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2012 2013 12: 49 originally published online 3 DecemberEuropean Journal of Political TheoryBernard Yack

The significance of Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment  

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DOI: 10.1177/1474885112463649

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E J P TArticle

The significanceof Isaiah Berlin’sCounter-Enlightenment

Bernard YackBrandeis University

Abstract

This paper takes a close look at Berlin’s claim that the emergence of Counter-

Enlightenment pluralism marks a momentous historical watershed. It concludes that

Berlin is right to draw our attention to the importance of this event, but that he

seriously misinterprets its significance. He has good reason, in particular, to treat

Herder as ‘the most formidable adversary of the French philosophes and their

German disciples’, but not because Herder put a stop to the ancient creed of

monism on which they relied. For Berlin’s monistic interpretation of the French

Enlightenment, I shall show, badly misrepresents that intellectual movement and its

impact on the world. The great significance of Herder’s pluralist critique of the

Enlightenment lies, instead, in the way in which it rehabilitates prejudice as a source

of human virtue and creativity, a critique that directly attacks the core mission of the

philosophes: to remove the obstacles to the gathering, preservation and dissemination of

useful knowledge.

Keywords

Isaiah Berlin, Counter-Enlightenment, Enlightenment, Herder, moral pluralism

Isaiah Berlin’s enthusiasm for the early German critics of the Enlightenment haspuzzled many of his readers. Why, they wonder, would someone who made hisname defending individual liberty want to pal around with intellectuals who cele-brate Volkisch passions and fashions? The answer, of course, is that Berlin believedthat he had discovered in their writings a momentous insight, one that all goodchildren of the Enlightenment ignore at their peril: the incommensurability ofvalues and hence the inadequacy of the moral monism that has dominated westernthought for 2,500 years. For Berlin the German revolt against the French

Corresponding author:

Bernard Yack, Department of Politics, MS058, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454, USA.

Email: yack@brandeis.edu

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Enlightenment marks ‘a decisive turning point in Western intellectual history’,1 achallenge to rise free of some of our oldest and most persistent habits of thought.

The influence of Berlin’s ideas about monism and value pluralism has begun toequal, perhaps even surpass, that of his famous distinction between negative andpositive liberty. But because his approach to intellectual history, with its sweepinggeneralizations about epochs, is no longer fashionable, the historical claim thatinspired his theory of value pluralism has received very little critical analysis.Berlin’s supporters are inclined to treat ‘Berlin’s depiction of the Enlightenmentas monistic in its basic assumptions about truth and value’ as ‘both correct and notparticularly controversial’.2 His critics, in contrast, are inclined to treat it as ‘a trifleembarrassing’,3 and complain about Berlin’s overly ‘monolithic’ account of theEnlightenment.4 They suggest that the great pluralist succumbed to a monisticaccount of that tremendously complex and varied movement and insist that seriousstudy of the period has to begin by pluralizing the Enlightenment(s) that began toemerge in the 18th century. As a result, neither Berlin’s critics nor his followersdevote much sustained attention to what is probably Berlin’s most important his-torical claim. I find that quite ironic, since it seems to me that Berlin’s penchant forsweeping, epoch-embracing claims is largely responsible for our continuing interestin his work. If he had avoided the broad generalizations that offend so manycontemporary historians and pluralized his account of historical movements,5

then it is hard to believe that we would be still be debating the meaning of hisideas today.6

This article takes a serious look at Berlin’s claim that Herder’s pluralist critiqueof the Enlightenment marks a momentous historical watershed, one that we can nolonger afford to ignore. It concludes that Berlin is right to draw our attention to theimportance of this event, but that he seriously misinterprets its significance. He hasgood reason to treat Herder as ‘the most formidable adversary of the Frenchphilosophes and their German disciples’,7 but not because Herder put a stop tothe ancient creed of monism on which they relied. For Berlin’s monistic interpret-ation of the French Enlightenment, I shall argue, badly misrepresents that intel-lectual movement and its impact on the world. The great significance of Herder’spluralist critique of the Enlightenment lies, instead, in the way in which it rehabili-tates prejudice as a source of human virtue and creativity. This critique strikes atthe core of the mission of the philosophes’ party of humanity: to remove the obs-tacles to the gathering, preservation and dissemination of useful knowledge. For itsuggests that these characteristic activities of enlightenment will break down thepartial and limited horizons within which the perfection of different human virtuesmust take place.

