This piece examines Isaiah Berlin’s theory of individual liberty, its roots in the history of political philosophy more generally, and how Berlin shaped this material into what became an incredibly robust form of liberalism which fortified the status-quo from the revolutionary threat of Marxism and other radical movements from below. Ultimately, I will demonstrate how Berlin’s brand of ‘liberal pluralism’ which preaches toleration, relativism and moderation in political thought – actually justifies the type of imperialism, conquest and repression in the theoretical realm which noted liberals of our own epoch – the Obamas and Clintons – have been all too keen to prosecute in practise. For this reason, Berlin’s liberalism should be of vital concern to radicals today.
I
To begin, I would like to turn to The Magus of the North which is Berlin’s celebrated portrait of the life and thought of the eighteenth-century thinker J.G. Hamann. He was foremost a radical anti-Enlightenment thinker; every facet of his philosophy was developed in and through a visceral antagonism to that movement. For Hamann, the Enlightenment means most of all ‘the treatment of men as if they were machines’. How is this achieved? The explosion of Enlightenment science has a dark consequence; its rules and laws are transferred from the realm of nature and applied to the realm of human society: ‘science . . . has turned from a servant of man’s fine and infinite creative capacity into a dictator which determines his position, morally, politically, and personally.’
For Hamann, as Berlin points out, this takes a particular form. The deterministic bent of the theorems involved in systems like Newtonian mechanics are imposed from the outside onto the spontaneity and fluidity of human social relationships forcing them into a fixed and rigid template of universal law which perverts and represses the authentic spirit and life of the human experience: ‘This turns human relations into mechanical ones, and makes of… a spontaneous capacity for acting in some appropriate fashion, a dead rule’. According to Berlin, the ossified and bureaucratic system, the brittle and universal dictates applied by the totalitarianism of the Enlightenment monolith to the spontaneity and joy of human relations – when Hamann lays these things bare, he does so in the guise of a precocious, prolific prophet whose ‘sermon against dehumanisation and reification’ is delivered hundreds of years ‘before those terms had been thought of’.
Why is human life so incompatible, so incommensurable with the universal standards Enlightenment reason seeks to promote? In answer to this question, Berlin turns to the early eighteenth-century Neapolitan thinker Giambattista Vico. For Vico, human societies as historical formations are incredibly diverse, each grows out of a specific set of social and historical conditions quite unique to itself. The idea of applying Enlightenment standards of universality to world history, to suggest that there are natural laws which can be said to apply to all people in all times universally – a law or series of laws which encompass a universal human nature and have been waiting to be discovered by the application of universal reason, is, for Vico, the most arrant nonsense.
Vico’s ‘ancients were frightening savages, orriblili bestioni, roaming the great forest of the earth, creatures remote from us’. They were thrust into a world where ‘the first peal of thunder filled them with terror. Awe – a sense of a power greater than themselves brooding over them – awakened in them. They gathered together for self-protection; there follows the “age of the gods” or patres, stern heads of primitive human tribes. Outside their fortifications there is no security: men attacked by other men stronger than themselves seek protection and are given it by the “fathers” at the price of becoming slaves or clients.’
For Vico, argues Berlin, these elemental forms of social life create a culture which is steeped in the aura of epic poetry, great men doing great deeds which are sanctified by the particularities of blood lineages and the time-honoured traditions of the tribe: ‘This marks the “heroic” age of oligarchies, of harsh and avaricious masters, users of “poetic” speech, ruling over slaves and serfs’. It is not that these people were in some sense gradually fumbling their way toward a future of Enlightenment rationality; it is not that they represent a stage in which the thought of Voltaire or Locke is already implicit, just waiting to be actualised; rather it is the case that such people would have found the idea of universal law and its uniform applicability, girded by notions of a generic reason, utterly incomprehensible. Each society has its own unique set of conditions and from this evolves its culture and morality.
For Vico, as Berlin points out, you cannot come to terms with the ancient Mycenaean world, say, by applying the universal and rational precepts which inhere in mathematics and Enlightenment thought, for its qualitative uniqueness will repel any such effort; if you want to understand the ancients you must use your aesthetic sensibilities rather than your rational ones – you must imbibe the flavour of their language, their literature, their poetry and their plays – in a word, you must try to experience their ‘myth, or mode of worship, or language, or building’. You must breathe in the aesthetic aroma of their culture, rather than try to rationally dissect and quantify it. In the same vein Berlin lauds this aspect in Montesquieu’s work too, citing the Frenchman favourably when he argues that all laws ‘should be so adapted to the people for which they are created, that it should be a great coincidence if the laws of one nation suit another’.
One can see, then, that there opens up a dialectic between Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment thought; whereas the philosophes tended to emphasise universal, quantitative, rational, mediated and systematic forms of thinking – the anti-Enlightenment school tended toward the irrationality and spontaneous power of the particular and direct emotional experience. The polarities between the universal and the particular, the rational and irrational, calculation and emotion, the systematic and the spontaneous, knowledge and experience, objectivism and relativism, the quantitative and the qualitative – formed a rich vein of creative tension and a powerful philosophical legacy which would mark the thought of the future. When Berlin marshals his arguments against Hegelianism and Marxism in the twentieth century, it is absolutely vital to recognise just how he leans on the critique of the Enlightenment in order to understand just how badly he, Berlin, goes wrong, and also to understand something of the political instincts which drive his arguments in the first place. It is to this that we turn now.
