Isaiah Berlin and the Problem of Counter-Enlightenment Liberalism
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Isaiah Berlin and the Problem of Counter-Enlightenment Liberalism Mark Bode, BA (Hons) Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the School of History and Politics, University of Adelaide, January 2011. Contents Abstract i Declaration ii Acknowledgements iii Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Insider’s Outsider: Berlin, Zionism and the Enlightenment . Introduction 11 . The Insider 12 . The Insider as Outsider: Berlin’s Zionism 25 Chapter Two: Monism and Berlin’s Critique of the Enlightenment . Introduction 35 . Berlin’s Enlightenment 39 . The Defence of Negative Liberty 53 . Berlin as Counter-Enlightenment Liberal: Lilla’s Critique 62 Chapter Three: Philosophy By Other Means: Isaiah Berlin, a Philosopher Writing the History of Ideas . Introduction 71 . The Philosopher as Historian of Ideas 77 . Quentin Skinner and the Priority of Context 85 . A Philosopher By Other Means 94 Chapter Four: A Secularised Neo-Calvinism: Berlin and the Idea of Historical Rupture . Introduction 111 . Totalitarianism and Post-War Thought 115 . A Sense of Reality 122 . Marxism and the Rise of a Secularised Neo-Calvinism 137 Chapter Five: The Destruction of the Questions and Berlin’s Turn to Joseph de Maistre . Introduction 153 . The Destruction of the Questions 157 . Berlin’s Interpretation of Joseph de Maistre 168 . Maistre and the Analysis of Totalitarian Thought 180 Conclusion 191 Bibliography 194 i Abstract This thesis will explore the complex relationship between Isaiah Berlin‟s liberalism and his work in the history of ideas. While Berlin‟s explicitly political thought reads like a scion of the Enlightenment, albeit with a pronounced Cold War inflection, his work in the history of ideas appears to indict the Age of Reason as partially responsible for the rise of totalitarianism. As a liberal thinker, therefore, Berlin seems Janus-faced. He appears to charge the Age of Reason with complicity in the rise of totalitarianism, yet continues to defend the most legitimate child of Enlightenment thought: liberalism in a negative form. As some of his critics have observed, notably Mark Lilla and Zeev Sternhell, Berlin seems intent on divorcing liberalism from the its foundation in the Enlightenment. This project, they are united in charging, is philosophically incoherent and politically ill-judged. The thesis will present an alternative reading of the relationship between Berlin‟s liberalism and his intellectual history. Instead of interpreting Berlin‟s turn to the Counter- Enlightenment as an assault on the Enlightenment and a blow against his own liberalism, his interpretation of the Counter-Enlightenment, especially the proto-fascist work of Joseph de Maistre, will be read as a search for a „lens‟ with which to examine the nature of totalitarian thought. In this context, Berlin‟s lengthy and neglected essay on Maistre is of greatest importance: the darkly prescient thought of the reactionary and ultramontane Savoyard – strikingly out of place in his own time, yet an intellectual contemporary of the twentieth century – provides an analytical „window‟ onto the presuppositions and character of totalitarianism. Berlin‟s turn away from the Age of Reason, therefore, is guided by an overarching methodological conviction: it is Maistre, rather than Voltaire, who is the better guide to the twentieth century‟s most shockingly original contribution to political thought and practice, totalitarianism. ii Plagiarism Declaration This work contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution to Mark Bode and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. I give consent to this copy of my thesis, when deposited in the University Library, being made available for loan and photocopying, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I also give permission for the digital version of my thesis to be made available on the web, via the University‟s digital research repository, the Library catalogue, the Australasian Digital Theses Program (ADTP) and also through web search engines, unless permission has been granted by the University to restrict access for a period of time. Signed:________________________________________________Date:______________ iii Acknowledgements As this thesis has taken shape over the years, a few more than I care to remember, I have incurred many personal and intellectual debts, all of which I would like, were I able, to acknowledge individually. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, I simply do not have sufficient space. I hope that the lack of correspondence between my many reasons for gratitude and the actual number of people thanked will signal the overall scope of my debt – too large to easily express – lest it be seen as a hierarchy of importance, or as the first sign of a faulty and fading memory. My greatest debt is to my supervisor, Paul Corcoran, who has accompanied the sometimes rocky development of this work with a combination of patience, sage counsel and moral support. Its completion owes a great deal to him. As a supervisor, Paul has been, as I knew that he would be, a source of sound advice and unfailing support. On a more intangible and human level – which is no less important, in many ways – he has contributed just as much, for which I am more than merely grateful. Paul is, as my father would have said, ein Mensch. I would also like to pay tribute to the friends and acquaintances who have made the process of completing this thesis, which often seemed like a mirage, always receding into the distance, more than just bearable. They often made it fun. Over countless coffee breaks, leavened by more alcoholic interludes, they have contributed more than I can adequately express. Given the difficulty of translating a sense of certainty into a succinct series of sentences, I would simply like to acknowledge them by name: Alan Goldstone, David Cannon, Paul Tsoundarou, Anita Lewan, Aaron Retz, Josh Forkert, Luke Trenwith, Dana Papuc, Clare Parker and Pat Tree. In different ways, I am equally grateful to them all. No less importantly, I would like to thank the School of History and Politics at the University of Adelaide, especially its Head, Clem Macintyre, who has assisted me in a iv number ways, sometimes beyond the strict call of duty. As in all departments, the office staff have often been indispensable. I would especially like to thanks Chris McElhinney, whose sure command over all aspects of the School‟s structure and workings, especially in matters financial, has often prevented me from spending fruitless hours in search of bureaucratic enlightenment. Last, but by no means least, I would like to extend my thanks to my co-supervisor, Lisa Hill, whose incisive comments on the first draft have done much to tighten and strengthen the argument developed in the following pages. Lisa, too, has been a source of support and advice over the years, and I would like to thank her in both a scholarly and a personal sense. On a more mundane level, I would like to point out, at the risk of stating the obvious, a risk that I am happy to take, that I am solely responsible for the argument advanced in this work. All of its limitations are mine: some of the strengths that it might be said to possess have a decidedly more mixed parentage. 1 Introduction Since the publication of Two Concepts of Liberty in 1958, Isaiah Berlin‟s work has come under increasing critical scrutiny. With the overwhelming majority of his essays now published in edited collections – a project overseen, since 1978, by Henry Hardy, his long- time editor – Berlin‟s interpreters now have access to the full range of his thought. Since his death on November 5th 1997, four collections of his occasional essays have been published, along with the first two volumes of his collected correspondence, part of a projected series of three, which has added even greater depth and comprehensiveness to the central themes of his thought.1 Although Berlin‟s work was often initially published in the hermetic pages of minor journals, his posthumously published oeuvre gives no inkling of the fragmented character of its original composition. The exhaustiveness of Hardy‟s editorial project is matched by the secondary literature on Berlin‟s thought, which has largely focussed on two themes: firstly, his argument against positive liberty; and, secondly, his defence of liberalism, conceived in negative terms, on the basis of value-pluralism. In the wake of Gerald MacCallum‟s hostile assessment of Berlin‟s critique of positive liberty, the critical response to the argument developed in Two Concepts of Liberty – that positive liberty provides philosophical succour to totalitarian thought – has grown significantly.2 In the rough half-century since its initial publication, criticisms of Berlin‟s case against positive liberty, along with less frequent defences of his argument, have been launched from a number of scholarly 1 The four posthumously published volumes, all drawn from Berlin‟s extensive intellectual Nachlass, are, in order of first publication: The Roots of Romanticism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1999); The Power of Ideas (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000); Freedom and its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (Princeton, New Jersey and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002); The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture Under Communism, with a foreword by Strobe Talbott (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2004). The two published volumes of Berlin‟s collected letters are: Flourishing: Letters, 1928-1946 (London: Chatto and Windus, 2004); and Enlightening: Letters, 1946-1960 (London: Chatto and Windus, 2009). 2 For MacCallum‟s critical assessment of the adequacy of Berlin‟s conceptual distinction and political critique, see Gerald MacCallum Jr., „Negative and Positive Freedom‟, in Philosophical Review, Vol.