Isaiah Berlin Quotes

Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.

We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss.

Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both.

Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.

To understand is to perceive patterns.

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.

All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament.

Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing completely straight was ever made

Total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs. —Isaiah Berlin

The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution in which all good things coexist, seems to me not merely unobtainable--that is a truism--but conceptually incoherent. ......Some among the great goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.

I can see how, with enough false education, enough widespread illusion and error, men can, while remaining men, believe this and commit the most unspeakable crimes.

But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you—the social reformers—see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.

The underlying assumption that human nature is basically the same at all times, everywhere, and obeys eternal laws beyond human control, is a conception that only a handful of bold thinkers have dared to question.

I have said that one of the distinguishing characteristics of a great man is that his active intervention makes what seemed highly improbable in fact happen.

As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.

If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter.

The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced by choices equally absolute, the realisation of some of which must inevitably mean the sacrifice of others.

[People] cannot live without seeking to describe and explain the universe to themselves. The models they use in doing this must deeply affect their lives, not least when they are unconscious; much of [their] misery and frustration…is due to the mechanical and unconscious, as well as deliberate, application of models where they do not work…The goal of philosophy is always the same, to assist [people] to understand themselves and thus operate in the open and not wildly, in the dark.

Romanticism embodied "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals.

......philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilization....but if professors can truly wield this fatal power, may it not be that only other professors, or, at least, other thinkers can alone disarm them?

To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.

Fontenelle was the most civilized man of his time, and indeed of most times.

Tetlock conferred nicknames (borrowed from philosopher Isaiah Berlin) that became famous throughout the psychology and intelligence-gathering communities: the narrow-view hedgehogs, who “know one big thing,” and the integrator foxes, who “know many little things.

The only thing which can be regarded as properly tragic is resistance, resistance on the part of a man to whatever it is that oppresses him.

Nothing is more comforting than the weaknesses of persons obviously superior to oneself.

The view that the truth is one and undivided, and the same for all men everywhere at all times, whether one finds it in the pronouncements of sacred books, traditional wisdom, the authority of churches, democratic majorities, observation and experiment conducted by qualified experts, or the convictions of simple folks uncorrupted by civilisation---this view, in one form or another, is central to western thought, which stems from Plato and his disciples.

Understanding men or ideas or movements, or the outlooks of individuals or groups, is not reducible to a sociological classification into types of behaviour with predictions based on scientific experiment and carefully tabulated statistics of observations.

as Isaiah Berlin put it, ‘disregard for the preferences and interests of individuals alive today in order to pursue some distant social goal that their rulers have claimed is their duty to promote has been a common cause of misery

La parola "libertà" è uno degli indici più sicuri per individuare l'ideale di vita ultimativo e generale abbracciato dall'uomo che la usa, per capire ciò che vuole e che non vuole, e se quell'ideale egli lo sta perseguendo consciamente o inconsciamente.

لكل مجتمع إنساني، لكل الناس، بل لكل عصر وحضارة، مثُله المتفردة ومعاييره، سبل عيشه وتفكيره وسلوكه. ليست هناك قواعد او معايير للحكم تعد كلية وثابتة وخالدة يمكن وفقها ترتيب مواضيع ثقافات وأمم مختلفة من حيث امتيازها.

he makes a vast contrast between nature, which is this elemental, capricious, perhaps causal, perhaps chance-directed entity, and man, who has morality, who distinguishes between desire and will, duty and interest, the right and the wrong, and acts accordingly, if need be against nature.

True pluralism, as Berlin understands it, is much more tough-minded and intellectually bold: it rejects the view that all conflicts of values can be finally resolved by synthesis and that all desirable goals may be reconciled. It recognises that human nature generates values which, though equally sacred, equally ultimate, exclude one another, without there being any possibility of establishing an objective hierarchical relation among them. Moral conduct may therefore involve making agonising choices, without the help of universal criteria, between incompatible but equally desirable values.

As the distinguished British philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote as he reflected on the bitter lessons of the twentieth century, 'Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth, especially about how to live, what to be and do - that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: and need restraining or suppressing. It is terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right, have a magical eye which sees the truth, and that others cannot be right if they disagree.

A hedgehog will not make peace with the world. He is not reconciled. He cannot accept that he knows only many things. He seeks to know one big thing, and strives without ceasing to give reality a unifying shape. Foxes settle for what they know and may live happy lives. Hedgehogs will not settle and their lives may not be happy.

So what are Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts?” the lecturer asked. Nearly everyone raised a hand. The lecturer called on the student who had studied at Oxford. “Negative liberty,” he said, “is the freedom from external obstacles or constraints. An individual is free in this sense if they are not physically prevented from taking action.

The mere existence of alternatives is not . . . enough to make my action free.

The more we know about the past, the more we know what is not true about the present

I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men's, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside. I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer - deciding, not being decided for, self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realising them. This is at least part of what I mean when I say that I am rational, and that it is my reason that distinguishes me as a human being from the rest of the world. I wish, above all. to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for my choices and able to explain them by reference to my own ideas and purposes. I feel free to the degree that I believe this to be true, and enslaved to the degree that I am made to realise that it is not.

