Isaiah Berlin
NATIONALISM: PAST NEGLECT AND
PRESENT POWER
The history of ideas is a rich, but by its very nature an
imprecise field, treated with natural suspicion by experts in more exact
disciplines, but it has its surprises and rewards. Among them is the
discovery that some of the most familiar values of our own culture are
more recent than might at first be supposed. Integrity and sincerity
were not among the attributes which were admired-indeed, they were
scarcely mentioned-in the ancient or medieval worlds, which prized
objective truth, in matters of theory, and getting things right, in
matters both of theory and practice. The view that variety is desirable,
whereas uniformity is monotonous, dreary, dull, a fetter upon the
freely-ranging human spirit, "Cimmerian, corpse-like," as Goethe
described Holbach's
Systeme de la Nature,
stands in sharp contrast
with the traditional view that truth is one, error many, a view scarcely
challenged before-at the earliest-the end of the seventeenth century.
The notion of toleration, not as a utilitarian expedient to avoid
destructive strike, but as an intrinsic value; the concepts of liberty and
human rights as they are discussed today; the notion of genius as the
defiance of rules by the un trammelled will, contemptuous of the
restraint of reason at any level-all these are elements in a great
mutation in western thought and feeling that took place in the
eighteenth century, the consequences of which appear in various
counterrevolutions all too obvious in every sphere of life today. This is
a vast topic which I shall not directly discuss: I wish to draw attention
to, at most, only one corner of it.
The nineteenth century, as we all know, witnessed an immense
growth of historical studies. There are many explanations of this: the
This essay was given as a Lionel Trilling Lecture at Columbia University. An earlier
version of some of theses in this essay, although in a different form, was included in an
article entitled "The Bent Twig: A Note on Nationalism" in
Foreign Affairs
51 (1972),
11-30.
