Writing with Isaiah Berlin: The Uses and Limits of a Distinction

Part of: The Deep Reader

Tolstoy has been offered advice that could satisfy his admirers more readily than it satisfies him: continue describing the individual lives he understands so extraordinarily well, and leave the grand explanations of history alone. Partway through The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin lets this division of labor begin to sound like a solution. The novelist could do what only he does supremely well. Why insist on the other task?

Berlin has prepared the attraction by accumulating sensations, relations, passions, insight, and the ordinary succession of experience that Tolstoy can render. “What, then, is the historian’s task,” he asks, before opening the possibility that the rendering might be enough. Admiration has acquired a plausible recommendation for what the admired writer should do next.

Then the recommendation gets an owner: Turgenev, who repeatedly offered it, and Tolstoy, who refused it. Describing lives would leave unanswered why people live together and affect one another as they do. On the next page, the scenes we have just been invited to cherish become the “trivial ‘flowers’ of life, not the ‘roots’.” Berlin makes us experience the frustration of having praised a gift that cannot satisfy the person possessing it.

Tolstoy resists the answer offered to him

The opening animals could have made the essay a more manageable kind of entertainment. From Archilochus, Berlin borrows the fox's many pursuits and the hedgehog's central vision, then names writers whose differences make the division feel culturally expansive. A sufficiently confident reader could spend the afternoon sorting a library.

Tolstoy spoils that ease. On page 24 of Russian Thinkers, Berlin places the division inside him: the perception he possesses does not satisfy the understanding he believes he needs. The label has produced a conflict rather than settled an identity. Artistic success can now become evidence of a thinker's continued frustration.

The words “at least in part” put an important limit on the proposal. Berlin names historical doctrines as the field he will examine, leaving a reader free to test that inquiry without subscribing to a complete psychological account of the man.

Turgenev's advice is delayed long enough for its good sense to reach us before its attribution. If Berlin had begun by announcing the friend's misunderstanding, we might have felt no temptation to share it. By developing the recommendation first, he makes Tolstoy's refusal cost the reader an explanation that had almost seemed sufficient.

Praising a conversation more warmly will not explain how innumerable actions produce a historical outcome. Tolstoy's dissatisfaction has this specificity: the artist's achievement and the thinker's demand do not answer the same question. Berlin can defend the greatness of the scenes and still have to follow the inquiry that their greatness leaves unfinished.

That movement requires three people to remain audible. Turgenev recommends, Tolstoy refuses, Berlin interprets the refusal. Fold them into one voice and we get praise for description followed by a puzzling attack on it. Keeping the disagreement personal lets Turgenev's admiration remain real even as we discover how little consolation it can offer Tolstoy.

The person hidden inside self-mastery

“Two Concepts of Liberty” begins its account of self-direction from an aspiration worth wanting. A person wishes to conduct a life for reasons they can regard as their own. Berlin gives that wish its dignity before following a development in which somebody else will claim the authority to say what those reasons really are.

The metaphor of mastery begins to divide its owner. A directing self is distinguished from the part it directs, then a higher rational self from passions and immediate desires. The supposed true self can be enlarged to include a social whole. An authority speaking for that whole can finally present its command as the person's authentic will, even while the actual person refuses.

The recurrent self makes the verbal route sound continuous. The power to decide has moved from the person who wanted to direct a life to an authority entitled to overrule that person.

Berlin does not call this an inevitable deduction. On page 179 he says the two notions of liberty have diverged “not always by logically reputable steps.” The qualification changes the proof required. We must examine historical transformations and disputed inferences, rather than convict self-direction of every use made in its name.

The next assertion is more disturbing than the claim that coercion might serve somebody's good. It says the coerced person has really consented. Berlin marks the escalation on page 180: “I may go on to claim a good deal more than this.”

What has been added is authority over another person's wanting. I may judge that an intervention serves your interests; I may then claim that the choice you would make under altered conditions is the choice you actually make beneath your refusal. A hypothetical preference has been promoted into an authentic will that the speaker is entitled to pronounce.

The refusal has lost its force just when it seemed most necessary. It can now be treated as a symptom of the lower, confused, or inauthentic self. The claimant has awarded himself the right to decide which of the other person's wishes count as that person's own.

For an essayist, the useful work starts where the ambiguous word begins changing somebody's authority. Follow who defines it, whom the definition represents, and what accepting it would authorize. Repeating a term can conceal that movement; a succession of new labels can conceal it too. The reader needs to be able to stop at the added claim and ask who granted its speaker the right to make it.

Then, on page 181, Berlin allows that the negative conception of liberty—freedom from interference by others—can be manipulated in a corresponding way. He replies that positive freedom has historically proved more susceptible to the division of the self. His preference now rests on a comparative historical claim; the concepts alone cannot secure it.

A portrait can outrun its hypothesis

Berlin's fluency creates another risk for a writer learning from him. A vivid division can feel like possession of a person. The Hedgehog and the Fox gives us a place to test the reach of that feeling against the essay's own opening restraint.

By the final pages, the bounded inquiry has grown into a portrait of Tolstoy's divided understanding. The comparison with de Maistre preserves differences in belief while joining an acute perception to a longing for ordering truth. From there, the conclusion reaches toward torment and tragic stature. The essay has accumulated enough force to make the whole man seem to stand within its account.

That enlargement is an interpretive achievement we can still contest. The opening classification cannot certify what Tolstoy knew, or refused to know, about himself. Evidence about historical doctrines has helped form a psychological portrait; admiration for the portrait should not let us forget the additional claims it makes.

Separate the subject's statements, recorded conduct, the pattern proposed by the essay, and the uncertainty that remains. The conclusion may reach beyond the opening evidence, but the extension must become answerable to what follows. A modest adverb attached to a sweeping diagnosis will not make the missing support appear.

Neither essay needs an invented scene to acquire a human stake. Tolstoy receives a recommendation that leaves his hardest question unanswered. In the liberty essay, an actual refusal can be discounted by a claim about an authentic self. Criticism and conceptual argument remain different forms, with different evidence, while both can make us feel what another person's explanation costs its subject.

Return to the moment your essay's distinction first seemed to settle the matter. If the pages continue, what has made their continuation necessary? Berlin lets the admiration of Tolstoy disclose an unanswered demand, then lets the vocabulary of self-direction disclose a disputed authority. The reader has another question because something in the offered answer has become harder to accept.

Illustration of Isaiah Berlin and Leo Tolstoy.

Sources

Isaiah Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” in Russian Thinkers, edited by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (Hogarth Press, 1978), pp. 22–81. Opening classification and scope: pp. 22–24; the historian’s task and Tolstoy’s rejection of artistic self-sufficiency: pp. 36–37; concluding comparison and portrait: pp. 78–81.

Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Liberty, edited by Henry Hardy (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 166–217, section II, especially pp. 178–181.