II
Berlin’s criticism of Marx’s system (and vicariously Hegel’s own) works in the following way. Firstly Berlin suggests that Marx has adopted the instrumentalist and absolutely rationalist aspect of Enlightenment thought in which men and the relationships between them are conceived of as machines, as automatons: ‘His proletarians are a body of men without national allegiance, utterly deprived of all the barest means of life, mere machine fodder, men so destitute as to have almost no individual needs of their own’. Marx’s vision of the proletariat is a lifeless ‘abstraction’ of rational thinking which bears very little resemblance to the specific and particular realties of working people who are, of course, driven by more emotive sensibilities and instincts such as ‘national allegiance’.
So far, we can see exactly how Berlin’s critique of Marx dovetails with the idea of a brittle Enlightenment rationalism which is then imposed on an organic social group with the consequence that human existence is rendered quantified, abstract and mechanical – ‘machine fodder’. But Marx was also a post-Enlightenment thinker – he was writing after the great Enlightenment philosophes of the seventeenth and eighteenth century and in the context of a different set of social categories; for this reason, his thought and ideology has a very different scope and aim.
Whereas Enlightenment ideology helped to pave way for the bourgeois epoch and the capitalist social system by raising up the generic, isolated individual and sanctifying him as the emblem of an eternal human nature which was unfolded through timeless natural laws – Marx worked to uncover a living socio-historical development, the clash of classes throughout history, culminating in the prospect of a modern proletariat which was capable of seizing political control of society’s economic organs in and through collective means, thus sounding the death knell of the capitalist world.
So, for Berlin to provide a self-styled anti-Enlightenment critique of Marxism, it was necessary to reconfigure that critique in accordance with the historical ends of Marx’s theory of proletarian revolution. To do this, Berlin resurrected the Aristotelian notion of teleology, albeit in a rather bowdlerized fashion:
There is another ancient doctrine in which men have traditionally sought reassurance: teleology. History, it was thought, would be meaningless – merely a causal sequence, or a chaos of unrelated episodes – if it lacked some ultimate purpose . . . despite all accidents and collapses, the story will have a happy ending.
Berlin then combines such ‘teleology’ with notions of Enlightenment reason and rationality:
reason rejects the notion of a mere collection of “brute” facts; there must be advance or growth towards the fulfilment of some goal or pattern . . . human reason itself . . . cannot and will not for ever be frustrated, and must, late or soon, triumph over all obstacles, both external and self-generated, and build a world in which men have become everything that, as rational creatures, they consciously or unconsciously seek to be.
It doesn’t matter that, in actual fact, the ancients didn’t have a teleological conception of history – i.e. a conception of history as an evolution from lower stages to higher stages as part of some immanent, unfolding principle. In the ancient world, history – in the non-supernatural descriptions of it – was nearly always considered to be a cyclical phenomenon: an initial social form of being, say ‘Kingship’, endures a corruption (Tyranny) and the historical process worked by returning society to a state of uncorrupted Kingship again. In other words, the concept of history for the ancients was less Hegelian/Marxist but rather much more Nietzschean in tenor.
As so often with Berlin, it doesn’t matter about the devil in the details, for he has now forged his weapon – he has fused ‘teleology’ with Enlightenment rationalism to create a critical and cutting conception of the Marxism he so despises: ‘He [Marx] wished to perform a rational analysis of what caused social development to occur as it did, why human beings had hitherto largely failed, and why they could and would in the future succeed in attaining peace, harmony, cooperation . . . [Marx] prophesies the triumph of the proletariat as the inexorable verdict of history itself, of the triumph of human reason over human irrationality’.
For Berlin these ideas are dangerous because ‘the entire Hegelian-Marxist teleology…fuses facts with values.’ In so doing, it imposes a rational schema on human development which overlooks the richness and uniqueness of the individual moral life; the sensibilities, impulses, subjective feelings and aspirations of the individual are overridden by the vast, teleological and tyrannical sweep of a broader and crushing process called ‘history’ – a series of mechanical laws which subsume all the qualitative richness of human life in a quantitative, lifeless unfolding, an unfolding which is consecrated in ‘scientific’ and ‘rational’ terms through the inevitable culmination of a Utopia in which all human misery and oppression has been overcome.
Of course, it is precisely because human society is so rich and diverse that lifeless pseudo-scientific schemes of the Hegelian and Marxist vein can only end up perverting its material, twisting and warping it into a brutalized and oppressive cast;
such Utopias are… nothing but modern forms of astrology. When such schemes are applied to human beings they do dreadful damage. To confuse our own constructions and inventions with eternal laws or divine decrees of is one of the fatal delusions of men.
And what motivates the creation of such a theory? What could compel one to devise such a fantastic, militant, angry and combustible promise for a utopic future which would have such grave ramifications for the present? Berlin believes that, in Marx’s case, he has identified the answer, located the individual pathology which drives the need to create such a dangerous theoretical fantasy, disguised by the grandiose and so-called ‘objective’ category of ‘historical development’ and the rubric of the ‘class struggle’.
III
For Berlin, the years Marx spent mastering classical German philosophy, the decades of immersing himself in British political economy, the exhaustive empirical studies he carried out on English capitalism, his intensive engagement with the radical thought of the early French, British and German socialists, the almost unending toil he performed in synthetizing all these elements and aspects into an endeavour to lay bare the mechanics of capitalism, its unfolding exhibited and exposed in a vast and totalising logical schema – all of this, by Berlin, is condensed into one single ‘fact’. Marx, you see, was a self-hating Jew. His sense of self-hatred and loathing was exacerbated by the intense anti-Semitic prejudice he had endured, and he balmed these feelings of inferiority and degradation by a supreme act of psychological transference; he projected his individual inadequacies and miseries onto the conceptual abstraction of a whole class, a class which, furthermore, could avenge itself on society, and thus Marx could in some sense revenge himself on the world for all the petty humiliations he had endured:
Marx…donned a uniform that liberated him from his own oppressive garments and entered and transformed a movement and a party that bore none of the scars of the highly vulnerable social group in which he was brought up . . .. The insults he is avenging and the enemies he is pulverising are, as often as not, his own . . . are the persecutors of the rootless cosmopolitans, the revolutionary Jewish intellectuals . . .. Marx’s idealisation of the proletariat, despite all his own preaching against illusions of this kind, is itself the idealised image of a man craving to identity himself with a favoured group of men who do not suffer from his particular wounds.
