Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment PDF
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment edited by Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson 1 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © the several contributors 2016 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2016 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2016942455 ISBN 978–0–19–878393–0 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi Foreword Hermione Lee, President of Wolfson College The conference on Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment, on which this collection of essays is based, took place at Wolfson College, in Oxford, from 20 to 22 March 2014, with the support of Wolfson College, All Souls, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the Oxford Faculty of Modern Languages, and the Modern Humanities Research Association. I was very glad to host the conference at the college which Isaiah Berlin founded and where he was the first president, and which began its life as Wolfson College fifty years ago, in 1966, dedicated to those principles of liberty, tolerance, pluralism, and independence of mind in which Berlin so eloquently believed. Since Berlin’s presidency, Wolfson College has maintained his legacy and posthumous intellectual life through its involvement with the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust and through its support of the work of Henry Hardy, Honorary Fellow of the College, in editing Berlin’s books, essays, lectures, and (with Mark Pottle, Jennifer Holmes, Serena Moore, and Nicholas Hall) his letters. The fourth and final volume of Berlin’s Letters, Affirming: Letters 1975–1997, was published in 2015. Berlin ‘belongs’ to a number of Oxford colleges—Corpus, All Souls, New—but his creation of Wolfson as a new graduate college in the 1960s was a mark of his belief that historical institutions need to continue to change, and to incorporate differences, con- tradictions, and radical developments. The belief applies also to his intellectual work, and is expressed in this volume’s acknowledgement in its Introduction, that ‘he would have not have wanted his readings [of the Enlightenment] to be set in stone’. That the essays from this conference make up a re-evaluation of Berlin as a historian of ideas ‘not intended as an act of piety or an attempt at rehabilitation’, but as a critique which brings a wide variety of views to bear on his work, is as it should be. The conference from which these essays arises was supported in part by the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson, a centre for the study of biography, autobiography, letters, and other forms of life-writing. It’s apt, then, that so many of these essays deal with the history of ideas and of differing approaches to the Enlightenment through individual cases: Marx, Meinecke, Hume, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, Hamann, Kant, Mill, Machiavelli, Vico, Herder, Hess, and Herzen. Berlin approached the Enlightenment as ‘the grounding of our belief in human individuality’, and his approach to history, ideas, and philosophy was very often through the study of individuals. He was profoundly suspicious of abstract principles and general theories, and of the sacrifice of the individ- ual to ‘remote ends’. He rejoiced in the study of heroes, exceptional thinkers, and actors, and in those influential personages who, as he said of Chaim Weizmann, ‘must perma- nently transform one’s ideas of what human beings can be or do’. In his essay on Herder OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi vi foreword (in Three Critics of the Enlightenment) he proposed that ‘all the works of men are above all voices speaking . . . and that self-expression is part of the essence of human beings as such’. This volume takes on, critically and analytically, Berlin’s ‘self-expression’ on Enlightenment themes, and in doing so makes a significant new contribution to the study both of Isaiah Berlin and of the Enlightenment. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi Acknowledgements This book is the outcome of a conference on ‘Isaiah Berlin’s Enlightenment’, organized by Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson, and hosted by Wolfson College, Oxford, from 20 to 22 March 2014. The conference was generously supported by Wolfson’s Centre for Life-Writing, All Souls College, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the Oxford Faculty of Modern Languages, and the Modern Humanities Research Association. The conference was first conceived at a meeting of the Besterman Centre for the Enlightenment, now part of the Enlightenment research programme within the Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities (TORCH). We are particularly grateful to Hermione Lee, President of Wolfson, for her enthusiastic support at every stage of this project, and to Henry Hardy, Isaiah Berlin’s devoted editor, for his participation in the conference and his willing advice to the editors and many contributors to this volume. At the conference Henry presented an audio-recording of Isaiah Berlin’s contribution to the 1975 Wolfson College lectures on ‘The Enlightenment and its Critics’. This was an absorbing and memorable expe- rience for all who were fortunate enough to listen to it, and it is hoped that one day a transcription of the lecture can be published. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi Contents List of Abbreviations xi Notes on Contributors xiii Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 1 Laurence Brockliss Part I. An Idea in Context 1. Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, and the Enlightenment 21 David Leopold 2. Berlin’s Conception of the Enlightenment 35 Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson 3. Between Friedrich Meinecke and Ernst Cassirer: Isaiah Berlin’s Bifurcated Enlightenment 51 Avi Lifschitz Part II. Enlightenment Thinkers 4. Berlin and Hume 69 P. J. E. Kail 5. Berlin and Montesquieu 79 Karen O’Brien 6. Isaiah Berlin and the Origins of the ‘Totalitarian’ Rousseau 89 Christopher Brooke 7. Rococo Enlightenment? Berlin, Hamann, and Diderot 99 Marian Hobson 8. Sympathy and Empathy: Isaiah’s Dilemma, or How He Let the Enlightenment Down 113 T. J. Reed 9. Isaiah Berlin, J. S. Mill, and Progress 121 Alan Ryan Part III. Counter-Enlightenments? 10. Berlin, Machiavelli, and the Enlightenment 137 Ritchie Robertson
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