Tolstoy’s interest in history began early in his life. It seems to have arisen not from interest in the past as such, but from the desire to penetrate to first causes, to understand how and why things happen as they do and not otherwise, from discontent with those current explanations which do not explain, and leave the mind dissatisfied, from a tendency to doubt and place under suspicion and, if need be, reject whatever does not fully answer the question, to go to the root of every matter, at whatever cost.

Pattern recognition is so basic that the brain's pattern detection modules and its reward circuitry became inextricably linked. Whenever we successfully detect a pattern-or think we detect a pattern-the neurotransmitters responsible for sensations of pleasure squirt through our brains. If a pattern has repeated often enough and successfully enough in the past, the neurotransmitter release occurs in response to the mere presence of suggestive cues, long before the expected outcome of that pattern actually occurs. Like the study participants who reported seeing regular sequences in random stimuli, we will use alomst any pretext to get our pattern recognition kicks. Pattern recognition is the most primitive form of analogical reasoning, part of the neural circuitry for metaphor. Monkeys, rodents, and birds recognize patterns, too. What distinguishes humans from other species, though, is that we have elevated pattern recognition to an art. "To understand," the philosopher Isaiah Berlin observed, "is to perceive patterns." Metaphor, however, is not the mere detection of patterns; it is the creation of patterns, too. When Robert Frost wrote, "A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain" his brain created a pattern connecting umbrellas to banks, a pattern retraced every time someone else reads this sentence. Frost believed passionately that an understanding of metaphor was essential not just to survival in university literature courses but also to survival in daily life.

Twain had it too and Alexander Woollcott. Stephen Spender and Barbara Skelton insisted Cyril Connolly had it, on rare occasions, when the word for it was “magnificent,” but I only heard faint echoes of this gigantic gift. Sir Isaiah Berlin had it, and I heard him: but the trouble was, once he got really going on a line of fantastic humor, he began to speak so fast, and his accent became so impenetrable, that the sense wasdifficult to grasp, though his evident delight in his fun was so furious that you laughed all the same.

Men would no longer be victims of nature or of their own largely irrational societies: reason would triumph; universal harmonious cooperation, true history, would at last begin. For if this was not so, do the ideas of progress, of history, have any meaning? Is there not a movement, however tortuous, from ignorance to knowledge, from mythical thought and childish fantasies to perception of reality face to face, to knowledge of true goals, true values as well as truths of fact? Can history be a mere purposeless succession of events, caused by a mixture of material factors and the play of random selection, a tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing? This was unthinkable. The day would dawn when men and women would take their lives in their own hands and not be self-seeking beings or the playthings of blind forces that they did not understand. It was, at the very least, not impossible to conceive that such an earthly paradise could be; and if conceivable we could, at any rate, try to march towards it. That has been at the centre of ethical thought from the Greeks to the Christian visionaries of the Middle Ages, from the Renaissance to progressive thought in the last century; and indeed, is believed by many to this day.

Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic and ultimately absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous: like all distinctions which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine investigation.

The more I say the more remains to be said … as soon as I speak it becomes quite clear that, no matter how long I speak, new chasms open. No matter what I say I always have to leave three dots at the end. Whatever description I give always opens the doors to something further, something even darker, perhaps, but certainly something which is in principle incapable of being reduced to precise, clear, verifiable, objective prose.

This, for both Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, is the central tragedy of human life; if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world; above all, what presumptuous nonsense it is to claim to perceive an order merely on the strength of believing desperately that an order must exist, when all one actually perceives is meaningless chaos –a chaos of which the heightened form, the microcosm in which the disorder of human life is reflected in an intense degree, is war.

To preserve our absolute categories or ideals at the expense of human lives offends equally against the principles of science and of history; it is an attitude found in equal measure on the right and left wings in our days, and is not reconcilable with the principles accepted by those who respect the facts.

What is a lost battle?... It is a battle one believes one has lost. ...

Kerensky, yes, Kerensky – I think we have to say one of the great wets of history.

πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ, ἐχῖνος δ'ἓν μέγα

keep in mind always Isaiah Berlin’s admonition from his celebrated lecture delivered in 1953, and published the following year under the title “Historical Inevitability,” in which he condemns as immoral and cowardly the belief that vast impersonal forces such as geography, the environment, and ethnic characteristics determine our lives and the direction of world politics.

What is it that I wish to convey?...I wish to convey something immaterial and I have to use material means for it. I have to convey something which is inexpressible and I have to use expression. I have to convey, perhaps, something unconscious and I have to use conscious means. I know in advance that I shall not succeed and cannot succeed, and therefore all I can do is to get nearer and nearer in some asymptotic approach; I do my best, but it is an agonizing struggle in which, if I am…any kind of self-conscious thinker, I am engaged for the whole of my life.

