Customer Reviews

Isaiah Berlin : A Life

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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.

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.

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.

A prophet 'speaks for God' or (more loosely) is a 'truth-teller'. Berlin was a 'truth-teller' in his re-statement of political liberalism in the midst of the 20th century. Berlin was one of many intellectuals transplanted due to the revolutions and upheavals following WWI - he fell in love with England, and became an Oxford don. He might have remained for the rest of his life a little-known figure on the fringe of the 'Oxford philosophy' movement (called 'linguistic analysis') but for three things. One was his Zionism, though it was more the gentle Zionism of Weizmann, than the triumphalist variety of Ben Gurion. Another was the Second World War, where he became a key figure in British diplomacy in Washington, and got to know many New-Dealers. A third (and perhaps the decisive one) was his long stay in Moscow in 1945, where he met the poets Anna Ahkmatova and Boris Pasternak. As a result of this, there grew his fascination with the history of ideas, where he was to make his greatest mark on the intellectual life of the 20th century. Berlin's main thesis is the inconsistency (and opposition) of human ends, and against the theory that all rational human ends must be one. Thus 'Libery, Equality and Fraternity' is a zero-sum game - if you pursue equality, then a dimunition of some (or some people's) liberty is inescapable. This is an excellent biography with a crystal-clear exposition of Berlin's ideas, and a fascinating insight into 'one man's life'.

Ignatieff has written a wonderfully warm and captivating biography of this Jewish public intellectual who occupied a place certainly as prominent in England as Walter Lippman did here or Raymond Aron in France. The reader should be familiar with the "The Hedgehog and the Fox," if not some of Berlin's other essays, and have heard at least one of Berlin's BBC broadcasts. Ignatieff can do little more than allude to these as he traces Berlin's complicated relationship to his Russian homeland, to England, to Zionism, to the United States and with his wide circle of friendship with the best and the brightest that each of them had to offer. Why is this book such a pleasure? I think it a combination of Ignatieff's felicitous style and compendious research, together with Berlin's wise observations, his humor, and, above all, his remarkable, if self-centered, modesty.

This is one of the most insightful, educated, emotional, and inspiring biographies I have ever read. Michael Ignatieff has accomplished one of the most difficult tasks for a non-Russian biographer writing about a Russian persona: Mr. Ignatieff has guessed and grasped the subdelties of one of the most interesting, and surprising minds of the times. The author throughout the book never let go of I. Berlin's Russian Jewish descent; M. Ignatieff never underestimated Berlins's belonging to his very spesific past and most vulnerable identity. Also the language of the biography is sympathetically emotional, sincere, eloquent, in other words totally in accordance with Isaiah Berlin's life. This book has become one of my most satisfactory literary experiences.

Ignatief has done a fine job here in detailing not simply the life of Berlin but in actually digging into his past to provide insight into the biographical context of many of his views. Ignatief explains that Berlin's Russian roots were never fully covered over by his passionate embrace of his adopted country of Britain. His identity became what postcolonial theorists refer to as an example of "hybridity," meaning that he was niether fully one or the other.

This hybridity helped to form the basis for Berlin's belief that life is in essence tragic and there is no way to reconcile all valid worldviews.

I found this to be an incredibly compelling interpretation of Berlin's famous defense for pluralism. Finally, anyone interested in Western ideas in the aftermath of the Second World War will benefit greatly from reading this book.

Few biographies turn out to be such good books: Ignatieff's empathy for its subject mirrors Berlin's ability to understand/feel, and explains the glow that remains when you finally put the book down; in that sense it is a very unusual biography, fitting a most unusual man. Objectivity and love make a fair, warm testemony that does not cut intellectual corners. Berlin was lucky with his biographer, but then he always was.

One criticism: I think it's the first chapter("Albany"), not the last, that should have closed the book - it is there that Ignatieff gives a clearer feeling of who I.Berlin was. I went back to the begining and repeated that first chapter, and only then did the book seem complete.

I'd only vaguely recalled Isaiah Berlin's name from my casual reading in the 60's and 70's. I knew he was an esteemed Oxford don, a philosopher who had once passed through the periphery of the Kennedy years, as many quasi- and semi-quasi celebrities of any rank did then; and who had finally emerged as a sort of stone-gray eminence of Western thought. Voila for first impressions and fashionable facsimilies.

Upon discovering Turgenev's wonderful "Fathers and Sons", I also found Berlin's Romanes Lecture "Fathers and Children" as a 60-odd page prelude and was instantly enthralled. I not only glowed at Berlin's intimate feel for history, but for his nakedly innate empathy, notwithstanding and god-blessing his ability to make it all meaningful to me, the humble reader.

Either because I was so enamoured with Turgenev and/or really "finding" Berlin at last, I'll never know. To me then, neither was more important than the other. It's only after years and much living do I realize ultime: Turgenev was a god and Berlin only an intuitive but skeptically timid genuis. How nice; expecially when Michael Ignatieff writes a dynamite biography and makes me weep for Isaiah. Shalom

This is the life- story of the most important historian of ideas of the twentieth century. The story is told with clarity and sympathy . And something is caught of the tone and spirit of the person considered to be ' the greatest talker the English language had ' since Coleridge. Berlin was a person not only of remarkable learning, but of tremendous intellectual enthusiasm. His understanding of how it may be impossible to reconcile ' ultimate value claims' is at the heart of his championing of liberal democracy. The story is a remarkable one including not simply his climbing to the top of the pole of the English intellectual establishment ( despite his Jewishness) but his able service in the cause of freedom during the Second World War. One of Berlin's great volumes ( edited by his devoted student Henry Hardy)'Personal Impressions' tells of Berlin's warm friendships with many of the greats of the twentienth century. One such friendship was with Chaim Weizmann first President of Israel. Berlin was a 'Yom Kippur Jew' and ardent Zionist who contributed much to Israel . On a recent walk on Keren Ha- Yesod street in Jerusalem I took special pleasure in seeing a quiet little square named after him. This book should be an introduction to reading his own collections of essays which Hardy put together. They are the remarkable record of a most remarkable mind.