Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought - Updated Edition
504
Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought - Updated Edition
504eBookUpdated edition with a New Foreword (Updated edition with a New Foreword)
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Overview
This new edition features the previously unpublished delivery text of Berlin's inaugural lecture as a professor at Oxford, which derives from this volume and stands as the briefest and most pithy version of his famous essay "Two Concepts of Liberty.?
Political Ideas in the Romantic Age is the only book in which the great intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin lays out in one continuous account most of his key insights about the period he made his own. Written for a series of lectures at Bryn Mawr College in 1952, and heavily revised and expanded by Berlin afterward, the book argues that the political ideas of 1760-1830 are still largely ours, down to the language and metaphors they are expressed in. Berlin provides a vivid account of some of the era’s most influential thinkers, including Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Helvetius, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, and Schelling. Written in Berlin’s characteristically accessible style, this is his longest single text. Distilling his formative early work and containing much that is not to be found in his famous essays, the book is of great interest both for what it reveals about the continuing influence of Romantic political thinking and for what it shows about the development of Berlin’s own influential thought.
The book has been carefully prepared by Berlin's longtime editor Henry Hardy, and Joshua L. Cherniss provides an illuminating introduction that sets it in the context of Berlin's life and work.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400852819 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/25/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 504 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Political Ideas in the Romantic Age Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought
By Isaiah Berlin Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2006 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-12695-1
Preface EDITOR'S PREFACE
A Tale of a Torso
... in accepting the invitation to become President of Iffley College in 1965 Berlin was acknowledging that he was incapable of writing a big book. Maurice Cowling
275 printed pages! Quel horreur! Isaiah Berlin
Political Ideas in the Romantic Age may be seen as Isaiah Berlin's Grundrisse, the ur-text or 'torso', as Berlin called it, from which a great deal of his subsequent work derived, but which also contains much that is distinctive and not to be found elsewhere in his writings. It was first composed between 1950 and 1952,and is based on a distillate of his early work in the history of ideas, itself informed and to a considerable extent constituted by the enormous amount of background reading he did for his Home University Library biography of Karl Marx in the 1930s, when he was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. It is the longest continuous text he ever wrote, at over a hundred thousand words. The prologue was written somewhat later, and Berlin revised the main text in his own hand - particularly heavily in the earlier chapters - after it had been typed from his initial dictation.
I have already recounted the story of this text briefly in my preface to Berlin's Freedomand its Betrayal, an edited transcript of a set of radio lectures that derive from it. But let me expand on this a little here.
On 21 April 1950 Katharine E. McBride, President of Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, wrote to Berlin, inviting him to give the Mary Flexner Lectures. The letter reached him at an opportune moment, as he was about to return to All Souls to become a full-time historian of ideas. He accepted with alacrity, in the first place provisionally, and six weeks later definitely. In his second letter he proposed a topic:
As for the subject of my lectures; I am wondering whether you would find the political ideas of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century a suitable topic. What I should like to talk about is the different fundamental types of approach to social and political problems - e.g. the Utilitarian; that of the Enlightenment (rational and sentimental) from the Encyclopaedia to the French Revolution; the Authoritarian-Reactionary (de Maistre and his allies); the Romantic; the Technocratic-Scientific (Saint Simon and his followers), and perhaps the Marxist. These seem to me to be the prototypes from which our modern views in their great and colliding variety have developed (only stated, it appears to me, with much more clarity, vigour and dramatic force by the founders than by their modern epigoni). My lectures, while occupied with the history of ideas, would have a very direct bearing upon our present discontents. I don't know what I ought to call this subject - it is part of a work on the history of European ideas from 1789 to 1870 which, in any case, I must at some time write for the Oxford History of Europe, but perhaps the title could be thought of later. Perhaps something quite simple, 'Six (or however many) Types of Political Theory', or perhaps something a little more arresting. However, if this kind of subject is suitable I could set to work and prepare some lectures.