This was a transformation from what the late Isaiah Berlin described as “Negative Liberty” to “Positive Liberty.”4 The idea of negative liberty is perhaps more familiar. It can be defined as the absence of restraint, a freedom from interference by outside authority with individual thought or behavior. A law requiring motorcyclists to wear a helmet would be, under this definition, to prevent them from enjoying the freedom to go bareheaded if they wish. Negative liberty, therefore, can be described as freedom from. Positive liberty can best be understood as freedom to . It is not necessarily incompatible with negative liberty, but has a different focus or emphasis. Freedom of the press is generally viewed as a negative liberty—freedom from interference with what a writer writes or a reader reads. But an illiterate person suffers from a denial of positive liberty; he is unable to enjoy the freedom to write or read whatever he chooses, not because some authority prevents him from doings so but because he cannot read or write anything. He suffers not the absence of a negative liberty—freedom from—but of a positive liberty—freedom to read and write. The remedy lies not in removal of restraint but in achievement of the capacity to read and write.

That objective truth exists, that it can be discovered, and that life, individual and social, can be lived in its light – this belief is more characteristic of the Russians than of anyone else in the modern world.

Tolstoy was perfectly right to protest that history is not made to happen by the combination of such obscure entities as the ‘power’ or ‘mental activity’ assumed by naïve historians; indeed he was, in Kareev’s view, at his best when he denounced the tendency of metaphysically minded writers to attribute causal efficacy to, or idealise, such abstract entities as ‘heroes’, ‘historic forces’, ‘moral forces’, ‘nationalism’, ‘reason’ and so on, whereby they simultaneously committed the two deadly sins of inventing non-existent entities to explain concrete events and of giving free reign to personal, or national, or class, or metaphysical bias.

Yet man is born to love. He is compassionate, just and good. He sheds tears for others and such tears give him pleasure. He invents stories to make him weep. Whence then this furious desire for wars and slaughter? Why does man plunge into the abyss, embracing with passion that which inspires him with such loathing? Why do men who revolt over such trivial issues as attempts to change the calendar allow themselves to be sent like obedient animals to kill and be killed?

Reading his autobiography many years later, I was astonished to find that Edward since boyhood had—not unlike Isaiah Berlin—often felt himself ungainly and ill-favored and awkward in bearing. He had always seemed to me quite the reverse: a touch dandyish perhaps but—as the saying goes—perfectly secure in his masculinity. On one occasion, after lunch in Georgetown, he took me with him to a renowned local tobacconist and asked to do something I had never witnessed before: 'try on' a pipe. In case you ever wish to do this, here is the form: a solemn assistant produces a plastic envelope and fits it over the amber or ivory mouthpiece. You then clamp your teeth down to feel if the 'fit' and weight are easy to your jaw. If not, then repeat with various stems until your browsing is complete. In those days I could have inhaled ten cigarettes and drunk three Tanqueray martinis in the time spent on such flaneur flippancy, but I admired the commitment to smoking nonetheless. Taking coffee with him once in a shopping mall in Stanford, I saw him suddenly register something over my shoulder. It was a ladies' dress shop. He excused himself and dashed in, to emerge soon after with some fashionable and costly looking bags. 'Mariam,' he said as if by way of explanation, 'has never worn anything that I have not bought for her.' On another occasion in Manhattan, after acting as a magnificent, encyclopedic guide around the gorgeous Andalusia (Al-Andalus) exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, he was giving lunch to Carol and to me when she noticed that her purse had been lost or stolen. At once, he was at her service, not only suggesting shops in the vicinity where a replacement might be found, but also offering to be her guide and advisor until she had selected a suitable new sac à main. I could no more have proposed myself for such an expedition than suggested myself as a cosmonaut, so what this says about my own heterosexual confidence I leave to others.

In the early 1960s, Rawls wrote that the injustices of Jim Crow were not a topic for philosophical discussion. The morality of Jim Crow was clear-cut in its brutal injustice. The circle around Rawles was more concerned with what Isaiah Berlin declared the 'most fundamental of all political questions' - the problem of political obligation, and its mirror, disobedience. Ethical philosophers concerned with finding a moral basis for the rules of society now looked for a moral basis for breaking them.

Unless there is some point at which you are prepared to fight against whatever odds, and whatever the threat may be, not merely to yourself, but to anybody, all principles become flexible, all codes melt, and all ends in themselves for which we live disappear.

History alone – the sum of empirically discoverable data – held the key to the mystery of why what happened happened as it did and not otherwise; and only history, consequently, could throw light on the fundamental ethical problems which obsessed him as they did every Russian thinker in the nineteenth century.

Boldogok, akik olyan fegyelemben élnek, amelyet kétely nélkül elfogadnak, akik szabadon engedelmeskednek szellemi vagy világi vezetőik parancsaiknak, akiknek szavát megszeghetetlen törvényként fogadják el; vagy azok, akik saját módszereikkel jutottak világos és megingathatatlan meggyőződésekre a tekintetben, hogy mit kell tenni, és milyennek kell lenni, s e meggyőződésekhez nem férhet kétség. Én csak azt tudom mondani, hogy akik ilyen kényelmes dogma-ágyon nyugosznak, az önkéntes rövidlátás különböző formáinak áldozatai, szemellenzőik arra talán jók, hogy elégedetté tegyék őket, annak megértésére azonban nem, hogy mit jelent embernek lenni.

