As another important tendency Berlin analyses the socialism in the Soviet Union. He claims that the works of Karl Marx certainly were not responsible for Communist and Fascist states. Marx was typical nineteenth century social theorist, in the same sense as Mill, Comte or Buckle. He believed that many of the questions of his predecessors were quite genuine, and thought that he had solved them. Any nineteenth century thinker with respect for the sciences would regard with genuine horror the practice of Communist states. Berlin points out that Russian communist Plekhanov has said that if the revolution demanded it, everything democracy, liberty, the rights of the individual, happiness or even life must be sacrificed to it. Lenin accepted it easily and without apparent qualms and then began the coercion, violence, executions, total suppression of individual differences in the name of the highest ideals. I agree with Dostoevsky who has said that revolution starting from unlimited liberty ends in unlimited despotism. In Dostoevsky s Brothers Karamazov the Grand Inquisitor has said that what men dreaded most was freedom of choice, to be left alone to grope their way in the dark; and the church by lifting their responsibility from their shoulders made them willing, grateful and happy slaves. The Grand Inquisitor stood for the dogmatic organization of the life of the spirit. It seems tantamount to elimination of all alternatives as it was in the Soviet Union.
What is genuinely typical of our time is a new concept of the society, the values of which are analysable from some factual hypothesis or metaphysical dogma about history or race or national character. There is one and only one direction in which the history that embody impersonal forces or class structure, can develop. The cosmic forces are conceived omnipotent and indestructible. Only some elite can canalize these forces and control them. The task of these experts is to adjust human beings to these forces and to develop in them an unshakeable faith in the new order. Communists believed that proletariat has this eternal force in the class struggle. Berlin emphasizes that no body of men which has tasted the power or is within a short distance of doing so, can avoid a certain degree of cynism which is generated by the sharp contact between the pure ideal and its realization in some unpredicted form which seldom conforms to the hopes or fears of earlier times.
According to Berlin, Lenin himself was in certain respects oddly utopian. Lenin started with the egalitarian belief that with education and the rational economic organization, almost anyone could be brought in the end to perform almost any task efficiently. But his practice was strangely like that of those irrationalist reactionaries who believed that man was everywhere wild, bad, stupid and unruly, he demands a powerful leader. Such terms as truth or honour or obligation or beauty, become transformed into purely offensive or defensive weapons, used by the state or party. It was the suppression of whatever in the individual may raise doubt or assert itself against the single, all-embracing, all-satisfying plan. What Lenin demanded was unlimited power for a small body of professional revolutionaries, trained exclusively for one purpose. Lenin believed that democratic methods are ineffective. A man s beliefs, if Marx and Engels were right, flowed from the situation of his class and could not alter. The proper task of a revolutionary therefore was to prepare the class for its historical mission to be a dominant class. Lenin thought that the mass of the proletarians themselves are too benighted to grasp the role which history had called on them to play. According to him men could be saved by being ruthlessly ordered by leaders who had acquired a capacity for knowing how to organize the liberated slaves into a rational planned system. Today as the result of such regimes there is a loss of faith in existing political activities and ideals, and a desperate desire to live in a universe which however dull or flat was at any rate secure against the repetition of such catastrophes. An element of this is a growing sense of the greater or lesser meaninglessness of such ancient battle-cries as liberty or equality, or civilization, or truth. All the ancient political principles begin to vanish, feeble symbols of creeds are no longer relevant to the new realities. It leads to a noticeable growing lack of interests in long-term political issues.
Every situation calls for its own specific policy, since out of the crooked timber of humanity, as Kant once remarked, no straight thing was ever made. Berlin supposes what the age calls for is no more faith, or stronger leadership, or more scientific organization. Rather it is the opposite less Messianic adour, more enlightened scepticism, more toleration, more room for the attainment their personal ends by individuals and by minorities whose tastes and beliefs find little response among the majority. Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual or collective. Since no solution can be guaranteed against error, no disposition is final. And therefore toleration of a minimum inefficiency may allow more spontaneous, individual variation and will always be worth more than the neatest and most delicately fashioned imposed pattern.
