Isaiah Berlin: A Life By Michael Ignatieff Chatto & Windus 356pp, £20 in UK
The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin Chatto & Windus 171pp, £20 in UK
IN ways that may not be immediately obvious, Isaiah Berlin was an emblematic figure of our century. He was not a revolutionary, founded no party, formulated no radical political strategy, nor was he an original philosopher, and although he did a creditable translation of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, he was not a great prose stylist, and left no magnum opus. Yet as a theoretician of liberalism, particularly in the years between the rise of Nazism and the end of the 1960s, he articulated a humanitarian agenda forceful enough to set against the various forms of barbarism that so blighted the times through which he lived.
When Michael Ignatieff asked Berlin what most surprised him about his life, he replied: "The mere fact that I should have lived so peacefully and so happily through so many horrors." "Lived through" is the key term. He was born in Riga, the Latvian capital, in 1909. At the moment of birth he suffered one of his rare misfortunes, when the doctor applied a forceps to the infant's left arm, leaving the limb permanently damaged. Berlin's father was a timber merchant, who before the 1917 Revolution made a killing on a shipment of plywood which enabled him to lodge £10,000 in an English bank; this nest-egg was to be the saving of the family when they emigrated to England in 1920.
It was in St Petersburg, where the family had moved, that the seven-year-old Isaiah had an experience that was to prove formative, both of the man and the thinker. He was walking through the streets with his governess when a revolutionary crowd surged past with a captured policeman in their clutches whom they were obviously carrying off to be lynched. As Ignatieff says, "the memory of 1917 continued to work within Berlin, strengthening his horror of physical violence and his suspicion of political experiment, and deepening his lifelong preference for all the temporising compromises that keep a political order safely this side of terror".
He went up to Oxford in 1928, where he studied classics, history and philosophy. He was a brilliant student, with a capacity for hard work and, Ignatieff drily observes, "an extraordinarily acute sense, from a few pages, of whether a book was worth reading . . ." This gift was to lead to the suspicions that were whispered about him throughout his career, that he had not actually read many of the obscure works he liked to cite. However, these whisperings, and, more surprisingly, his Jewishness, did not prevent him from being elected in 1932, at the remarkably early age of 24, to All Souls College, "the very Parnassus of English academic life", whose members did no teaching, had all their needs cared for, and ate very well. Berlin spent six years there, the happiest period of his life.
It was inevitable that he would go on from All Souls to become one of the great and the good of English life, but he was also a natural cosmopolitan. An aborted trip to Moscow in 1940 left him stranded in America. He spent the war in New York and Washington, where the All Souls don transformed himself into a vigorous and highly effective propagandist working to bring the US into the fight against fascism. "He discovered in himself," Ignatieff writes, "a journalist's ear for gossip and intrigue." One of his tasks was to send official reports to London on American life and opinion, and his perceptiveness and incisive prose style became legendary. He also worked hard in these years, and, indeed, for many years afterwards, for the Zionist cause.
He was now a figure of consequence both in academe and in the wider world of political affairs, consulted by leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. (Ignatieff tells of Berlin being invited to lunch at Downing Street in 1944 and being pumped for his views on all manner of subjects by Churchill, who, growing increasingly baffled by the answers he was receiving, ended by asking him what was the most important thing he had written. "White Christmas," came the reply; the guest was Irving Berlin. When he heard it, the other Berlin enjoyed the story hugely.) However, the most significant encounter of his life, and the one he was to remember with the deepest passion, was with the poet Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad in 1945. She was 20 years older than Berlin, but the long night they spent together in rapturous conversation was as erotically charged as it was spiritually transfiguring. Forever afterwards he was to regard Akhmatova as the very symbol of individual courage in the face of a seemingly irresistible tyranny.
Berlin's best-known formulation was based on a line from the Greek poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." It was a useful and provocative distinction, and, as Ignatieff points out, it identified a fissure within his own sensibility, for on one side there was his fox-like addiction to gossip and intrigue, and on the other his longing to "feel one thing more truly than anything else". Ignatieff believes Berlin found his "one thing" when he switched his intellectual focus from philosophy to the history of ideas and worked out his theory of liberalism, to which he gave succinct expression in the 1958 essay "Two Concepts of Liberty". Here he made the distinction between negative and positive liberty, the former a "letting-be" by which individuals are allowed to make of themselves what they wish, the latter a coercion into what the state or the dictatorship judges freedom to be. "Positive liberty" leads to the "strange reversal" described by Ignatieff: "to begin with an ideal of freedom as selfmastery and to end with the dictatorship of the proletariat and Stalin's engineers of human souls."
Berlin saw the roots of 20th-century totalitarianism, from right and left, in the Romantic movement inaugurated mainly by a number of German thinkers and artists in the latter half of the 18th century. The Roots of Romanticism is the text of the Mellon Lectures delivered in 1965 in Washington. Although he forbade publication of the lectures - all delivered without scripts, and with only the barest of notes - until after his death, they represent Berlin at his best: quick-minded, erudite, witty and profound, and, above all, exciting. To read this book - and to listen to the accompanying CD recording of the final lecture - is to feel the force of living thought coming white-hot from the forge of a superb mind.
Berlin lived on into a peaceful old age, no longer doing first-rate work, but enjoying the role of "public man". He died in 1997. Michael Ignatieff spent 10 years in preparation for this biography, taping countless hours of conversation with his subject. The result is an elegant and judicious assessment which identifies both the strengths and weaknesses of one of our terrible century's great intellectual adventurers.