It is quite easy, I shall argue, to pursue the philosophe’s vocation without acommitment to moral monism. Hence, the decline of moral monism marks nogreat watershed in human history. But the rehabilitation of prejudice is anothermatter, since it is so much more antithetical to Enlightenment goals. Pace Berlin’srenegade disciple John Gray, the rejection of monism by no means strikes a ‘death-blow. . . to the project of the Enlightenment’.8 There are places of honour inmodern museums for the achievements of every culture and sympathy for the

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communal bonds that inspired them in a world in which ‘we are all multiculturalistsnow’, as Nathan Glazer put it.9 But whether human beings are maimed or per-fected by their shared prejudices, that is an issue for which we have no easy solu-tions. We have been struggling with it intently since that watershed moment towhich Berlin draws our attention.

Berlin’s misrepresentation of the French Enlightenment

Let me begin with what seems to me Berlin’s misunderstanding of the FrenchEnlightenment, a misunderstanding that is widely shared. Ironically, this misun-derstanding diminishes the significance of the Counter-Enlightenment revolt thatBerlin celebrates. For who today is ready to endorse the kind of monism that Berlinascribes to the philosophes? Correcting Berlin’s view of the French Enlightenmentthus not only improves the accuracy of an important historical category, it allowsus to see the importance of the pluralist revolt against it.

Berlin takes the Enlightenment’s monism to be clear and easily confirmed, awell-established premise upon which to build, rather than a controversial view thathe needs to demonstrate.

No matter how deeply relativity about human values or the interpretation of social,

including historical, facts entered the thought of social thinkers of this type they too

retained a common core of conviction that the ultimate ends of all men at all times

were, in effect, identical . . .Despite profound differences of outlook, there was a wide

area of agreement about fundamental points: the reality of natural law . . . of eternal

principles by following which alone men could become wise, happy, virtuous, and

free . . .Thinkers might differ about what these laws were, or how to discover them, or

who were qualified to expound them; that these laws were real, and could be known,

whether with certainty, or only probability, remained the central dogma of the entire

Enlightenment. It was the attack upon this that constitutes the most formidable reac-

tion against this dominant body of belief.10

Similar passages abound in Berlin’s essays,11 passages in which he interprets theEnlightenment as the product of western rationalism’s original sin, the pursuit of asingular understanding of the good.

At some point I realized that what all these views had in common was a Platonic ideal:

in the first place, that, as in the sciences, all genuine questions must have one true

answer and one only, all the rest being necessarily errors; in the second place, that

there must be a dependable path towards the discovery of these truths; in the third

place, that the true answers, when found, must necessarily be compatible with one

another and form a single whole, for one truth cannot be incompatible with another –

that we know a priori. This kind of omniscience was the solution of the cosmic jigsaw

puzzle. In the case of morals we could then conceive what the perfect life must be,

founded as it would be on a correct understanding of the rules that governed the

universe.12

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Berlin recognizes that some key Enlightenment figures, such as Montesquieu,Hume and even Diderot, fit poorly into any movement defined by a commitmentto natural law and its singular answers to our moral questions. He thereforedevotes considerable effort to showing that their scepticism about such ideaswas not perceived as ‘a source of danger’ to its general acceptance amongEnlightenment thinkers.13 But if the philosophes celebrated sceptics likeMontesquieu and Hume, why should we think of a commitment to the monisticideal as their ‘central dogma?’ My problem with Berlin’s monistic conception ofthe French Enlightenment is not that it excludes some important thinkers whomwe ordinarily associate with that movement, but rather that it misrepresents thecommon core of conviction and commitment that gave this movement its dis-tinctive character.

