This widespread internationalisation of our lives is perhaps the best thing that has happened in the world to date. Or, to be more precise, because the progress towards this goal is not irreversible – nationalists could interrupt it – the best thing that could happen. Through this process, poor countries will become less poor, since they will fit into markets where they can use their comparative advantages to good effect, and prosperous countries will achieve new levels of scientific and technological development. And more important still, democratic culture – the culture of the sovereign individual and civil and pluralist society, the culture of human rights and the free market, of private enterprise and the right to criticise, the culture of decentralised power – will grow stronger where it already exists and will extend to countries where now it is a mere caricature or a simple aspiration.
Is there a certain utopian ring to all this? Of course. And, even in the best of cases, all this is all a distant possibility, which will not be achieved without setbacks. But, for the first time it is there, within our grasp. And it is up to us whether it becomes a reality or it disappears like a will-o’-the-wisp.
Cambridge, November 1992
The Man Who Knew Too Much
If in addition to his brilliance, Isaiah Berlin (1909–97) had not been so well liked and held in such high regard, then it is quite possible that he would never have been the universally recognised intellectual figure that he had become by the time of his death, and that most of his work would remain unknown to the majority of his readers outside a handful of academic colleagues and students in Oxford and in American universities where he taught. Throughout his life he showed an Olympian lack of interest in whether or not his essays were read or published – he sincerely believed that they were not important enough to merit that honour – and he also decided not to write his autobiography or write a diary, as if he were not remotely concerned about the image that he might leave for posterity (‘Après moi le déluge’, he liked to say).
Those of us who did not attend his classes and yet still feel ourselves to be his students will never be able to thank enough Henry Hardy, the philosophy postgraduate at Wolfson College (that Isaiah Berlin founded and ran in Oxford between 1966 and 1975), who, in 1974, proposed to his supervisor that he should collect, edit or reedit his writings. However incredible it might seem, up until that date, he had published only three books, on Marx, Vico and Herder, and his four essays on freedom. The rest of his vast written work was unpublished, packed in dusty boxes in his office, or buried in scholarly journals, Festschriften, in folders containing testimonials, speeches, reports, reviews, obituaries – or in archives of official institutions, feeding the worms. Thanks to the persuasive gifts of Hardy, who managed to overcome Isaiah Berlin’s tenacious reticence to excavate his own bibliography, which he did not think was justified, and to Hardy’s titanic research and rigorous editing, between 1978 and 1999 there appeared Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Magus of the North, The Sense of Reality and The Roots of Romanticism, the books that really cemented the prestige of Isaiah Berlin inside and outside the university. In the near future, his voluminous correspondence will also be published. Without the devotion and tenacity of Henry Hardy, this master of liberal thought that we know today would not exist. And without Michael Ignatieff, another friend and persistent follower of the professor from Latvia, he would still be a mere ghost, without flesh or blood, shielded behind a scattered bibliography.
Just as the volumes compiled by Hardy proved to the world that the insinuations of his rivals were absolutely false, when they put around the idea that Isaiah Berlin was merely a brilliant conversationalist, a salon philosopher, without the patience or the energy to undertake work of great intellectual scope, so, thanks to Ignatieff – a journalist and historian, born in Canada, a graduate of Toronto and Harvard, now resident in England – we now know42 that the author of The Hedgehog and the Fox had an interesting and, at times, dramatic and adventurous life. His life was not just spent, as might first appear, submerged in the rituals and the peaceful cloisters of the elegant unreality of Oxford, for he was involved, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, in the great events of the century, like the Russian Revolution, the persecution and extermination of Jews in Europe, the creation of Israel, the Cold War and the great ideological conflicts between Communism and democracy in the post-Second World War period. The character that emerges from Ignatieff’s book – an affectionate and loyal book, but also an independent work because, true to Berlin’s ethical principle par excellence, that of fair play, he does not hesitate in pointing out his errors and defects along with his virtues and excellent qualities – is still very attractive, a modest, cordial, amenable and sociable man, around which the legend that followed him throughout his life was built. But the picture is also more complex and contradictory, more human and more profound, of an intellectual who, despite having received major honours in his county of adoption, Great Britain – President of the Royal Academy, Rector of an Oxford college, recipient of a knighthood from the Queen and of the Order of Merit – always felt deep within himself that he was an expatriate and a Jew, supporting a tradition and a community that had been, since time immemorial, the object of discrimination, unease and prejudice, a condition that contributed decisively to the insecurity that shadowed him through every period of his life and also, doubtless, shaped his prudent outlook, his desire to integrate into society and to go unnoticed, away from the glare of power and success, and also shaped his systematic defence of tolerance, pluralism and political diversity and his hatred of fanaticism of any form. Behind the inexhaustible conversationalist who, it seemed, bewitched guests at dinners and parties with the quality of his stories, his fluency and his extraordinary memory, there hid a man torn by the moral conflicts that he described before, and better than, anyone else: freedom and equality, justice and order, the atheist Jew and the practising Jew, and a liberal fearful that unrestricted freedom might lead to ‘the wolf eating the lambs’. The clear, serene and luminous thinker suggested by his writings comes out in the portrait painted by Michael Ignatieff. But beneath the shining clarity of his ideas and his style there appears a man overwhelmed by doubt, who made mistakes and was tortured by these mistakes, who lived in a state of discreet but constant tension that prevented him feeling totally integrated into any society, despite all appearances to the contrary.