We have long known that in closed societies, the the arrival of democracy, with its clashing voices and differing opinions, can be "complex and frightening," as [Karen] Stenner puts it, for people unaccustomed to public dissent. The noise of argument, the constant hum of disagreement--these can irritate people who prefer to live in a society tied together by a single narrative. The strong preference for unity, at least among a portion of the population, helps explain why numerous liberal or democratic revolutions, from 1789 onward, ended in dictatorships that enjoyed wide support. Isaiah Berlin once wrote of the human need to believe that "somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science... there is a final solution." Berlin observed that not all of the things that human beings think are good or desirable are compatible. Efficiency, liberty, justice, equality, the demands of the individual, and the demands of the group--all these things push us in different directions. And this, Berlin wrote, is unacceptable to many people: "to admit that the fulfilment of some of our ideals may in principle make the fulfilment of others impossible is to say that the notion of total human fulfilment is a formal contradiction, a metaphysical chimera." Nevertheless, unity is a chimera that some will always pursue.

The central values by which most men have lived, in a great many lands at a great many times—these values, almost if not entirely universal, are not always harmonious with each other. Some are, some are not. Men have always craved for liberty, security, equality, happiness, justice, knowledge, and so on. But complete liberty is not compatible with complete equality—if men were wholly free, the wolves would be free to eat the sheep. Perfect equality means that human liberties must be restrained so that the ablest and the most gifted are not permitted to advance beyond those who would inevitably lose if there were competition. Security, and indeed freedoms, cannot be preserved if freedom to subvert them is permitted. Indeed, not everyone seeks security or peace, otherwise some would not have sought glory in battle or in dangerous sports. Justice has always been a human ideal, but it is not fully compatible with mercy. Creative imagination and spontaneity, splendid in themselves, cannot be fully reconciled with the need for planning, organization, careful and responsible calculation. Knowledge, the pursuit of truth—the noblest of aims—cannot be fully reconciled with the happiness or the freedom that men desire, for even if I know that I have some incurable disease this will not make me happier or freer. I must always choose: between peace and excitement, or knowledge and blissful ignorance. And so on... If these ultimate human values by which we live are to be pursued, then compromises, trade-offs, arrangements have to be made if the worst is not to happen. So much liberty for so much equality, so much individual self-expression for so much security, so much justice for so much compassion.

If you take home one souvenir from this part of the tour, may I suggest that it be a suspicion of moral monists. Beware of anyone who insists that there is one true morality for all people, times, and places—particularly if that morality is founded upon a single moral foundation. Human societies are complex; their needs and challenges are variable. Our minds contain a toolbox of psychological systems, including the six moral foundations, which can be used to meet those challenges and construct effective moral communities. You don’t need to use all six, and there may be certain organizations or subcultures that can thrive with just one. But anyone who tells you that all societies, in all eras, should be using one particular moral matrix, resting on one particular configuration of moral foundations, is a fundamentalist of one sort or another. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin escribió una vez sobre la necesidad humana de creer que «en algún lugar, en el pasado o en el futuro, en la revelación divina o en la mente de un pensador individual, en los dictámenes de la historia o de la ciencia [...] existe una solución definitiva».[3] Berlin observó que no todo aquello que los seres humanos creen que es bueno o deseable resulta ser compatible. La eficiencia, la libertad, la justicia, la igualdad, las necesidades del individuo y las del grupo: todo ello nos empuja en direcciones distintas. Y para mucha gente —escribió Berlin—, eso resulta inaceptable: «Admitir que la satisfacción de algunos de nuestros ideales puede imposibilitar en principio la satisfacción de otros equivale a decir que la idea de una plena realización es una contradicción formal, una quimera metafísica». Pese a ello, la unidad es una quimera que algunos siempre perseguirán.

