Isaiah Berlin: A Life [Paperback]

Michael Ignatieff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 1999

Isaiah Berlin was witness to a century. Born in Riga in the twilight of the Czarist empire, he lived long enough to see the Soviet state collapse. Biographer of Marx, scholar of the Romantic movement, and defer of the liberal idea of freedom against Soviet tyranny, Berlin was the presiding judge of intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic. When he died in 1997, he was hailed as the most important liberal philosopher of his time. But Berlin's life was not only a life of the mind. From Albert Einstein to Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill to Anna Akhmatova, his circle of friends constitutes a veritable who's who of twentieth-century art, politics, and philosophy. In this definitive work, the result of a remarkable ten-year collaboration between biographer and subject, Michael Ignatieff charts the emergence of a unique temperament and a singular vision.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Russian by birth, Jewish by descent, English by choice, Isaiah Berlin (1909-97) knit together three identities into a cosmopolitan sensibility that informed his contributions as one of the 20th century's most influential and important intellectuals. Based on his experiences as a child during the Russian Revolution and his friendships with such beleaguered writers as Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, Berlin affirmed the superiority of individual freedom and judgment to Marxist totalitarianism. But he made fellow liberals uncomfortable with his unwelcome reminders that their ideals--liberty, equality, social justice--inevitably conflicted and required painful tradeoffs. London-based journalist Michael Ignatieff, who spent 10 years interviewing Berlin before his death, adeptly captures an appealing man: lighthearted, spontaneous, a brilliant conversationalist and lecturer (one of Oxford University's most popular professors), able to savor private happiness despite an essentially tragic view of political life. Ignatieff admires Berlin's views without accepting them uncritically; similarly, he acknowledges personal failings while appreciating the serenity Berlin achieved against considerable odds. This lucidly written, thoughtfully argued work is a model of the well-balanced biography, carefully evaluating the complex interplay of character and conviction in one remarkable individual. --Wendy Smith --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Over the last 10 years of Isaiah Berlin's life (1909-1997), Ignatieff tape-recorded conversations with the philosopher in what he describes as "a virtuoso display of a great intelligence doing battle with loss." Because this biography is based primarily on these talks?as well as on interviews with Berlin's widow, friends, students and colleagues?the tone is informally conversational rather than pedantically authoritative. After a prosperous childhood in Latvia, Berlin's family was forced to move to London, where young Isaiah absorbed the British values of decency, the toleration of dissent and the importance of liberty over efficiency. At Oxford, he developed intellectually under the likes of Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, R.G. Collingwood, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf. Berlin did well at Oxford?he was elected Tutor at New College, Fellow of All Souls?but with war coming, he welcomed a chance to work for the Ministry of Information, first in the U.S., where his brilliant wartime dispatches (avidly read by Churchill) established his reputation in both Britain and America, and later as part of a Foreign Office team in Moscow (where he met Boris Pasternak) and Leningrad (where he began his transformative friendship with Anna Akhmatova). Throughout the book, Ignatieff concentrates on his subject's conversation and flow of ideas. Berlin championed freedom but not dogmatically. In his view, to be true to human nature in its diversity, we have to embrace contradictory values; otherwise, we lose our humanity. Ignatieff's biography is worthy of its subject, lucidly explaining how this "Paganini of words" used philosophy to defend civilized society.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 356 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks (October 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805063005
• ISBN-13: 978-0805063004
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,171,097 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great read about a fascinating life., March 12, 1999

By 

Norman Lezin, [e-mail] (Santa Cruz, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Isaiah Berlin: A Life (Hardcover)

I would give this brilliant book six stars if I could. It was a great read, and I learned a lot about myself, as well as about Berlin.

It gave coherence and voice to many of my beliefs that followed Isaiah Berlin's, even though I only knew of him, if at all, as a mythic English intellectual whose writings were Delphic and seemed opaque to me.

I, too, could never identify with the smugness of idealogues on the left or the right. The narrow strand between these groups has been lonely terrain for the past 50 years of my adult life.

I congratulate Michael Ignatieff on a masterpiece, an evocation of a great, courageous man who literally kept his cool over the better part of the century, when all about him were shouting fire. I hope his values take root for the next century.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nobody's useful idiot, November 6, 2001

By 

Daniel Mandel (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Isaiah Berlin: A Life (Hardcover)

Isaiah Berlin was an intellectual figure whose deep subtlety of thought never made him inscrutable. His reputation as a standard bearer of liberalism is also widely but imperfectly known. Michael Ignatieff has made good this state of affairs, aided by the decade-long co-operation of his subject, who put none of the usual obstacles of authorised biography in his path.

Born in Riga to traditional Jewish parents and raised there and later in St Petersburg in the last days of Tsarist Russia and the early years of the Soviet Union, Berlin was taken providentially to Britain where he adjusted with ease to British education and mores. His detractors would later identify his defence of British institutions as a deformation of émigré idealisation. His school career gave only slight indication of the achievement to follow at Oxford, where he was elected at 23 a fellow of All Souls, perhaps the most rarefied, in its association of powerful men and untrammelled scholars, of Oxford colleges. The chaos and mounting dread left behind in Russia immunised Berlin from the millenarian ideologies that so infected his contemporaries.

