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Proper Study of Mankind, The

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"The Proper Study of Mankind" is an awe-inspiring anthology of seventeen essays in the Humanities by the erudite and engaging Isaiah Berlin. The title may seem a bit stilted for Berlin, who is no starched collar, and whose writing is crisp, crackling, and refreshingly free of pomp and pedantry. But then...so long as one stops and thinks (something going out of fashion these days, but still very much in the spirit of Berlin)...that title does make sense. Of course! "The proper study of Mankind is Man." Not ideals. Not ideologies. But human beings as they really are--and what they actually do.

Berlin does not believe in final solutions to human questions. There is no definitive answer once and for all. Nor is there one way, the way, the only way to be, live, act, think, learn, work, write, express oneself, etc. Man is not singular. Man is plural. That is what makes humanity so facinating to "study." The mystery, the drama, the unpredictability of these intractable creatures baffle social scientists, human engineers, controlling personalities who--try as they may!--cannot quite track down, trap, take prisoner the wildly elusive chimera of "human nature."

Ah, but Shakespeare delights in this dazzling dance. And so does Berlin. He writes with riveting wonder at the butterfly flights of human beings, human minds, human wills, human histories. He traces errant clues left behind, on scattered pages, to defy the wind of time. Berlin is sensitive to these fragile fragments of thought, these traces, these rumblings of the human spirit. He is a great historian of ideas--one who listens with a keen sense of hearing for echoes and reverberations in the din of cacophony. He is a perceptive discerner of patterns in space, careers through time, and points of origin. He is original. He does not regurgitate his enormous reading. Rather, he chews, tastes, savors, spits out fat, sucks up marrow, and digests. Thus fortified by this huge feast of reading, Berlin writes something utterly new, all his own, from all that he has read.

The most stirring, most exciting, pages in this anthology are those of the finale (section V) of Berlin's essay on "The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will." When Berlin writes like this, you don't just see light, you feel fire! But then, turning to Berlin's penetrating essay on "The Origins of Machiavelli," the reader is captivated by an utterly different set of sensations: depth, moisture, deep caves, dank smells, dirt, digging in darkness, fearful, clutching one's dagger, probing, deeper--a Dante-esque spiralling down to the bowels of the earth--followed by a swift sudden plunge into the heart of this seminal genius, this Machiavelli, this spectre of the night whose short, simple, virus-like books continue to plague the west, century after century. This too is great reading!

Indeed, all of the essays in this anthology are good. It's just that some are better than others--depending on what you are looking for. The first six essays are predominantly conceptual. They distill the ideas. Thus, they have punch and potency. But they are somewhat dry and lacking in flavor. Reading them, the connoisseur sips pure alcohol. All the while, however, he or she longs for the exquisite taste of an excellent wine: full-bodied, fruity, robust, bursting with bouquet, and delightfully complex. That is to say: the vintage Berlin.

Abruptly after the first six essays, however, the corks pop, the writing flows, and taste buds bathe in champagne. Berlin is at his best--humane, historical, humorous--in the nine essays that follow: four on "The History of Ideas"; three on "Russian Writers"; and two on "Romanticism and Nationalism." The remaining essays, the last two, on "Twentieth-Century Figures" (Churchill and Roosevelt) round out the feast with a delicious dessert. After devouring this book, however, I keep coming back for seconds, thirds, fourths from my favorite essays--those on Romanticism, Nationalism, the Counter-Enlightenment, and, of course, Machiavelli.

Still, each essay in this anthology is ingenious in its own way: the approach, the point of view, the style of writing...everything curved, shaped, fitted--just so--to suit the subject. But there is no forced compartmentalization. Ideas from one essay spill over into another--and can be found swimming, quite freely, in a third. Those who demand strict obedience, straight lines, right angles, cleanliness, order, stability, sterility, etc., will be appalled. But those who despise totalitarianism will be overjoyed.

The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing -Archilochus, 8th century BC

Never have the readers of the New York Times been more humbled and mystified than the November day in 1997 when the paper ran a front page obituary for the Latvian-born British philosopher Isaiah Berlin. You could hear the collective gasp and feel the pull of the intake of breath as thousands of folks who pride themselves on being "in the know" turned to one another and asked, across a table laid with grapefruit halves and bran cereal,, "Was I supposed to know who Isaiah Berlin was? I've never heard of him." The answer is that there was no real reason most of us would have heard of him, though we'd likely read a couple of his book reviews. He was after all a philosopher who never produced a magnum opus summarizing his worldview. His reputation really rested on a couple of amusing anecdotes, one oft-cited essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox, and on his talents as a conversationalist, which would obviously only have been known to an elite few. Oddly enough, he has experienced a significant revival of interest since his death, but he is basically still just known for this essay.

