Isaiah Berlin's enlightenment and counter-enlightenment

Transactions of the American Philosophical Society

Volumn 93, Issue 5, 2003, Pages 13-31

  Wokler, Robert ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949515035     PISSN: 00659746     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (94)

1. Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Peter Halban, 1992), pp. 95-6
2. Philip P. Wiener (ed.), Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1968, 1973), vol. 2, pp. 100-12
3. In French, the expression "les lumières" refers to the authors of Enlightenment ideas as well as to their doctrines' collective character. Thanks to Rivarol and others, the term achieved a certain currency in the course of the French Revolution, and in the second half of the nineteenth century, partly by way of Taine's surveys of the origins of contemporary France, what in English around the same time came to be described as the "the Age of Enlightenment" was encapsulated in French as "le siècle des lumières." On the inauguration in English of the expression The Enlightenment, see John Lough, "Reflections on Enlightenment and Lumières," in the British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 8 (1985), pp. 1-15
4. and especially James Schmidt, "Inventing the Enlightenment: Anti-Jacobins, British Hegelians, and the Oxford English Dictionary," forthcoming in 2003 in the Journal of the History of Ideas
5. Norbert Hinske and Michael Albrecht (eds.), Was ist Aufklärug? Beiträge aus der Berlinischen Monatsschrift (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973)
6. Ehrard Bahr, Was ist Aufkärung? Thesen und Definition (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974)
7. and James Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996)
8. in Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967-), sect. 4, vol. 2, p. 478, 22[17]: "Es giebt kürzere und längere Bogen in der Culturentwicklung. Der Höhe der Aufklärung entspricht die Höhe der Gegen-Aufklärung in Schopenhauer und Wagner."
9. William Barret, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1958), p. 244
10. Isaiah Berlin, The Age of Enlightenment, forming vol. IV of the The Great Ages of Western Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1956), ch. 8, pp. 271-5
11. Isaiah Berlin, "The Philosophical Ideas of Giambattista Vico," in Art and Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Italy (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1960), pp. 156-233
12. Isaiah Berlin, "Herder and the Enlightenment," in Earl R. Wasserman (ed.), Aspects of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965)
13. reprinted in Encounter, 25 (no. 1, July 1965), pp. 29-48
14. and (no. 2, August 1965), pp. 42-51
15. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: John Murray, 1990), pp. 91-174
16. Isaiah Berlin, "Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism, " in G. P. Morice (ed.), David Hume: Bicentennial Papers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977)
17. reprinted in Berlin's Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. and with a bibliography by Henry Hardy, with an introduction by Roger Hausheer (London: Hogarth Press, 1979); see especially pp. 181-5
18. Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, first published by Thomas Butterworth in London in 1939, of which four editions and over ten translations had been published by 1978
19. Isaiah Berlin, "Historical Inevitability," Auguste Comte Memorial Trust Lecture no. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954)
20. and The Hedgehog and the Fox (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953)
21. Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958)
22. most recently published in Berlin, Liberty, ed. Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
23. Stephen Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), ch. 1, "The Anatomy of Liberty," pp. 28-52, and Lionel Gossman's contribution to this volume
24. Ernest Gellner, "Sauce for the Liberal Goose" (review of John Gray, Isaiah Berlin, London: Harper Collins, 1995)
25. Prospect (November 1995), p. 61
26. Isaiah Berlin, "Montesquieu," in his Against the Current, pp. 142, 144, and 157-8
27. and his "Two Concepts of Liberty," in Liberty, pp. 212-17
