Book Reviews

Abstract

In one of his most famous essays, Isaiah Berlin quotes a fragment from the Greek poet Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’ (‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, in Berlin 1978c, 22). The contrast is a metaphor for the crucial distinction at the heart of Berlin’s thought between monist and pluralist accounts of moral value. According to monism, a single value or narrow set of values overrides all others, while in the pluralist view human goods are multiple, conflicting and incommensurable. Monism, Berlin believes, harbours political dangers that pluralism avoids. While the great authoritarian visions of politics have all rested on monist foundations, pluralism is naturally aligned with toleration, moderation and liberalism. Berlin, the pluralist and liberal, thus tends to present himself as a fox, and certainly he knew many things. He is best known for his distinction between negative and positive liberty, but there is far more to him than this. His biographer Michael Ignatieff notes Berlin’s contributions not only in liberal political theory but also in ‘analytical philosophy, in the intellectual history of Marxism, the Enlightenment, and the Counter-Enlightenment’ (Ignatieff 1998, 10). One could add Berlin’s work on nineteenth-century Russian thought, on the history of nationalism, on Jewish identity, and on many other topics. Something of Berlin’s range is indicated by the essays collected in The Power of Ideas and by the contributions, from friends and colleagues, to The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin. Indeed, there is some truth in the widespread judgement that Berlin is primarily an historian of ideas rather than a political thinker. Certainly his characteristic style is very different from that of most anglophone political philosophers. Richly contextual, Berlin’s discussions are typically focused less on the logic of a thinker’s arguments than on the subject’s personality and social and intellectual background. His object is not so much to assess the validity of the case before him, but rather to reconstruct, as vividly as possible, the world as it appeared to the writer in question, and then let readers draw their own conclusions. Berlin’s feats of imaginative reconstruction, in particular of the profoundly illiberal thought of anti-Enlightenment thinkers like Joseph de Maistre and