Essay Three: Two Concepts of Liberty
In the political and philosophical thought Sir Berlin became famous with his two concepts of liberty. This essay is of a great importance in the development of political philosophy during the late twentieth century. Actually sometimes the twentieth century is called Berlin s century, because he saw our century as the century of the triumph of democracy and liberalism and that of the fall of totalitarianism. The liberal tradition is connected with the sense of negative liberty that is involved in the answer of the question What is the area within which the subject – a person or group of persons is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons? Socialism and totalitarianism is deeply connected with the sense of positive liberty which is involved in the answer of the question What or who is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do or to be this rather than that?
Let us analyze these two concepts of freedom in the light of Berlin s conception. First will be the notion of negative liberty.
1. In the foundation of the negative liberty there is a strict distinction between private life and public authority. It is said that one is free to the degree to which none interferes with his activity. In this case political liberty is the area within which man can act unobstructed by others. Private life is the opposite of public life. But we may ask: where are the limits of the public/ private? I guess we can not get a single clear answer to this question, because in many cases my private life and the public authority overlap, for example the destiny of my country is of a deep regard to me, my life and activities. Men are largely interdependent, and no man s activity is so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others in any way.
2. The theory of negative liberty supposes that there exists a certain minimum of personal freedom that could not be contracted. Sometimes this minimum is called the human natural rights that are written in the constitution, they are human rights to freedom, life and property. Sometimes this minimum is acknowledged as a utility, or happiness, or categorical imperative, or social contract. The wider is the area of non-interference, the wider is my freedom. English political philosophers disagreed about how wide the area could or should be. They believed that it could not be unlimited, but they were sure that men s minimum needs must be satisfied. Consequently, it is assumed that the area of men s free action must be limited by law.
3. We may ask: is there a certain maximum of personal freedom? I guess in the tradition of liberal democracy there is no consensus on this issue. English political philosophers supposed that freedom could not be unlimited, because if it were, there would be a state in which all men could boundlessly interfere with all other men. This kind of natural freedom would lead to social chaos in which men s minimum needs would not be satisfied. They believed, with good reason, that individual liberty is an ultimate goal for human beings, and none should be deprived of it by others. Philosophers with an optimistic view of human nature and a belief in the possibility of harmonizing human interests such as Locke or Adam Smith and Mill believed that social harmony and progress were compatible with reserving a large area for private life over which neither the state nor any other authority must be allowed to trespass. They claimed that in the future the area for private life will be larger than today and we would not feel the authority of the state at all, but I believe that this theory is only a utopia that will never come true.
Berlin insists upon that human goals are so discrepant and can not harmonize with one another. Therefore there exist only one solution: try to do lesser harm to others, which actually means: try to find some compromise how we could live together, making our lives more comfortable. It means: try to live according the golden rule not to treat others as I should not wish them to treat me. Justice in its simplest and most universal sense – this is the foundation of liberal morality. If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of other human beings, then the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral. We must preserve a minimum area of personal freedom if we are not to degrade or deny our nature . We cannot remain absolutely free and must give up some of our liberty to preserve the rest. Hobbes and Locke would say: according to social treaty we must give up some part of our liberty in order to live in security and prosperity. What then must the minimum be? That which a man cannot give up without offending against the essence of his human nature. What is this essence? What are the standards which it entails? This has been and perhaps always will be a matter of infinite debate. Berlin declares that unless men are left to live as they wish, civilization cannot advance, the truth will not come to light and there will be no scope for spontaneity, originality, genius, for mental energy, for moral courage.
This is liberty as it has been conceived by liberals in the modern world from the days of Erasmus to our own. Every protest against exploitation and humiliation springs from this individualistic and much disputed conception of man. Berlin notices three facts about this position: a) All coercion is bad as such, although it may apply to prevent other, greater evils. Men seek to discover the truth and to develop a certain type of character critical, original, imaginative, independent and so on -, but truth can be found and such character can be bred only in condition of freedom.
b) The relationship between individual liberty and the religious faith is very complicated. Christian (and Jewish or Moslem) belief in the absolute authority of divine or natural laws, or in the equality of all men in the sight of God, is very different from belief in freedom to live as one prefers. The ideal of individual liberty is a recent phenomenon in the Western history, it has appeared only in the Renaissance or the Reformation.
c) Liberty is not incompatible with some kinds of autocracy. The extent of my freedom seems to depend on how many possibilities are open to me. Self-government may on the whole provide a better guarantee of the preservation of civil liberties than other regimes, and has been defended as such by libertarians. But there is no necessary connexion between individual liberty and democratic rule. The answer to the question Who governs me? is logically distinct from the question How far does the government interfere with me?
