Karl Marx

"When Berlin wrote this book, he wasn’t established. The book proposal came from the Home University Library, based in London, which published popular books on various intellectual subjects. A number of people at Oxford turned down the offer to write this — not surprisingly because they didn’t know anything about Marx, and if they knew anything, they didn’t care very much, or were hostile. This is in the 1930s, when there was a lot of communism around, but it was mostly working class. There are intellectual sympathisers, but not many at Oxford, which was very conservative. I don’t think people at Oxford were on any particular campaign or felt threatened by Marxism: Stalinism wasn’t much known about, and people were more worried about fascism in Germany. Berlin, as a writer, is quite secularised in his outlook. He grew up speaking Russian and German. A major point here is that his take on Marx is quite fresh and independent of the generalised Marxism that is around both on the Continent and in Britain. It’s not completely isolated from that, but what strikes me about the book, which was published in 1939, is that it touches base with the conventional, biographical, intellectual, critical approaches to Marxism and the kind of popular Marxism which British Communists and British anti-communists would have recognised, but it doesn’t spend very long there. I think that’s because Berlin didn’t find these ideas very intellectually interesting. “Marx was a liberal thinker. There’s not as much difference between Marx or indeed Marxism and liberalism as many people think. ” What interested Berlin is Marx as a 48er: that is, a protagonist of, and participant in, the great revolutions of 1848-9, which are an explosion of liberalism allied with nationalism. To be nationalistic, in this period, was to be anti-dynastic and pro-constitutional, and not exclusionary. It’s a happy moment when liberalism and nationalism go together — and we’re all going to be wonderful democratic nations with our ethnic, linguistic, and folk characteristics. This is going on all over central Europe. What Berlin does is bring a central European perspective. I see him occupying a political-intellectual-cultural axis somewhere between Riga and Vienna. This is now a lost world of central European, restless multiculturalism which is deeply inflected with Germanic culture and the secularised Jewish contributions to that, and lots of different religious and nationalistic contributions along the way — set against dynastic, authoritarian, non-constitutional church-supported regimes, particularly the Roman Catholic church. The revolutions in 1848 may have started in Paris, but they spread to Vienna. Marx and Engels got as far as Vienna during those revolutions. Berlin brings this perspective to Marx, and finds the Marx of the Manifesto , the Marx who was a central European actor, albeit based in London. He sees Marx as a secularized German intellectual. He’s not very interested in Marx’s Jewish origins. Marx was a liberal thinker. There’s not as much difference between Marx or indeed Marxism and liberalism as many people think. This is because if you are against non-constitutional, authoritarian regimes, you are a liberal. That’s what the French Revolution was about, and that’s what the 1848 revolutions were about: they were about bringing constitutionalism and popular sovereignty, and representative and responsible government, to parts of Europe where the rulers and the church were fanatically dedicated to maintaining their own grip. This was only relaxed, rather slowly, in the 1850s and 1860s. Marx was wholly in favour of popular sovereignty and representative and responsible government. His angle was to keep pushing on the economic side, and to insist that governments needed to take responsibility for the economic welfare of citizens. Essentially, he was a social democrat. But in order to pursue that kind of agenda, you had to be a radical, terrorist revolutionary and prepared to take up a gun. That’s what this flaring up of revolutions was about. It didn’t really hit Russia until about 1905. The dividing of Marx from his liberalism is something that is projected onto his ideas, and particularly his politics, much later on. Now, in the course of doing this kind of politics, Marx wanted to push liberals into the economic realm. That’s exactly what social democrats do now, and that’s the argument that various political parties had with George Osborne. It’s not that much different, frankly."