28. Berlin's pluralism was, to my mind, inspired ultimately by his reading of both Herder and John Stuart Mill, although its connections with later philosophical doctrines have still to be traced. I am unconvinced by Michael Ignatieff's allusion in this regard (see his Isaiah Berlin: A Life, [London: Chatto & Windus, 1998], p. 336, n. 4) to James Fitzjames Stephen's Liberty, Equality, Fraternity of 1873, and I suspect that ideas associated with pluralism would in Berlin's own lifetime have come to his notice more by way of such distinctions as were made by W. D. Ross in 1930 in his account of The Right and the Good. Kingsley Martin, in his biography of Harold Laski (London: Victor Gollancz, 1953) describes what he terms "the pluralist movement" prevalent in London in the 1920s (see pp. 71-2 and 74), whose decentralist and syndicalist principles have scant connection with Berlin's pluralism. In the final chapter of Isaiah Berlin, Gray argues (see pp. 141-56) that value-pluralism and liberalism are inconsistent ideals, notwithstanding Berlin's endeavors to derive one from the other. But in his Conversations with Jahanbegloo (see p. 44) Berlin himself describes these principles as incompatible, even though he subscribes to each of them
29. Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London: The Hogarth Press, 1976)
30. and Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. H. Hardy (London: Pimlico, 2000)
31. Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, pp. 8-12, 13-16, 30-40, 111, 131-2, 143, and 169
32. Isaiah Berlin, The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism, ed. H. Hardy (London: John Murray, 1993)
33. and Three Critics of the Enlightenment, pp. 283-4 and 328-9. As Hardy explains in his preface (p. 246), this text has been salvaged for readers partly by way of a machine relic found in the National Science Museum and the expertise of staff at the National Sound Archive, which together made possible the reconstitution of "Dictabelt" recordings - now a defunct technology - embracing passages for which no original manuscript or typescript survived
34. Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1965, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1999)
35. White, books in review, Political Theory, 5.1 (February 1977), pp. 124-7
36. and Gardiner, review essays, History and Theory, XVI.1 (1977), pp. 45-51
37. While largely welcoming Berlin's scholarship, William Dray, however, in a critical notice, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, IX.1 (March 1979), pp. 179-82, doubts whether Berlin had managed to establish Vico's and Herder's significance for readers today
38. Among commentaries of a predominantly descriptive rather than evaluative character, see, for instance, John Michael Krois, book reviews, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 10.4 (Fall 1977), pp. 276-80
39. and James C. Morrison, "Three Interpretations of Vico," including assessments as well of Ferdinand Fellmann's Das Vico-Axiom and Leon Pompa's Vico, offering interpretations strikingly different both from Berlin's and each other's, Journal of the History of Ideas XXXIX.3 (1978), pp. 511-18
40. Scouten, book reviews, Comparative Literature Studies, XV.3 (1978), pp. 336-40 (especially p. 338)
41. Hans Aarsleff, "Vico and Berlin," collectively reviewing Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, and Personal Impressions, as well as Vico and Herder, in the London Review of Books, 5-18 November 1981, pp. 6-7
42. succeeded by his published letter in retort to Berlin's response of 3-16 June 1982, pp. 4-5
43. Isaiah Berlin, "Professor Scouten on Herder and Vico," Comparative Literature Studies, XVI.2 (June 1979), pp. 141-5
44. and "Isaiah Berlin responds to the foregoing criticisms of his work" and "Isaiah Berlin writes," London Review of Books, 5-18 November 1981, pp. 7-8
45. and 3-16 June 1982, p. 5
46. W. H. Walsh, book reviews, Mind, vol. LXXXVII, no. 346 (April 1978), pp. 284-6 (especially p. 286)
47. Arnaldo Momigliano, "On the Pioneer Trail," The New York Review of Books, 11 November 1976, pp. 33-8 (especially pp. 34 and 38)
48. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), introduction, pp. 2-6
49. and "Progress or Return? The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization," dating from 1952
50. first published in Modern Judaism (1981), pp. 17-45
51. and reprinted in Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 87-136
52. On Berlin's assessment of Strauss, see Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, pp. 31-2
53. British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 3 (1980), pp. 89-106
54. and Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (London: John Murray, 1990), pp. 70-90
55. Berlin's revisions first appeared in L. Pompa and W. H. Dray (eds.), Substance and Form in History: A Collection of Essays in Philosophy of History (Edinburgh, 1981)
56. Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, pp. 76-8
57. Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," in Liberty, p. 212
58. The "Ionian fallacy," as he termed it, was first discussed by Berlin in 1950 in his essay on "Logical Translation" published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. It is treated in some detail by Claude Galipeau on pp. 50-58 of his Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994)
