A Chamber of the Divinity School in the Bodleian Library. Oxford.
What an amazing interview. A rare treat, Steven Lukes could level with Berlin and hence, fortunately for us, skipped all the idiotic questions. I asked Professor Lukes if this interview is digitized, evidently not. So I had to scan and “retouch” the following quotes.
Isaiah Berlin on the generation of his father (p.54):
“By his generation, a great many Jews had drifted into secular life. I think by that time the relative emancipation was such in Russia that half my cousins were not Hasidim at all. His brothers and sisters weren’t, his cousins weren’t. He didn’t become a flaming atheist. Some did. One of the cousins became a member of the Cheka. My father’s sister was nearly arrested for some kind of revolutionary activity in Warsaw at one stage in the 1905 Revolution and so on. Sir Lewis Namier explained this extremely clearly: “Eastern European Judaism was a frozen mass until the rays of Western Enlightenment began to beat on it. Then some of it remained frozen, some evaporated – that meant assimilation and drifting, and some melted into powerful streams: one was Socialism and the other Zionism”. That’s exactly right.”
Isaiah Berlin on Riga at the turn of the century (p.55):
“At the top were the Baltic barons. They were of German origin, fanatical supporters of the Czarist throne and they held high offices in the Russian government. They were not too popular in that country. At home they tended to speak German. Below them came the prosperous German merchants together with Scandinavians — Danes, Swedes, as well as Scotsmen and Englishmen — a colony of merchants who were basically responsible for exporting Russian goods to the west. I don’t suppose that the total inhabitants of Riga could have numbered more than two hundred thousand and perhaps there was a foreign colony of say twenty thousand and say three thousand Russians, sixty thousand Germans and forty thousand Jews and a hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand Letts.
Then came the Jews. Now the prosperous Jews spoke German, since they couldn’t mostly get their children into Russian universities, mainly because there was a strict quota for Jews. It was a very sore point, A good many sent their children, who spoke perfect German, to the University of Berlin or Koenigsberg. Then there came the middle class Russian Jews who talked Russian, and then came the Jews of the self-created Ghetto, Riga was outside the Pale. The Ghetto was not an official ghetto and they were employed by other Jews. You see Jews could remain outside the Pale of Settlement if they were rich beyond a certain point. If the turn-over of their business was more than so much, if they were merchants of the First Guild so-called, or if they were professionals or artisans — doctors, dentists, metal workers, milkmen and the like. If you were a Jewish dentist you might have thirty assistants, none of whom knew anything about dentistry; you bribed the police and they were allowed to stay.”
Isaiah Berlin on three original ideas of Karl Marx (p. 71):
“I discovered that two, maybe three ideas in Marx were wholly remarkable and amounted to genius.
- The idea of Marx that was genuinely original was the idea of the influence of technology on culture, that technological change influences culture to a profound degree. Saint-Simon had indeed said it before quite clearly, but not perhaps clearly enough.
- The other idea was about big business and what it did. I think he probably invented this. That there would be a phenomenon of big business, huge centralized control of production and manufacture and exchange which in his day didn’t exist. In other words he saw that capitalism was going to become an international phenomenon. That it was going to become a huge centralised dominant world force; that I Think is due to Marx: What we call big business is not a phrase used in the 19th century.
- The third idea is that of the class war. Class warfare has been exaggerated, but nevertheless exists as a phenomenon. There is such a thing as conflict between classes.”
Isaiah Berlin on Karl Marx not acknowledging his intellectual debt (p.72):
“…He was a thinker of genius. I don’t deny that. But it was the synthesis that was important. He never acknowledged a single debt. His theory is a compound of previous ideas. It was a shock to me, not that it was a compound, but his total refusal lo acknowledge a debt to anyone. I didn’t get to like him as a man, I thought I knew what it would be like to meet him.
Isaiah Berlin clarifies his “negative liberty” very important!!! ( p. 93):
“I ought to have made more of the horrors of negative liberty and what that led to.
Negative liberty is basic; positive liberty is also basic. They are both perfectly good forms of liberty which we all pursue. I am not at all against positive liberty, properly conceived. But they are not the same, and even clash.
The question of negative liberty is how many doors are open? The question of positive liberty is who governs me? Do I govern myself or am I the victim? Very different questions.
Because positive liberty was politically perverted far more. Negative liberty led to laissez-faire. The sufferings of children in coal mines or poverty, but positive liberty became total despotism, the crushing of all ideas, the crushing of life and thought. Bull agree I ought to have made it clearer that positive liberty is as noble and basic an ideal as negative.”
Isaiah Berlin on the left leaning intelligentsia in the catholic cultures (and certainly Jewish by analogy) (p.97):
“In any country under the ascendancy of the Roman Church, there arises an intelligentsia which invariably turns the left. Why did Croce study Karl Marx? Why was Gaetano Salvemini intensely anti-clerical? They moved to the left by reaction. The Church of England doesn’t create that kind of reaction. Take France, Italy, Spain, Russia: there you find a pre-revolutionary, left-inclined intelligentsia, critical of Czar and Church, even though there were a few leftist priests.”
Isaiah Berlin on the New Deal (p. 98):
“I thought that that New Deal was the most successful, admirable experiment promoting both justice and prosperity in a society without introducing the rather restrictive aspects of socialism. As such it was an arrangement rather like Attlee’s. It was a form of welfare stale. That’s what the New Deal was. And it was promoted by extremely able and morally sympathetic characters.
…the welfare state in England was admirable and the New Deal in America under Roosevelt was very good; it unfortunately had to be modified as a result of the requirements of war but it came back to some degree under Truman and on the whole it left a permanent impact on American society. The real opposition to the policies of Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan and the others derives from memories of and faith in the values of the New Deal.”
Isaiah Berlin on the Liberalism in Russia (p. 122):
“The only time when Russia was liberal was between , February and November 1917, and not at any other time. There is a view that Russia was an autocracy in which liberalism was always very feeble and therefore the idea that it would pass from Czarism to some kind of Western-style constitutional liberalism was always very remote. I don’t agree. Russian history shows one that the number of perfectly good liberals in the Western sense in the 80s and the 90s of the 19th century was much higher than people allow: doctors, lawyers, agricultural experts, engineers, writers, professors, schoolmasters tended to have a great deal of respect for and understanding of Western values. Therefore the idea that Russia had inevitably to pass from one despotism to another (as Maistre once predicted) is false. If Lenin had been debilitated by some accident in April 1917, there would have been no Bolshevik revolution. There might have been a civil war between Left and Right, and the Right might have won, in which case maybe Russia would not have been a Liberal country, but it would have been less despotic than it turned out, something like Alexander’s Yugoslavia; or the Left might have won in which case we might have had a rather untidy liberal state; but what happened needn’t have happened.”
Bodleian Library photo published with permission from flickr/archidave
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