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Iated these ideas as instruments to express their need to coerce and op–
press others, or their desire to expand power.
The parallel point is that monistic ideals, when advanced by persons
of skeptical or ironic temperament bear within them safeguards on the
use of force in their realization. Plato, whose idea of the perfect state is
the primary source of monism, also provides us with the cautionary
ironic drama in which the republic ruled by the philosopher king
devolves into an absolutist tyranny. A source of Kant's metaphor in Isaiah
XL, 4 that "the crooked shall be made straight," is usually read as a form
of eschatological utopian prophecy, appropriate to the Kantian denial.
Yet the religious skeptics also muted the utopian prospect by interpreting
the equivocal text as a much more limited messianism, reading the phrase
in
its literal sense to mean that the rugged terrain of the abandoned land
can be made level again, with the restoration of political sovereignty.
Religious ironists through the ages, from Chaucer to Kafka and Agnon
(in his novella
That Which is Crooked Shall be Made Straight)
have shown
how the prophetic reading can be sustained while the tangled skein of
things remains irremediable in this life.
In this volume, however, Berlin has respected the constraints of the
history of ideas, and he avoids detailed comments on the connections
between these ideas and their exploitation in institutional history by
persons of extraordinary temperament, even when he has himself been a
participant or witness of that history. The sense of great excitement
generated by his works, then, is not derived from the impress of its
relevance to contemporary history, although that is implicit throughout
these essays. Rather, it has its source in the fusion of the prose style with
the intellectual substance, the power and rhythm of the movement of the
sentences as they lead to the shape and clarity of the intellectual portrait.
This achievement is an intrinsic confirmation of Berlin's central theme of
objective pluralism. For the romantic critic could correctly point out
that the style reflects the unique qualities of the individual, without
contradicting the classical thesis that its objectification can provide all
men with an ideal form to be pursued.
