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DAVID SIDORSKY
to do its own thing, rather than to be guided into conformity with the
laws which best suit universal human nature.
This principle can be clearly differentiated from the realistic or prag–
matic argument that a perfect society can be projected as a theoretically
coherent idea but is unattainable in practice. For the notion of a single
perfect society is conceptually incoherent if it must include an
incompatible set of expressive values. This distinction can be seen in the
parallel criticism of anarchistic utopianism. Again, the argument is not
that a society in which the use of force or the threat of force would
be
replaced by the persuasive power of love and reason is an ideal possibility
which cannot be realized. Since every society necessarily requires that its
members will be bound by some set of rules, norms or laws, and the idea
of a rule or law presupposes a sanction for its violation, the assumption
that there could be an anarchic society in which sanctions would be in–
admissable is conceptually contradictory. On this analysis, it would follow
that one reason for the escalation of coercion by utopians lies in the fact
that while seeming to goad persons along the path to a harmonious even
if asymptotic ideal, they are asserting moral authority in the name of a
self-contradictory idea. It is this theorem of the impossibility of a perfect
society which is the logical analogue for Berlin of the expressive Kantian
aphorism that from the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight
can be made. It reinforces the political moral of the limited scope that
should be given to politics in social transformation.
Berlin ascribes to the romantic thought of the nineteenth century a
critical place in refuting the idea of a single universal society that can
progress toward perfection, primarily because of its view that ideals are
the creation, rather than the discovery, of plural groups. Yet even while
delineating this he indicates his refusal to "condone the extravagances of
romantic irrationalism." For the romantic view that ideals are the cre–
ation of the self also meant that these ideals were not checked by such
Enlightenment icons as "Reason" and "Nature." An ideal could be pur–
sued even though it violated the moral criterion, singularly stressed by
Kant but implicit to some degree in any moral behavior, of not asserting
moral imperatives which were in conflict with those of other communi–
ties of rational beings. Similarly, contrary to naturalism, a political course
could be followed even though the evidence available by inquiry into the
relevant facts of the situation weighed in for its abandonment. Berlin
tellingly quotes Fichte: "I do not accept what nature offers because I
must ... I believe it because I will."
Such an attitude, as the French existentialists showed in the Second
World War, can inspire resistance in the face of incredible odds, for in
being prepared to defy both logic and fact, it can be defiant of alien
power. Yet, it has also blazed a trail which Berlin partly tracks in his
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