Although he never considered writing his autobiography, Isaiah Berlin agreed to talk to his friend Michael Ignatieff, in front of a tape recorder, about all the events in his life, on condition that Ignatieff would only publish the results of his research after Berlin’s death. The conversation lasted ten years and ended in the final week of October 1997, a few days before his death, when Sir Isaiah, very fragile and racked by illness, invited his biographer to Headington House, his country house in Oxford, to correct some facts that his memory had clarified, and to remind Ignatieff, insistently, that his wife, Aline, had been the centre of his life, and that he was for ever in her debt. Ignatieff rounded off these personal memoirs with very detailed research in Russia, the United States, Israel and England, interviewing hundreds of people associated with Berlin, and combing newspapers, books and archives, so his biography, without being definitive, is certainly a very complete account of the life of the great thinker, linking it to the development of his interests, convictions, ideas and intellectual work. It is a literary biography, in which the life and the work are melded.
Although Isaiah Berlin spent only his first twelve years in Russia (he was born into a well-off Jewish family in 1909 in Riga, at a time when Latvia belonged to the Russian Empire), the experiences of those early years of his childhood, affected by tremendous social convulsions and family upheavals, left an indelible impression and shaped two aspects of his personality: his horror of totalitarianism and dictatorships, and his Judaism. The main event of this childhood was, without doubt,
the Bolshevik revolution which he saw close up in Petrograd, where his family had taken up residence after fleeing from the insecurity and the threats that the Jewish community was subject to in Riga. In Petrograd he witnessed, at the age of seven and a half, scenes of street violence that made him immune for ever to revolutionary enthusiasm and ‘political experiments’. In this period, his hostile attitude towards Communism was born, and he remained faithful to it throughout his life, even at the time of the Cold War, when the great majority of the intellectual community of which he was part was Marxist or close to Marxism. He never yielded to this temptation; and his anti-Communism led him to extreme positions that were rare in him, like defending the United States during the unpopular Vietnam War and refusing to sign a protest against Washington in response to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (Castro ‘may not be a Communist’, he wrote to Kenneth Tynan, ‘but I think that he cares as little for civil liberties as Lenin or Trotsky’43). This attitude led him to commit an act that was not very consistent with his pluralist ethic: he used his academic influence to block the appointment to a Chair in Politics at the University of Sussex of Isaac Deutscher, an exiled Jew like himself, but an anti-Zionist and a left-wing intellectual, the author of the most famous biography of Trotsky. His somewhat dubious response to those who accused him of behaving in this affair like ‘the anti-Communist witch hunters’ was that he could not support for a Chair anyone who subordinated scholarship to ideology.
Fleeing once again, this time not only from fear but also from hunger, the Berlin family returned to Riga for a short time in 1920, and on the train they were subjected to insults and attacks from anti-Semitic passengers and officials, which, according to Berlin, made him realise for the first time – and for ever – that he was not Russian or Latvian, but Jewish, and would always be so. Although he was an atheist and was educated in England in a secular environment, he was always committed to the community and the culture of his ancestors, even to the extreme of strictly observing Jewish religious rituals at home. He was a curious practising non-believer. And, as a Zionist, he collaborated closely with one of the founders of the State of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, although, unlike a number of his relatives, he never thought of emigrating and becoming an Israeli citizen. A lot of this work was done during the Second World War, when Isaiah Berlin was serving as an analyst and political adviser to the British government, in New York and in Washington, which must have caused him much anguish and many moral dilemmas, given the tense and sometimes antagonistic relationship that existed between the Foreign Office, that was pro-Arab, and the Zionist leaders. Knowing in detail these contradictions in Isaiah Berlin’s personal life helps us to understand the secret root of one of his most famous theories: that of ‘contradictory truths’.
The Latvian Jewish community into which Isaiah was born spoke Russian, Latvian and German, and although the child learned these three languages, he identified most with Russian culture, a language and a literature that he studied all his life. In England, while he was educated at a most distinguished Christian public school, St Paul’s in London, and then, thanks to his outstanding grades, at Oxford, he continued studying Russian alongside philosophy, so that although the umbilical cord that bound him to Russia was cut at twelve years of age, when he became a British citizen and was assimilated into the life of his second country, his intellectual sympathy and love for Russian language and literature remained. We can see this in the remarkable assurance and knowledge that he brought to his many essays on Russian writers and thinkers (Russian Thinkers is, for me, his best book), like those dedicated to Tolstoy, Turgenev, or his admired model, the liberal Alexander Herzen. On his return to Russia for a few months in 1945 as a British diplomat – a journey that would have an incalculable effect on his emotional and political life – the two great writers that he met, Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, were literally astonished at the fluent elegance with which this professor from another world spoke the cultured Russian of former times, and also that he was so well acquainted with a literature and authors that were beginning to become ever more invisible or remote in this society that was subject to the iron censorship of Stalin.
