Isaiah Berlin: A Life
by Michael Ignatieff

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Book Review: Nobody's useful idiot
Summary: 5 Stars

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.

Summary of Isaiah Berlin: A Life

But Berlin's life was not only a life of the mind. Present at the crucial events of our age, he was in Washington during World War II, in Moscow at the dawn of the Cold War, and dining with President John F. Kennedy on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis. 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--serene, comic, secular, and unafraid--and he examines its influence on Berlin's vision of liberalism, which stressed the often tragic nature of political and moral choice. A magisterial book, illuminating and beautifully written, Isaiah Berlin will stand with the great modern biographies.

Historical Books

• Subjects > Biographies & Memoirs > Historical
• Professionals & Academics > Philosophers