[...] I hope you will have no hesitation in rejecting my suggested lectures if for some reason they are not what you desire, but I am preoccupied with the thought of the early nineteenth century and its antecedents, and should find it difficult to turn my attention to something very different; but that is no reason why you should allow this to be foisted upon you if some other plan would suit you better. If, on the other hand, my suggestion is acceptable to you, I have no doubt that I shall myself vastly profit by the experience.
Naturally, Berlin's suggestion was accepted. And he was right to predict that giving the lectures would serve his own purposes, because the invitation proved to be the catalyst for the preparation, over the next two years, of the present work, which can for once rightly be described as 'seminal'. I say 'preparation' rather than 'writing' advisedly, since in December 1951 he is still 'in process of hysterical dictation of the rough draft'.
The only other surviving detailed evidence of Berlin's thinking as he worked towards the typescript, so far as I know,2 appears in a letter to Bryn Mawr written in November 1951, sent in reply to a request for an overall title under which to announce the series, and for titles for the individual lectures:
I am not sure what the best title of my lectures would be, perhaps 'Political Ideas in the Romantic Age' would be best, and you can put in '1760-1830' if you think well of that. I have been looking for some title denoting what I really want to talk about; i.e. the particular period during which modern political and social beliefs really came to be formulated and the controversies acquired their classical expression, in the sense that present-day arguments still deal in concepts and even terminology which crystallised during those years. What I wanted to avoid was a term like 'origins' or 'foundations', since this would commit me to talking about people like Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke etc., who may be the fathers of all these things, but are definitely felt to be predecessors and precursors and, certainly as far as mode of expression is concerned, altogether obsolete. I had therefore thought of as an alternative title 'The rise and crystallisation of modern political ideas'. If you can think of something more elegant than either, I should be grateful. Perhaps the first might be the title, the second a subtitle. I leave that to you.
As for the individual lectures, I should like to suggest the following: (1) 'The Concept of Nature and the Science of Politics' (Helvétius and Holbach); (2) 'Political Liberty and the Ethical Imperative' (Kant and Rousseau); (3) 'Liberalism and the Romantic Movement' (Fichte and S. Mill); (4) 'Individual Freedom and the March of History' (Herder and Hegel); (5) 'The Organisation of Society and the Golden Age' (Saint-Simon and his successors); (6) 'The Counter-Revolution' (Maistre and Görres).
His mood as he finished the draft typescript was characteristically unselfconfident. As he wrote to a close friend at New College, David Cecil:
here I am trying to write this book on political ideas, & it is coming out all awry - sentimental, vague, clumsy, soft, unscholarly, a mass of verbiage & dough unseasoned, no sharp points, only occasionally little gleams of what I thought I said, what I thought I wanted to say. However I persist. I don't know what the lectures will sound like, but there will, unless I fall ill or die, be a book. Not very good, less so than I can do on the Russians. But I must get the circulation of blood going: I accepted the lectures because I knew they wd lay the foundations of a book. - & having dictated 150.000 words, I suppose there is.
The lectures were duly delivered in the spring of 1952 - the first on 11 February and the last on 17 March - after a good deal of characteristic administrative flimflam into which we do not need to enquire here. As usual, the act of lecturing caused him terrible self-doubt. Between the second and third lectures he wrote to Marion Frankfurter: 'The lectures are an agony, of course, I seem to myself to be screaming meaningless phrases to a vaguely discernible, half darkened, audience; & feel terrified before, hysterical during & ashamed afterwards.'
Berlin certainly intended to publish a book based on the typescript he had prepared for the lectures, and to do so within a year or two of their delivery. As he told A. L. Rowse during the last phase of preparation, 'I am even now in the throes of the most awful agony of writing lectures for Bryn Mawr to be given in February & then printed, I suppose next year.' On 25 November 1952 he wrote to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, that he would have 'finished the politics - Bryn Mawr book' in 1953. The following January he remained optimistic in a letter to President McBride:
This brings me to the subject I am trying to evade and avoid, the question of the manuscript, which I really do hope to be able to send you by about May. Heaven knows what its condition will be, whether it will be 140,000 words or 60,000 words or both - but let us turn away from this bleak and distasteful topic.
