The last time I met Berlin was in 1994, a little over two years before his death. I was serving in the State Department at the time and gave a lecture in Oxford on the promotion of democracy as an objective of American foreign policy. It was unnerving to look down from the lectern and see him there, in the front row, fully gowned, eyes riveted on me, brows arched. After I finished, he came up to me and, along with several courtesies, offered his favourite piece of advice from someone who was not, I suspect, his favourite statesman: Talleyrand. 'Surtout pas trop de zele,' he said. I had the impression that he was not so much reproving me as letting me in on what he felt was a home truth about pretty much everything American, notably including our foreign policy.
What he called 'the unavoidability of conflicting ends' was the 'only truth which I have ever found out for myself'.[1] 'Some of the
Great Goods cannot live together . . . We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.'[2] It's a kind of corollary to his concept of pluralism, and of liberalism.
Thus, for him, all interesting issues are dilemmas. The only thing worse than making a mistake was thinking you couldn't make one. He believed we must face the inevitability of undesirable, potentially hazardous consequences even if we make what we are convinced is the right choice.
Had Berlin taken the matter that far and no further, he would have left all of us - including those of us in the think-tank business - in a cul-de-sac, a state of ethical and intellectual paralysis, not to mention chronic indecision.
But he did not leave us there. He argued that the difficulty of choice does not free us from the necessity of choice. Recognising a dilemma is no excuse for equivocation, indecision or inaction. We must weigh the pros and cons and decide what to do. If we don't, others will decide, and the ones who do so may well act on the basis of one pernicious ism or another. All in all, the making of choices, especially hard ones, is, he believed, an essential part of 'what it means to be human'.
Perhaps the best-known phrase associated with Berlin's view of the world and humanity is the one used as the title for his essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox. It comes from a fragment of Greek poetry by Archilochus: 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.' As he applied this saying to the major actors of history, Berlin was not praising one beast and condemning the other. Everyone combines both, although in different proportions and interactions. In that sense, the proverb doesn't quite work as a bumper-sticker for life - which is appropriate, since Berlin was wary of slogans and nostrums.
He did, however, have one big idea of his own - his own personal hedgehog - and it was (also appropriately) paradoxicaclass="underline" beware of big ideas, especially when they fall into the hands of political leaders.
The antonym of pluralism is monism, which holds that there is one overarching answer to who we are, how we should behave, how we should govern and be governed. It's when the powers- that-be claim to have a monopoly on the good, the right and the true that evil arises. Monism is the common denominator of other isms that have wrecked such havoc through history, including the two totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. One is associated with the name of Hitler, the other with that of Stalin, the photograph of whom on page vi shows him sitting beneath a portrait of that Big-Idea-monger, Karl Marx. Stalin looms in the background, and sometimes the foreground, of all Berlin's essays on Soviet politics and culture, including those written after the tyrant's death in 1953.
After perusing the manuscript of this book, George Kennan had this to say: 'I always regarded Isaiah, with whom I had fairly close relations during my several periods of residence in Oxford, not only as the outstanding and leading critical intelligence of his time, but as something like a patron saint among the commentators on the Russian scene, and particularly the literary and political scene.'
Berlin himself was not ethnically a Russian but a Jew (a distinction that has mattered all too much in Russian society); he was born not in Russia proper but in Riga, on the fringes of the empire; he was only eleven when his family emigrated from Petrograd to England, where he spent his long life; and he returned to Russia only three times. Yet he was, in many ways, a uniquely insightful observer of that country. As a boy, he had been able to dip into leather-bound editions of Tolstoy, Turgenev and Pushkin in his father's library and hear Chaliapin sing the role of Boris Godunov at the Mariinsky Theatre. And, of course, he retained the language, which gave him access to all those minds - Soviet, pre-Soviet, post- Soviet, un-Soviet and anti-Soviet - that informed what he thought and what you are about to read.
Throughout his life, as Berlin's own mind ranged over the centuries and around the world, he continued to think, read, listen, talk and write about Russia, both as the home of a great culture and as a laboratory for a horrible experiment in monism.
In pondering how that experiment might turn out, Berlin rejected the idea of historic inevitability, not least because that itself was monistic. Instead, he believed in what might be called the pluralism of possibilities. One possibility was that Russia, over time, would break the shackles of its own history. He asserted that belief in 1945, immediately after his first meeting with the poet Anna Akhmatova, recounted in 'A Visit to Leningrad' and 'Conversations with Akhmatova and Pasternak'. He returned from Leningrad to the British Embassy in Moscow, where he was working at the time, and wrote a visionary dispatch to the Foreign Office in London. It expressed a hope that the vitality and magnificence of Russian culture might withstand, and eventually even overcome, what he called the 'blunders, absurdities, crimes and disasters' perpetrated by a 'most hateful despotism'; in other words, that the best in Russia's dualism might win out over the worst.
Akhmatova wrote Berlin into her epic Poem without a Hero as 'the Guest from the Future'. Yet in real life, his powers did not include that of prophecy. He did not expect to outlive the Soviet Union. In 1952, in an essay included here, he advanced the concept of 'the artificial dialectic', the ingenious tactical flexibility in the Communist party line that would, he believed, never allow 'the system to become either too limp and inefficient or too highly charged and self-destructive'. It was 'Generalissimo Stalin's original invention, his major contribution to the art of government' - and part of the tyranny's survival manual. He feared it would work:
[S]o long as the rulers of the Soviet Union retain their skill with the machinery of government and continue to be adequately informed by their secret police, an internal collapse, or even an atrophy of will and intellect of the rulers owing to the demoralising effects of despotism and the unscrupulous manipulation of other human beings, seems unlikely ... Beset by difficulties and perils as this monstrous machine may be, its success and capacity for survival must not be underestimated. Its future may be uncertain, even precarious; it may blunder and suffer shipwreck or change gradually or catastrophically, but it is not, until men's better natures assert themselves, necessarily doomed.
Some might find in this judgement evidence that Berlin was blind to the handwriting on the wall, or at least less far-sighted than Kennan, who had, in 1947, discerned in the USSR 'tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power'.[3]