ‘State’ was understood in Graeco-Roman terms – is necessarily a contradiction; and to point this out explicitly, I think, was upsetting. Nobody but the ancient sceptics, not Augustine (who did, after all, believe that enough justice would prevent States from being ‘huge robber bands’),1 nor Pascal (who lived after Machiavelli), ever quite said that. The idea that political success was literally impossible if the citizens all practised Christian virtues, that Christians, including Christian princes, must avoid political ‘realism’ of any kind if they are to escape perdition – that was a pretty tough (if in fact implausible) analysis. It is one thing to contemplate the splendid heroes of the classical past and concede that some ruthlessness was indispensable to their glories: another to say that atavism, worthy in itself, is the path to political ruin.
[…] you say that I mention J. N. Figgis’s view ‘only to dismiss it out of hand’. Do I?2 The idea that Machiavelli suspended ‘the habeas corpus acts of the whole human race’ is precisely what I think he did. Figgis is right, as you say, to allow that raison d’état in desperate situations is one thing, but that to regard it as the normal method of operation is horrifying. Surely I did draw precisely that contrast? What Machiavelli regarded as normal, let us say Bellarmine (on Hus), or those who commit judicial murder, regard as only permissible in the direst predicaments.
[…] Marx and Disraeli. […] you say ‘Berlin maintains that the psychological need to overcome the taint of their origins was largely at the root of Disraeli’s ideologies’ etc. Surely not. Neither thought it to be an actual ‘taint’. The search for identity, a sense of dubious status, being unmoored from one bank and not moored to the other – this kind of uneasiness is something different from consciousness of a ‘taint’. You say ‘surely not all Jews to whom Orthodoxy was no longer credible, or who were nurtured in a secular environment, were compelled to seek a new identity?’ Were they not? Everyone whom I have ever met in that condition was less or more in that situation – sometimes in a perfectly open-eyed and un-neurotic way, but sometimes embarrassed to various degrees. You go on: ‘Are we to infer that the phenomenon of self-hatred is an inescapable consequence of anti-Semitism?’ I do not know about ‘inescapable’, but it is very common, surely? You say that ‘there is not a line to indicate that Marx had any doubts, uneasiness and self-questioning about himself as a Jew’. I think this is true, and if I imply the opposite I am surely wrong. What I wanted to stress was that, given the similarity of his origins and social position to those of Heine, Börne, Lassalle etc., and the anti-Semitism to which he was undoubtedly exposed (not only from Bakunin), his total failure, save on one fleeting occasion, to indicate in any way that he sprang so recently from a discriminated-against Jewish community is, to say the least, abnormal, and surely implies – if it does not demonstrate – repression of embarrassing attributes. As for Disraeli, according to my view of him, he suffered from no self-hatred, only from self-consciousness, about being a Jew.
[…] You are perfectly right that the need to belong is not a need to belong to a nation, but to this nation. But to value something, not because it is good or bad, or right and wrong, but solely because it is ‘mine’ or ‘ours’, is new. Arguments hitherto sought to demonstrate that this or that characteristic or policy or group or act was good or bad, right or wrong; after Herder & Co. an act or a quality of character was justified because it was German, and expressed the outlook of my or your nation, a class, a race – that is not simply ‘the love of our children and parents because they are our own’.1 ‘My country right or wrong’ is the opposite of what ‘bons patriotes’ means in the French Revolution – pride in the fact that it was my country, France, which expressed all these objectively right and noble truths. ‘Un-American’ is bad because it is un-American, not because ‘American’ = universally good, always, everywhere.
[…] You are absolutely right that critics of the Enlightenment are different from its enemies. When I delivered some lectures in Columbia on Vico, Hamann and de Maistre, I vaguely thought of publishing them as a book (in fact, I was committed to doing so, and, alas, reneged on my obligation). I realised that Vico was a critic, while Hamann and de Maistre were real enemies of the Enlightenment, who hated everything about it – unlike Herder, and of course Rousseau or Kant, who were critical, but, as you say, were taking part in a family quarrel, not a bitter onslaught from another land. In the end I found I was more interested in the critics than in the enemies, and my essays on Hamann and de Maistre remain unpublished.1 Hence the book entitled Vico and Herder, not, as originally intended, Three Enemies of the Enlightenment. […]
Yours sincerely,
Isaiah
1 No longer: they appear in TCE and CTH respectively.
1 From a tape recorded at IB’s home in Paraggi on 8 September after JF’s departure. JF had visited in the summer and she and IB had talked about Machiavelli after a visit from Arnaldo Momigliano in which Machiavelli – on whom IB was finishing a paper – had been discussed.
1 413/2 [here loosely rendered].
1 Biographers of Disraeli.
1 Jonathan Lieberson and Sidney Morgenbesser, ‘The Questions of Isaiah Berlin’ and ‘The Choices of Isaiah Berlin’ (principally a two-part review of Against the Current), New York Review of Books, 6 March 1980, 38–42, and 20 March 1980, 31–6.
1 ‘If the “permanent question mark in the path of posterity” [74 above] planted by Machiavelli is closely scrutinised, important consequences for our conception of human beings seem to follow from it. If it is an “inescapable characteristic” [“Two Concepts of Liberty”, in Liberty (xxiv/1), 214] of our lives that we make choices among absolute claims, choices that may have fruitful or ruinous consequences for human life, then are we not in some sense unconstrained, undetermined, “free”? And if so, then doesn’t this indicate an important fact about “human nature”, about man and his actions, individual or collective, past or present? Berlin’s essays on “The Counter-Enlightenment” and on Giambattista Vico explore the historical growth and consolidation of the “pluralist” insights he commends in Machiavelli as they were extended by other thinkers to address this question.’ ‘The Questions of Isaiah Berlin’, 40.
1 Sidney Hook, ‘Isaiah Berlin’s Enlightenment’, Commentary 69 no. 5 (May 1980), 61–4.
2 See 81 above.
1 ‘Remota itaque iustitia quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia?’ (‘So without justice what are kingdoms but grand larceny?’), The City of God, 4. 4.
1 loc. cit. (462/1), 63.