If, like me, you finally forced yourself to read War and Peace and were simply mystified by several of the historic and battle scenes, this essay is a godsend. Though many critics, and would would assume almost all readers, have tended to just ignore these sections of the book, Berlin examines them in light of Tolstoy's philosophy of history and makes a compelling case that Tolstoy intended the action of these scenes to be confusing. As Berlin uses the fox and hedgehog analogy, a hedgehog is an author who has a unified vision which he follows in his writing ("...a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance...") , a fox has no central vision nor organizing principle; his writings are varied, even contradictory. Berlin argues that Tolstoy was a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog, that he longed for a central idea to organize around, but so distrusted the capacity of human reason to discern such an idea, that he ended up knocking down what he saw as faulty ideas, without ever settling on one of his own.

According to Berlin, in War and Peace, Tolstoy used the chaotic swirl of events to dispel a "great illusion" : "that individuals can, by the use of their own resources, understand and control the course of events." Or as he puts it later, Tolstoy perceived a "central tragedy" of human life :

...if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world...

This idea is strikingly similar to the argument that F. A. Hayek made almost a century later in his great book The Road to Serfdom, though Hayek made it in opposition to centralized government planning. Tolstoy's earlier development of this theme makes him a pivotal figure in the critique of reason and a much more significant figure than I'd ever realized in the history of conservative thought.

I'd liked War and Peace more than I expected to when I first read it--despite not grasping what he was about in these sections of the book--and I'm quite anxious to reread it now in light of Berlin's really enlightening analysis. I've no idea how to judge the rest of Berlin's work or how he ranks as a philosopher, but you can't ask more of literary criticism than that it explain murky bits, that it engender or rekindle interest in an otherwise musty-seeming work, and that it take a potentially dated book and make us realize that it is still relevant. This essay succeeds on all those levels. In this instance at least, Isaiah Berlin warrants his hefty reputation.

GRADE : A+

I picked up a copy of this anthalogy of essays as I was browsing the bookstore. This was a time when I was wrestling with the absolutism of monistic philosphical systems, whether religious or secular(communism, nazism, capitalism, individualism, etc...)vs. the opposite view- nihilistic and perspectivist relativism, which seems to look at the shortcomings of the virtues of each of these systems, and so then tosses them all out the window, leaving us with nothing. I was not aware that there could be a third alternative. I started reading the first essay, "the pursuit of the ideal", and felt absolutely thunderstruck! How often have you felt that way after reading a philosophical essay? Another essay in the same vein is "Two Concepts of Liberty".

What Berlin is arguing in these essays is not that values do not exist, or that they are relative. It is more subtle: who said these values are all destined to converge together to form the perfectly virtuous man, as Aristotle seemed to think? Berlin uses the analogy of a jigsaw puzzle. The various virtues are like pieces of a puzzle, but who said this puzzle was a good one- that its pieces were designed to ultimately fit together, if only we were wise enough, learned enough, read enough, spiritual or religious enough, etc... And yet we seem to cling to this Platonic Ideal, this "ancient faith", as Berlin calls it, and sacrifice ourselves and our fellow man in trying to achieve a final solution to this puzzle. In this search for a final solution, no price seems to be too high to pay.

Can one be a perfect parent and be highly successful in their career? Can one be completely honest, peace-loving, and truthful (very laudable Christian virtues) and still be an effective leader of state (Who often needs the Machiavellian virtues of stealth, secrecy, and even heartless violence if needed)? Is one wrong in acknowledging the merits of capitalism, and yet wanting to have this tempered to some extent so that society offers a bit of a safety net to those who occasionally fall off?

Berlin's solution is to realize that these ultimate virtues do not necessarily always entail one another, and that life frequently forces us to choose between these. Of course we have the enlightenment ideals of judgement, rationality, knowledge,& intelligence to help guide us. But there is also room for the Romanticist ideals of taste, temperament, and passion. It offers the best reconcililation between these world views that I am aware of. Berlin himself seems to like the label liberal objective pluralism for this kind of thinking.I have read things that echo his thought in such thinkers as William James and John Dewey, but never so clearly and eloquently written.

Do you find that there is something terribly wrong in the relativistic nihilism of postmodern thought, as well as absolutist, fundamentalist, narrow-minded and simple-minded ideologies (both religious and secular) which seem to be a backlash to that kind of thinking? Well, here is a very therapeutic third option. To me, it offers sanity in an insane world. I, like some other reviewers here, find it surprising that Berlin's views are not more often discussed in academic philosphy, as well as in public discourse on issues of values and ethics.

In this volume Henry Hardy Isaiah Berlin's faithful pupil and editor brings together some of the best essays from the previous volumes of Berlin essays he supervised the publication of. There are essays on 'The Pursuit of the Ideal ' on ' Philosophical Foundations' on 'Freedom and Determinism' on 'Political Liberty and Pluralism' on 'The History of Ideas ' on 'Russian Writers '

on' Romanticism and Rationalism' and on ' Twentieth Century Figures'

The volume contains Berlin's most well- known essays including the essay on 'The Hedgehog and the Fox' the one on ' Machiavelli' and the one ' On Historical Determinism'.