This level of analysis is gutter sniping of the lowest order – but to the malicious we must add the sneaky and the hypocritical, for after performing such a vulgar character assassination enacted to torpedo the validity of Marxist theory in advance, Berlin then reflects in the most disinterested and lofty of tones that he is ‘not concerned with the validity of Marx’s analysis of industrial society and culture’. When it comes down to it, however, Berlin is highly concerned with the validity of ‘Marx’s analysis of industrial society and culture’ which is precisely why he has taken the time to crudely impugn and delegitimise the motivations of the great revolutionist on a purely psychological level. And it is why Berlin describes Marx’s theoretical conception as one which promises a Utopia in the first place.
For Berlin, Marx’s theory, under critical scrutiny reveals itself to be a Utopia in the classical sense. The Latin phrase ‘Utopia’ was coined by Thomas Moore in the sixteenth century to mean, quite literally, ‘no place’. It was a little later that it acquired the meaning ‘perfect place’ as well. These two concepts work in tandem; the promise of Utopia is the promise of the ‘perfect place’ of the future, but such perfection is unattainable because the idea of the future which is promised has no moorings in the realities and social forms of the present. The ‘perfect place’, therefore, is as well ‘no place’. For Berlin ‘Utopias…are descriptions of impossible states of affairs, fantasies in the heads of intellectuals remote from reality, evasion of concrete problems, escape into theory and abstraction.’
In utopian conceptions, the reality of what ‘is’ the case at the level of social existence in the present stands in irreconcilable contradiction to the forms of the future the utopian seeks to bring into being. Marx’s teleological-driven description of something called ‘the proletariat’ has little to do with actual flesh-and-blood workers and more to do with the imperious, mechanized, frigid and rationalistic abstractions of Marx’s own mind which he then seeks to impose illegitimately on the rich and variegated terrain of human experience. The Russian and the French Revolutions represent the consequences of such a procedure; they are convulsions and upheavals generated by history when Utopian rationalists endeavour to apply their theoretical abstractions to a reality which simply doesn’t fit them: ‘When such schemas are applied to human beings they can do dreadful damage…this is what happened in the French Revolution.’
Berlin’s charge against Marx (and others who wish to transform the social reality fundamentally in and through a rational programme and a theory of human freedom) is that such theories provide a utopic vision, a quasi-religious and messianic fantasy in which the realities of the present stand in stubborn opposition to the illusory mirage of a perfect future, and the violence which comes from trying to reconcile the two moments calls forth the twinned cataclysms of revolutionary terror and totalitarianism. Berlin’s critique of Marxism, then, is fundamentally pivoted on this notion that Marxism is a Utopian conception which creates a cleavage between the present and the future, an untraversable divide between what is the case, what actually exists, and what ought to be. But how much truth is there in any of this?
IV
Marx himself believed that the most important element in his own work was his discovery of the way in which labour power generated ‘surplus value’. This discovery was based on the application of the dialectical method (which had reached its fruition with the classical German philosopher Hegel) to British classical economy, particularly the economic thought of Smith and Ricardo, and the most radical aspect of that thought which involved the labour theory of value. The labour theory of value had first been proposed in an embryonic form by the great theologian Thomas Aquinas, and had passed through several iterations and even more centuries before it reached Smith and Ricardo. But it was in Smith and Ricardo that the labour theory of value achieved its most pronounced and systematic expression. Ricardo writes:
The value of a commodity, or the quantity of any other commodity for which it will exchange, depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production, and not on the greater or less compensation which is paid for that labour.
Here we have, in embryo, the idea of socially necessary labour coming to constitute the value of any particular commodity. To cleave a diamond from a mine requires several different labour operations; it needs to be hewn from the rock by one group of people, collected and transported from the quarry by another, yet a third set of people who have their own skills and specialisations are involved in the cutting and shaping and finally there is the issue of distribution which requires a further set of people whose labour has yet another qualitatively specific form. The diamond’s higher price (the concrete manifestation of its value) is, ultimately, the result of the fact that a lot more different and diverse forms of labour are distilled in the process of bringing it to the market place in order to be sold; a banana, on the other hand, is cheaper precisely because much less labour, and less specialisation of labour is required to bring it to the point where it can be sold on a stall.
However neither Smith nor Ricardo were able to apply the labour theory of value to the issue of ‘profit’ – i.e. the way in which capitalists are able to ‘make’ money in and through their relationship to the workers they employ; or to say the same thing, Smith and Ricardo both treated profit as something separate and independent from the law which informed the value of commodities more generally and which saw such value as a measure of the labour embodied in them. Marx’s truly revolutionary step was to apply the law of value – which Smith and Ricardo had only used to describe commodities as they appeared in a generic guise – to the living labour which capital mobilized at the point of production. In so doing, he applied the law of value to the fundamental social relationship which undergirds the capitalist social system – the relationship of wage-labour to capital. What Marx noted was that the worker not only sells his or her labour power to the capitalist for a particular number of hours for a given wage, but that such labour power itself was a commodity and therefore could be measured in accordance with the labour theory of value as well.