59. John Gray, Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London and New York: Routledge, 1995)
60. and my review, "Laying the Enlightenment to Rest," Government and Opposition, 32 (1997), pp. 140-5
61. Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, pp. 21-2
62. Variants of the same argument appear in "The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West," in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, pp. 24-5
63. and in "Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism" in Against the Current, pp. 162-4
64. Berlin, The Age of Enlightenment, introduction, pp. 28-9
65. Jacob L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1952), preface, p. vii
66. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)
67. Carl H. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), pp. 29-31
68. On this theme, see especially my "The Enlightenment, the nation-state and the primal patricide of modernity," in Norman Geras and Robert Wokler (eds.), The Enlightenment and Modernity (London: Macmillan Press, 2000), pp. 161-2
69. I have drawn the last three paragraphs largely from my own "Multiculturalism and Ethnic Cleansing in the Enlightenment," in Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter (eds.), Toleration in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 81-2
70. See my "La Querelle des Bouffons and the Italian Liberation of France: A Study of Revolutionary Foreplay," Studies in the Eighteenth Century, 6, special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life, 11 (1987), pp. 94-116
71. I have in mind here Wolfgang Pröss's edition of Herder's Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (München: Hanser, 2002)
72. See especially the sixth chapter of Gray's Isaiah Berlin, pp. 141-68
73. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, seventh edition (Tübingen: Max Niemayer Verlag, 1953), p. 348
74. and Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), p. 293
75. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life, ch. 11, pp. 148-69
76. Isaiah Berlin, "A Remarkable Decade. IV: Alexander Herzen" (first published in Encounter in the mid-1950s), in Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly, with an introduction by Kelly (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), p. 189
77. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953), pp. 46 and 79
78. Isaiah Berlin, "Jewish Slavery and Emancipation," in The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), pp. 169-70
79. Isaiah Berlin, "The Origins of Israel" (first published by the Anglo-Israel Association in 1953)
80. and "Jewish Slavery and Emancipation," in The Power of Ideas, pp. 150 and 164
81. Avishai Margalit, "Address delivered at the Commemoration in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford on 21st March 1998,"
82. and Margalit, "The Crooked Timber of Nationalism," in Ronald Dworkin, Mark Lilla, and Robert B. Silvers (eds.), The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), pp. 151-2
83. See my "Multiculturalism and Ethnic Cleansing in the Enlightenment" in Toleration in Enlightenment Europe, pp. 69-85
84. See the sixth of Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques. This text, incidentally, on account of its description of Presbyterians who only preach through their nose when they return to Scotland where they constitute the majority, might be said to form the Enlightenment's reply to Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue
85. Isaiah Berlin, "The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess," in Against the Current, pp. 237-40
86. On the circumstances surrounding the composition of Cassirer's work and its defense of the German Enlightenment, see especially my "Ernst Cassirer's Enlightenment: An Exchange with Bruce Mazlish," in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 29 (2000), pp. 335-48
87. and Kent Wright, "'A Bright Clear Mirror': Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment," in K. M. Baker and P. H. Reill (eds.), What's Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 71-101
88. Berlin reviewed the English translation of Cassirer's Philosophie der Aufklärung, first published in 1951, in the English Historical Review, 68 (1953), pp. 617-19
89. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishers, 1968), p. xiv
90. Berlin, The Power of Ideas, p. 165
91. Perry Anderson, "Components of the National Culture," New Left Review, 50 (July-August 1968), pp. 3-57
92. Anderson, "Components of the National Culture," p. 3
93. Isaiah Berlin, "Winston Churchill in 1940," "President Franklin Delano Roosevelt," and "Chaim Weizmann," in Berlin, Personal Impressions (London 1981), pp. 16, 31, 52-3 and 62
94. Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 113-16