This is a selection of the best writing of a person who is without question one a most significant modern political thinker and historian of ideas.

Berlin's love of ideas, his vast knowledge, his tremendous verbal energy and skill, his humane understanding of character, his original consideration of fundamental historical periods and processes are all at work here.

This is a volume which should be in the library of every person who wishes to think about history and politics seriously.

The review below is the work of someone who hates the English language. Bemoaning Isaiah Berlin his verbosity is akin to sitting courtside, complaining about Michael Jordan's long legs or the hairs on the hairy arms of Pete Sampras. Berlin's prose is verbose, fantastical, exhilarating, and breathtaking.

Said review below also, yet still more absurdly, claims Berlin to be a cultural relativist, an outrageous slander. Isaiah believed that human ends were constant and universal. He would often, in conversation, support this with an idea of Wittgenstein's, that if a lion could speak, we would not understand it. The point is that, unlike talking cats, we hear each other across contingents and cultures, centuries and civilisations. Less happily, the values we hold, Berlin also knew, while objective, even universal, are irreconcilable, conceptually incompatible, and live, contra Pythagoras, in eternal disharmony. Realising all our values at the same time would sound like something by Schoenberg. So we must make choices. And such choices, trade-offs that they are, involve loss. For Berlin, choice is constituted by loss, the meaning of tragedy, the original sin of free-will.

The book is a generous anthology of Isaiah's essays. While they're each published elsewhere, and while I would have made a different selection (I disagree with the inclusion of "Historical Inevitability", which is too long and needs some editing), this is a convenient format, perfect for taking on holidays and reading on the beach.

Isaiah Berlin wrote a lot of essays, as the size of this book, THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND, absolutely demonstrates. Near the middle of the book is an essay, "The Originality of Machiavelli," which shows how well Berlin could categorize intellectual activities into various kinds of significance.

"His distrust of unworldly attitudes, absolute principles divorced from empirical observation, is fanatically strong - almost romantic in its violence; the vision of the great prince playing upon human beings like an instrument intoxicates him. He assumes that different societies must always be at war with each other, since they have differing purposes. He sees history as an endless process of cut-throat competition, . . ." (p. 318).

The index is great, and even has an entry for "Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich . . . conversation with Stalin." Pasternak wanted to talk to Stalin, but the question which Stalin put to Pasternak, "whether he was present when a lampoon about himself, Stalin, was recited by Mandel'shtam" (p. 533) was not what Pasternak wanted to talk about. Pasternak wanted to talk to Stalin "about ultimate issues, about life and death." (p. 534). After Stalin put down the receiver, "Pasternak tried to ring back but, not surprisingly, failed to get through to the leader." (p. 534). Stalin had been quick to decide where that conversation was going, and cut it short by observing, "If I were Mandel'shtam's friend, I should have known better how to defend him." (p. 534). It is not obvious that Stalin would have appreciated a defense which asserted that the poem about Stalin was more true than anything else that Pasternak had ever seen, read, or heard, and any decent country would have comedians that would constantly broadcast such ideas on the radio 24/7 until the invention of TV would allow people to watch movies like "Forrest Gump" in the comfort of their own homes. Stalin has been rightly condemned for being hopelessly authoritarian when judging humor that was aimed at his sorry self, and Isaiah Berlin sees the pattern as one that Russia was particularly prone to suffer indefinitely. "Whatever the differences between the old and the new Russia, suspicion and persecution of writers and artists were common to both." (p. 537).

Berlin's account of his conversations with Anna Akhmatova strive to reflect what culture means for people who actively create work like Heine's comment, "I may not deserve to be remembered as a poet, but surely as a soldier in the battle for human freedom." (p. 537). We are now such a comic society on a global level that pop mock rap on the internet can pick on the soldier's mentality in a hilarious way, but it is good to be able to read Isaiah Berlin to account for how much such humor matters.

This may be one of the best collection of philosophical essays in the history of the literary realm. Isaiah Berlin's writing simply crackles to life, not just because it is intellectually stimulating, but more because it is challengingly persuasive. What do i mean by that? Well, expect yourself to critically engage with his ideas, or to be more precise, his fresh ideas on the ideas of other thinkers. When original and independent thinking challenges conventional or orthodox paradigms - that's when we need to consider why we should overturn or defend the prevailing systems. Nonetheless, Berlin doesn't seek to forment revolution in as much as he actually wants to converse with our minds. That's a fundamental difference between intellectual activism and activism of the intellect. Sadly, his theses on freedom and the politics are just the kind of stuff that most lay readers don't touch anymore; because they are not written in the pop non-fiction style that contemporary best-seller lists are made of. I would strongly encourage all lovers of knowledge and wisdom to throw themselves, without caution, into Berlin's well-articulated, thoughtful, and elegant prose. My only complaint is that it can get slightly verbose at times but if you can invest the time and effort in gleaning the pearls of his wisdom through and between the lines, you will be a much better informed student of mankind for it.

