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PARTISAN REVIEW
stumbled upon our shores . All civilizations and cultures have some–
thing to be proud of; all can boast, to greater or lesser degree , and
some few to a very great degree, of having enriched the arts , sciences,
and technical abilities . And in all it is possible, too , to trace here and
there, in scant or abundant portions, the practice of freedom. But
those enclaves in which the initiative, the whims, the high-handedness
of the individual could express itself were never so numerous and
constant, nor did they elsewhere interact and infect the rest of society
to the point of entirely reordering it, as in the West. There is no other
civilization which has, in a sense , as its birth certificate , those Ho–
meric hexameters composed, ·it is said, by a blind and itinerant poet
in the infancy of the West. This surely explains the might of a civili–
zation which grew and became strong enough to dominate , bend, or
transmute other cultures with its own customs , beliefs , institutions,
and values; and which little by little, at times by force, at times
through commerce, sometimes by a combination of the two, went
about destroying, assimilating, or influencing those other cultures .
To the point that today, not one of them dares renounce the idea of
freedom which all countries, regimes , and doctrines affect to worship
and to wish to institute , though many of them vitiate it as they en–
dow it with dubious properties. (Isaiah Berlin has detected at least
forty variations on the idea of freedom. )
True enough, then, that freedom - not an abstract freedom with
contradictory definitions, but a real, attainable freedom of specific
initiatives, offering itself without obstacles, or with surmountable
obstacles - has been the driving force of material and social progress.
It is responsible, if not for the disappearance of injustice and political
abuse, at least for their radical reduction and for the awareness that
they should be battled and condemned; and for humanity's most
cherished collection of artistic and spiritual creations. Nevertheless,
we must not forget that freedom has also exacted from mankind a
burden of misfortunes, and that to conquer and preserve his free–
dom, man has had to pay a high price.
For it is possible that in no other sphere besides that of freedom ,
do we see so clearly the essential complexity of the human deed,
which is never wholly positive or negative , good or bad, but always
relatively more of one or the other, in quantities quite difficult to
measure. These are the "contradictory truths" which Isaiah Berlin
has pondered so lucidly.
In the economic sphere, that same freedom which has been the
driving force of progress and development is also a source of inequality