In the EPJ results, there were two statistically distinguishable groups of experts. The first failed to do better than random guessing, and in their longer-range forecasts even managed to lose to the chimp. The second group beat the chimp, though not by a wide margin, and they still had plenty of reason to be humble. Indeed, they only barely beat simple algorithms like “always predict no change” or “predict the recent rate of change.” Still, however modest their foresight was, they had some. So why did one group do better than the other? It wasn’t whether they had PhDs or access to classified information. Nor was it what they thought—whether they were liberals or conservatives, optimists or pessimists. The critical factor was how they thought. One group tended to organize their thinking around Big Ideas, although they didn’t agree on which Big Ideas were true or false. Some were environmental doomsters (“We’re running out of everything”); others were cornucopian boomsters (“We can find cost-effective substitutes for everything”). Some were socialists (who favored state control of the commanding heights of the economy); others were free-market fundamentalists (who wanted to minimize regulation). As ideologically diverse as they were, they were united by the fact that their thinking was so ideological. They sought to squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates and treated what did not fit as irrelevant distractions. Allergic to wishy-washy answers, they kept pushing their analyses to the limit (and then some), using terms like “furthermore” and “moreover” while piling up reasons why they were right and others wrong. As a result, they were unusually confident and likelier to declare things “impossible” or “certain.” Committed to their conclusions, they were reluctant to change their minds even when their predictions clearly failed. They would tell us, “Just wait.” The other group consisted of more pragmatic experts who drew on many analytical tools, with the choice of tool hinging on the particular problem they faced. These experts gathered as much information from as many sources as they could. When thinking, they often shifted mental gears, sprinkling their speech with transition markers such as “however,” “but,” “although,” and “on the other hand.” They talked about possibilities and probabilities, not certainties. And while no one likes to say “I was wrong,” these experts more readily admitted it and changed their minds. Decades ago, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote a much-acclaimed but rarely read essay that compared the styles of thinking of great authors through the ages. To organize his observations, he drew on a scrap of 2,500-year-old Greek poetry attributed to the warrior-poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” No one will ever know whether Archilochus was on the side of the fox or the hedgehog but Berlin favored foxes. I felt no need to take sides. I just liked the metaphor because it captured something deep in my data. I dubbed the Big Idea experts “hedgehogs” and the more eclectic experts “foxes.” Foxes beat hedgehogs. And the foxes didn’t just win by acting like chickens, playing it safe with 60% and 70% forecasts where hedgehogs boldly went with 90% and 100%. Foxes beat hedgehogs on both calibration and resolution. Foxes had real foresight. Hedgehogs didn’t.

Louis XIV was a very proud and self-confident man. He had such and such mistresses, and such and such ministers, and he governed France badly. The heirs of Louis XIV were also weak men, and also governed France badly. They also had such and such favourites and such and such mistresses. Besides which, certain persons were at this time writing books. By the end of the eighteenth century there gathered in Paris two dozen or so persons who started saying that all men were free and equal. Because of this in the whole of France people began to slaughter and drown each other. These people killed the king and a good many others. At this time there was a man of genius in France – Napoleon. He conquered everyone everywhere, i.e. killed a great many people because he was a great genius; and, for some reason, he went off to kill Africans, and killed them so well, and was so clever and cunning, that, having arrived in France, he ordered everyone to obey him, which they did. Having made himself Emperor he again went to kill masses of people in Italy, Austria and Prussia. And there too he killed a great many. Now in Russia there was the Emperor Alexander, who decided to reestablish order in Europe, and therefore fought wars with Napoleon. But in the year ’07 he suddenly made friends with him, and in the year ’11 quarrelled with him again, and they both again began to kill a great many people. And Napoleon brought six hundred thousand men to Russia and conquered Moscow. But then he suddenly ran away from Moscow, and then the Emperor Alexander, aided by the advice of Stein and others, united Europe to raise an army against the disturber of her peace. All Napoleon’s allies suddenly became his enemies; and this army marched against Napoleon, who had gathered new forces. The allies conquered Napoleon, entered Paris, forced Napoleon to renounce the throne, and sent him to the island of Elba, without, however, depriving him of the title of Emperor, and showing him all respect, in spite of the fact that five years before, and a year after, everyone considered him a brigand and beyond the law. Thereupon Louis XVIII, who until then had been an object of mere ridicule to both Frenchmen and the allies, began to reign. As for Napoleon, after shedding tears before the Old Guard, he gave up his throne, and went into exile. Then astute statesmen and diplomats, in particular Talleyrand, who had managed to sit down before anyone else in the famous armchair1 and thereby to extend the frontiers of France, talked in Vienna, and by means of such talk made peoples happy or unhappy. Suddenly the diplomats and monarchs almost came to blows. They were almost ready to order their troops once again to kill each other; but at this moment Napoleon arrived in France with a battalion, and the French, who hated him, all immediately submitted to him. But this annoyed the allied monarchs very much and they again went to war with the French. And the genius Napoleon was defeated and taken to the island of St Helena, having suddenly been discovered to be an outlaw. Whereupon the exile, parted from his dear ones and his beloved France, died a slow death on a rock, and bequeathed his great deeds to posterity. As for Europe, a reaction occurred there, and all the princes began to treat their peoples badly once again.

Herzen is terrified of the oppressors, but he is terrified of the liberators too. He is terrified of them because for him they are the secular heirs of the religious bigots of the ages of faith; because anybody who has a cut and dried scheme, a straitjacket which he wishes to impose on humanity as the sole possible remedy for all human ills, is ultimately bound to create a situation intolerable for free human beings, for men like himself who want to express themselves, who want to have some area in which to develop their own resources, and are prepared to respect the originality, the spontaneity, the natural impulse towards self-expression on the part of other human beings too.

