ISAIAH BERLIN
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equality, human rights (particularly those of the labouring masses), for
individual and social liberty, the reduction of misery, oppression,
brutality, the emphasis on what men had in common, not on their
differences. Yet, to put it at its simplest, the differences were no less real
than the generic identity, than Feuerbach's and Marx's "species–
being." National sentiment, which sprang from them, fell on both
sides of this division between light and darkness, progress and reaction,
just as it has within the communist camp of our own day; ignored
differences assert themselves, and in the end rise against efforts to ride
over them in favour of an assumed, or desired, uniformity. The ideal of
a single, scientifically organised world system governed by reason was
the heart of the programme of the Enlightenment. When Immanuel
Kant, who can scarcely be accused of leanings towards irrationalism,
declared that "from the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing
can ever be made," what he said was not absurd.
I have one more suggestion to offer. It seems to me that the
thought of the nineteenth and early twentieth century was astonish–
ingly Euro-centric. When even the most imaginative and the most
radical political thinkers of those times spoke of the inhabitants of
Africa or Asia, there was as a rule, something curiously remote and
abstract about their ideas. They thought of Asians and Africans almost
exclusively in terms of their treatment by Europeans. Whether these
thinkers were imperialists, or benevolent paternalists, or liberals and
socialists outraged by conquest and exploitation, the peoples of Africa
and Asia were discussed either as wards or as victims of Europeans, but
seldom, if ever, in their own right, as peoples with histories and
cultures of their own; with a past and present and future which must be
understood in terms of their own actual character and circumstances;
or, if the existence of such indigenous cultures was acknowledged, as in
the case of, let us say, India or Persia, China or Japan, it tended to be
largely ignored when the needs of these societies in the future were
discussed. Consequently, the notion that a mounting !lationalism
might develop in these continents was not seriously allowed for. Even
Lenin seemed to think of national movements in these continents
solely as weapons against European imperialism; and of support of
them only as being likely to accelerate or retard the march towards
revolution in Europe. This is perfectly intelligible, since he and his
fellow revolutionaries believed that this was where the centre of world
power lay, "that the proletarian revolution in Europe would automati–
cally liberate the workers everywhere, that Asian or African colonial or
semicolonial regimes would thereby be swept away, and their subjects
