Berlin Isaiah - Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, Second edition

THREE CRITICS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

ISAIAH BERLIN WAS BORN IN RIGA, now capital of Latvia, in 1909. When he was six, his family moved to Russia; there in 1917, in Petrograd, he witnessed both Revolutions Social Democratic and Bolshevik. In 1921 he and his parents came to England, and he was educated at St Pauls School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

At Oxford he was a Fellow of All Souls, a Fellow of New College, Professor of Social and Political Theory, and founding President of Wolfson College. He also held the Presidency of the British Academy. In addition to Three Critics of the Enlightenment, his main published works are Karl Marx, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, Freedom and Its Betrayal, Liberty, The Soviet Mind and Political Ideas in the Romantic Age. As an exponent of the history of ideas he was awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli Prizes; he also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties. He died in 1997.

Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah Berlins Literary Trustees. He has edited (or co-edited) many other books by Berlin, including the first three of four volumes of his letters, and is currently working on the remaining volume.

Jonathan Israel taught early modern European history at University College London from 1974 to 2000. Since 2001 he has been professor at the Institute For Advanced Study, Princeton. His latest book is Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution and Human Rights 17501790 (2011).

For further information about Isaiah Berlin visit
http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/

ALSO BY ISAIAH BERLIN

*

Karl Marx
The Hedgehog and the Fox
The Age of Enlightenment
Russian Thinkers
Concepts and Categories
Against the Current
Personal Impressions
The Crooked Timber of Humanity
The Sense of Reality
The Proper Study of Mankind
The Roots of Romanticism
The Power of Ideas
Freedom and Its Betrayal
Liberty
The Soviet Mind
Political Ideas in the Romantic Age

with Beata Polanowska-Sygulska
Unfinished Dialogue

*

Flourishing: Letters 19281946
Enlightening: Letters 19461960
Building: Letters 19601975

THREE CRITICS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

VICO, HAMANN, HERDER

ISAIAH BERLIN

Edited by Henry Hardy

Second Edition

Foreword by Jonathan Israel

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Published in the United States of America, its Colonies and Dependencies, the Philippine Islands and Canada by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

press.princeton.edu

First published in the UK by Pimlico and in North America by
Princeton University Press 2000
Second edition published by Princeton University Press 2013
Vico and Herder Isaiah Berlin 1960, 1965, 1976
The Magus of the North Isaiah Berlin and Henry Hardy 1993
Editorial matter Henry Hardy 1997, 2000, 2013
Foreword Princeton University Press 2013

The moral right of Isaiah Berlin and Henry Hardy to be identified as the author and editor respectively of this work has been asserted

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berlin, Isaiah, 19091997.
Three critics of the enlightenment : Vico, Hamann, Herder /
Isaiah Berlin ; edited by Henry Hardy.
Second Edition / foreword by Jonathan Israel.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-15765-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-691-15765-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Vico, Giambattista, 16681744. 2. Hamann, Johann Georg, 17301788.
3. Herder, Johann Gottfried, 17441803. 4. Irrationalism
(Philosophy)History18th century.
I. Hardy, Henry, editor of compilation. II. Title.
B3583.B45 2013
190dc23
201309083

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro

Printed on acid-free paper

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Jonathan Israel

ISAIAH BERLIN (19091997) abandoned conventional philosophy towards the end of the Second World War, and amidst the incipient gloom of the Cold War turned instead to what he called the history of ideas. In doing so he not only changed direction, entering an area new to him, but introduced into the Anglo-American world a field of study previously largely confined to Italian and German scholarship, becoming one of the founders of intellectual history as we know it today.

He began extending and reorientating a discipline, the history of ideas, which in his case, as he was no historian, remained somewhat separate both from intellectual history conceived as basically cultural and social history and from history of philosophy as taught especially in university philosophy departments, focusing on the history of philosophers ideas in their relation to each other, largely abstracted from the wider historical process. Berlins history of ideas, however, was distinctly nearer to the first than the second, as he was more interested in the reception and the political and social implications of ideas than in their internal logical relationship to each other.

His originality lay in exploring the possibilities of major ideas that played a part in history less as an academic field than as a tool for commentary on contemporary affairs, and indeed for philosophising. The fragmented manner in which he published his insights and his preference for presenting his work in the form of essays, several of which became celebrated and widely quoted, but often in isolation from each other, delayed somewhat an appreciation of the full range, coherence and significance of his thought. Although he began to achieve international fame as an intellectual historian in the later 1950s, only after his death in 1997, and with the subsequent editing and publication of much writing discarded or left unpublished earlier, did it become fully evident that Berlin had, in a meaningful way, succeeded as a philosopher after all.

Among Berlins most celebrated essays, Two Concepts of Liberty, originally delivered as a public lecture in Oxford in 1958, had a particular relevance to his approach to the Enlightenment. The essay pivots on the fundamental distinction he brilliantly elaborates there, with permanent consequences for the study of political philosophy, between negative and positive liberty. Negative liberty, with its conceptual roots in Hobbes, prioritises liberty from interference by other people or institutions, seeks to cut back or minimise the power of the State (and authority more generally), and to leave the individual as far as possible free from outside constraints, free to pursue ends as an individual in his or her own way. Negative liberty he contrasted strikingly with positive liberty, which includes both self-rule individuals being in control of their own actions and the best use of freedom. Although any political philosophy must engage with both negative and positive liberty, different political philosophies put more emphasis on the one than on the other. Those thinkers, like Rousseau, who lean towards positive liberty tend to prize citizenship as a means to create a better or higher form of individual and society, viewing liberty as a politically, socially and culturally elevating and ameliorating process. The friction between the two kinds of liberty Berlin viewed as a tension certainly between society and the individual and perhaps also within the individual between, on the one hand, the aspiration to be governed by purely rational considerations, and, on the other, the pull of the passions. On the collective level, the two kinds of liberty collide