Isaiah Berlin’s Key Idea

Most people have heard of Isaiah Berlin, but knowledge of what he was and did is more patchy, and every now and then, when it emerges that I am at work on his papers, I am asked to explain about him – preferably, no doubt, in a brief soundbite. Sometimes the enquirer wants me to start from scratch, but sometimes there is a preconception at stake, and then it tends to be a question of responding to the implication that Berlin (1909–97) is a superseded Cold-War figure who belonged to -his own century more than to the one to come. This view seems to me absolutely mistaken.

No short account could do justice to the many-faceted significance of this remarkable man. As a thinker and historian of thought, as a teacher and talker, as a consummate essayist, as an exemplar of liberalism and a clear-headed enemy of totalitarianism – and as a sheer human being – he had a presence and made a contribution that will be remembered, rediscovered and analysed from many vantage-points for years to come. Several books have already been written about him, and more will follow. But if I was forced into a corner and told to select a single insight with special staying-power, I should choose his insistence, against the mainstream of Western thought, that there can be no universal right set of principles by which we should live, and that all attempts to discover a unique solution to the moral questions that face mankind are based on a profound mistake about the nature of human values.

The usual technical name for this doctrine is ‘pluralism’, unfortunately rather a characterless word that tends to make what is in fact an exciting, liberating and radical view of human values sound like a sterile philosophical backwater. Nevertheless, the term does capture Berlin’s essential starting-point, which is that ultimate human values – those values we adhere to for their own sakes, not as means to an end – are plural. That is to say, there are many of them, all perfectly genuine, and their distinctness – their plurality – is irreducible: they cannot be redefined or translated in such a way that they all turn out to be different manifestations of one super-value such as happiness or utility or obedience to some alleged supernatural dispensation.

What makes this multiplicity significant, Berlin believed, is that our values are also often incompatible and at times incommensurable – that is, not jointly measurable on a common scale. To take only the simplest examples, more justice means less mercy, more equality less liberty, more efficiency less spontaneity; and there is no objective procedural rule that enables us to balance one value against the other in such a conflict and decide where to draw the line.