ISAIAH BERLIN
347
Fichte, Michelet, and after them by sundry awakeners of the national
souls of their dormant peoples in the Slav provinces of the Austrian or
Turkish empires or the oppressed nationalities (as well as the domi–
nant majority population) ruled by the tsar; and in the end throughout
the world. There is a distance between Burke's assertion that the
individual may be foolish but the species is wise, and Fichte's declara–
tion, a dozen or so years later, that the individual must vanish, must be
absorbed, sublimated, into the species. Nevertheless the general direc–
tion is the same. This kind of value-laden language may at times affect
to be descriptive, aimed only at illuminating the concept of nation–
hood or historical development. But its influence on conduct has
been-and has by those who use it been intended to be-as great as that
of the language of natural law or of human rights or of the class war or
of any other idea which has shaped our world.
Finally, by a development which need cause no surprise, full–
blown nationalism has arrived at the position that, if the satisfaction of
the needs of the organism to which I belong turns out to be incompati–
ble with the fulfilment of the goals of other groups, I, or the society to
which I indissolubly belong, have no choice but to force them to yield,
if need be by force.
If
my group-let us call it nation-is freely to realise
its true nature, this entails the need to remove obstacles in its path.
Nothing that obstructs that which I recognise as my-that is, my
nation 's-supreme goal, can be allowed to have- equal value with it.
There is no overarching criterion or standard, in terms of which the
various values of the lives, attributes, aspirations, of different national
groups c;an be ordered, for such a standard would be supernational, not
itself immanent in, part and parcel of, a given social organism, but
deriving its validity from some source outside the life of a particular
society-a universal standard, as natural law or natural justice are
conceived by those who believe in them. But since, on this view, all
values and standards must of necessity be those intrinsic to a specific
society, and its unique history, to a national organism, in terms of
which alone the individual, or the other associations or groups to
which he belongs, if he understands himself at all, conceives all values
and purposes, such appeals to universality rest on a false view of the
nature of man and of history. This is the ideology of organicism,
loyalty, the
VoLk
as the true carrier of the national values, integralism,
historic roots,
La terre et Les morts,
the national will; it is directed
against the forces of disruption and decay categorised in the pejorative
terms used to describe the application of methods of the natural
sciences to human affairs-critical, "analytic" reason, "cold" intellect,
