Essay Four: Historical Inevitability
This essay originally was Auguste Comte Memorial Trust Lecture that was first read on 12 May 1953 at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences, and published by the Oxford University Press in the following year. Berlin acknowledges that Comte is indeed worthy of commemoration and praise. Comte s views have affected the categories of our thought more deeply than is commonly supposed. Our view of the natural sciences, of the material basis of cultural evolution, of all that we call progressive, rational, enlightened, Western; our view of the relationships of institutions and of public symbolism and ceremonial to the emotional life of individuals and societies, and consequently our view of history itself, owes a good deal to his teaching and his influence. Comte is often known as the father of sociology, he demanded evidence, he fought many metaphysical and theological mythologies, some of which might have been with us still; he provided weapons in the war against the enemies of reason. Comte believed in the application of scientific canons of explanations in all fields: and saw no reason why they should not apply to relations of human beings as well as relations of things. He did not say that history was a kind of physics, but his conception of sociology was pointed in the scientific direction of one complete and all-embracing pyramid of scientific knowledge, one method, one truth and one scale of rational values. Berlin stresses that this craving for unity and symmetry at the expense of experience is naive. Berlin agrees with Bernard Berenson who has set down his thoughts on what he called the Accidental View of History : I believe less and less in these more than doubtful and certainly dangerous dogmas, which tend to make us accept whatever happens as irresistible to oppose. 1
In this essay Berlin tries to answer the questions: Do there exist any historical rules that are unalterable and unlimited? Who or what is (or will be or could be) responsible for a war, a revolution, an economic collapse, a renaissance of arts, a discovery or a spiritual transformation altering the lives of men? He admits that there exist personal and impersonal theories of history. On the one hand there are theories according to which the lives of peoples and societies have been decisively influenced by exceptional individuals (it was thought that some men played a more decisive role in the course of history than others). Alternatively, there are doctrines according to which what happens occurs as a result not of the wishes and purposes of identifiable individuals, but of those of large numbers of unspecified persons. Either way, it becomes the business of historians to investigate who wanted what, and when and where, in what way; how many men avoided or pursued this or that goal, and with what intensity; and further to ask under what circumstances such wants or fears have proved effective.
Against this kind of interpretation there is a cluster of views according to which the behavior of men is in fact made what it is by causes largely beyond the control of individuals. According to these views the actions of individuals are formed by the influence of physical factors or of environment or of custom: or by the natural growth of some larger unit a race, a nation, a class, a biological species. Some writers believed that there exists some entity which can be characterized even in less empirical terms a spiritual organism, a religion, a civilization, a Hegelian World Spirit that governs the march of history. This kind of impersonal interpretation of historical changes sets down that impersonal or trans-personal or super-personal entities or forces, whose evolution is identified with human history, have the ultimate responsibility for what happens. But we may argue that with this set of believes in mind individuals might feel no responsibility for their actions, and this leads us to the total irresponsible actions in the name of some higher ideal. They cannot accept that individuals living side by side compose civilizations or races or spirits of nations. For Schelling or Hegel or Spengler individuals remain abstract precisely because they are mere elements or aspects, moments artificially abstracted and literally without reality. Marx s and Marxists views are more ambiguous. Berlin points that we cannot be quite sure what to make of such category as social class whose emergence and struggles, victories and defeats form the lives of individuals sometimes against and most often independently of their conscious or expressed purposes. But actually classes are never proclaimed to be independent entities: classes are constituted by individuals in their mainly economic interaction. Men do as they do, and think as they think and history and development of classes cannot be studied independently of the biographies of their component individuals. But Carlyle, quite contrary, believed that Tradition and History are wiser than we and the great society of the dead, of our ancestors and of generations yet unborn has larger purposes than any single creature, purposes of which our lives are a puny fragment. He like many conservators believed that we belong to this larger unit with the deepest and perhaps least conscious parts of ourselves. What all such views have in common is the fundamental distinction between, on the one hand, real and objective and, on the other, subjective and arbitrary judgments. They believe that history is greater entity than ourselves and this entity lives its life and dies for its richer self-realization and doubt whether we are or are worth, anything at all. For Bossuet, for Hegel, for Marx, for Spengler this reality takes on the form of an objective march of history. This process may be thought of as being in time and space or beyond them or as being cyclical or spiral or as occurring in the form of peculiar zigzag movement. Sometimes this process is called dialectic or continuous or uniform or irregular, broken by sudden leaps to a new level. It can be characterized as due to the changing forms of one single force or as the history of one deity or force or principle, or of several. But whatever version of the story is accepted the moral of it is always one and the same: that we must learn to distinguish the real course of things from the dreams and fancies. At the very least if we cannot swallow the notion of super-personal spirits or forces we must admit that all events occur without any principles and rules. And without universal order a system of true laws how could history be intelligible? How could it make sense, have meaning, be more than an account of a succession of random episodes, a mere collection of old wives tales? Our values – what we think