unrest has invaded science.”47 Indirectly, driven by popular misunderstandings rather than a fealty to Einstein’s thinking, relativity became associated with a new relativism in morality and art and politics. There was less faith in absolutes, not only of time and space, but also of truth and morality. In a December 1919 editorial about Einstein’s relativity theory, titled “Assaulting the Absolute,” the New York Times fretted that “the foundations of all human thought have been undermined.”48 Einstein would have been, and later was, appalled at the conflation of relativity with relativism. As noted, he had considered calling his theory “invariance,” because the physical laws of combined spacetime, according to his theory, were indeed invariant rather than relative. Moreover, he was not a relativist in his own morality or even in his taste. “The word relativity has been widely misinterpreted as relativism, the denial of, or doubt about, the objectivity of truth or moral values,” the philosopher Isaiah Berlin later lamented. “This was the opposite of what Einstein believed. He was a man of simple and absolute moral convictions, which were expressed in all he was and did.”49 In both his science and his moral philosophy, Einstein was driven by a quest for certainty and deterministic laws. If his theory of relativity produced ripples that unsettled the realms of morality and culture, this was caused not by what Einstein believed but by how he was popularly interpreted.

When you see someone attacking Plato – and many people do – you should understand that these people are defenders of psychopathy (especially of unrestricted libertarianism, a psychopath’s dream). They hate Plato and accuse him of being a totalitarian and fascist. Why? Because he was prepared to use the awesome power of the State to ensure that undesirables did not prosper, and certainly didn’t get to the top of society. All the opponents of Plato are extremist anti-Statists, whether they are anarchists, libertarians, predatory capitalists, free marketeers, liberals, or whatever. They are terrified of a designed, engineered society where the benevolent, wise State seeks to create the optimized State, and where psychos don’t get to weave their webs.

Kevés dolog játszik végzetesebb szerepet az emberi gondolkodás és cselekvés történetében, mint amikor egy bizonyos elvet egy területről, ahol az alkalmazható és érvényes, nagy fantáziával átvisznek más területekre, ahol talán izgalmasan és alakítóan hat, következményei azonban elméletileg tévesnek, gyakorlatilag pedig katasztrofálisnak bizonyulhatnak. Ez történt a romantikus mozgalommal és nacionalista következményeivel. A hősies egyént, a szabad alkotót nem az apolitikus művésszel, hanem a másokat a maguk megmásíthatatlan akaratának alávető vezérekkel vagy osztályokkal, fajokkal, mozgalmakkal azonosították, vagy olyan nemzetekkel, amelyek más nemzetek ellenében határozták meg magukat, és saját szabadságukat mindazok megsemmisítésével azonosították, akik szemben állnak velük. Az a gondolat, hogy a szabadság és a hatalom azonos, hogy szabadnak lenni annyi, mint félresöpörni mindent, ami az utunkba áll, nagyon régi eszme, amit a romantikusok kisajátítottak és vadul eltúloztak. Még jellemzőbb a romantikára az ember saját belső lényegének, magánérzelmeinek, vérösszetételének, koponyaformájának, születési helyének beteges, egomániás imádata mindazzal - az értelemmel, az univerzális értékekkel, az emberiség egészével - szemben, ami közös az egyénben a többi emberrel.

I remember how surprised I was to discover that Isaiah Berlin's famous essay on the two concepts of liberty, which once inspired many Polish intellectuals, myself included, was nothing more than a collection of platitudes and falsehoods that further prevented rather than encouraged any serious reflection on freedom.

In defiance of Berlin, I believe the concept of freedom should open us up to an abundance of weighty philosophical questions about the world and our place within it, rather than discourage us out of fear that we put our freedom at risk by answering these questions.

So what are Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts?” the lecturer asked. Nearly everyone raised a hand. The lecturer called on the student who had studied at Oxford.

It was assumed that entire societies could be transformed and changed in a relatively short span of time if only enough people were prepared to accept and follow the principles and priorities set by a vanguard in possession of those timeless standards. The only things that remained to be done, [Isaiah] Berlin wryly noted, was to eliminate all obstacles (human and material) to progress before the process of building the radiant future could begin in earnest. This could be done in one step through violence or gradually through persuasion, threats, reeducation, disenfranchisement, dispossession of property, relocation, coercion, blackmail, denunciation, and, if necessary, terror.

As [Isaiah] Berlin wrote to George Kennan in 1951, 'What we violently reject is ... the very idea that there are circumstances in which one has a right to get at, and shape the characters and souls of other men for purposes which these men, if they realized what we were doing, might reject.' The respect for individual liberty goes hand in hand with the recognition of human dignity as a fundamental principle and is incompatible with treating human beings as sheer material to be conditioned and shaped at will.

[Isaiah] Berlin was aware that when people feel lost in the complicated labyrinth of life, with its unsolvable tensions and paradoxes, they attempt to save themselves by trying to simplify and reduce reality to a few manageable patterns and clear ideas. Yet, they can never change the fact that life is a mixture of complexity and perplexity, and the more possibilities we are confronted with, the more perplexed and challenged we are likely to be.

