Isaiah Berlin in the Twenty-First Century: Liberal Pluralism for Troubled Times, by George Crowder, Routledge, 227 pp, £45, ISBN: 978-0367764647.

Political philosophy had been declared dead so many times that, like Mark Twain, one could only say the reports of its death had been greatly exaggerated. Writing just after the midpoint of the last century, the historian Peter Laslett said: ‘For the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead.’ Laslett’s qualifier, ‘for the moment’, suggested this period of somnolence might not be permanent, but he refused to speculate on how long it might last.

According to the dominant view of the era, political philosophy was on its way to being replaced by the modern behavioural sciences – economics, psychology, political science – that saw their job as discovering regularities in human behaviour that could be subsumed under general covering laws. This was further validated by the logical positivists who saw the remaining task of philosophy as clearing up conceptual difficulties that stand in the way of scientific progress. The great efforts of the classical philosophers to legislate on the proper scope of justice, freedom and equality was deemed officially over.

As things would have it, the revival of political philosophy did not have to wait for long. In 1958, two years after Laslett pronounced his obituary, Isaiah Berlin published ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ that remains the most widely discussed philosophical essay in the English language. In addition to his canonical works on liberty, Berlin went on to produce pioneering studies in romanticism, the Enlightenment, nationalism, Marxism, Russian thought and the philosophy of history. Today Berlin’s work is regarded as a testimony to the continued vitality of political philosophy.

Although Berlin has achieved the status of what the French call an ‘immortal’, he has never lacked critics. I was once told that a distinguished Oxford don would give his tutees a copy of Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts’ with a single word of instruction: kill. It was standard to complain that Berlin had over-emphasised ‘negative liberty’ – the right not to be interfered with – at the expense of other concepts such as justice, democracy and inequality. He has been blamed for paying insufficient attention to political institutions and for exaggerating the role of ideas in history.

Recently a new dogma has appeared: Berlin as a ‘Cold War liberal’. On this account, Berlin’s work, like many of his contemporaries – Michael Oakeshott, Raymond Aron, and Karl Popper – grew out of an exaggerated fear of communism leading him to endorse a minimalist conception of politics compatible with the ‘neoliberal’ economic policies of the Reagan and Thatcher years. On this telling, Berlin’s work represents an abandonment of the high ideals of emancipation on which the liberalism of Kant and Mill was based. I will return to this later.

It is into this scrum that George Crowder has attempted to restore Berlin for the twenty-first century. Crowder is an Australian political theorist who for over a quarter of a century has written and edited a series of books on Berlin focused on the themes of liberalism and value pluralism. He calls himself a ‘slow learner’ but I prefer to think of him as a deep thinker. In his newest book he wants to lift Berlin out of the Cold War context and show how his thought provides creative answers to the problems that vex our historical moment.

Crowder’s Berlin is a stool resting on three legs. The first is the distinction between negative and positive liberty. It is often represented that Berlin valued negative liberty (non-interference) at the expense of positive liberty (self-mastery). Crowder rejects, or at least modifies, the view that Berlin was a strict negative libertarian. Although Berlin warned of the dangers to which positive liberty is prone, he refused to treat negative liberty as an absolute value to which all others must be subordinated.

Second is the importance of cultural identity or ‘belongingness’ to any conception of human flourishing. Berlin approached this issue through his own Jewish identity and the importance of the Zionist model for self-recognition. He saw movements of national self-determination as legitimate expressions of a deep-rooted need of human nature, although one that could easily conflict with his ideas on the importance of individual liberty. How to reconcile one person’s desire to live as they choose to another’s belief in living according to cultural traditions remains a topic of perennial importance.

Third is the importance of value pluralism or the view that fundamental human values – liberty, justice, equality, excellence – are in a condition of ineradicable tension with one another and therefore that choice between the ‘Great Goods’ – sometimes even tragic choice – is endemic to the human condition. Does Berlin’s emphasis on the incommensurability of basic values commit him to a form of self-refuting? Moral relativism? Crowder denies this charge, arguing that moral pluralism is committed to certain substantive values like avoiding political extremes that lead to violence, accepting the necessity for trade-offs and compromises, and seeing value in competing ways of life while remaining committed to one’s own principles.

Crowder uses this platform to explore Berlin’s response to a range of contemporary issues. These include neoliberalism, identity politics and multiculturalism, populism, international relations, religion, feminism and what Berlin’s response might have been to climate change and the Covid pandemic.