The Second World War radically changed the private world of Isaiah Berlin. Without it, it is very likely that his life would have been spent, like those of other dons in Oxford, among the halls where he first gave classes on philosophy and later on political and social ideas, in libraries and in his rooms in the most prestigious and traditional of all the colleges in the university, All Souls, where he had been elected as a Fellow at the incredible age of twenty-three (the first Jew to be given a place at that college). But when the war broke out, this ‘asexual and erudite’ life underwent an abrupt transformation: the young don, whose fame as a polyglot and specialist in European cultures – Russian and German in particular – was already widespread in academic circles, was sent to the United States by the British government, to New York and Washington, to act as an adviser to the Foreign Office and the Embassy in its dealings with the White House. Between 1941 and 1945, Sir Isaiah did extraordinary work for his country of adoption, not just through his analyses of the international situation and the delicate diplomatic relations between the Allies, which are perhaps the most read among all the Foreign Office briefing papers (in 1944 Churchill himself was so impressed by them that he wanted to know who had written them. The Foreign Office response described him as ‘Mr Berlin, of Baltic Jewish extraction, a philosopher’. Churchill wrote to Eden, ‘The summaries are certainly well written’, and Eden replied in his own hand that he thought the papers had ‘perhaps a too generous Oriental flavour’.44 He also established a network of contacts in the highest social, academic and political circles in the United States, thanks to his personal charm and ease in society: a pyrotechnic conversationalist, he was the toast of diplomatic dinners and meetings, and, apart from hypnotising and amusing people with his anecdotes and his knowledge, he left his interlocutors with the rather gratifying impression that, by spending time with him, they were immersing themselves in high culture. This snobbish aspect of his life – which was always full of social engagements, dinners, galas and receptions in the highest echelons of society – curiously did not affect in any way his intellectual work, in which he never made concessions or lapsed into banality. It is not out of the question to see this somewhat frivolous aspect of his personality as a compensation, a substitute, for sex, of which it appears he had little or no experience until his later years. All his friends in Oxford were sure that he was a confirmed bachelor.
Perhaps this is the reason why he was so affected by an entire night that he spent in 1945, in a soulless flat in Leningrad, with the greatest living Russian poet, the unfortunate Anna Akhmatova. Isaiah Berlin had been sent for a few months to the British Embassy in Moscow and he took a nostalgic trip to Leningrad, in search of books and memories of his childhood. In a bookshop, someone overheard him asking after the poet and offered to take him to her flat, which was close by. Anna Akhmatova was fifty-six years old, twenty years older than Berlin. She had been a great beauty and a very famous poet before the Revolution. She was now in disgrace, and, since 1925, Stalin had not allowed her to publish a single line or give readings. Her tragic life was one of the saddest stories of those terrible years: the Soviet regime shot her first husband and imprisoned her third husband in a Siberian labour camp. Her son Lev, a talented young man with whom Isaiah Berlin spoke briefly on that night, would be sent to the Gulag for thirteen years, and the Soviet commissars blackmailed Akhmatova, offering to keep him alive if she wrote abject odes in adulation of the dictator who was tormenting her. Because the suffering of the poet greatly increased after that night, Isaiah Berlin would always feel remorse that he had been involuntarily responsible for this. (In the archives of the KGB, there is memorandum on the conversation, in which Stalin remarks to the cultural commissar Zhadanov, ‘So now our nun is consorting with British spies, is she?’45)
He always emphatically claimed t
hat the eleven or twelve hours that he spent with Akhmatova, were chaste, full of intense and sparkling conversation, and that in the course of the night she recited to him a number of the celebrated poems from the book Requiem that – in defiance of persecution – she was writing from memory, a book that would come to represent one of the highest testimonies of spiritual and poetic resistance against the Stalinist tyranny. The talk was of literature, of the great pre-Revolution authors, many of them dead or in exile, about whom Berlin could give her information, and, discreetly, they touched on Anna’s very difficult situation, her life always in the balance, seeing repression all around her and waiting for it to fall on her at any moment. But it is a fact that, although there was not the slightest physical contact between them, at noon the next day the austere Isaiah Berlin returned to the Hotel Astoria jumping with joy and proclaiming, ‘I am in love, I am in love!’ From that moment right up to his death, he would always state that this had been the most important event in his life. And Akhmatova’s reflections on that visit can be found in the beautiful love poems in Cinque. A story of impossible love, of course, because, from then on, the regime cut all communication and contact between the poet and the outside world, and in the following seven years, Berlin could not find out where she was living. (When he asked the British Embassy in Moscow to make enquiries for him, he was told that it would better for Akhmatova if he did not even try to contact her.) Many years later, in 1965, at the beginning of the thaw in the Soviet Union, Isaiah Berlin and other dons proposed the great Russian poet for an honorary doctorate in Oxford, and the Soviet authorities allowed her to travel to England to be awarded the doctorate. She was by now an old woman, but her prolonged ordeal had not broken her. Their meeting was cold, and when she looked around the sumptuous residence, Headington House, where Berlin lived with his wife Aline, she remarked caustically: ‘So the bird is now in its golden cage’.46