The monistic conception misrepresents the French Enlightenment in at leastthree significant ways. 1) It defines a movement that welcomed scepticism as ifthe movement were defined by a commitment to a singular conception of thehuman good. 2) It characterizes a movement inspired by common understandingsof what is wrong or evil in the world as if it were inspired by a common under-standing of the good. 3) It treats the French Enlightenment’s celebrated concept ofprogress as movement towards some ideal, when it is much better understood asendless movement away from recognized evils – a point that becomes clear whenyou look closely at its most famous example, Condorcet’s account of ‘indefiniteperfectibility’.14

If the French Enlightenment were defined in terms of the kind of moralmonism that Berlin ascribes to it, then scepticism and cultural relativism wouldbe its greatest enemies, a conclusion that Zygmunt Baumann, for one, works outwith considerable gusto. Baumann suggests that scepticism and pluralism repre-sent ‘the evil genius of [modern] European philosophy; anybody suspected of notfortifying doctrine against it tightly enough was brought to book and forced todefend himself against charges, the horrifying nature of which no one put indoubt’.15 Needless to say, Berlin does not share this wild exaggeration of theEnlightenment’s commitment to moral certainty, with its visions of philosophicinquisitions and torture chambers. He is well aware that the philosophes toasted –rather than roasted – sceptics like Montesquieu and that it was the moralistRousseau, not the sceptic Hume, whom they ostracized. Yet he still feels com-pelled to conclude, despite all evidence to the contrary, that ‘the very tone ofMontesquieu, the whole tenor of his work was somehow felt to be subversive ofthe principles of the new age’.16

That is a conclusion that Diderot and d’Alembert, the guiding spirits behind thegreat collective project of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopedia, would havefound very strange indeed. For they not only celebrate Montesquieu’s work,17 theyseem quite comfortable with his scepticism. In the end, it is the Cartesian quest forcertainty that worries d’Alembert much more than the scepticism displayed byBayle or Montesquieu or Hume. Descartes, he suggests, inspires us with hisdoubts, his revolt against ‘scholasticism, opinion, and authority’, not with his pur-suit of a singular and certain moral truth.

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If he concluded by believing he could explain everything, he at least began by doubt-

ing everything, and the arms which we use to combat him belong to him no less

because we turn them against him.18

I am not suggesting that scepticism about singular conceptions of the good is whatbrought the French philosophes together as a movement. I am insisting, however,that it did not exclude anyone from ‘the party of humanity’ that they constructed.19

Moral monism was not a plank in that party’s platform.Berlin insists that the philosophes subscribed to the doctrine ‘that the good is

one, but evil has many faces; there is one true answer to every real question, butmany false ones’.20 But a closer look at their social criticism points to precisely theopposite conclusion, that they were much more confident answering questionsabout what to avoid than how to live one’s life. Take Diderot, for example. Hisgreat dialogue, Rameau’s Nephew, held up to ridicule beliefs about the equation ofthe good with the virtuous life. But that did not deter him from his extraordinaryefforts to collect and disseminate useful knowledge in the Encyclopedia. That isbecause, like so many of his fellow philosophes, he was much more concerned todiminish evil, darkness, l’infame, as Voltaire called it, than to push us towards somevision of the good. Visions of a summum bonum meant little to him. He was,however, much more comfortable with assumptions about the summum malum:pain and discomfort and the forces of darkness that impede our efforts to relievesuch conditions. Ironically, Berlin reproduces this sensibility himself when he sug-gests that when values collide, as they inevitably do, our ‘first public obligation is toavoid extremes of suffering’.21

The philosophes, in this regard, were inclined to follow Locke, who taught in hisEssay Concerning Human Understanding that the primary motive for all humanaction is the need to relieve uneasiness, rather than the pursuit of some good.22

That is clear not only from the praise that d’Alembert lavishes on Locke’s moralpsychology,23 but from the way in which he explains why and how we come to seekknowledge.