good and bad, important and trivial, right and wrong, noble and contemptible are conditioned by the place we occupy in the pattern on the moving stair. Such attitudes are held to be rational and objective to the degree to which we perceive this condition accurately, that is, to understand where we are in terms of the great world plan. But we often forget that each condition and generation has its own perspectives of the past and future, depending upon where it has arrived, what it has left behind, and whither it is moving. To condemn the Greeks or the Romans or the Assyrians or the Aztecs for this or that folly or vice may be no more than to say that what they did or wished or thought conflicts with our own view of life which may be the true or objective view for the stage which we have reached. If the Romans and the Aztecs judged differently from us, they may have judged no less well and truly and objectively to the degree to which they understood their own condition and their own very different stage of development. For us to condemn their scale of values is valid enough for our condition, which is the sole frame of references we have. And if they had known us they might have condemned us as harshly and, because their circumstances and values were what they inevitably were, with equal validity. According to this view there is nothing, no point of rest outside the general movement, where we or they can take up a stand, no static absolute standards in terms of which things and persons can be finally evaluated. The opposite attitude rests on the belief that everything is caused to occur as it does by the machinery of history itself by the impersonal forces of class, race, culture, History, Reason, The Life-Force, Progress, The Spirit of the Age. Berlin claims, the notion that history obeys laws, whether natural or supernatural, that every event of human life is an element in a necessary pattern, has deep metaphysical origins. In the first place, there is the teleological outlook whose roots reach back to the beginnings of human thought. It occurs in many versions, but what is common to them all is the belief that men and all living creatures and perhaps inanimate things as well have functions and pursue purposes. Every entity has a nature and pursues a specific goal which is natural to it, and the measure of its perfection consists in the degree to which it fulfils is. Evil, vice, imperfection, all the various forms of chaos and error are, on this view, forms of frustration and failures. On such view to say of things and persons that they exist is to say that they pursue goals. To say that persons exist and they really have a lack of purpose is to say something self-contradictory and therefore meaningless. Teleology is not a theory or a hypothesis, but a category or a framework in terms of which everything should be conceived and described. It enters, however unconsciously, into the thought and language of those who speak of the rise and fall of states or movements or classes or individuals as if they obeyed some irresistible natural or supernatural laws. Berlin emphasizes that historical movements exist and we must be allowed to call them so. Collective acts do occur, societies do rise, flourish, decay, die. Patterns, atmospheres, complex relationships of men or cultures are what they are. Rhythms of history occur, but it is a sinister symptom of one s condition to speak of them as inexorable. Cultures possess patterns, and ages spirits, but to explain human actions as their inevitable consequences or expressions is to be a victim of misuse of words.
Teleology is not the only metaphysics of history. There is a second, no less time-honoured view according to which there is – not goals, which explain and justify whatever happens – but a timeless, permanent, transcendental reality, above, or outside or beyond, which is as it is forever, in perfect, inevitable, self-explaining harmony. This theory tries to explain the underlying pattern of the events of history. The ideal now is a self-consistent, eternal, ultimate structure of reality. Visible world has been thought as of an appearance, a feeble shadow, but its origins, cause, explanation and justification is in an ideal harmonious reality. The relation of this reality to the world of appearances forms the subject-matter of all the parts of true philosophy of ethics, aesthetics, logic, of the philosophy of history and of laws and of politics. The central issue of them remains one and the same Reality and Appearance. To understand truly is to understand it and it alone.
What both these concepts have in common is the notion that to explain is to subsume under general formulae, so that with knowledge of all the relevant laws and of a sufficient range of relevant facts, it will be possible to tell not merely what happens, but also why. But Berlin criticizes these concepts and offers us the modern concept of history pluralism and the variety of views. Berlin claims that all standards are relative. Quoting Berlin, we are what we are, and when we are and where we are; and when we are historians, we select and emphasize, interpret and evaluate, reconstruct and present facts, as we do, each in his own way .1 There is no hard and fast line between subjective and objective, of course it does not follow that there is no such line at all. No doubt some concepts and categories are more universal than others, but they are not therefore objective in some absolutely clear sense. Objective , true , fair are words of large content, their uses are many, their edges often blurred. Ambiguities and confusions are always possible and often dangerous. We shall not condemn the Middle Ages simply because they fell short of the moral or intellectual standards of the revolutionary intelligence of Paris in the eighteenth century, or denounce these latter because in their turn they earned the disapprobation of moral bigots in England in the nineteenth or in America in the twentieth century. We can add: other times, other standards. Nothing is absolute and unchanging, time and chance alter all things. Surely it is not necessary to dramatize these simple truths, which are now too familiar, in order to remember that the purposes, the ultimate ends of life pursued by men are many, even within one culture and generation. Some of these goals come into conflict, and lead to clashes between societies, parties and individuals. The ends of one age and country differ widely from those of other times and other outlooks. We should recognize that not all good things are necessary compatible with one another and we should seek to comprehend the changing ideas of culture, peoples, classes and individuals without asking which are right, which wrong.
1 Isaiah Berlin Four Essays On Liberty p. 87.