Product Description

The result of ten years of interviews between Berlin and Ignatieff, this is the biography of one of the greatest and most humane of modern philosophers. Berlin (born in Russia in 1909) was caught up in the most powerful currents of the century, and the book is full of memorable encounters.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #78971 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 367 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Isaiah Berlin was one of the leading liberal thinkers of the 20th century, and one of its fastest talkers. Born in the Latvian port of Riga in 1909, his family survived the Russian Revolution, but its chilly aftermath forced his Anglophile father to resettle them in Surbiton in 1921. Isaiah assimilated quickly, becoming in his mind equal parts Russian, English and Jewish, and subsequently he became the first Jew to be elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was to spend most of his life studying and lecturing at Oxford, developing his concept of "negative liberty"; but although he longed to know one big thing, to be a "hedgehog" in his own famous definition, instead he felt more naturally a "fox", knowing many smaller things. This Reynard instinct, however, made him wonderful company, and he became that rarity: a British public intellectual, who made learning attractive. Michael Ignatieff has written a book that stands somewhere between a biography and a ghost-written autobiography, relying mostly on Berlin's own recollections gathered from conversations between them over a 10-year period. Berlin had his detractors, including himself ("superficial"), and a more critical evaluation of his contribution to philosophy will be written, but Ignatieff captures the human side of this wise and cosmopolitan man, whose deceptive "lightness of being" concealed a soul that stared at the horrors of his century. --David Vincent

Customer Reviews

The Fox who aims to be a Hedgehog.
Twentieth Century philosophers in England fall into two groups. The bigger is the one whose members engage in analyzing the meanings of words and the ways that we use them. While this is undoubtedly an important enterprise, it is often rather arid and does not touch on what is really significant to most people. These philosophers tend to teach us cleverness.

The other, rather smaller group, to which Isaiah Berlin belonged (after having started as a member of the first group), addresses itself chiefly to human concerns, to how we ought to live. I maintain that men like him teach us wisdom.

Isaiah Berlin certainly did not live in an ivory tower; and in Michael Ignatieff's immensely attractive biography we can follow his engagement in the great world. Like many other academics, he worked in government during the Second World War: at the Ministry of Information in New York and then at the British Embassy in Washington and (very briefly just after the war) at the Moscow Embassy. As a committed Zionist, he played a minor but not unimportant role, acting as an intermediary between his friend Chaim Weizmann and American politicians during the period when American attitudes towards the aspiration for an independent Israel were being shaped. Weizmann and Ben Gurion both asked him to move to Israel and play a part in shaping the nascent state; but Berlin declined. One reason for this was that he felt himself temperamentally unfitted for the intrigues, infighting and abrasiveness that such a role would involve.

Ignatieff shows repeatedly how, although Berlin had political commitments - particularly to Zionism and to anti-Communism - he shied away from being put into a confrontational position. He did not like making enemies; he liked to please; he was uncomfortably aware of his dual allegiance when working for a British government which was unsympathetic to Zionist aspirations. There seems to me no doubt that the philosophy which would develop in due course was a sublimation of his psychology. It should go without saying that this is not said in denigration of his philosophy: some of the greatest achievements in creativity have been driven by personal needs of this kind. One must judge the value of a philosophy by the quality of the end product, not by its psychological origins.

One of Berlin's essays is entitled The Hedgehog and the Fox. The fox, so an ancient Greek once said, knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ignatieff argues that Berlin indeed knew many things but that he had been in search of the one big thing that would make sense not only of the tensions he felt within himself, but also of those which any open-minded person must feel when seeing that in so many important conflicts, whether in personal life, in the history of ideas, in politics, or in philosophical situations, there is so much to be said for each side. He found this one big thing in the notion of Pluralism.

Pluralism means that every individual and every society must accept that there is never one absolute value to which other values must be subordinated. There are many values in life which all command respect; but the most important of these - freedom, justice, equality, tolerance, compassion, loyalty - often must collide. Take, for example, Liberty and Equality. Both are rightly sought after; but equality can only be achieved by curtailing the liberty of action which, if granted, will result in some people pulling ahead of others. And even a single value, like equality, has tension built into it: do we look for equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? Again, if we want equality of opportunity, the result may be inequality of outcome; if we want to ensure equality of outcome, we cannot also have equality of opportunity. There are occasions when unavoidable collisions of values - of allegiance or of moral duty, for example - are the very stuff of tragedy.

Berlin was a liberal and believed in rational discussion; but he thought that no amount of rational discussion can resolve these conflicts of values; and for him it was certainly not a solution to give to any one value absolute priority over others which have as good a claim to be universal.

Berlin was as fascinated by those ideologies which he regarded as inhuman as he was by those he shared. He once said that he would never describe Nazism as mad. It did indeed rest on totally perverted axioms, but upon these axioms its theorists did erect an intellectual structure: how else could one explain that fascism was espoused not just by thugs, but by many academics at universities and by thinkers in other walks of life? Even more so was this the case with Marxism: he detested it, but he truly understood it from within. Ignatieff comments that "Berlin was the only liberal thinker of real consequence to take the trouble to enter the mental worlds of liberalism's sworn enemies." And although liberalism and nationalism, usually allies in the first half of the 19th century, parted company thereafter, Berlin was also one of those rare modern liberals who had respect for nationalism. The freedom to give expression to national identity was an important freedom, but of course it must not itself become oppressive of other people's national identity.

As the book's title suggests, this is a biography that focusses most strongly on the philosopher's life. An exposition of his ideas is skilfully woven into the narrative; but it is not until we are two-thirds of the way through the book, when Berlin had reached the age of 40, that we come upon the chapter headed "Late Awakening" - awakening, that is, to the ideas for which he became famous. But I cannot praise highly enough the loving and vivid portrait of Isaiah Berlin that Ignatieff has given us and the fascinating account of his private and public life.

"A fine balance of the private man with the public thought"
Michael Ignatieff charts Berlins remarkable life from his early childhood witnessing the stirrings of Bolshevism in Riga and the full revolutons in Moscow. Subtly drawing out the man from the ideas, we learn of Berlins intellectual self doubt in the mainstream of the Oxford philosophes of the '30s, and how this led latterly to carving out his own agenda on the more sensitive soil of the history of ideas, refuting the rigid philosophical concepts and categories that for him failed to connect with human reality. Igantieff exposes superbly how difficult Berlin found it to relate to the opposite sex, however easy he found it getting in the minds of those 18th. century philosophers he was studying, but how he overcame his self doubt to find a happy and fulfilling marriage. Yet interestingly, we see that the major work he felt he needed to write always elluded him, and he never seems to have felt at ease with the essay format. Ignatieff brings out these characteristics that emphasis the sensitive and personable side to Berlin few intellectuals of his stature possessed - a superb work however we must now expect that Ignatieff provides a follow up work looking more carefully at the application of Berlin's value pluralism in the modern world and analysing its implications.