How so? Well, one has to account for the socially necessary labour time required to bring living labour to market, which means accounting for the socially necessary time required to feed, clothe and shelter a given worker, to allow them to manifest their commodity for a given number of hours. Let’s say that if the worker has laboured for ‘four hours’ in any given day, he or she has, thereby, worked the equivalent of the costs required to feed, clothe and shelter him or her for a twenty-four-hour period, the period required for them to deploy their labour power for the day in question. But what Marx then concluded was truly revolutionary. Though ‘four hours’ might have been the value embodied in the commodity labour power for a particular duration, nevertheless the worker has the ability to work over and above those four hours. He or she could work six hours or eight hours or even ten hours. In this way, Marx saw how the commodity labour power is unique among commodities; for not only is it equivalent in value to the socially necessary labour time required to bring it to market – to deploy it – but also it has the capacity to produce a value over and above this, to generate a ‘surplus value’.
In this way Marx was able to show that that the ‘profit’ any given capitalist made was actually the hidden, undisclosed surplus value that the commodity labour power had the ability to generate and that the capitalist could then appropriate by exploiting such labour. But more than this, such profit also went to investing in constant capital – in the tools, the machinery, the warehouses, all the various properties and sites in which people produce, and again, that profit is also recycled back into wages in order to appropriate and exploit new ‘surplus value’. In other words, the Marxist analysis reveals that the entire edifice of capitalism is saturated with the labour power which has been appropriated by capital and is then embodied in the material accoutrements and social forms which structure every gradation and level of its economic system.
Now this has an irrepressible bearing on Marx’s theory of revolution. The concept of a future Marxist revolution as involving the proletariat taking power – assuming political control over society’s economic organs in and through the form of workers councils – simultaneously involves a future which is brought into a concrete mediation with the present; in expropriating capital, in taking control over the factories and workplaces on a democratic basis, the proletariat absorbs its own alienated substance, i.e. it reclaims in the future the alienated surplus product it generates in the present. Present and future are not simply bound by some theoretical ‘abstraction’ which is imposed on history from without, which the living social relationships of people in their active lives are then twisted into conformance with; rather the revolutionary moment which fuses present with future is adduced from the concrete substance which the proletariat generates from itself at the level of social being in and through the objective form of its labour, and the way that labour is embodied in the world.
In other words, the charge which Berlin levels against Marxism – the charge that it involves a rational and idealised abstraction of something called ‘proletariat’ which then offers a gateway into a utopic and idealised future which has no mooring or grounding in the objective realities of the present – this charge has no bearing on Marxism if and when Marxism is considered from the purview of the living relationship between capitalist and proletarian centred around the commodity ‘labour power’. But there is a reason why Berlin levels this charge. In his entire body of work – even though he, Berlin, has actually written a book on Marx – he hardly mentions the concept of ‘surplus value’. In his book on Marx he refers to the concept twice. First, he writes in the preliminary section how ‘the theory of exploitation and surplus value is found in Fourier’. This is simply untrue – Marx’s theory of proletarian exploitation as that of expropriated surplus value is not to be found in Fourier or anywhere else at the time. Berlin, as so often, doesn’t provide any type of reference for his sweeping assertion so what he is picking up on is difficult to say presuming it’s not an out and out fabrication.
Later in the same book, Berlin explains that Marx’s ‘theory of exploitation’ is ‘unaffected’ by his concept of value as ‘a uniform entity called undifferentiated human labour’ and the law of value which measures such ‘undifferentiated human labour’. All in all Berlin devotes perhaps five paragraphs of his entire corpus to what Marx himself regarded as his own most significant discovery, and Berlin only does this much in order to hastily divorce ‘the law of value’ from its application to Marx’s ‘theory of exploitation’. In so doing, Berlin negates the very nature of the leap forward Marx made; that is, the application of the law of value to a historically constituted class relationship from which the necessary basis for the proletarian revolution could be adduced; that is, not simply as a purely moral category but as a category whose moral notion of freedom was actually tied to the historical agency which could bring that freedom into being at the level of its own social existence.
The Marxist theory of the proletariat as a revolutionary unfolding unites the poles of the ‘moral postulate’ and the ‘practical fact’, the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’, the ‘future’ and the ‘present’, ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. For Berlin’s critique of Marxism as a purely ‘idealised utopia’, a ‘rational abstraction’, a quasi-religious ‘teleology’ to hold any charge, he must either disregard Marx’s theory of value as applied to the commodity ‘labour power’ altogether, or – on the one occasion where he does confront it – Berlin must divorce the theory of value in Marx from Marx’s conception of exploitation. Once the Marxist conception of the proletariat as an exploited class is severed from its grounding in the law of value, the necessity of the proletariat reclaiming its alienated labour substance at the level of practical existence is annulled. Marxism, therefore, is converted into a purely moral and idealistic postulate which is separated from the embodied forms of practical existence which the proletariat generates as the productive class; or to say the same, Marxism becomes precisely the type of idealised and utopic promise of revolutionary emancipation which Berlin wishes to critically demolish.
V
Now one can still disagree with the Marxist prognosis but what is vital about Berlin’s critique is that he simply doesn’t make any genuine attempt to engage on the economic and philosophical themes which Marx developed in Capital, and which were about evolving a form of socialism which was not utopic, but rather was grounded in the immanent and logical unfolding of objective social categories at the level of historical existence and the way in which class consciousness – by conceptualising such an unfolding – has the ability to bring it to its fruition through self-aware and revolutionary activity. Berlin barely touches on this, but when he does it is to simply break down this organic connection between social consciousness and social being in order to conclude, without any further ado, that Marx was a utopian thinker. Berlin is doing something far from original here. The idea that Marxism is some form of religion, a teleology which takes the form of a mechanical determinism, and the idea that it promises a heaven but creates a hell are the stock-and-trade criticisms which are advocated by people, in the main, who have never read a word of Marx.