One of the most effective parts of the book is its response to the charge that Berlin was a neoliberal, a claim made most recently in Samuel Moyn’s Liberalism Against Itself. This is low-hanging fruit based on a reading of Berlin as a kind of negative liberty absolutist that cannot be seriously maintained.

Neoliberalism is associated with the doctrine of laissez-faire economics and a conception of human behaviour as one of utility maximisation, yet nothing could be further from Berlin’s beliefs. He was a lifelong social democrat who was broadly supportive of the construction of the postwar British welfare state. He once referred to FDR’s New Deal as ‘the most constructive compromise between individual liberty and economic security which our time has witnessed’.

People are often judged by the company they don’t keep. Berlin never attended meetings of the Mont Pèlerin Society, which attracted such luminaries as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, nor is his name mentioned in any of the leading historical studies of the neoliberal movement. His work is not a part of the Liberty Fund canon, a leading venue of Anglo-American libertarian thought.

As a self-described ‘empiricist’, Berlin simply found the language of neoclassical economics as false to human experience. His appreciation of life as a continuous exercise in self-creation is at odds with the technocratic and rationalistic ethos of neoliberalism. The Chicago economist George Stigler once described self-interest as the ‘granite’ on which the science of economics is built. And yet to attribute a person’s behaviour to their self-interest says little of value. It merely says that we have an interest in doing what we have an interest to do.

The neoliberal conception of human beings as single-minded utility maximisers has been disproven so many times in practice that it has come to appear more an article of faith than an empirical belief. Time and again, we have seen people driven by cultural objectives – consider the recent importance attributed to ‘wokeness’ – that have little or nothing to do with their economic priorities. The Trump administration is Exhibit A of how people can vote in vast numbers for a candidate whose economic policies cannot possibly benefit them in any meaningful way.

Crowder is on thinner ice when it comes to identity politics. Berlin was one of the few philosophers of his generation to take seriously the problem of group identity. The idea of cultural belongingness was something he discovered in the Counter-Enlightenment doctrines of Vico and Herder who treated entire civilisations as exfoliations of diverse and often irreconcilable clusters of values.

Yet Crowder maintains that Berlin did not go far enough in endorsing the multiculturalist agenda. I agree here with Berlin. He was resistant to going down the rabbit hole of modern-day multiculturalism where issues of race, ethnicity and gender have become the ultimate markers of identity. It is important to distinguish a reasonable pluralism – something like e pluribus unum (out of many, one) – from the policies of multiculturalism that are destructive of the social fabric. Berlin may not have known where exactly to draw that line, but he knew that such a line needed to be drawn.

Berlin was deeply attuned to the tendency of ideas to morph into their opposites, for example, the language of positive liberty becoming paternalist and authoritarian. This is equally true for identity claims which, taken to an extreme, imprison people in ascribed racial and ethnic boxes. He wisely saw that identity politics was inconsistent with the value of individual liberty and the freedom of people to live as they like.

The theme of identity is connected to Berlin’s views on nationalism. Berlin strongly believed that nationalism was a legitimate expression of a people’s desire to belong, be strong and respected among the nations of the Earth. He liked to the tell the story of a conversation he had with the Hegelian-Marxist philosopher Alexandre Kojève. ‘You are a member of the most cultured, civilised, brilliant and cosmopolitan people in history,’ Kojève remarked. ‘Why do you want to give all this up to become Albania?’ Berlin replied: ‘For the Jews, Albania looks like progress.’

The question is how to prevent Berlin’s liberal nationalism from degenerating into populism and strongman rule. Berlin’s answer was the example of the Russian-Jewish émigré Chaim Weizmann who would become the first president of the state of Israel. Berlin described Weizmann as a ‘virtuoso’ in politics who possessed an almost preternatural capacity to understand people, to sympathise with their plight and never lose sight of their aspirations. His personality expressed a ‘harmonious nature’ free from violence, fanaticism and intolerance. His statecraft was free from the Machiavellianism that had disfigured Lenin. Above all, ‘he possessed tact and charm to a degree exceeded by no statesman of modern days’. It was the example of Weizmann that separated Berlin’s liberal Zionism from the more militant nationalisms of his day and ours.

