THE LION OF LIBERALISM

THOUGH HE PUBLISHED BUT LITTLE, ISAIAH BERLIN WAS THE MOST ESTEEMED INTELLECTUAL IN THE ENGLISH WORLD

Author: By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, August 2, 1998

Page: F1

Section: Books

Initially concentrating on philosophy and political theory, he eventually specialized in something so comparatively abstruse as the history of ideas. Of the 11 books he published during his lifetime, only two appeared before Berlin turned 60 -- and one of those was an anthology. Seven of the remaining books were essay collections gathered by other hands (usually belonging, as in the two books under review, to the indefatigable Henry Hardy). The pursuit of a magnum opus did not drive Berlin. His two best-known works, ``The Hedgehog and the Fox'' (a study of Tolstoy's view of history) and ``Two Concepts of Liberty'' (a meditation on political freedom), are, respectively, an essay and a lecture.

Yet the death of this man who published so erratically and had such a seemingly peripheral (if distinguished) career occasioned an extraordinary response. The New York Times ran Berlin's obituary on Page 1, and The New Republic put his photograph on its cover above the words, ``When a sage dies, all are his kin.'' The most remarkable tribute occurred in May, when The New York Review of Books chose to publish the first surviving example of his writing. What's so striking about this is that he wrote the piece (a short story inspired by the Latvian-born Berlin's experience of the Bolshevik Revolution) when he was 12. There is juvenilia, and then there is juvenilia: It's as if anything that issued from Berlin's pen ought to be considered sacred writ. It is not too much to say that, at the time of his death, Isaiah Berlin was the most esteemed intellectual figure in the English-speaking world.

To understand this reputation, one must begin with the man rather than the work. He was, by all accounts, one of the great conversationalists, an individual whose vivacity and charm rivaled his erudition. Edmund Wilson, not one given to gushing (especially when the subject was English, male, or, worst of all, both), first met him in 1949. Writing to a friend, Wilson described Berlin as ``a sort of double Russian-and-British personality. The combination is uncanny but fascinating. We spent the whole time talking brilliantly, covering rapidly, but with astonishing knowledge, sure intelligence, and breathtaking wit, an incredible variety of subjects.''

Berlin's social gifts as much as his intellectual prowess helped make him a supreme inside player in a supremely inbred culture. He belongs to an august Oxbridge line that extends from Benjamin Jowett in Victorian times through Berlin's friend Maurice Bowra in the earlier years of this century to another of his friends, and perhaps the last of this line, Noel Annan: a group of scholar-mandarins whose influence and stature in the tight little island of British intellect far outstripped their publication record.

What makes Berlin's place on such a list all the more impressive is his having been Jewish and a native of a foreign land, two facts he never sought to conceal. He championed Israel, and few writers in English have been as illuminating on Russian literature (in addition to the Tolstoy essay, ``The Proper Study of Mankind'' includes ``Herzen and His Memoirs'' and the profoundly moving ``Conversations with Akhmatova and Pasternak''). Yet while such a background long ago became commonplace in American intellectual life, it is still regarded as exotic, at best, in Britain.

During World War II Berlin served in the British Foreign Service (so insightful were his weekly dispatches from Washington on US politics that they were prized by no less a reader than Winston Churchill), and his diplomatic instincts, in several senses of the term, were highly developed. There was something almost ambassadorial about Berlin, not just in his easy ability to negotiate different cultures (academic and civic, Russian and British, Jewish and secular), but also in the uninflected lucidity of his prose and the stance of detached observer maintained in his essays.

This is, of course, the classic stance of philosophical liberalism: the traditional British ideology of liberty. Its great champion was John Stuart Mill, but Mill drew on centuries of national practice as well as theory. Berlin came to it from afar. As a boy, he saw a man murdered in the streets of Petrograd by a revolutionary mob. He then saw his family gain refuge in a country with a tradition of individual liberty. That personal history helped make Berlin more native than the natives in his fervently measured belief in freedom. ``Fervently measured'' is an odd phrase, but no odder than a philosophy that simultaneously seeks to respect individual rights and social norms. Ever distrustful of ideological camps, Berlin applied to himself the one label that abjures labeling: ``pluralist.''

The most revealing essay in ``The Proper Study of Mankind,'' which easily qualifies as the most comprehensive introduction to Berlin's work, is, of all things, a tribute to Franklin D. Roosevelt. As it happens, Berlin was a master of panegyric, a talent shown to excellent effect in ``Personal Impressions'' (1981), the most readerly of his books. Both the examples included here, ``Winston Churchill in 1940'' and the Roosevelt essay, memorably demonstrate Berlin's abilities as a celebrant. But what makes the latter so striking is the extremely uncharacteristic passion Berlin displays. It is unusual for an Englishman to look to the United States for models of political leadership. Yet Berlin clearly sees FDR, the 20th century's great master of the middle way, as the 20th century's paradigmatic political figure.

Now, at a time when Marxist-Leninism barely exists and the infallibility of the market is worshiped almost equally in classroom and boardroom, we forget what a narrow margin someone opposed to both once had to tread. Berlin's was a lonely voice of restraint and mediation during much of the middle portion of this century, equally opposed to the seductive simplicities of left and right. (This unemphatic yet devout commitment to liberalism is another element in the reverence with which he was held.)

``The best that can be done, as a general rule, is to maintain a precarious equilibrium,'' he writes in ``The Pursuit of the Ideal,'' the first essay in ``The Proper Study of Mankind.'' ``That is the first requirement for a decent society; one that we can always strive for, in the light of the limited range of our knowledge, and even of our imperfect understanding of individuals and societies. A certain humility in these matters is very necessary.''

The unsystematic nature of Berlin's writings means there is repetition in his work. Perhaps the single most repeated item is the citing of a remark of Kant's, ``Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.'' That Berlin should so often quote the greatest of Enlightenment thinkers expressing a sentiment so antipathetic to the Age of Reason makes perfect sense. For it was in the clash and mingle between Enlightenment and Romanticism that Berlin came to specialize as a genealogist of ideas. No one else has examined so searchingly what he called (in his essay ``Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power'') the ``elements in a great mutation in western thought and feeling that took place in the eighteenth century'' and the reaction against them in the 19th century.

First published in 1979, ``Against the Current'' may be the most representative of Berlin's books. This new paperback edition includes an exhaustive bibliography of his works, something of no small value for anyone interested in an author who published so variously and so often obscurely, as Berlin did. That publication history contributed to his reputation as well: In practice, as in thought, Isaiah Berlin never embraced the obvious.