He never did complete the necessary work, and the torso was laid aside and forgotten, despite the fact that he had revised much of it extensively.
It is hard to say at what precise juncture hope of a book was lost, but the last reference I have seen in the Bryn Mawr files occurs in March 1956, when President McBride gamely hopes for a manuscript by that July; and in 1959 Berlin still writes to Oxford University Press as if the book was on his agenda; at any rate, it provides an excuse to explain the delay in writing his book for the Oxford History of Modern Europe, from his commitment to which he then proceeds to extricate himself.
In 1992 I produced a fair copy of PIRA, incorporating all Berlin's myriad handwritten alterations, and the prologue that he had written subsequently, but I do not believe that he ever looked at it, at any rate seriously. Here is the relevant part of the covering letter I sent with the typescript:
With somewhat bated breath I enclose my provisional rendition of what is by far your longest unpublished work (about 110,000 words, or 275 printed octavo pages), the 'long version' of the Flexner Lectures. Don't panic! I'm not asking you to do any work on this - not even to look at it in any detail. But since it now exists, it seemed reasonable to show it to you, if only so that you might admire its bulk. Perhaps you had no idea you had in fact written such a long book?!
I have inserted after the contents page a note on the text which you might find of interest. It raises one or two questions, such as: Was there ever a corresponding 'long version' of the last two lectures, or did you never have time to draft this? Why did you never publish the lectures with OUP, as you were under contract to do? Was it indeed Anna Kallin's plan that the Third Programme version should be the 1952 Reith Lectures, and if so, when and why was this notion scotched? Was there a recording of the lectures as delivered in the USA?
Berlin replied:
275 printed pages! Quel horreur! I don't know about the last two lectures - the BBC texts are in their own way surely complete? I have no recollection of a contract with OUP (remember, I shall be eighty-three in June). Anna Kallin did indeed wonder whether they might make Reith Lectures - I was only too ready. She put it up, I had a letter inviting me to do them, followed by a letter two days later countermanding. That was that. I was asked to do the series seven or eight years later, and by that time said that I had nothing to say. That was before I thought of Romanticism.
Even though I have still found no trace of the last two chapters, there is some evidence that they were drafted, though one cannot be certain. In any event, for Maistre he could make use of a typescript prepared some years before. He was right about the BBC texts, and his views on Saint-Simon and Maistre appear in Freedom and its Betrayal. A longer version of his treatment of Maistre is the centrepiece of The Crooked Timber of Humanity. I have not repeated these accounts in this volume, but the reader may wish to turn to them after finishing the present text, to complete the journey begun within these covers.
Readers familiar with Berlin's oeuvre will hardly need to be told where in his later work the ideas of PIRA reappear, in a more or less altered form; those less well travelled in his writings may welcome some brief preliminary guidance. At one stage I contemplated an exhaustive concordance of parallels, but once I began compiling this it quickly became clear that a complete listing would be more confusing than helpful, since so much of Berlin's work consists of journeys across similar terrain. The context and the purpose of the enquiry often differ; nor does Berlin ever exactly repeat himself, even when he is ostensibly recapitulating discussions that have appeared elsewhere, which means that one needs to read all his discussions of a topic to be sure that one has squeezed out every drop of what he (not always consistently) has to say about it. Nevertheless there is a good deal of overlap in his work taken as a whole, and readers who tackle it systematically will recognise a number of previous acquaintances - eventually old friends - as they travel onward.
A striking example of Berlin's avoidance of repetition is provided by his multiple treatments of what he sometimes calls the 'three-legged stool' or 'tripod' of key assumptions (for him mistaken) on which Western philosophy has, in his view, rested for some two thousand years. In his usual account, these assumptions are that in ethics and politics, as in science, all genuine questions have unique answers, that these answers are in principle discoverable, and that they all fit together into a coherent whole. This leitmotif is implicit in the first chapter of PIRA, though not set out there in a single coordinated passage. It becomes explicit in Berlin's later work, for example (among many other instances) in 'The Romantic Revolution' (1960; SR), in the second lecture - 'The First Attack on Enlightenment' - of The Roots of Romanticism (1965), and in 'The Divorce Between the Sciences and the Humanities' (1974; AC).