In light of this it is worth examining Berlin’s own version of the best possible society. Berlin’s conception of what society ‘should’ tend towards is based on a certain notion of liberal freedom which he outlines and contrasts in one of his major works, Four Essays on Liberty. Part of this book involves outlining conceptions of positive liberty and negative liberty. Positive liberty, for Berlin, is what might be described as an active process; it is the means by which the individual self-actualises, the way he or she is able to determine their own decisions as they make their way in the world: ‘I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men's acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside.’ Some level of positive liberty should be enjoyed by all members of a free society, and yet in the same moment he regards it with a heightened wariness.
For positive liberty is something which can easily and swiftly be abused; and again it is here that his sympathy with the critique of the Enlightenment on the part of thinkers like Hamann resonates. In asserting one’s positive liberty, one endeavours to be a subject rather than a slave, but one can be a slave to more than just a slave owner. One might, as Berlin points out, consider oneself to be a slave to nature, a slave to one’s natural appetites, cravings and desires. For Berlin, this can lead to a split in he individual; on the one hand you have the bodily self which mires you in the sensations and appetites of the physical world, on the other you have a higher self, a self which isn’t enslaved to nature and which in some sense seeks transcendence in and through reason and rationality. For Berlin, such a separation lies at the heart of Enlightenment thought, because Enlightenment thought inevitably brings these two aspects, these two selves, into confrontation:
This dominant self is then variously identified with reason, with my ‘higher nature’, with the self which calculates and aims at what will satisfy it in the long run . . . which is then contrasted with irrational impulse, uncontrolled desires, my ‘lower’ nature, the pursuit of immediate pleasures, my ‘empirical’ or ‘heteronomous’ self, swept by every gust of desire and passion, needing to be rigidly disciplined if it is ever to rise to the full height of its ‘real’ nature.
The higher nature, through the use of reason, must in some sense ‘suppress’ the lower nature of emotion, capriciousness, individual desires, etc., if positive liberty is to be realised. But, Berlin continues, this process of ‘suppression’ doesn’t simply stop at the level of the individual. If one accepts the premise – i.e., that the individual is composed of a higher and lower nature and that the key to freedom is allowing the higher nature to predominate – such a paradigm must apply to all individuals. Yet some people might not have the means to ‘free themselves’ from the characteristics of their lower, more irrational natures; in such a situation, those who are in touch with their ‘true selves’, who have already made the leap to freedom, must make the same leap on behalf of the more reticent majority. In this way, the higher, rational self becomes a template to be imprinted on all individuals and is key to their ‘freedom’ whether they understand this or not: ‘This entity . . . identified as being the “true” self which, by imposing its collective, or “organic”, single will upon its recalcitrant “members”, achieves its own, and therefore their, “higher” freedom.’
This is, of course, what Berlin considers to be taking place with Enlightenment thought; the template of the generic, rational individual is generalised and becomes the means to ‘justify the coercion of some men by others in order to raise them to a “higher” level of freedom.’ Berlin regards the Rousseauean ‘general will’ to be an example of this; it is an instance where the multifarious, diverse and diverging ‘empirical’ wills of many different individuals are subsumed under a generic, uniform and totalising abstraction of a general will which purports to embody the rational interests of all. But Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s general will is just one example of how a ‘super personal entity’ is able to override the definitive particularities of individual personhood; other ‘abstractions’ to be so deployed include ‘state, a class, a nation, or the march of history itself, [which are] regarded as a more `real' subject of attributes than the empirical self.’ We can see how, for Berlin, positive freedom is linked with Enlightenment thought which is, in turn, linked with the thought of Hegel and Marx (‘the march of history’) in and through a generalised, universalised rationalist perspective which is brought into a violent opposition with individuality.
And for this reason, Berlin’s notion of ‘pluralism’ becomes crucial in forming an antidote to these types of doctrines. The political notion that the development of a teleological process or the actualisation of the capacities for reason, which inhere in the higher nature of every individual, will eventually yield ‘a perfectly harmonious society’ inevitably appears in the philosophical realm in terms of the conception of an absolute truth. There is simply the one all-encompassing truth, the general will, the march of spirit through world history, the development of a classless society – the truth of mankind becomes a single and absolute goal and the truth of man’s essential being is transcribed in single and absolute terms thereby:
This is the belief that somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heart of an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution . . . from Plato to the last disciples of Hegel or Marx . . . the notion of a final harmony in which all riddles are solved, all contradictions reconciled.
It is this belief which, ultimately, lays the grounds for totalitarianism – of the Marxist type, of the Rousseauean type, or even of the fascist type. In order to counter it we need, argues Berlin, to acknowledge that the truth about human beings is not absolute; that – and here again he deploys the relativistic aspect which can be found in Vico’s thought – the complex of human individuals in different places and at different times is also a complex of rich, variegated and vital needs and aspirations which cannot be encompassed by a one-size-fits-all form of rationalism: ‘To admit that the fulfilment of some of our ideals may in principle make the fulfilment of others impossible is to say that the notion of total human fulfilment is a formal contradiction, a metaphysical chimaera.’
And this is where Berlin introduces his view of liberal pluralism. In a modern society – the England or the America in which Berlin spent a period of time living – ‘the fanaticism, compulsion, persecution’ which was part and parcel of examples of totalitarianism like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia was by and large absent. For modern liberal society is not ‘constructed around the ancient principle that there is only one good for men.’ Instead modern, forward-thinking liberal society recognises that ‘not all values are compatible with one another, and choices must be made for no better reason than that each value is what it is, and we choose it for what it is, and not because it can be shown on some single scale to be higher than another’. For Berlin, then, pluralism is the chief characteristic of any ‘healthy’ liberal society, guarantees the true freedom of the individual through ‘choice’ and opens a path toward ‘pluralism, toleration, compromise.’ Above all ‘[t]oleration is historically the product of the realisation of the irreconcilability of equally dogmatic faiths, and the practical improbability of the complete victory of one over the other. Those who wished to survive realised that they had to tolerate error. They gradually came to see merits in diversity, and so became sceptical about definitive solutions in human affairs.’
