ISAIAH BERLIN
27
before I pack up completely; I do not know if! can manage to do .
this ....
Krauze:
Autobiography?
Berlin:
No, no. Certainly not.
Krauze:
No memoirs?
Berlin:
No, no memoirs. I shall allow myself the luxury of not writ–
ing memoirs. One has to be a great deal more interested in oneself
than I am to write good memoirs; and I'm not greatly interested
in myself, and never have been.
I delivered some lectures more than ten years ago in
Washington about some of the intellectual origins of romanticism,
which I think is perhaps the biggest single shift in European
thought-a mutation, as such changes are called now-since the
Renaissance .
It
shook the classical tradition-the belief in objec–
tive knowledge of good and bad, beautiful and ugly, noble and
ignoble, as well as in factual and logical truth; it stressed inven–
tion and creativity as opposed to discovery and truth.
It
is respon–
sible for the dangerous but powerful and fascinating idea that
men do not discover values but make them, create them; that, by
rules you-or your group, nation, class, party, church-have
created, you create your life; you do not imitate pre-existing eter–
nal models. I tried to say something about this in the lectures
delivered in Washington, the Mellon Lectures, and I should like
to write a book about the vastly influential attack on realism,
objectivity, truth, the scientific approach to the world that sprang
from all this-mainly among the Germans.
Krauze:
I have a last question: What do you feel about the spread of
a totalitarian mentality in the Third World (and even closer-you
have it here in Northern Ireland)? How do you see the role of the
liberal intellectual when faced with such an acute ideological
polarization?
Berlin:
I think that anybody who believes that there is one truth and
one truth only, and only one true path towards it, only one solu–
tion to the problems that arise and one that must be put into prac–
tice at all costs, because it alone will save his class, country,
church, nation, society, party-mankind itself-anyone who
believes that is likely in the end, if he acquires power, to create a
situation in which blood will be shed, the blood of those who
doubt or oppose him, who jeopardize the possibility of salvation.
Men of this kind argue that those who do not take the one true