Maistre is fascinated by the spectacle of war. Consider, he says, a battlefield. People imagine that a battlefield is a place where things happen in a planned manner. The commander gives orders, the troops march into battle, and battles are won or lost in accordance with the preponderance of troops, or the skillful instructions issued by the generals. Nothing could be less true. Consider an actual battle. Once more, do not look at the textbook, look at life: zoology and history are Maistre's masters. If you find a battlefield, what you will encounter upon it is not at all an orderly procession of events matching the descriptions of eye-witnesses, or even of strategists, of tacticians or historians. What you will find is appalling noise, confusion, slaughter, death, ruin, the shrieks of the wounded, the groans of the dying, the violent firing of firearms. 'Five or six kinds of intoxication' people possess upon the field; a general cannot possibly tell whether he is losing the battle or winning it. Nobody can possibly tell this. Wars are not won by rational calculation, they are won by moral force. They are won by people who feel they are winning them. They are won by some kind of irrational inner certainty.

these are the trivial ‘flowers’ of life, not the ‘roots’.

Tú puedes creer que eres libre, tú puedes creer que eres feliz, tú puedes creer que deseas esto o aquello, pero yo sé mejor lo que eres, lo que deseas, lo que te libera

Vivere la vita come un blocco unico e coerente, vivere la vita come esplosa in tanti frammenti. È la storia della volpe e del riccio di un frammento di Archiloco, e su cui Isaiah Berlin ha costruito un saggio. «La volpe sa molte cose, ma il riccio ne sa una grande». Berlin ne fa uno spartiacque degli scrittori, dei pensatori, e dell’umanità in generale. Gli esseri umani si dividono in volpi e ricci. Ricci sono quelli che si rifanno a un unico principio ispiratore, sulla base di una visione morale del mondo. Volpi sono quelli che si appassionano a modelli diversi e contraddittori, senza un faro etico. Per esempio, ricci secondo Berlin sono Platone, Lucrezio, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevskij e Proust. E volpi: Erodoto, Aristotele, Montaigne, Erasmo, Molière, Goethe, Puškin, Balzac e Joyce. Otto e mezzo racconta che Guido è volpe. Il Gattopardo racconta che don Fabrizio è riccio. Tutti e due concludono il film accettando la propria essenza. E forse, Fellini, Mastroianni sono volpi; Visconti, Lancaster sono ricci. Non so, potrebbe essere cosí. Ma di sicuro, questi due film contemporanei rappresentano i due aspetti dell’umanità, secondo questo principio. Insieme, riempiono tutti i tasselli possibili.

Let us have the courage of our admitted ignorance, of our doubts and uncertainties. At least we can try to discover what others ... require, by ... making it possible for ourselves to know men as they truly are, by listening to them carefully and sympathetically, and understanding them and their lives and their needs...

THERE IS A LINE among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’2 Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.

Roosevelt “believed that with enough energy and spirit anything could be achieved by man,” the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote in an essay comparing Roosevelt and Churchill. “So passionate a faith in the future,” Berlin went on, “implies an exceptionally sensitive awareness, conscious or self-conscious, of the tendencies of one’s milieu, of the desires, hopes, fears, loves, hatreds, of the human beings who compose it, of what are described as ‘trends.’” This uncanny awareness, Berlin argued, was the source of Roosevelt’s genius. It was almost as if the “inner currents [and] tremors” of human society were registering themselves within his nervous system, “with a kind of seismographical accuracy.

Isaiah Berlin solía recordar aquel viejo cuento judío según el cual un rabino iba cierta noche por un oscuro bosque. De pronto, le salió al paso un espantable monstruo. Lo vio el rabino y exclamó: –¡Bendito sea el Señor nuestro Dios, que tanta variedad puso en sus criaturas! La idea de igualdad puede ser muy tentadora, pero en el fondo es peligrosa. Es lo que han buscado todos los totalitarismos. Lo verdaderamente humano es la diversidad que nos distingue de otros seres animados, iguales entre sí, y donde cada miembro de la especie hace lo mismo que los demás. El hombre no es una hormiga ni una abeja. Sus posibilidades de ser y hacer son infinitas. No sólo hay Bach: hay también Mozart, y Beethoven y Brahms. (Y los Beatles, y Lara, y José Alfredo). Lo mejor que me puede pasar es que no todos sean como yo. Si lo fueran, el mundo sería muy aburrido. (Y ciertamente no muy bueno). No sólo debemos admitir la diversidad, o tolerarla, debemos también agradecerla. Nos enriquece, nos hace plenamente humanos. Bendita sea la diversidad. Gracias a ella todos podemos ser todo.

It is a distinctive feature of Berlin’s liberal outlook that, while remaining steadfastly committed to Enlightenment values of toleration, liberty and human emancipation from ignorance and oppression, it rejects the Enlightenment conception which sees universalizing reason as the mark of man, and a rational society, in which particularism has been transcended or else domesticated, as the telos, the aim, goal, or end of history.

Russell Seitz and the defenders of tobacco invoked liberty, too. But as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin sagely pointed out, liberty for wolves means death to lambs.124 Our society has always understood that freedoms

Isaiah Berlin understood the well-known saying that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” as a metaphor for two styles of thinking.