These accounts are broadly similar. However, if we turn to other treatments of the trope, differences appear. In 'The Birth of Greek Individualism' (1962;L) we find that the usual first and third legs have become legs 1 and 2, and that there is a new leg 3: 'The third assumption is that man has a discoverable, describable nature, and that this nature is essentially, and not merely contingently, social.' Though this substitution is obviously motivated by the topic of the lecture, made clear in its title, one does wonder if there is a certain arbitrariness about the selection of legs for the tripod, indeed about the number of legs this supportive piece of furniture is said to possess. In chapter 4 of 'The Magus of the North' (1965;TCE) we find the Enlightenment tradition resting on 'three pillars' of faith - 'in reason', 'in the identity of human nature through time and the possibility of universal human goals', and 'in the possibility of attaining to the second by means of the first'. The cake is recognisable, even if the recipe is subtly different. In any event, as Berlin wrote in another context, 'like all over-simple classifications of this type, [it] becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic and ultimately absurd', though it can certainly offer 'a starting-point for genuine investigation'.
Let me now mention a few of the other principal correspondences between PIRA and later works that may strike the reader who comes to the former when familiar with the latter, or indeed vice versa. The first and most straightforward of these, of course, is between the four chapters of PIRA, the first four Mary Flexner Lectures, and the first four BBC Lectures published in Freedom and its Betrayal (reckoning the introduction to that volume together with its first chapter - on Helvétius - as the single item they originally constituted). Next in line is the use of the second and third chapters in 'Two Concepts of Liberty', and of the fourth in 'Historical Inevitability'. These are the reworkings that George Crowder has in mind when he sums up the main thrust of PIRA in these terms: 'In the torso Berlin sketched the outlines of what would become his mature position in many areas, but three in particular: the complex political legacy of Enlightenment rationalism and its critics, the contrast between negative and positive liberty, and the vulnerability of positive liberty to corruption.'
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Foreword by William A. Galston xiAbbreviations and Conventions xxiii
Editor’s Preface xxv
Isaiah Berlin’s Political Ideas: From the Twentieth Century to the Romantic Age by Joshua L. Cherniss xliii
POLITICAL IDEAS IN THE ROMANTIC AGE
1 Prologue 1
1 Politics as a Descriptive Science 21
2 The Idea of Freedom 112
3 Two Concepts of Freedom: Romantic and Liberal 195
4 The March of History 261
Appendix: Subjective versus Objective Ethics 325
Summaries of the Flexner Lectures 333
Note from the Editor to the Author 349
Appendix to the Second Edition The Concise ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ 355
Index 389
What People are Saying About This
Political Ideas in the Romantic Age makes an intriguing and provocative contribution to the history of ideas, and also to the study of Berlin's own thought. The ideas Berlin examines are intrinsically interesting and hugely influential. The book integrates Berlin's analysis of liberty with his reading of the debate between the Enlightenment and the counter-Enlightenment to an extent not found in his other works. And the editing is as meticulous as anything done by Henry Hardy, who is the best possible editor of any text by Berlin.
— George Crowder, Flinders University, Australia, author of "Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism"
"Political Ideas in the Romantic Age makes an intriguing and provocative contribution to the history of ideas, and also to the study of Berlin's own thought. The ideas Berlin examines are intrinsically interesting and hugely influential. The book integrates Berlin's analysis of liberty with his reading of the debate between the Enlightenment and the counter-Enlightenment to an extent not found in his other works. And the editing is as meticulous as anything done by Henry Hardy, who is the best possible editor of any text by Berlin."—George Crowder, Flinders University, Australia, author of Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism