Table Of ContentOUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/19/2016, SPi
Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment
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Isaiah Berlin and the
Enlightenment
edited by
Laurence Brockliss
and Ritchie Robertson
1
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3
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Foreword
Hermione Lee, President of Wolfson College
The conference on Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment, on which this collection of
essays is based, took place at Wolfson College, in Oxford, from 20 to 22 March 2014,
with the support of Wolfson College, All Souls, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and
Jewish Studies, the Oxford Faculty of Modern Languages, and the Modern Humanities
Research Association. I was very glad to host the conference at the college which Isaiah
Berlin founded and where he was the first president, and which began its life as Wolfson
College fifty years ago, in 1966, dedicated to those principles of liberty, tolerance, pluralism,
and independence of mind in which Berlin so eloquently believed.
Since Berlin’s presidency, Wolfson College has maintained his legacy and posthumous
intellectual life through its involvement with the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust and through
its support of the work of Henry Hardy, Honorary Fellow of the College, in editing
Berlin’s books, essays, lectures, and (with Mark Pottle, Jennifer Holmes, Serena Moore,
and Nicholas Hall) his letters. The fourth and final volume of Berlin’s Letters, Affirming:
Letters 1975–1997, was published in 2015.
Berlin ‘belongs’ to a number of Oxford colleges—Corpus, All Souls, New—but his
creation of Wolfson as a new graduate college in the 1960s was a mark of his belief that
historical institutions need to continue to change, and to incorporate differences, con-
tradictions, and radical developments. The belief applies also to his intellectual work,
and is expressed in this volume’s acknowledgement in its Introduction, that ‘he would
have not have wanted his readings [of the Enlightenment] to be set in stone’. That the
essays from this conference make up a re-evaluation of Berlin as a historian of ideas
‘not intended as an act of piety or an attempt at rehabilitation’, but as a critique which
brings a wide variety of views to bear on his work, is as it should be.
The conference from which these essays arises was supported in part by the Oxford
Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson, a centre for the study of biography, autobiography,
letters, and other forms of life-writing. It’s apt, then, that so many of these essays deal with
the history of ideas and of differing approaches to the Enlightenment through individual
cases: Marx, Meinecke, Hume, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, Hamann, Kant, Mill,
Machiavelli, Vico, Herder, Hess, and Herzen. Berlin approached the Enlightenment as
‘the grounding of our belief in human individuality’, and his approach to history, ideas,
and philosophy was very often through the study of individuals. He was profoundly
suspicious of abstract principles and general theories, and of the sacrifice of the individ-
ual to ‘remote ends’. He rejoiced in the study of heroes, exceptional thinkers, and actors,
and in those influential personages who, as he said of Chaim Weizmann, ‘must perma-
nently transform one’s ideas of what human beings can be or do’. In his essay on Herder
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(in Three Critics of the Enlightenment) he proposed that ‘all the works of men are above
all voices speaking . . . and that self-expression is part of the essence of human beings as
such’. This volume takes on, critically and analytically, Berlin’s ‘self-expression’ on
Enlightenment themes, and in doing so makes a significant new contribution to the
study both of Isaiah Berlin and of the Enlightenment.
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Acknowledgements
This book is the outcome of a conference on ‘Isaiah Berlin’s Enlightenment’, organized
by Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson, and hosted by Wolfson College, Oxford,
from 20 to 22 March 2014. The conference was generously supported by Wolfson’s
Centre for Life-Writing, All Souls College, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish
Studies, the Oxford Faculty of Modern Languages, and the Modern Humanities
Research Association. The conference was first conceived at a meeting of the Besterman
Centre for the Enlightenment, now part of the Enlightenment research programme
within the Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities (TORCH).
We are particularly grateful to Hermione Lee, President of Wolfson, for her enthusiastic
support at every stage of this project, and to Henry Hardy, Isaiah Berlin’s devoted
editor, for his participation in the conference and his willing advice to the editors
and many contributors to this volume. At the conference Henry presented an
audio-recording of Isaiah Berlin’s contribution to the 1975 Wolfson College lectures
on ‘The Enlightenment and its Critics’. This was an absorbing and memorable expe-
rience for all who were fortunate enough to listen to it, and it is hoped that one day a
transcription of the lecture can be published.
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Contents
List of Abbreviations xi
Notes on Contributors xiii
Introduction: Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 1
Laurence Brockliss
Part I. An Idea in Context
1. Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, and the Enlightenment 21
David Leopold
2. Berlin’s Conception of the Enlightenment 35
Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson
3. Between Friedrich Meinecke and Ernst Cassirer: Isaiah Berlin’s
Bifurcated Enlightenment 51
Avi Lifschitz
Part II. Enlightenment Thinkers
4. Berlin and Hume 69
P. J. E. Kail
5. Berlin and Montesquieu 79
Karen O’Brien
6. Isaiah Berlin and the Origins of the ‘Totalitarian’ Rousseau 89
Christopher Brooke
7. Rococo Enlightenment? Berlin, Hamann, and Diderot 99
Marian Hobson
8. Sympathy and Empathy: Isaiah’s Dilemma, or How He Let the
Enlightenment Down 113
T. J. Reed
9. Isaiah Berlin, J. S. Mill, and Progress 121
Alan Ryan
Part III. Counter-Enlightenments?
10. Berlin, Machiavelli, and the Enlightenment 137
Ritchie Robertson
