The Proper Study of Mankind

"My second book is The Proper Study of Mankind , whose remit was to provide the best of Isaiah Berlin’s essays all together in one volume. Indeed it includes one of my other choices, The Hedgehog and the Fox , and three of the essays from Liberty . So the idea was to choose samples of his most important work in a wide variety of areas. It includes philosophy, history of ideas, studies of nineteenth-century Russian writers (one of his main interests), three of his ‘personal impressions’ of contemporaries, and more besides. It’s quite a chunky book, it runs to 650 pages. I don’t necessarily think it’s a book that should be read straight through from the beginning to the end. Indeed, I say in my preface that I advise people to begin with the more informal, personal essays before turning to the meatier, more philosophical pieces. Most people who want to read just a certain amount of Berlin and not the whole lot will find enough here, I think, to be grist to their mill. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter That was the idea, yes. I’m a bit torn about agreeing with that for all readers. I think one of the great things about Berlin is that he is not just somebody who can be read by academics and students and specialists of various kinds: he speaks to all intelligent human beings. If you haven’t got a particularly philosophical turn of mind, one of the other books that I’ve chosen – Personal Impressions – is a good one to start with because that’s the most assimilable and digestible. But if you’re a serious person who wants to understand, across the whole range of his thought, what it is that Berlin is up to, then I think, yes, The Proper Study of Mankind is the book I would start with. He was a great reader, and his papers (which have been deposited in the Bodleian Library in Oxford) contain a lot of notes which prove line by line that he did read carefully. But he also quite evidently had the capacity to absorb the essence of a book without reading it word by word from cover to cover. This was something that mirrored his capacity in conversation: he had a great ability, as he once described it in a letter, to ‘see a pattern on the carpet.’ That is to say, he could see very quickly what you were on about if you were talking to him. He could see very quickly what an author was on about in a book too, and, when he wrote about people he knew, the same capacity displayed itself: he could convey the point of a person, the source of his or her world view – their way of looking at the world – very deftly. That was one of the most striking things about him."

"I started reading him in my twenties when I lived in Germany, in a very boring little town called Bonn. The British embassy used to be there when it was Germany’s capital, and so you could devote a lot of time to reading things like Isaiah Berlin. His writing is just extraordinary. He didn’t really write books, he wrote essays. There are two particular essays – “The Hedgehog and the Fox” and “Two Concepts of Liberty” – which were really formative in developing my political thought. “The Hedgehog and the Fox” in particular was very interesting to me because of its analysis of political thought in Tolstoy. I ultimately came to a conclusion (this will sound very arrogant indeed) that Berlin missed the big picture of Tolstoy’s writing, which is that Tolstoy believed, and this is evident in War and Peace , that it’s not great men or governments who make history but the actions of ordinary people. One begins to understand that Tolstoy was in fact an anarchist, that this is what Tolstoy believed in. He believed in the theory of ordinary people making history. “The Fox and the Hedgehog” is not about that, it’s about other, more mystical aspects of Tolstoy’s thought, but it is nonetheless a sublimely good piece of writing, as is “Two Concepts of Liberty”. I think people need to act on their own convictions to address their political concerns, and by definition that is a leaderless activity. If they look to leaders to define the agenda then it’s not going to happen. People need to look to themselves, and the great beauty of that is people releasing themselves from the framework of leadership and of leaders giving people permission to act. The actions of the many upon their convictions have far greater potential for real change than the actions of any small group or government. All the great changes in human history – from the emancipation of women to civil rights – came about because of the actions of groups of people. In the 21st century we are tremendously more connected to other people globally than we were before. The potential for triggering sweeping political change from the actions of just a few people is extraordinary, which is one reason why I think the Occupy movement is very, very interesting."