The necessity of protecting our own bodies from pain and destruction causes us to

examine which among external objects can be useful or harmful to us, in order to seek

out some and shun others. But hardly have we begun to survey these objects when we

discover among them a large number of beings who seem entirely similar to ourselves,

that is, whose forms are entirely like ours and who seem to have the same perceptions

as we do, so far as we can judge at first glance. All this causes us to think that they also

have the same needs that we experience and consequently the same interest in satisfy-

ing them. Whence we conclude that we should find it advantageous to join with them

in finding out what can be beneficial to us and what can be detrimental to us in

nature.24

From the Encylopedists’ point of view, progress is a movement away from a nega-tive condition of pain and discomfort, rather than a movement towards some idealgood defined by the laws of nature, a point developed at length in the

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French Enlightenment’s most famous celebration of this idea, Condorcet’s valedic-tory Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. This bookclimaxes in a wonderfully optimistic vision of our future, a vision that certainlydeserves the adjective utopian for its hopefulness. But even here Berlin’s monisticimage of the French Enlightenment is misleading. For Condorcet presents us with avision of endless improvement away from constraint and discomfort, rather thancontinuing movement towards some ideal. ‘Indefinite perfectibility’ is his creed,rather than the pursuit of the ideal. He sets out to show that

. . . nature has set no term to the perfection of human faculties; that the perfectibility of

man is truly indefinite; and that the progress of this perfectibility, from now onwards

independent of any power that might wish to halt it has no other limit than the

duration of the globe upon which nature has cast us.25

As we find new means of easing old constraints on our development, completelynew and undreamt of capacities await us. Singular visions of the good human lifetherefore represent constraints on human progress as Condorcet conceives it, nottheir goal. No matter how idealistic his vision of the future may be, with its elim-ination of war, hunger, even death,26 it is not inspired by a monistic understandingof the good.

That said, it should be emphasized that the pursuit of knowledge that eases thehuman condition is not neutral with regard to different ways of life. It rules outmany ways of life, in particular those dependent upon shared prejudices and thedefence of constraints on the pursuit of useful knowledge, even if it does notendorse any particular way of life as the good to follow. But this understandingof enlightenment and progress does not invoke the monistic ideals emphasized byBerlin. If it is the desire to uncover, preserve and disseminate useful knowledge thatbrings these figures together, then they have little to fear from a sustained critiqueof intellectual and moral monism.

Why does Berlin exaggerate the intellectual and moral monism of the philo-sophes? Part of the answer is biographical. As Berlin recalls it, his first seriousconsideration of the French Enlightenment occurred when, in preparing his bookon Marx, ‘he began reading Marx’s forerunners, the Encyclopedists, Helvetius,d’Holbach, Diderot’.27 Viewed from this perspective, as ‘forerunners’ of Marx’sefforts to demonstrate that communism represents ‘the riddle of history solved’,28 itis not surprising that Berlin focused on the more monistic ideas he found in thetexts of the French Enlightenment.

Moreover, Berlin seems to share the general inclination of intellectual historiansto exaggerate the importance of positive ideals and discount the importance ofobjects of hatred in the construction of systems of thought. Think, for example,of how much scholarship has been devoted to utopianism and how little work tothe study of different ways of understanding what keeps human beings fromachieving their goals. Even when social critics, such as Marx or Nietzsche,devote almost all of their efforts to identifying a new way of understanding theobstacles to our satisfaction, many historians are inclined to treat the utopian

