DAVID SIDORSKY
On Isaiah Berlin
There is an old dogma which can be traced back before Aristotle's argu–
ment with the Platonists to the conflict between followers of Parmenides
and of Heracleitus that all philosophers can be divided into two camps:
monists who are the champions of the One and pluralists who are the
champions of the Many. This doctrine rises to the stature of an aphorism
only with its topping and undercutting conclusion that all historians of
philosophy can be divided into two groups: those who believe that
all
philosophers are either monists or pluralists, and those who do not. The
recurrent theme of Isaiah Berlin's new collection of essays,
The Crooked
Timber of Humanity,
sketching the career of ideas that have shaped mod–
ern politics, particularly some of its most destructive and catastrophic
tendencies, is that monism, particularly in its utopian varieties has been
the central, harmful illusion of the twentieth century.* (Berlin writes of
our century in an essay on European unity, "It is by now a melancholy
commonplace that no century has seen such remorseless and continued
slaughter of human beings by one another as our own.") The
recognition of pluralism, traced to the thought of romanticism and of
the counter-Enlightenment, appropriately mixed with an openness to re–
ality derived from empiricism and a moderating of ambition generated by
skepticism, provides the intellectual antidote.
The most attractive formulation of the argument is in the opening
autobiographical essay, "The Pursuit of the Ideal." In it, Berlin examines
what might be termed, to adapt Keynes's title for his account of Cam–
bridge, "Oxford's early beliefs," the ideal of historical progress which he
shared. It was a viewpoint derived from the historicism of Marx and
Hegel that was built upon the Enlightenment faith in the application of
the methods of the natural sciences
to
social problems. This faith is seen
as a continuation of the philosophical rationalistic tradition, exemplified
by the confidence of Socrates in the power of argument. In Berlin's
special case it also represented the moral to be drawn from the great
Russian writers that there was a way to transform the human condition
through the properly educated heart, even when a proper education may
require in a Rousseauist Tolstoy or a Slavophile Dostoevsky some un–
learning of the false sophistication of the West.
Alongside the autobiographical memoir Berlin provides an analytical
formulation of this belief in "the Platonic ideal" that "all genuine ques-
*The Crooked Timber of Humanity. Clrapters in tire History of Ideas.
By Isaiah Berlin. Alfred
A. Knopf $21.50.