Chance took him to America during the war and into the service of the British Foreign Office, where he dazzled his superiors from Churchill down with the probity and depth of his copious reports on the American scene. Churchill would comment approvingly on his memoranda to Eden, an insecure politician who appreciated Berlin's brain but suspected expertise and who took the opportunity to note in margin, 'There is perhaps a too generous Oriental flavour' (p. 125).

So impressed was Churchill with Berlin that he insisted that he be invited to dinner, where he quizzed his guest on the war and strategy, only to receive bland replies. "But when do you think the war will be over?" persisted Churchill. "Mr Prime Minister", Berlin replied, "I shall tell my children and grandchildren that Winston Churchill asked me that question". Perplexed, Churchill then inquired what was Berlin's best work. "White Christmas" came the reply from Irving Berlin (pp. 125-6). And so the celebrated tale of the wrong Berlin being invited to dinner was born. Ignatieff recounts these and other anecdotes with style and gentility.

A life-long Zionist, Berlin appreciated that Jewish statehood had created the potential for normalcy in Jewish life, allowing Jews for the first time to decide how they might manage their individual lives. Nonetheless, he adjudged early that a life in Israel was not for him, though Weizmann, Ben Gurion and others all sought to harness his energies to the national enterprise.

He could be sedulously aloof from Zionist work while serving in the Foreign Office, won points from colleagues for towing the official line, but grave times saw him side with his Jewish loyalties when, in 1943, he learnt of an Anglo-American initiative to defer Zionist claims till after the war. He let word out to the Zionists in America and gingerly covered his own tracks in doing so, aborting the initiative. "If he had once entertained thoughts that a Jew might work happily in the Foreign Office," writes Ignatieff, "the experience of 1943 cured him of that illusion for good." The history of ideas, not the labyrinth of diplomacy, was to become his natural domain.

Philosophically, Berlin rejected the sterile pretensions of logical positivism while at the same time rejecting the moral absolutism of political belief. Indeed, he avoided all semblance of intellectual intolerance, taking his friends from many points of the political and social compass. He did not always handle the resultant suspicion and criticism well.

The Left comprised the better part of his intellectual opponents, with E.H. Carr arguing that Berlin's avoidance of socio-economic factors in an individual's actions destroyed the ability to morally evaluate at all. Berlin retorted with a classical defence of individual choice that was circumscribed but never foreclosed by background and circumstance.

Berlin regarded all terrorism as a moral deformation and for that reason was but a sceptical sympathiser of nationalism. He perceived the value of national independence but never deluded himself that decolonisation wars and nation-building necessarily established liberty. Thus his refusal of requests to back the FLN campaign in Algeria because of its wholesale recourse to the terrorist method of murdering civilians.

A man of exquisitely complex background and loyalties, he eschewed ideological absolutism of any kind: thus his debate with Arthur Koestler on the latter's advocacy after Israel's establishment of the diametric alternatives of emigration to Israel or total assimilation for Jews. He detected in Koestler's own complex working out of his divided identities another totalitarian temptation that ill-matched the complex alternatives now actually open to Jews. He repudiated the idea that Jews, uniquely amongst peoples, would have to bow to historic necessity (a favourite totalitarian truncheon) and either emigrate en masse to Israel or divest themselves of their own identity.

Berlin also rightly identified the totalitarian fallacy in the sublimated desire of people to surrender choice to systems that relieved them of responsibility. Berlin's liberal universe was strong but not idealised: liberty means choice between often-incompatible values and tragedy is implicit in the potential loss involved. Liberty creates harm and hardship, but it is better than all alternatives in providing scope for an otherwise unattainable individual freedom.

Ignatieff's portrait of Berlin is solid and supple. He depicts a man who refused to be drawn into political campaigns, was singularly free of the vice of cultivating power and privilege, and who produced outstanding and digestible expositions of his key philosophical ideas.

Even in this magisterial biography, there are inevitably some small quibbles. Some lapses in sub-editing can be put right in a new edition and might not even exist in the British one. Abba Eban's surname is mis-spelt more than once (though not in footnotes); Lord Moyne is described as a senior Mandatory Palestine official when he was in fact the British Minister of State in Cairo. But Ignatieff deftly handles the multiple briefs of his subject without sacrificing chronological coherence or clarity of exposition.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Elegant Portrait of a Great Liberal Intellectual, December 5, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Isaiah Berlin: A Life (Hardcover)

Michael Ignatieff spent many hours with Isaiah Berlin over the ten years before Berlin's death, aged 88, in 1997, and the frank portrait that emerges in this book is of a very human intellectual with a deep attachment to liberty. The book traces Berlin's life from his early years in Riga and revolutionary St. Petersburg, and his family's flight to England, to his sure rise through the hallowed halls of Oxford and the Foreign Office to the very pinnacles of the British academic establishment. Berlin quickly put aside the sterility of formal philosophical debate and engaged himself in a life-long study of the history of ideas, and in particular the evolution of liberal thought. Berlin's overwhelming interest was in people, and the book catalogues his varied encounters with a gallery of huge personalities over the course of the century. The reader catches glimpses of Churchill, Kennedy, and literary giants such as Anna Akhmatova. Berlin's persona is part Russian Jew, part Englishman of letters, and Ignatieff draws out the contradictions and felicitous harmonies in this cultural mixture. Berlin had an unerring knack for being in the right place at the right time, and in distilling Berlin's extraordinary life, Ignatieff provides a lively overview of a century of ideas. An excellent read.