Let us further look upon the notion of positive freedom: not freedom from, but freedom to to lead one prescribed form of life.
1.The positive sense of the word liberty derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer deciding, but not being decided for. This is at least part of what I mean when I say that I am rational. Positive freedom as a self-mastery, is reasonable claim for each normal individual. It seems to me that in this essay Berlin criticizes positive liberty too much. Actually I can understand him, because it seems to me that he avoids from being called totalitarian (socialist or marxist).
2. Berlin quickly shows us the negative side of self-mastery: I am my own master ; I am slave to no man , but may I not be a slave to nature? Or to my own passions? Are these not the species of the identical genus slave some political or legal, others moral or spiritual? This dominant self sometimes is identified with reason, with my higher nature , which is contrasted to uncontrolled desires, my lower nature. The real self may be conceived as something wider than individual, as a social whole: a tribe, a race, a church, a state. Berlin stresses that the perils of using organic metaphors to justify the coercion of some men by others in order to raise them to a higher level of freedom have often been pointed out. It seems strange and unnatural to me to coerce men in the name of some goal (for example, justice and public health) which they would themselves pursue, if they were be more enlightened. Here rises the area of totalitarianism as it were in the form of fascism and communism. This monstrous impersonation, which consists in equating what X would choose if he were something he is not, or at least not yet, with what X actually seeks and chooses, is at the heart of all political theories of self-realization. But it seems to me that Berlin exaggerates the evils of political theories of self-realization (such as marxism) to much. Berlin criticizes the liberal T.H.Green, who in 1881 said that the ideal of true freedom is the maximum power for all the members of human society alike to make the best of themselves. Berlin says that Green was a genuine liberal: but many a tyrant could use this formula to justify his worst acts of oppression. In the end of his essay Berlin comes to the conclusion that conceptions of freedom directly derive from views of what constitutes a self, a person, a man. Enough manipulation with the definition of man and freedom can be made to mean whatever the manipulator wishes. Berlin emphasizes that this thesis is not merely theoretical, our history has turned it to reality. Quoting Berlin, what I may seek to avoid is simply being ignored, or patronized, or despised in short, not being treated as an individual, having my uniqueness insufficiently recognized, being classed as a member of a statistical unit without identifiable, human features and purposes of my own. This is the degradation that I am fighting against not equality of legal rights, nor liberty to do as I wish (although I may want these too), but for a condition in which I can feel that I am, because I am taken to be, a responsible agent, whose will is taken into consideration, even if I am attacked and persecuted for being what I am or choosing as I do .1 Berlin s wish simply to be understood and tolerated, or to be taken into account, seems to me sympathetic as a wish of every normal individual to be understood and recognized. Each individual feels happy if he is a member of the society that can recognize, understand and tolerate him. It is a reasonable demand: please understand
1Isaiah Berlin Four Essays on Liberty p.155 156.
me, as I understand you. What I am, is largely determined by what I feel and think, and if you do not tolerate what I say to you, then you do not tolerate me. In this essay Berlin is against paternalism. He even claims that paternalism is despotic, and explains this sentence in the following way: paternalism is an insult to my conception of myself as a human being, determined to make my own life in accordance with my own purposes. Each man has his specific character, abilities, aspirations, ends. Berlin believes in the pluralism of values as in the one and only reasonable solution how to attain the ideal of a tolerant and open society. According to Berlin, if the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict and of tragedy can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. Pluralism with the measure of negative liberty seems to him a truer and more humane ideal than the goals of those who seeks in the great, disciplined, authoritarian structures the ideal of positive self-mastery by classes, or peoples, or the whole of mankind. It is truer, because it, at least, recognize the fact that human goals are many, not all of them commensurable. To assume that all values can be graded on one scale seems to Berlin to falsify our knowledge that men are free agents, it is more humane because it does not deprive men, in the name of some remote ideal. I suppose that we will see whether the idea of pluralism of values is capable to live or are there some other alternatives to a single all-embracing system of values. I would like to conclude my report with Kant s idea that out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.