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Berlin has managed to stay above the theoretical battles that have
characterized the writing of political and social ideas in the last several
decades. Perhaps one reason he can transcend all camps is that he
simply knows too much to get involved in disputes that even the
intellectual giants of the past could not resolve. Consider, for example,
the question of whether the intellectual historian should concern
himself with trying
to
disclose the perennial issues and timeless truths
of political texts or whether he should study the historical context
which presumably brought the texts into being. This battle between
the ancients and the moderns , between those who, like the late Leo
Strauss and his students, want
to
elucidate moral truths, and those
who, like Quentin Skinner and the contextualists, want to provide
factual knowledge, represents the struggle between two incompatible
value systems that may reside within the mind of a single thinker.
Berlin makes this clear in his essay on Montesquieu, a philosopher
who desired to equate law with the "eternal" principle of justice as a
"necessity of nature," and a social scientist determined to demonstrate
that the "spirit of laws " reflected the changing moral habits and beliefs
of particular societies. Even during the Enlightenment the philosophy
of truth could not survive the sociology of knowledge.
Although the kind of intellectual history Berlin prefers to write
has never been satisfactorily defined, it is possible to note three themes
that run through the corpus of his works as well as the collected essays
in
Against the Current.
First of all , in contrast to the trendy structural–
ists who have called for a history without a subject, Berlin has always
held, as did Hannah Arendt, that the thinking subject is both the agent
and mirror of human consciousness. Michel Foucault concluded
Order
of Things
with the chilling observation that if the categories by which
man constitutes himself continue
to
crumble, "then one can certainly
wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge
of the sea. " Confronted by such brooding nihilism, it is heartening to
have Berlin remind us that it is the problems man discovers, and not
necessarily resolves, that command our respect; and in his essays Berlin
dramatizes elegantly that moment of discovery by thinkers who must
think against the current to overturn assumptions, what social scien–
tists would call, less elegantly, "paradigms. " Foucault desires to see
man's mind "erased" because of the "scandal" of knowledge, the
historical spectacle of a human mind that cannot penetrate objective
reality. To Berlin it is the glory of the human mind that it continues to
pursue that which it cannot claim to possess . ("Mind," Trotsky once
wrote, "limps after reality.") The great intellects are, for Berlin, not the