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scraps that are strewn throughout their work, the few vague outlines of a positiveideal, as the source of their discontent with the world.29 Similarly, they assume thatthe French Enlightenment must have been inspired by their own version of a‘heavenly city’, as Carl Becker puts it, rather than by their tremendous outpouringof words about what is holding us back. Berlin seems to share this disposition andtherefore exaggerates the importance of the monistic ideals he finds in some cornersof the French Enlightenment.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, there is the way in which Berlin con-structs the Enlightenment as a ‘residual category’, as a negation of the new pluralistapproach that he celebrates.30 We are inclined to construct residual categorieswhen we use the absence of what we find most striking and novel in a laterperiod to define the period that preceded it. In this way, ‘primitive society’ isdefined in terms of the absence of certain recognized features of civilization; anti-quity in terms of the absence of certain novel features of modernity, and themodern world in terms of the absence of the post-modernist’s celebration ofirony and rejection of foundations. Similarly, when you think that the most strikingand original feature of Counter-Enlightenment arguments is their endorsement ofvalue pluralism, then you are likely to be disposed to treat the negation of valuepluralism as the glue that held the Enlightenment together.

The problem with most residual categories is that they are not simply wrong andtherefore hard to counter. Characteristically modern forms of social organizationare absent from the worlds that preceded them; irony and anti-foundationalism arenot prominent features in early modern thought; and the assertion of value plur-alism is relatively rare among the philosophers of the French Enlightenment. Butjust because the distinctive feature of the later period plays little role in the earlierone, that does not mean that the earlier period was organized around the negationof that feature, the pre-modern world around something called tradition, themodern world around foundationalism or the French Enlightenment around theassertion of intellectual and moral monism. Berlin, I am suggesting, identified theFrench Enlightenment with monism not so much because he found overwhelmingevidence of its importance to the philosophes, but rather because he found littleevidence of any commitment to the new ideal of value pluralism that he found sointriguing.

The significance of Herder’s cultural pluralism

The great significance of Herder’s revolt against the French Enlightenment lies in ishis account of the way in which we create and nurture values, rather than his mereassertion of their variety and incommensurability. For Herder argues that theplural values he celebrates are the spontaneous product of limited cultures,rather than the result of rational and self-conscious choices among incommensur-able goods. He insists that the perfection of humanity proceeds through the gen-eration and collection of partial, as well as inconsistent virtues. Only by closing oureyes to much of the world can human beings create anything like either the sub-limity of the biblical patriarch or the playfulness of the Classical Greeks.

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Herder would have us appreciate all of these fragmentary virtues, even when theyrun counter to some of our deepest commitments. But he insists that these partialperfections of human character are nurtured within the horizons provided by some-what closed communities.

That is why Herder insists, in Another Philosophy of History, that ‘prejudice isgood’31 – as programmatically Counter-Enlightenment a statement as you couldask for. Prejudice is good not just because it keeps us warm and cosy in a coldworld of self-interested calculation. Nor is it good because, as Burke argued, itsmoothes the harsh edges of our natural drives.32 No, shared prejudice is goodbecause it provides us with the selective focus that allows partial perfections toemerge and flourish. Shared prejudice ‘pushes people together at their center;making them stand firmer upon their roots, more flourishing in their way, morevirile, and also happier in their inclinations and purposes’.33

[Nature] placed manifold dispositions in the heart and assembled some of them in a

circle around us, at our disposal: then she moderated the human gaze so that after a

short period of habituation this circle became man’s horizon. Not to look beyond:

hardly even to suspect what lies beyond! Everything that remains akin to my nature,

that can be assimilated into it, I envy, pursue, appropriate; beyond this, kindly nature

has armed with insensitivity, coldness, and blindness. She may even turn to contempt

and disgust – yet she has no purpose but to push me back upon myself, to give me

sufficiency at the center that sustains me. [Emphasis in original text.]34

From this point of view, the deepest problem with the French Enlightenment is notits supposed attachment to a monistic understanding of human goods, but ratherits assault on shared prejudice as the primary obstacle to human happiness. In theireffort to free human beings to pursue happiness as we choose to understand it thephilosophes undermine the means by which peoples achieve happiness and nurturehumanity’s most distinctive virtues. Herder would never say, with Nietzsche, thatyou have to love your virtue ‘infinitely more than it deserves to be loved’ in order tobe creative;35 for he believed that the succession of fragmentary perfections pro-duced by different cultures were part of the unfolding of humanity’s full, naturalpotential. But he would agree with Nietzsche that the preachers of Enlightenmentunwittingly undermine our capacity for creativity by indiscriminately illuminatingthe dark shadows of our cultural inheritance.

