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that Utopian ideals cannot be constructed in the historical world because
of the diversity of human languages with their incommensurate concep–
tual frames .) Berlin's focus in this volume is not upon the comparative
adequacy of the liberal tradition but upon the significance for contem–
porary history of the recurrent debate, in diverse ways, between monism
and pluralism in modern political thought.
Thus in the essay, "The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West," that
debate which had been dramatically developed in his intellectual
autobiography emerges with significant variations. For Berlin shows how
the Platonic monistic ideal became embodied in the ideas of a universal
natural law, related in Europe, to the status of a universal Roman law
and a single Roman Catholic faith. The pluralist challenge to this
universalism was ever present in the irrepressible local traditions. These
traditions influenced the Protestant Reformation and found expression in
it. The Protestant location of religious salvation in individual faith rather
than in a universal code of practice was a catalyst for the emergence of
the pluralist idea. Yet Berlin , as a chronicler of the paradoxes of cultural
history, proceeds to demonstrate that the forces that gave birth to the
Protestant Reformation also gave rise to modern physics with its power–
ful reinforcement of the idea of universal truths that are discoverable and
verifiable by men and women of all cultures, historical periods or social
inheritance. With the extension by the Enlightenment of this vision of
scientific truth from modern physics to the domain of economic and
political events, the basis had been laid for modern utopianism,
particularly as expressesd in many Marxist, socialist, and anarchist political
movements.
The decisive counter for pluralism was developed in the thought of
critics of the Enlightenment, especially among the Romantics like
Herder. Political or moral ideals for the Romantics were not universal
Platonic archetypes found by rational inquiry but creations of the Self,
whether an individual or a collective self. In another work, Berlin had
cited Herder's outcry against the classical ideal in Germany that "we are
not Greeks, we are not Romans," and it is a corollary of the quest for
self-expression that the ideal society for a German must be different than
it would be for a Frenchman of the Enlightenment. Although Berlin
comments and clarifies the dark role that this romantic idea of self ex–
pression has played in the will to power of modern nationalism, he
demonstrates its potential for pluralism in its rejection of any universal
and uniform social model that is to be imposed upon another person.
Since every moral ideal is the creation of one group ego or cultural self,
there cannot be any Platonic republic, utopian ideal or perfect society
produced for another society. The political corollary of this principle of
the necessary imperfection of fixed ideals is that each society must be left
