Henry Hardy - In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure

Henry Hardy is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, Isaiah Berlins principal editor, and one of his literary trustees. He began editing Berlin in the mid-1970s as a graduate student at Wolfson. An editor at OUP for thirteen years from 1977, Hardy has been working full time on Berlin since 1990 and has now edited or co-edited eighteen of his books, as well as a four-volume edition of his letters, the last volume of which ( Affirming: Letters 19751997 , coedited with Mark Pottle) was published in 2015 by Chatto & Windus. He is also the editor of The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin , with George Crowder (Prometheus, 2007), and The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin (Boydell, 2009).

Praise for
In Search of Isaiah Berlin

An extraordinary book, In Search of Isaiah Berlin relates the story of a twenty-five-year collaboration between Isaiah Berlin and his editor, Henry Hardy, told via previously unpublished letters that are as delightful as they are revealing of Berlins personality and ideas.

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF,
AUTHOR OF ISAIAH BERLIN: A LIFE

Henry Hardys special vantage point as Berlins long-standing editor makes In Search of Isaiah Berlin a peculiarly authentic and vivid picture of the twentieth centurys greatest liberal thinker. Recounting the decades in which he was acquainted with Berlin and collaborated with him in publishing his writings, Hardy preserves for later generations his encounter with a unique, complex and captivating personality, which will be immediately recognisable to those who knew the man. Going on to explore and critically assess Berlins thought, he has written a book that will be of intense and enduring interest to anyone concerned with twentieth-century ideas and the future of liberalism as a living philosophy.

JOHN GRAY, EMERITUS PROFESSOR
OF EUROPEAN THOUGHT, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS,
AUTHOR OF ISAIAH BERLIN: AN INTERPrETATION OF HIS THOUGHT

By the Same Author

Subjective Experience (http://bit.ly/2zAH2eo)
Tunes: Collected Musical Juvenilia (http://bit.ly/2uwF2xZ)

Books edited by the author

The works and letters of Isaiah Berlin

Karl Marx
The Hedgehog and the Fox
The Age of Enlightenment (http://bit.ly/2NMukfy)
Russian Thinkers (with Aileen Kelly)
Concepts and Categories
Against the Current
Personal Impressions
The Crooked Timber of Humanity
The Magus of the North
The Sense of Reality
The Proper Study of Mankind (with Roger Hausheer)
The Roots of Romanticism
The Power of Ideas
Three Critics of the Enlightenment
Freedom and Its Betrayal
Liberty
The Soviet Mind
Political Ideas in the Romantic Age

Flourishing: Letters 19281946
Enlightening: Letters 19461960 (with Jennifer Holmes)
Building: Letters 19601975 (with Mark Pottle)
Affirming: Letters 19751997 (with Mark Pottle)

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Arnold Mallinson, Under the Blue Hood: A Hotchpotch 19231985
Maurice Bowra, New Bats in Old Belfries, or, Some Loose Tiles
(with Jennifer Holmes)
The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin (with George Crowder)
The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin and Wolfson College (with Kei Hiruta and Jennifer Holmes)

For Mary

Well, poor man, he obviously did think of himself as a biographer, but he wont do. He could help: hes been through my works a million times and performs wonderful services if I dont know where a text is, he takes ten hours and finds it, finds the place.

Berlin in conversation with Michael Ignatieff,
18 June 1989 (MI Tape 11)

In Search of
Isaiah Berlin

A Literary Adventure

Henry Hardy

Contents

Credits : The Trustees of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust and Henry Hardy, except 122, 136, 229 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Berlin 545 fo. 399, 570 fo. 59, 562 fo. 424, scans Bodleian Library, Oxford; 150 University of Kent; 152 Richard Willson / Guardian News & Media; 270 E. C. Hodgkin