Herder’s insistence on the plurality and incommensurability of values is a rela-tively easy challenge for the heirs of the French Enlightenment to address. For, aswe have seen, it was a shared commitment to gather and spread useful knowledgethat brought the philosophes together, rather than a commitment to push us evercloser to some ideal vision of the good. You do not need to agree about the goodlife or even acknowledge the possibility of a singular understanding of the good inorder to participate in the project of Enlightenment understood in this way. Youneed only agree that it is worthwhile to work together to relieve human discomfortand fight against those who would impede the discovery and dissemination of theknowledge that would help us do so. The philosophes’ party of humanity excludes

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sadists, masochists and all those who take satisfaction from keeping others in acondition of suffering, ignorance and subordination. But it has plenty of room forcompeting and incommensurable visions of the human good.

Herder’s rehabilitation of prejudice, in contrast, poses a far more difficult chal-lenge to the French Enlightenment and its heirs, since it strikes so forcefully at itscore commitments. The breaking down of the barriers to the spread of usefulknowledge was – and is, as practised today – designed to empower humanbeings to enjoy and perfect their lives by freeing them from the discomforts andconstraints that stifle human happiness and creativity. But if Herder is right, theseefforts to empower human creativity are, to a certain extent, self-defeating, sincethey rob us of the shared cultural horizons that we need to perfect the different andincompatible virtues of which human beings are capable.

I would suggest that we find it rather easy to reconcile the pursuit of enlighten-ment, as the philosophes understood it, with an acknowledgement of the pluralityand incommensurability of human values. We devote tremendous resources to thepreservation and celebration of the disparate achievements of all great cultures andcivilizations, not just the classical rationalists whom we are inclined to see as ourpolitical and intellectual ancestors. And we expect people to show sincere respectfor those who value religious experience, so much so that the recent burst of anti-religious diatribes has been worth noting as a cultural event and social provoca-tion.36 Our default position, it seems, is acceptance and respect for the differentpaths that people take to the good, as long as we keep the engines of materialprogress moving full steam ahead. Like the Clarence Darrow figure at the end ofthe film Inherit the Wind, a mainstream liberal take on the Scopes monkey trial, wewant people to show respect to both Darwin and the Bible, two good books withsomething to teach us about how to live.

There is, however, nothing like such a simple and easy accommodation betweena commitment to spread useful knowledge and Herder’s rehabilitation of prejudice.To the extent that we have absorbed Herder’s lesson, it has left us uncertain anduncomfortable, which may help explain why Berlin shies away from it. It has notpersuaded us to stifle the institutions that produce a steady stream of useful andtransformative knowledge. But it has, I would suggest, led us to associate a con-siderable sense of loss with the practice of enlightenment, one that goes well beyondmere nostalgia for a simpler world and way of life.

Berlin misses or ignores these Nietzschean echoes in Herder’s critique of theEnlightenment. That may reflect his eagerness to make Herder palatable to Englishand American liberals. But I believe that the primary reason Berlin misses thesignificance of Herder’s rehabilitation of prejudice is that he looks at value plur-alism from the perspective of the individual observers and consumers of humanvalues, rather than from the communal perspective of their producers.

