Henry Hardy's Reading List

"There was once a display of books somewhere – I think it might have been at the British Academy, a display of books by Fellows. Berlin was the President at the time, and was asked what his most important book was. He said Four Essays on Liberty . I don’t disagree with that. It was first published in 1969, and I produced a considerably expanded edition of it in 2002, simplifying the title from Four Essays On Liberty to Liberty. It contains his principal essays on liberty and also, under the same umbrella, material on pluralism, which was one of his principal ideas: that values are incommensurable, and, associated with that, also on monism, which he’s opposed to – the idea that there’s only one correct way to live life. Monism is exemplified by movements such as Nazism and Communism, which he analyses in the first of the four essays. Liberty very much has the core of his intellectual position in it, the heart of the matter. That could be said to be true, although I believe that his contribution to the idea of pluralism has begun to overtake the idea of the two concepts of liberty. In the academic community, there’s still a lot of interest in the two concepts, which do remain very important. But I think if you ask an intelligent reader today what strikes them about Berlin, they’re more likely to talk about his pluralism. Pluralism is the view that ultimate human values – that is to say, values that we pursue for their own sake, not objectives that we pursue because they contribute to some deeper or more fundamental end – are of their very nature irreducibly distinct, and often in conflict, and cannot be measured against one another, or measured in terms of one super-value in which they can all be cashed out, such as utility – which is what the Utilitarians are supposed to have done. This means that the idea that you can construct a perfect life where all values are harmonised with each other and all make their exactly right contribution to a single perfect way of living life is conceptually incoherent. It just can’t be arrived at. And because this is so, according to him, you have to make room in your political arrangements for many different approaches to life, each of which has just as much claim to be right as the others, rather than imposing top-down a single way of life, as, say, Communists seek to do. And that’s why liberty, but in particular negative liberty – which means that you are not impeded by other people from doing what you want to do or might come to want to do – is so important, because it gives space for the plural ways of life to flourish and doesn’t promote one at the expense of others. It tends to be, yes. Positive liberty isn’t essentially a bad idea. In fact, Berlin is very careful to say that it’s a valid universal human goal when uncorrupted – he’s often misunderstood on this point and treated as a critic of all forms of positive liberty. One of the difficulties is that it’s rather difficult to define positive liberty because he arguably has more than one notion of it. Roughly speaking, though, it’s a matter of who is in charge. Negative liberty is a question of how many doors are open before you, positive liberty is a matter of who decides which ones you go through. The idea is that you want to be in charge yourself – you don’t want other people to be making those decisions for you. But Berlin concentrates his fire on a particular version of positive liberty, namely the view that there are two selves within each of us: there’s the ‘real’, ‘higher’, ‘rational’ self, and the poor benighted empirical self. According to this view, what we want or need is to have the real self in charge. For that, you move on to the idea that the real self can be guided by some higher authority (typically the state) which knows what your ‘true and objective’ needs are much better than you do yourself. And then, by a further step, it becomes possible to say that freedom is a matter of obeying the state. That’s what he calls a ‘monstrous impersonation’, and he has a lot to say against it. It’s a view typified by Rousseau’s claim that it is sometimes right for citizens to be ‘forced to be free.’"

"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."