Isaiah Berlin probably is one of the 20th century's most underrated thinkers. A truely learned man he brought his insight in the history of ideas, reflecting on the elightenment and freedom, the golden age of Russian literature, and rubbing shoulders with the high and the mighty. All of these facets are displayed here. Mr. Hardy has done an exceptional job at assembling these essays. My favorite being "The Hedgehog and the Fox." In this essay, Berlin explores the natures of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky is the hedgehog who knows one thing really well. Tolstoy is the fox, reflecting his epic sweep and universal understanding of humanity. In a nutshell, Berlin's political philosophy is strongly lined up on the side of freedom and the dignity of the individual. Not exactly in favor in these days of extremist bland thinking. My one complaint is that there is so much more to Berlin than these exceptional essays. If 20th century philosophy is to be remembered as more than an unpleasant memory, it will be as the time of the age of Berlin.

Going by the reviews that read below this one, I've decided to deliver a useful note for the prospective reader. If however you are well versed in the philosophers of the 18th-20th century, you might like to skip my review. I've yet to complete Berlin's anthology of essays as I've taken a time out to understand each of his referenced philosphers that he lists ever so extensively throughout just the 1st 2 chapters. To clearly comprehend Berlin's arguments, it is effective to consider the thoughts of most if not all the arguments he has referenced from a list of great thinkers from the 18th century. Since I have made the effort to do so, Berlin's thoughts have been raising out of the book with such greater clarity, permitting a far more entertaining read despite his solemn context.

Of the content itself, Berlin has written his essays in easy to read prose, which is very favourable. In his intelligible language he shares his philosophy, first, of a concept with which to analyse mankind that has till presently been a test to define. He then delves greater into his discourse of a proper study of mankind.

Fact of the matter is, it is truly difficult to provide a strong and consequential review of Berlin's work if one hasn't appropriately studied the works of other great thinkers of his time, and is well aquainted at least with the dogmas that have been influenced as a result. If you have a remote curiosity as to what this book might behold given it's very appropriate and self-explanatory title, enter the mind of Berlin with the motivation to learn, experience, and perhaps understand the effects, or perhaps the lack of it, in our world, that has been due to these, or the lack of, great thinkers.

If you want to get to the chief ideas of Berlin, buy THE HEDGEHOG AND THE FOX as a stand-alone book; do not waste your money on this highly verbose and repetitious book.

And what a terrible writing! Pompously and unnecessarily long sentences. At least with Hegel and Kant, you would arrive at a clear meaning after you finished carefully reading a sentence that filled a whole page. With Berlin, whose sentences are teeming with digressive parentheses, you look at a sentence and right off the page jump at you a number of ways a better writer could have condensed his prolix sentences into sentences at least three times shorter than his. In sum, it seems like Mr. Berlin never went beyond the first draft of his essays, omitting to revise, edit, and compress his writing. Yes, yes, you might say, "Well, this reviewer is probably too dumb to understand Berlin." Maybe you are right. But, I find it hard to see why it should be difficult to understand what a sentence about the biographical details of a Russian politician is trying to convey. I would have much easier time confessing to stupidity if the sentences in question were, instead, about some subtle philosophical points concerning the ontological foundations of our a priori ideas or the dialectical movement of the World Spirit, or the sources of our moral directives.

As to the ideas themselves, Berlin does have a few good ones, most notably in THE HEDGEHOG AND THE FOX. The fox knows many things; and the hedgehog only one big thing. It is a very profound distinction, and after reading this essay you can have a fun time classifying the people you know into these two general categories. However, this distinction is confined, I think, only to the realm of psychology and cannot be used to derogate, as Berlin does, all philosophical attempts to arrive a single system that explains the world. Yes, there is, de facto, a phenomenal variety in our world; but that in itself is not a proof of the errorneousness of all the unitary systems as a class, but rather a part of the problem these systems try, with varying success, to explain. Overall, Berlin's apotheosis of cultural relativity, which he derives from the "fallacies" of the "dogmatist" philosophies, does not rest on any sound and consistent set of arguments, but rather hopes to attain acceptance based solely on the current cultural fads. "Everything is relative!" proclaim the culturally sensitive commentators, caring very little as to how we should, then, explain the fact that there are certain values that are valid universally. Killing and stealing are frowned upon in Mozambique as well as in Montana, and even in Brooklyn. Fortunate for the philosophical supporters of cultural relativity, there are in the world much better partisans of this relativity than Berlin. Read Paul Feyerabend for a much better defense.