With most of the contributors to Berlins first Festschrift

Headington House

Berlins study at Headington House

Berlins heroes and villains on his study door

At the BBC, London, 1964, for an episode of Conversations for Tomorrow

Supporting Wolfson College during Eights Week with Aline

In his room in All Souls

With Imogen Cooper

With the Israeli novelist Amos Oz

During his 1995 BBC TV interview with Michael Ignatieff

Credits : 1 Sandra Burman; 2 family of Isaiah Berlin; 3 Andrew Strauss; 4 Serena Moore; copyright BBC Photo Library; 6 Alice Kelikian; 7 John Crossley; 8 www.johnbatten photography.co.uk; 9 Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo; 10 BBC Motion Gallery / Getty Images, copyright BBC (camera: Steve Plant)

The last part of the Epilogue is full of good ideas the johnny cant work out. And of course, in the phrase of critics, would have been better left out. So it would; only Tolstoy couldnt leave it out. It was what he wrote the book for.

Arnold Bennett on Tolstoys War and Peace

This book combines two rather different narratives, both based on my extensive correspondence with Isaiah Berlin. The first is the story of my work as Berlins editor. The second relates our philosophical exchanges about pluralism, religious belief and human nature. Either part can be read without the other if the interests of the reader so dictate. The philosophy is almost entirely self-contained in chapters 911. I could have followed Tolstoys example and made these chapters an Epilogue, but the two threads are intertwined, because it was my response to Berlins ideas that motivated my work on his writings. I didnt want to conceal this fact, but I did fillet out the philosophical discussions from their chronological positions in the editorial story so that they could be read separately or simply skipped.

Berlin used to describe the way the nineteenth - century Russian intelligentsia processed Western ideas as the boomerang effect:

Transformed and vitalised by contact with the unexhausted Russian imagination by being taken seriously by men resolved to practise what they believed some of these ideas returned to the West, and made a vast impact upon it. They left it as secular, theoretical, abstract doctrines; they returned as fiery, sectarian, quasi - religious faiths. (SR2 247)

It would be hubris to compare my obsessive worrying away at Berlins ideas with this phenomenon, or with Tolstoys epilogue, but it is true that I took Berlins ideas seriously and tried to show that they had implications he had neglected; and recording these investigations, for all that they report ideas this johnny cant work out, was a primary motive for writing the book.

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If any readers are curious about the personal background of the author, they may like to read the brief autobiographical sketch at http://bit.ly/2L9tWtb.

The acronyms used to refer to Berlins books are listed on pages xiii1. The selective biographical glossary on pages 2856 comprises what were originally footnotes on selected persons mentioned in the text.

I should like to thank those who read drafts of the book and suggested improvements, which I have plagiarised at will: George Crowder, Kei Hiruta, Esther Johnson, Ana Martins (who also suggested the books main title), Beata Polanowska - Sygulska , Tatiana Wilde, my editor at I.B.Tauris (who also suggested the subtitle), Jayne Parsons, who succeeded her, my copy - editor Sarah Terry, my typesetter Alex Billington, my proofreaders Martin Liddy and Robina Pelham Burn, and my publicists James Beedle and Clare Kathleen Bogen. For help on particular points I am indebted to John Barnard, Angie Goodgame, Samuel Guttenplan, Nicholas Hall, Deborah Laidlaw and Mary Hardy. I also wish to take this opportunity to thank a number of colleagues who, in various roles, have given me vital editorial, archival, administrative or secretarial help in my work on Berlins texts over nearly fifty years: Brigid Allen, Victoria Benner, the late Betty Colquhoun, James Chappel, Georgina Edwards, Hugh Eveleigh, Jason Ferrell, Steffen Gro, Nicholas Hall again, Roger Hausheer, Jennifer Holmes, Michael Hughes, Esther Johnson again, Aileen Kelly, the late Serena Moore, Derek Offord, Eleonora Paganini, Kate Payne, Mark Pottle, Tatiana Pozdnyakova, Kim Reynolds, Teisha Ruggiero, Natalya Sarana, Norman Solomon, Josephine von Zitzewitz.