A shift in perspective

It is obvious that any textual analysis can be enriched by means of contextual interpretation, and Berlin’s work is no exception. In this case, by referring to his biography we are able to fill in the blanks present throughout his work, which are to a large extent the result of a notoriously unsystematic style of writing.10 With the exception of his very early study of Marx, and the unfinished “Political Ideas in the Romantic Age”,11 _{all his work is written in essay form and} their topics can appear as incredibly diverse at first glance, to the point that they may look like a collection of caprices devoid of real argumentative narrative. This makes it extraordinarily difficult to achieve an integrated understanding of his writings. Students of Berlin often struggle to fit his work into a single discipline, and in general his oeuvre has been analysed using a metonymical method. That is to say, Berlin has been read mostly by establishing one or a few of his essays or ideas as central, and only considering the rest of his works as more or less relevant depending on how much or how little they relate to the ideas established as pivotal.

6 _{A. Ryan, 'Wise Man', The New York Review of Books, 45.20 (1998): 29.}

7 _{J. Cherniss, A Mind and Its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin's Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford}

University Press, 2013); A. Dubnov, Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012a); M. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998).

8 _{I. Berlin and R. Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Halban, 1992); I. Berlin and B.}

Polanowska-Sygulska, Unfinished Dialogue (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006); I. Berlin and S. Lukes, 'Isaiah Berlin in Conversation with Steven Lukes', Salmagundi, 120, 52-135 (1998).

9 _{I. Berlin and H. Hardy, Letters, 1928-1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); I. Berlin and H.}

Hardy, Building: Letters 1960-1975 (London: Chatto & Windus, 2013); I. Berlin, H. Hardy, and J. Holmes,

Enlightening: Letters, 1946-1960 (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009).

10 _{J. Ferrell, 'Isaiah Berlin as Essayist', Political Theory, 40.5 (2012).}

11 _{I. Berlin, Karl Marx; His Life and Environment (London: T. Butterworth ltd., 1939); I. Berlin, Political Ideas} in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006).

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This has allowed the widespread dismissal of Berlin’s work as an historian, and instead placed him as a liberal political theorist with a curious, albeit contingent, interest in the history of ideas. Conversely, this thesis argues that the saliency of Berlin’s political thought resides precisely on his capacity to grasp the inseparability of history and philosophy when it comes to defending liberalism. In this sense, Berlin’s pioneering ideas have been largely misread, and it is the object of this thesis to bring attention to them and inspire a discussion on the need to assess political ideas hermeneutically.

Berlin was one of the first authors – if not the first one – to pursue ‘the study of past thinkers as part of the activity of normative political theory, and not as pure “historical” enquiry’ in a way which ‘maintains a continuity between the history of political thought and normative political theory’.12 _{The continuous line he traces between history and normative} political theory is made possible by his deep understanding of those elements that define our current understanding of human nature and the consequent critical examination of methodologies in political theory that colours all of his works. Thus, Berlin’s ideas can only be weighed in full when considered as an investigation of human nature that uses history and philosophy as its medium, and not its subject matter. Berlin’s historical writings are conducive to something other than merely painting a portrait of a particular historical moment, and his philosophical reflections on normative concepts are not just thought exercises. Berlin is in fact doing something with his writings, and doing it the best he could have done it, given the particular historical and intellectual context in which he wrote them. In this regard, I am happy to ‘humbly’ draw partly from Skinner’s methodology as a departing point ‘when maintaining that an understanding of the meaning of a given text requires one to understand what question the writer was addressing, what concepts, ideas, and political vocabulary were available to him

12 _{P. Kelly, 'Contextual and Non-Contextual Histories of Political Thought', in Jack Hayward et al. (eds.), The} British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1999): 43, 50.

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to express his ideas, and how he acted in the world through his text(s)’.13 However this thesis disagrees with Skinner and other Cambridge Historians alike in their insistence that texts only respond to other texts, and that intellectual biography – or history-making, in general – is not a method of textual interpretation. Finally, I fully subscribe to Dubnov’s contention that ‘one cannot avoid narration and reconstruction of ‘textual’ as well as ‘nontextual’ surroundings if one wishes to understand, first, the questions and challenges texts were designed to answer, and, second, the vocabulary and bank of ideas available to the thinker’.14 _{In order to show that} this is the case, I will not only apply this method to my interpretation of Berlin, but more importantly show how Berlin’s work stands as a functioning example of the way in which this is done. This presents the foundations to argue that there are strong hermeneutical reasons to argue for a deeper relevance of his work. Berlin was not just an essayist or a social commentator, nor a deficient historian or a philosophically languid Cold War liberal ideologist. If his defence of liberalism seems to suffer from any of these flaws is because his method has been largely misunderstood and underestimated in its potential to produce a robust defence of liberalism. The main aim of this thesis is to produce the evidence to support this argument, and the first step in this direction is the contextual interpretation of his oeuvre presented in this chapter.