It is as this point that Isaiah Berlin mobilizes the concept of negative liberty. In order for ‘liberal society’ to sustain, the ‘pluralism’ which guarantees people’s ability to ‘choose’ must be fortified against the possibilities of repression and totalitarianism, or to say the same, there must be an absence of coercive legal, cultural or physical obstacles to such ‘choice’. For pluralism to flourish, for ‘toleration’ to become the norm, modern society must exist in a state of ‘negative liberty’, i.e., a state where people’s ability to make ‘choices’ is not frustrated and there exists the recognition that individuals of all different types might have many contradictory social aims and ends but that these can all be allowed to coexist from within the framework of society as a whole.
But what of his actual description of liberal society as a uniquely ‘pluralistic’ formation? Has modern liberal society been the only society to offer up some kind of pluralism? As Perry Anderson writes, Berlin seems to have thought so:
Berlin’s accounts of pluralism involve a stark before and after. Up to a given historical moment – whose precise location can vary, but which roughly falls between Machiavelli and Fichte – monism prevailed: the existence of a single normative standard was affirmed by all traditions, however much they disagreed over what it was. Beyond this time, understanding of the diversity of legitimate values gradually dawned.’
However, Anderson questions this fundamental framework with a good deal of acuity:
Can Ancient, or Medieval, or Early Modern society really have been so ideologically monolithic that the possibility of alternative conceptions of a good life was never seriously entertained? At the very outset of his story, Berlin seems to have mislaid Mount Olympus. What was Classical polytheism but the personification of many and contrary values? Constant himself noted that Antiquity allowed for more than one ideal – the practice of philosophy demanded virtues other than those of war, of equal dignity. Medieval society confessed a range of values too – according to the most established doctrine, fighting, praying and working were separate vocations, each blessed in the eyes of God. Chaucer hardly conveys the sense of a single type of human value. As for the Renaissance – Montaigne, Shakespeare . . ..
I think that the reason Berlin disregards such questions isn’t one of simple laziness. Rather it is about the type of ‘choice’ that undergirds Berlin’s whole conception. His notion of pluralism revolves around a highly specific concept of ‘choice’. But choice for whom? Anatole France once wrote of bourgeois society and bourgeois law: ‘In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.’ His point is clear – though in abstraction citizens have equal political rights, the economic inequalities which pertain at a more fundamental level are fully in effect, and actually delimit such rights – and, consequently, the ‘choices’ of a large section of the population are inevitably restricted. For instance, if a rich man is forced to abandon his home for whatever reason, he will never have to sleep under a bridge, for he will have the money to spend a few nights in a hotel. But the poorest of people cannot ‘choose’ the hotel option as a way of avoiding homelessness; for them, although the formal choice to stay in a hotel exists (they are not prohibited from doing so by any legal coercions) nevertheless given the nature of their economic reality that bridge is no doubts going to be their ultimate destination for the night.
Berlin’s notion of ‘choice’ in the context of the type of ‘pluralism’ which undergirds liberal society is entirely in keeping with this. It is very much the choice of the abstract individual, an individual unmoored from the type of economic relations of exploitation which pertain in a capitalist society mired in a specific form of class oppression. It is the choice of the worker which is couched in negative freedom; he or she has the political right to choose to apply for a job – any job – on the market; he or she can apply to be a politician, a brain surgeon, a top-flight lawyer or an airplane pilot. There are no legal decrees or statutes preventing the posting of such an application or banning that person’s entry into that particular field. But in reality, unless you have had the economic privileges which come with being a member of the middle and upper classes: unless you have had the chance to go to university, unless you have the right connections and names to put on your CV, unless you have had the funds to support a year apprenticing in a big law or media firm – it is highly unlikely as a person from a lower economic bracket that you will be able to access these types of jobs. In this case your ‘choice’, the negative freedom you are able to actualise, involves being able to choose between a variety of rather more poorly paid jobs which tend to have the longest hours.
If, on the other hand, you are from a very wealthy family; if, as a child, you go a prestigious independent school – say St Paul’s School, perhaps, in the heart of London – if you then end up going on to one of the most prestigious universities in the world – Oxford University, for example – where you mix with the most prestigious and prosperous, first as a student, later as a member of faculty; if, to all these advantages in your class background, you then proceed to write long defences of the elite you belong to in terms of notions of liberal freedoms which help justify their economic power and ascendency – then not only will you enjoy the ‘negative liberty’ which comes from almost no restrictions on your ability to attend the most swanky of restaurants, to be published in the most elite of literary journals, to speak at the most reputable of venues, to be assigned membership of the most prestigious academic institutions such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences – but on top of all this, who knows? You might even end up going from being humble old Isaiah to Sir Isaiah Berlin, member of the order of the British Empire and Fellow of the British Academy.
On the other side of the mirror, however, the road to self-actualisation is of a very different order. For those people who experience the ‘negative freedom’ of bourgeois right and law as the freedom to be drawn into the worst forms of exploitation, the freedom to experience the most inadequate forms of healthcare, the poorest selection of foods, the most meagre of educational opportunities, for this group of people, the possibility of attaining a more concrete and genuine form of freedom is not premised on some abstract ‘political right’ which guarantees some generic notion of ‘choice’ but rather on transforming the systematic forms of oppression they are in thrall to at the level of the economic and class dimensions of society. Berlin’s conception of pluralism and ‘choice’ couched in the concept of ‘negative freedom’ is only ever articulated from the purview of the generic individual – who has the abstract possibility of ‘choice’ – but one which can never determine or touch the forms of social and historical being which create the objectives limits in which that choice operates.
