ISAIAH BERLIN
25
Ideas of sufficient power and depth-that is to say, ideas that
concern the central interests of human beings as such (and there is
such an entity as human nature-men in the twentieth century
cannot be totally different from men of the fourth or fourteenth
century
B.C.
or there would be no understanding of the past at
all)-these ideas, and the meanings of the words that express
them, survive misinterpretation, just as very bad translations of
works of a sufficient degree of universal significance-for exam–
ple, bad translations of Shakespeare-nevertheless get through;
bad translations of the Psalms (where there is a continuous tradi–
tion of what the Hebrew words mean) still mean something;
indeed, a great deal. Of course historicist critics are saying some–
thing true: in order to understand ideas fully, or understand the
unity of thought and practice, we have to perform difficult histori–
cal, sociological, psychological work: yet these ideas would not
have survived at all if this had been indispensable to grasping
something of their essence directly.
Krauze:
About your transit from philosophy to history of ideas: why
and when did it take place?
Berlin:
I was always interested in the history of ideas, even when I
was a fairly typical Oxford philosopher. It may have started, to
some extent, I think, because I came from Russia and-not alto–
gether consciously-experienced a contrast of two cultures, which
makes one aware of differences of concepts, ideas, forms of life.
But that was not, I think, the main cause of my interest. I was
commissioned to write a book on Karl Marx, in 1933 or 1934. I
didn't know much about Karl Marx, but I thought that Marxism
was likely to become more important rather than less. I knew that
if I didn't write a book on Marx, I would never bring myself to
discover what Marxism was. Marx is not the clearest of writers;
his disciples increase the difficulty by evasion and obscurity; and
it did not seem tempting to read volumes upon volumes of Marx
and Engels and their immediate disciples as an occasional intellec–
tual occupation. At least, I did not think I could do it in this way.
So I thought that if I had to write a book on Marx I would have to
make myself read this body of writing, nearly all of it. In the
course of reading Marx, I realized that I had to read about
Marx's forerunners. I read about, and then read the works of, the
French
philosophes
of the eighteenth century, to whom I was led by
Engels and Plekhanov. Then I read about their critics in