When Berlin defends his theory of value pluralism against the charge of moralrelativism, he is concerned to show that we can appreciate the values produced byalien cultures, that these values are not packaged and sealed in separate little boxes.Just because these values are not our own, he argues, that does not mean we cannotappreciate the objective goods that they perfect.37 For what makes these values

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valuable is the way in which they develop and perfect objective goods, rather thantheir ability to gain subjective approval. Moral relativists, Berlin argues, insist thatvalues are purely a matter of subjective preference: ‘I prefer coffee, you preferchampagne. We have different tastes. There is no more to be said.’ Value pluralists,in contrast, recognize that there are many things that have value, quite apart fromwhether or not we are attached to them. They merely insist that we cannot main-tain all of these objective values together in a single life or even a single rankordering.38

This defence of value pluralism certainly builds on and amplifies one side ofHerder’s argument. Few things get Herder angrier – and Herder was famouslyquick to anger – than the failure of the philosophes to make the effort to appreciatethe virtues perfected by cultures alien to their own. It would be laughable forurbane Parisian intellectuals to emulate the sublime, awe-inspiring virtues of thebiblical patriarchs; but it is sheer prejudice on their part not to recognize theextraordinary value of these virtues as partial perfections of human nature.Nevertheless, Herder also recognized that the producers of these values are nur-tured by limited horizons rather than the perusal of a list of incommensurablehuman values. These values may be ‘objective’, in the sense that they can beexplored and appreciated by people who do not begin with a taste for them. Butappreciating these values is not the same thing as living by them, let alone produ-cing them as new and distinct perfections of human faculties. For those who live byand produce these values, unlike those who observe and appreciate them, moralrelativism is unavoidable: for these values can only be defended within the partialperspectives that nurture them.

Herder, unlike Berlin, looks at value pluralism from both the observer’s and theproducer’s perspective. He is concerned with nurturing the connections that willproduce and preserve different human values, not just appreciating the worth ofvalues that are not our own. As an observer, Herder, like Berlin, decries the preju-dices that blind us to the achievements of alien cultures. As a lover of humanity,however, he seeks to protect, not just appreciate, our capacity to produce suchdifferent and incommensurable forms of human perfection. That makes his under-standing of value pluralism much more complex and awkward than Berlin’s. But italso makes it a much more significant challenge to the ideas and hopes of theEnlightenment.

Herder is hardly alone in seeking to rehabilitate prejudice in response to thephilosophes. But he did so without de Maistre’s misanthropy, Burke’s fondness forhierarchy or Nietzsche’s dangerous and fallacious belief that since we cannot pro-duce greatness without shared constraint, the imposition of shared constraint isbound to produce something great, ‘something . . . for whose sake it is worth whileto live on earth’.39 That is what makes him, in Berlin’s words, ‘the most formidableof the adversaries of the French philosophes and their German disciples’ in a worldnot ready to abandon its love of liberty, equality and fraternity.40 Ironically, how-ever, Berlin himself was too much a child of the French Enlightenment’s commit-ment to easing the suffering of individuals to recognize the full significance of theCounter-Enlightenment revolt that he celebrated.

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Notes

1. G. Garrard (2007) ‘Strange Reversals: Berlin on Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment’, in G. Crowder and H. Hardy (eds) The One and the Many: Reading

Isaiah Berlin, pp. 141–58, 151. Amherst, NY: Promotheus Books.2. Ibid. p. 146.3. R. Wokler (2003) ‘Isaiah Berlin’s Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment’, in R.

Wokler (ed.) Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment, pp. 13–37, 18. Philadelphia:American Philosophical Society.

4. G. Crowder (2004) Isaiah Berlin: Liberalism and Pluralism, p. 103. Cambridge: PolityPress.

5. I argue against those who argue that we cannot usefully generalize about theEnlightenment in (2006) ‘Naming and Reclaiming the Enlightenment’, EuropeanJournal of Political Theory 6: 343–54.

6. As we do in conferences, like the one at Harvard celebrating Berlin’s 100th anniversary,for which this paper was originally prepared.