The important thing now, as Arizona State University gender studies scholar Breanne Fahs writes, is to integrate these perspectives, which represent what philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the two kinds of freedom: positive and negative liberty, or “freedom to” and “freedom from.”22 Sex-positive feminists have focused on the freedom to: freedom to have sex, freedom to enjoy ourselves, freedom to do the things that men do without the unjust inhibition caused by a double standard. They were right. Sex-negative feminists were concerned with freedom from: freedom from being treated as sexual objects, freedom from feeling obligated to have sex to show that we are cool, freedom from the idea that sex is by default good. Transgressive personal sexuality shouldn’t be the price of entry to radical spaces and sexual liberation shouldn’t be the sum of women’s liberation. They were right too, but they received less attention.

There is no kinship between Joseph de Maistre and those who really did believe in the possibility of some kind of return — neo-medievalists from Wackenroder and Görres and Cobbett to G. K. Chesterton, and Slavophils and Distributists and Pre-Raphaelites and other nostalgic romantics; for he believed, as Tolstoy also did, in the exact opposite: in the "inexorable" power of the present moment: in our inability to do away with the sum of conditions which cumulatively determine our basic categories, an order which we can never fully describe or, otherwise than by some immediate awareness of it, come to know.

No one has ever excelled Tolstoy in expressing the specific flavour, the exact quality of a feeling – the degree of its ‘oscillation’, the ebb and flow, the minute movements (which Turgenev mocked as a mere trick on his part) – the inner and outer texture and ‘feel’ of a look, a thought, a pang of sentiment, no less than of a specific situation, of an entire period, of the lives of individuals, families, communities, entire nations.

Tolstoy’s genius lies in a capacity for marvellously accurate reproduction of the irreproducible, the almost miraculous evocation of the full, untranslatable individuality of the individual, which induces in the reader an acute awareness of the presence of the object itself, and not of a mere description of it, employing for this purpose metaphors which fix the quality of a particular experience as such, and avoiding those general terms which relate it to similar instances by ignoring individual differences – the ‘oscillations’ of feeling – in favour of what is common to them all.

The Greek poet Archilochus once observed that the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one important thing—a phrase later made famous by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Bogle was the quintessential hedgehog. He always believed in one big thing with a fiery passion. He had the integrity and intellectual suppleness to shift positions, though. When he was later confronted with his change of heart on the merits of active investing, he quoted the economist John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

...men in general, as he found them, do not like leisure, do not like peace, do not like stability, what they like is strife, hatred, struggle, passion, love, violence; that when men are left peaceful for too long they get bored; that when men have order and stability for too long they become restive; that men actually indulge in sports which are full of danger because they are full of danger; that men admire enemies who cause terror in them far more than they admire enemies who do not cause terror in them; that men actually seek terror; that men seek irregularity in life . . . there is nothing more dreary for human beings than to be quiet, peaceful, steady contemplators such as Hume or the Utilitarians wanted to make them; that this is the sort of thing which caused degeneracy in countries. The only thing which kept people alive was to forget themselves in some task about which they were passionately concerned.

Er bestaat geen noodzakelijk verband tussen individuele vrijheid en democratie.

در واقع ما تنوع را به خودی خود عاملی مخل وحدت خودمان به شمار نمی آوریم؛ بلکه همشکلی را به نوعی ناشی از فقدان تخیل یا بی فرهنگی و در موارد حاد شکلی از بردگی تلقی می کنیم.

تلاش برای رسیدن به کمال هم به نظر من به نوعی نسخه ای برای کشتار است. حتی اگر صادق ترین و پاکدل ترین آرمان گرایان هم به دنبالش باشند، وضع بهتر از این نیست. هرگز کسی به شدت ایمانوئل کانت اخلاق گرا نبوده است، ولی حتی او هم در لحظه ای که نور اشراق بر ذهنش تابیده بود، گفت: " سرشت تلخ بشر هرگز میوه ای شیرین به بار نمی آورد." همشکل سازی کامل مردم، که از خواسته های برنامه های جزمی است، تقریباً همیشه راهی به سوی خشونت و وحشیگری است.

Il nazionalismo non è la consapevolezza della realtà del carattere nazionale, né l'esserne fieri: significa credere nella missione unica della propria nazione, ritenuta intrinsecamente superiore agli scopi o atttibuti di tutto ciò che è fuori di essa.

Intorno, diciamo, al 1820...troviamo, specialmente in Germania, poeti e filosofi i quali dicono che la cosa più nobile che un uomo possa fare è servire a ogni costo il proprio ideale interiore...E se l'ideale fosse falso? A questo punto interviene un radicale mutamento categoriale che segna una grande rivoluzione nella storia dello spirito umano. La questione se un ideale sia vero o falso non è più ritenuta importante e anzi non è neppure del tutto intelleggibile. L'ideale si presenta nella forma di un imperativo categorico: servi la luce interiore che è in te per il fatto che arde dentro di te, e per nessun'altra ragione... Il modello valido per l'etica e la politica è d'un tratto cambiato: si è passati dall'analogia con le scienze naturali, o con la teologia, o con una qualsivoglia forma di conoscenza o descrizione dei fatti, a qualcosa che riprende i concetti di impulso e di meta in senso biologico e li combina con quelli della creazione artistica.