Berlin’s views on nationalism are further related to his reflections on international relations to which Crowder devotes an excellent chapter. It is in the domain of international politics that value pluralism runs up against its deepest challenge. Value pluralism may be a good recipe for conducting affairs during peacetime but does not fare as well in moments of national crisis when the very existence of society may be at stake. Berlin was a realist in the style of George Kennan. He rejected the moralism of the anti-war movement but also the hard-edged Realpolitik of Henry Kissinger.

Berlin recognised that politics cannot do without the need for enlightened leadership. He praised Churchill as a statesman who led his country into battle with an almost single-minded sense of purpose. Churchill saw the world in bold ‘primary colours’ in which there were ‘no half-tones, nothing intangible, nothing impalpable, nothing half spoken or hinted or whispered’. Most of all, he possessed a historical imagination that was ‘so strong, so comprehensive, as to encase the whole of the present and the whole of the future in a framework of a rich multicoloured past’.

There are times when even value pluralism must bend before the needs of national unity. Lincoln’s decision to suspend habeas corpus and imprison anti-war agitators is a case in point. Actions undertaken in wartime as a matter of ‘military necessity’ would have been unconscionable in times of peace. Wise statesmanship consists in knowing the difference.

One of the most interesting chapters in Crowder’s book deals with religion. Berlin admitted that he was ‘tone-deaf’ to religion even though he celebrated the High Holy Days and was a pipeline for Jewish students studying in Oxford. Among his most distinguished students were the Canadian Marxist philosopher GA Cohen who later succeeded to Berlin’s chair, Yael Tamir, a theorist of liberal nationalism and former member of the Israeli Knesset, and the political theorist Fania Oz-Salzberger.

One reading of Berlin, attributed to him by his longtime editor Henry Hardy, is that any system of monotheistic belief is false to the truth embodied in value pluralism. Monotheisms are not only false but dangerous because they carry the seeds of intolerance, therefore the major Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – must be rejected. Écrasez l’infâme!

Such a view is almost comically absurd, although it is central to the resurgent of atheism of people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. There is first a practical objection. The great monotheistic religions provide the belief structure for millions, if not billions, of people. Calling these views out as false to value pluralism and then going on a secularist rampage against them is bound to be self-defeating. What is entirely absent from this claim is any inkling of what Berlin called ‘a sense of reality’ – a kind of prudent common sense – that forms the basis of sound moral judgement.

Second, this attack on revealed religion is false at a deeper, philosophical level. Value pluralism, if it is to be true to its name, must be willing not only to tolerate but even to welcome certain non-pluralist points of view. A world consisting only of value pluralists would be barren and empty. It would begin look something like the scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian but the crowd would be chanting in unison: ‘We are all moral pluralists.’

Value pluralism is not itself a belief system but a framework for allowing different conflicting beliefs to live together in relative peace. It is a ‘second order’ belief, a belief about the place of beliefs. The attempt to replace revealed faith with a system of value pluralism alone would be asking many people to give up a central feature of their identity. This would be a new form of authoritarianism masking itself as liberation.

Crowder’s answer to the problem of religion and value pluralism is a defence of ‘interfaith’ belief. Interfaith challenges traditional religious exclusivism and standard liberal claims for tolerance. It asks believers not only to accept the fact of religious difference but to find genuine value in other ways of life.

This solution is both too strong and too weak. It is too strong because it asks people to find value in other beliefs that they may find repugnant. I am reminded of a sentence from Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise: ‘As men’s ways of thinking vary considerably and different beliefs are suited to different persons, what moves one person to reverence leads another to ridicule.’ Must a religious person who lives under a regime of self-imposed sexual abstinence find value in the life of a libertine? Must a devout Muslim who prays to Allah five times a day find value in the mockery of an atheist who regards all religious beliefs as false?

Interfaith is too weak because it dilutes the priority of faith, which is the foundation of all belief. Much depends on whether the emphasis is on the ‘inter’ or the ‘faith’. An interfaith society would look like Thomas Jefferson’s hope that all Americans would become Unitarians. Such a solution sounds like weak tea.

There is much more in this rich and rewarding book that bears discussion. Most importantly, it keeps alive the legacy of Berlin at a time when historicising and relativising critiques would imprison him in a narrow Cold War perspective. Berlin’s major works may have been written during the Cold War, but this scarcely exhausts their value or explains how they speak to us today. Let us continue to keep that flame alive. His memory is a blessing.