7. I. Berlin (1976) Vico and Herder, p. 145. New York: Viking.

8. J. Gray (1993) Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought, pp. 64–5. London:Routledge.

9. N. Glazer (1997) We are All Multiculturalists Now. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press.

10. I. Berlin (1982) ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, in Against the Current, pp. 1–24, 3–4.New York: Penguin.

11. E.g. in Berlin (n. 7), pp. 145, 175–6. Berlin (1991) ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, in Berlin,

The Crooked Timber of Humanity, pp. 1–19, 5–6. New York: Knopf. Berlin (2002)Liberty, p. 212. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berlin (2000) ‘My Intellectual Path’,in Berlin, The Power of Ideas, pp. 1–23, 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

12. Berlin (1991, in n. 11), pp. 5–6.13. I. Berlin, ‘Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth Century European Thought’ (1991, in n. 11),

70–90, 71–2.

14. A. N. de Condorcet (1967) Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the HumanMind. New York: Noonday Press.

15. Z. Baumann (1992) Intimations of Post-Modernity, p. 104. London: Routledge.16. I. Berlin, ‘Montesquieu’ (n. 10), pp. 130–61. The complainers against Montesquieu in

this essay are Bentham and Helvetius.17. Especially in d’Alembert’s (1995) Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot,

pp. 99–100. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. As well as in his ‘Eulogy for

Montesquieu’, which he used as a preface to vol. 5 of l’Encyclopedie.18. D’Alembert (1995, in n. 17), p. 80.19. P. Gay (1964) The Party of Humanity. New York: Knopf.

20. Berlin (n. 7), pp. 175–6.21. Berlin (1991, in n. 11), p. 17.22. J. Locke (1975) Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.23. D’Alembert (1995, in n. 17), pp. 83–4.24. Ibid. p. 11.25. Condorcet (n. 14), p. 4.

26. See, in particular, his sketch of the tenth or future stage, of human progress, ibid.pp. 173–202.

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27. I. Berlin and R. Jahanbegloo (1991) Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, p. 12. New York:Scribner’s.

28. K. Marx (1975–) Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts, in Marx and Engels, CollectedWorks, vol. 3, p. 296. New York: International Publishers.

29. In order to do so, to explain why such meagre positive ideals generate such intense

dissatisfaction, scholars often hypothesize that these ideals draw on and secularize thestronger feelings associated with religious images of heaven and the Messianic end ofdays. For a discussion and critique of such secularization arguments, see B. Yack (1986)The Longing for Total Revolution, pp. 3–27. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

30. For a discussion of residual categories, focusing on the distinction between antiquityand modernity, see B. Yack (1997) The Fetishism of Modernities, pp. 50–1. Notre Dame,IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

31. J. G. Herder (2004) Another Philosophy of History, p. 29. Indianapolis: Hackett.32. E. Burke (1998) Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp. 67–76. Indianopolis:

Hackett.

33. Herder (n. 31), pp. 29–30.34. Ibid. p. 29.35. F. Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, in Nietzsche (1983)

Untimely Meditations, p. 64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.36. The most prominent examples: R. Dawkins (2006) The God Delusion. New York:

Houghton Mifflin. D. Dennett (2006) Breaking the Spell: Religion as a NaturalPhenomenon. New York: Viking. C. Hitchens (2007) God is Not Great: How Religion

Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve.37. Berlin (n. 7), pp. 145, 169.38. Berlin (1991, in n. 11), pp. 10–11. See also Berlin (n. 13), p. 80, and (n. 7), p. 211.

39. Nietzsche declares that the one thing that is essential is that ‘there be obedience over along time and in a single direction: given that, something always develops, and hasdeveloped, for whose sake it is worth while to live on earth; for example, virtue, art

music, dance, reason, spirituality – ’. F. Nietzsche (1996) Beyond Good and Evil, p. 101.New York: Vintage.

40. Berlin (n. 7), p. 145.

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