"This book has been considerably enlarged in its latest (third) edition to take in many more pieces that he wrote after the first two editions appeared. It displays very well his ability to put himself in the shoes of a person whose view on life, whose values, whose attitudes might be significantly different from his own, and, indeed, very different from one another’s. So what you get is empathetic pen portraits of a wide range of startlingly different people. In that way he was very unlike those writers who tend to mine other thinkers and writers, and indeed people, for things that they can co-opt for their own agendas: they are always looking for things to agree with, and things to disagree with, so that everything is filtered through their own world view. What Berlin was very good at doing was emptying himself of his own preconceptions and standing in the shoes of these other people who are describing the world from their point of view. It’s a breathtakingly impressive capacity, and not only useful in sheer human terms in yielding a rich understanding of other living human beings – which you see in his Personal Impressions – but also in the more theoretical sphere, because it makes him an excellent historian of ideas. To understand another thinker fully, you need to deploy this kind of capacity and his capacity, in this regard, was second to none. Yes, it does. If you like, you can see the essays of Personal Impressions as a series of case studies in pluralism. This doesn’t come out much in Personal Impressions because, as he described it, it was a collection of éloges – funeral orations or obituaries or appreciations of people that he admired – so you don’t get so much of the cattiness there. But you do get a lot of the caustic remarks in the letters – that can’t be denied. He was very hard on people whose moral personality he disapproved of. He himself displayed very richly a capacity which he often attributed to others under the label ‘moral charm’, which I can’t really define further, other than by naming it. But when he found that other people manifested lack of integrity or moral failings of one kind or another that he disapproved of, he was very free – at least in private letters – with his criticism of them. He was willing to judge people negatively. He always said that you should understand before you condemn – which, of course, I hope we would all agree with. But some people felt that he was too ready to condemn without understanding. He was occasionally liable to a sort of visceral antipathy to certain people, which appeared to proceed not from an intellectual assessment but from some instinctive level – people like Hannah Arendt. It’s difficult to account for it in rational terms, but he had a small panoply of hate figures, undoubtedly. The most striking piece – and I think everybody who has read it would agree with this in some way – is his memoir of his meetings with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, the latter in particular, in 1945. Everybody who knows anything about Berlin knows the story of how he went to Russia at the end of the Second World War and was based in Moscow. He visited Leningrad for a fortnight and when he was there he went to see Anna Akhmatova, the great poetess, and talked to her right through one night until the middle of the next morning. His account of that and its effect on him and her is extremely moving and brilliantly written. It’s the longest piece in the book and, I think, the best. It is a sort of love story, yes, but at an intellectual level, or at least on a level that was unexpressed physically. He always said that people assumed that they had an affair because he was there all night, but he always insisted – and I believe him – as he put it: ‘Nothing is further from the truth. She sat in one corner of the room; I sat in the other and we never even touched. I didn’t even kiss her hand.’ But still, there was a very intense bond created on that occasion and he came to be a deeply symbolic figure for her – often occurring in her poetry from that moment onwards. When he later married, she was obviously very hurt. Not that she wished to marry him herself, but he’d obviously betrayed some kind of mystical union which she thought that they had with each other. “He was a genius at being a human being.” Music was one of the most important things in his life, more important than his own academic work. He would often say that personal relationships were the most important thing in life – ‘People are my landscape’, as Karl Wolfskehl put it – and I would have thought that music would come a close second or indeed an equal first. There is a piece on the music critic Martin Cooper in the book, but he also knew a number of musicians and composers, including Stravinsky, and had a rich life of listening to music. He claimed to have listened to more music of more kinds for more hours than anybody else. He was on the board of The Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and knew a great deal about opera – not only the operas themselves, but the people who performed and sang in them. He had quite an influence on the repertoire of the Royal Opera during the years that he was there, for example engineering a production of Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron . Music was deeply important to him, but not in an esoteric way. His favourite radio channel – people are sometimes surprised to know – was Classic FM, not Radio 3, because it played more of the core of the musical repertoire that he loved."

"My fourth choice is The Hedgehog and the Fox , which is also in The Proper Study of Mankind, but as it’s still a separate book I feel entitled to choose it as a separate item. Not only is it one of Berlin’s most famous essays, partly because of its extremely apt title, but it’s also one of his best essays. It exemplifies something that we haven’t yet talked about: his deep knowledge of and interest in the Russian writers of the nineteenth century. It’s a book about Tolstoy and his view of history. It has also given to British and indeed world culture this tool of analysis: the dichotomy which divides writers, in the first place, but in the end all human beings, into hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs pursue one single vision: they’re natural monists in the terms we were discussing earlier. The foxes are natural pluralists who see life in all its teeming variety and don’t try to force all this variety into the Procrustean bed of a single vision of life. This book scores on a number of levels – both in the creation of the dichotomy and in the way in which he deploys it. It’s a brilliant analysis of Tolstoy’s own conflicted attitude to history. Roughly speaking, Berlin argues that Tolstoy was by nature a fox who writes most brilliantly about the fine detail of human life, none of which can be systematised in any way, yet he longs for and tries to find some enormous undergirding pattern which makes sense of it all, some vision of historical inevitability. He was torn by this division, he never managed to reconcile its two components, and ended up a broken figure as a result. That’s very brilliantly expressed. It also contains a lot about a figure called Joseph de Maistre – a right-wing Catholic writer whom Berlin wrote about elsewhere too – and ties him very interestingly to Tolstoy. It’s famous especially for its opening, where Berlin lists the various people whom he regards as hedgehogs and foxes, and for the ending, which has a moving portrait of Tolstoy as a tragic figure: ‘almost wholly isolated, he is the most tragic of the great writers, a desperate old man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded at Colonus.’ It’s an astonishing piece of writing. It’s 90 pages long in its new edition. It’s short, but very powerful. The title comes from an isolated line by the archaic Greek poet Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ There are disputes about how exactly this should be interpreted, but the most natural interpretation is simply that the hedgehog responds to all the different threats from the fox, and indeed from anywhere else, by rolling up into a ball: he has only a one-trick repertoire. That can be taken as a metaphor for somebody who interprets everything he discovers in life in terms of his one single issue – a single-issue fanatic."