ISAIAH
BERLIN
23
dramatize it and make of it a romantic dream to satisfy his pride
and give him, in his own eyes, a superior status, one that made it
possible for him to operate politically as he wished. As far as I can
tell, I'm not subject to either of these temptations. I have never in
my life either wished not to be aJew, or wished to be one. AJew
is a Jew, as a table is a table. Things and persons are what they
are and one accepts them naturally. I've never been either proud
or ashamed of being aJew any more than I'm proud or ashamed
of possessing two arms, two legs, two eyes.. ..
Krauze:
Concerning the place of the history of ideas in the humani–
ties: today's historians are mainly interested in economic and
social history. Can you tell me something about the importance of
the history of ideas? It has been said that it is old-fashioned . . . .
Berlin:
There are two things I should like to say about that. One is–
and it's a platitude-that ideas are extremely important; much
more so than various Marxist and non-Marxist theories have
made them out to be.
If
you consider the impact of Marxism itself
on the history of the world, it's a history that could scarcely have
occurred without it. It's a self-refuting doctrine for Marxism to
maintain that ideas are, in some sense, the by-product, or a kind
of spiritual reflection or ideological consequence , of material cir–
cumstances.
If
Marx had not lived beyond the age of twelve, it
seems to me that the history of Europe and the world might have
been somewhat different. Christianity is an idea, Marxism is an
idea, Freudianism is an idea-or rather, they are clusters of ideas.
Who can deny their power, their great causal influence, beyond
that of the situations in which they arose?
My other thesis is this: there are people nowadays, the critics
you have in mind, who maintain that it is no good treating ideas
outside the context of history. In order to write about ideas you
must know the people who formulated them: what their motives
were, and what their purposes were, and the kind of societies in
which they lived; and what problems they were trying to answer
and what kind of language they used in coping with these prob–
lems (and each other). Because men think largely in words, their
ideas and concepts are shaped by the usage and role played in
their lives of the actual linguistic terms in which they think . We
are told that unless one does this, one is not going to understand
what they are saying. Therefore the way in which people, say in