But the freedom to self-determine for the individual at the bottom of the economic food chain is inexorably bound to his or her membership of a collective or class. Workers are often unable to actualise the ‘negative freedom’ of capitalist, consumerist and political ‘choice’ which ‘liberal pluralism’ offers because they are in thrall to a more fundamental economic exploitation. Their potential to transform and supersede the economic form of that exploitation is bound up with the fact that the individual is part of a group which stands in a particular relation to the means of production. If a worker wants to create an environment where the jobs he or she has access to involve higher salaries, where he or she can ‘choose’ and actually realise forms of employment which will better remunerate and protect them in terms of their status as workers, he or she can only achieve this not in their capacity as an isolated individual, but in their capacity as a member of a class which has the ability to organise, to form collective entities like unions, to picket and strike, to create en masse the conditions by which employers are forced to raise wages and install benefits. And, of course, in the Marxist lexicon, the ability to transform the economic inequalities of capitalism most fundamentally comes from the capacity of the proletariat to act in a collective and revolutionary manner in order to place the means of production under its own auspices, creating the outline of a classless future.
But such forms of collective self-determination at the historical level are precisely what Isaiah Berlin rules out, i.e. he places them under the category of ‘positive freedom’ which has an inherent bias towards totalitarianism. We are now in a position, I think, to see what Berlin’s theory of liberal pluralism truly entails in and through the rather insidious contrast he makes between positive and negative freedom. Positive freedom – i.e., that freedom which people employ in actively transforming the world in and through their own struggles and efforts – is linked inexorably with the phenomenon of totalitarianism. Negative freedom is about preserving those elements in capitalist societies within a liberal superstructure from forms of fundamental interference. In other words, the struggles, protests, and other forms of organisation people develop to change the world and to create a better future, are curtailed in advance – their possibilities negated, while the present in its liberal-capitalistic form is raised up and articulated as the only type of social arrangement which provides ‘toleration’ and is thus the authentic guarantor of true human freedom. Berlin’s defence of liberalism cuts off the future from the possibilities of radical change and makes of the capitalist social world an eternal present. It works to make sure that the everyday grinding economic forms of class exploitation and class power of the present remain absolutely intact but masked by the somewhat superficial and cosmetic freedoms which a free market provides.
VI
Berlin’s contrast between positive and negative freedom is problematic for other reasons, however. First and foremost, Berlin never seriously examines the way in which negative liberty was used to rationalise and absolve some truly horrific events in the past which a burgeoning free market economy helped wreak. The political theorist Joshua Cherniss tells us ‘Berlin later regretted that he had not made more of the evils that negative liberty had been used to justify, such as exploitation under laissez-faire capitalism’. Regret notwithstanding, one should recognise events like the Irish potato famine where the British state continued to ship out potatoes from Ireland to be sold on the English market even as people in Ireland starved in their hundreds of thousands. The Whig colonial administrator, Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, actually prevented aid from reaching the Irish masses on the grounds that nobody should interfere with the ‘negative freedom’ of a laissez faire economy. One has to acknowledge that such events, ubiquitous in the history of capitalism, present a bloody stumbling block to the complacency that surrounds liberal notions of ‘negative freedom’.
But perhaps even more crucially, Berlin is less than consistent in his criticisms of ‘positive freedom’. He is keen to criticise those ‘utopian’ (and ultimately ‘totalitarian’) schemes which endeavour to act ‘positively’ in the interests of the masses to transform structural economic inequalities at the level of collective historical development. But when the ruling classes of the ‘pluralistic’ liberal societies unleash their own ‘positive freedoms’ in order to make sure that others – other societies, other nations – conform to their ‘pluralistic values’, Berlin’s objections at once became less strident. In 1956, for example, when England, France and Israel had invaded Egypt to take control of the Suez Canal which had been nationalised by the Egyptian state, and in order to forcefully remove the Arab leader of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Berlin lauded the invasion and wrote to the wife of the British Prime Minster Anthony Eden declaring that her husband had ‘saved England’.
In the case of the Vietnam war – perhaps given the length and breadth of the movements which developed against it – Berlin was a little more equivocal, arguing that the idea to mount the invasion had been a foolhardy one on the part of the Americans, but ultimately, Berlin came down on the side of imperial power once again when he urged American troops not to withdraw and said that if South Vietnam were lost, other pro-Western regimes in the region would follow. As Michael Ignatieff points out, this echoed verbatim the ‘domino theory’ put forward by the US administration of the time in order to justify their military adventures across the globe:
On Vietnam, he [Berlin] believed that the Americans should not have intervened but, having committed themselves, they could not withdraw precipitously…that the domino theory – the likely collapse of other pro-Western regimes in the region following a Communist victory in Vietnam – happened to be true.
For the same reason, as Tariq Ali notes, Berlin offered his tacit support to the American architects of the US foreign policy which helped facilitate and justify the murder of a generation of communists in Indonesia in 1965: ‘This included justifications of the 1965 massacre of over a million Communists and other leftists in Indonesia’. And in the febrile cold war atmosphere, where an earnest grassroots opposition developed from amongst populations across the globe, terrified by the spectre of superpowers squaring up to one another like great giants against a backdrop of dark cloud and flashing lightening – Berlin allowed the mask of stuttering moderation, of liberal equanimity, to once again slip. When asked by a friend to make a statement in support of unilateral nuclear disarmament, Berlin refused, and instead indulged the type of rhetoric which might have come from the mouth of the most war-rabid Washington hawk. The notion of truth being a multiple and contradictory set of relative and pluralistic values was suddenly evaporated before a tub-thumping objectivism which might have given any Soviet-bloc dictator a run for his money:
Unless there is some point at which you are prepared to fight against whatever odds, and whatever the threat may be, not merely to yourself, but to anybody, all principles become flexible, all codes melt, and all ends in themselves for which we live disappear.’
As Christopher Hitchens would adroitly summarise – ‘from the Cold War through Algeria to Suez to Vietnam, Berlin strove to find a high “liberal” justification either for the status quo or for the immediate needs of the conservative authorities.’ For when it came to the ruling elites of the Western world, Berlin was – more often than not – prepared to make rather more concessions to the use of ‘positive freedom’, especially when it was mobilized in order to smash the ‘commies’ (and the native populations such governments straddled). According to Berlin, certain countries – not only those in the Communist bloc but also Third World countries and some of the Arab countries – seemed ill-equipped to develop the civilized, pluralistic values which Berlin so cherished. In an interview he made this clear stating,
I suspect that there may not be much liberalism in Korea. I doubt if there is much liberalism even in Latin America. I think liberalism is essentially the belief of people who have lived on the same soil for a long time in comparative peace with each other. An English invention. The English have not been invaded for a very very long time.
And herein in lies the nub; certain countries – particularly those of the Third World – the same countries which have been ‘invaded’ are the very countries which are incapable of rising to the liberalism which Berlin lauds. The obverse also holds true for Berlin: those nations that are able to project imperial power and remain unoccupied are also those which (unless they are ‘communist’) are capable of cultivating truly humane, pluralistic and democratic societies. One sees now, the inexorable logic with which the bookish, charming and self-effacing Berlin yielded to a more hawkish and bellicose Berlin who demanded the Americans bring their imperial duties to their bloody fruition on the global stage. If the more backward countries couldn’t raise themselves to the level of civilisation that Berlin required, then one could only provide one’s wholehearted support for the external power which – through military means – could impose such social arrangements on them. In this, we see that the true successors of Berlin’s liberalism are the Obamas and Clintons whose honeyed phrases about ‘liberation’ and the ‘spread of democracy’ occur against a background of smoking wastelands, drones, destruction, and death. The arc of liberalism is long, but truly, it bends toward imperial invasion and mass-murder.
VII
To recapitulate then: the structure of Berlin’s theoretical conception unfurls in the following way. First he provides us with a lucid and engaging philosophical description of several significant anti-Enlightenment thinkers; from these he extracts the elements of relativism and romantic irrationalism which they wielded so potently; so armed, Berlin combines such relativism and irrationalism to countermand Marxism which he now describes in terms of a mechanical objectivism, a utopian schema inasmuch as its frigid and mechanistic caveats are imposed on a reality whose richness and particularity fracture under the strain – yielding horrific forms of totalitarianism as a consequence.
In contrast to this Berlin proffers his own form of ‘pluralistic’ liberalism. A brand of liberalism which – by mobilizing the same strain of anti-Enlightenment relativism – seems to offer a society of individual choice not hampered by hard and fast notions of objective truth and the mechanisms of ‘positive freedom’. The latter comes to create forms of collective and social power that, according to Berlin, militate against the freedom of the individual. The use of philosophical relativism here allows Berlin to overlook and ignore just how the plurality of choice the individual enjoys is itself framed within certain objective limits. Society itself is underpinned by an objective historical development which is expressed in terms of objective class structures that facilitate an objective form of exploitation – i.e., that of the surplus value produced by labour which is appropriated by capital.
In employing his brand of relativism, Berlin is able to dogmatically disregard the objective economic premises of the capitalist social system itself; thus ‘negative freedom’ can be posited as an abstraction that facilitates the privileges of the most prosperous precisely because such freedom does not touch the underlying fundamental forms of economic exploitation. Positive freedom, which relates to forms of self-determination that crystalize at the level of classes determining their interests in a collective fashion, is derided and dismissed as something which lays the way for totalitarianism. In this way, Berlin has absolutely fortified the social system in which he is so very at home.
The contradiction arises when one considers the nature of the individual liberal capitalist societies of the First World; more often than not, their capitalism is premised on their ability to exploit and subdue populations and regions across the globe – or to say the same, their capitalism is premised on the ability of the ruling class of those nations to manifest their ‘positive freedom’ in and through imperialist conquest and domination. When Berlin was confronted by this visceral contradiction in his thought as it applied to ongoing historical development, he made a rather dramatic volte-face stating that ‘positive freedom’ when employed in this capacity by such ruling groups and nations could be a very positive thing indeed.
It seems apposite to conclude by quoting from the late Christopher Hitchens who managed to capture the fundamental political instincts of the philosopher of pluralism which had taken root at an early age. Hitchens records:
As a small Jewish boy, an only child with a defective left arm, tenderly raised in Riga . . . Isaiah Berlin saw a terrified tsarist cop being dragged away by a mob. The sight . . . powerfully coloured his view of disorder and insurrection; the more so, perhaps, because his infant imagination furnished the subsequent scene of lynching or drowning that he did not in fact witness . . ..
One could argue that if he had been exposed to another contemporary scene of cruelty – the mass slaughter of peasant conscripts at Tannenberg, for example, or the Cossacks dealing with a demonstration, or perhaps the Black Hundreds falling to work in a shtetl – the formative effect would have or might have been different. Yet I think it’s clear, from his own recurrence to the story, and from other evidence, that it was the disturbance to the natural order that made the young Isaiah tremble and flinch . . ..
1. Isiah Berlin, The Magus of the North – J.G Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (Fontana Press, Great Britain: 1994), 44.
