...the notion of unity in difference, still more that of differences in
unity, the tension of the One and the Many, is his obsessive idée maоtresse.

Isaiah Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment”

As Abraham Lincoln once said, “We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing”.^[1] Isaiah Berlin’s life’s work was to draw out and dissect the many meanings of the concept, and his method was often to approach settled beliefs from unsettling perspectives. Therefore a distinctive feature of his legacy is his insight into what he called the “important if often maddening irregulars of civilisation” – those intellectual mavericks who, from the 18th century onward, made their wild irruption into “the well-ordered procession of sane and rational European thinkers?”^[2]
Berlin himself is often seen by his critics as just such a figure. His central dichotomy of monists and pluralists, hedgehogs and foxes has been interpreted as an all-out attack on the values of the Enlightenment, launched from the hostile and distorting perspective of its more eccentric opponents. It has been argued that his reaction against the despotic consequences of historical teleologies rooted in Enlightenment thought led him to identify too closely with the Counter-Enlightenment in the form of Vico, Herder, and Hamann; his sympathy for these irregulars having blinded him to irreconcilable differences between their irrationalism and his own liberal pluralism.^[3]
Berlin had such critics in mind when he remarked in the late 1960s on the “astonishing opinions” imputed to him since the publication a decade earlier of his lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty”, which defended the notion of negative freedom against the encroachments of teleological doctrines linking liberty to overarching goals. He had been accused, he said, of ultra-individualism, subjectivism, and extreme relativism, and a blank endorsement of negative as opposed to positive liberty; but he protested that he was doing no such thing, “since this would itself constitute precisely the kind of intolerant monism against which the entire argument is directed.”^[4] Yet surprisingly few of Berlin’s critics have sought to address this entire argument. Most concentrate instead on specific areas, a method that skews the picture of the whole. For instance, his views on the historical clash between monists and their critics are often discussed on the basis of his studies of three great enemies of the Enlightenment, while no mention is made of a much larger and more disparate group of thinkers who were central to Berlin’s reflections on the problem of freedom: the Russian intelligentsia.
In his essay “The Pursuit of the Ideal” Berlin has written of the early influence on his thought of the moral approach of nineteenth-century Russian novelists and social theorists – their concern with the roots in the human condition of injustice and falsity in human relations. They made him intensely aware, he writes, that the great ideological storms of the twentieth century were not just the outcome of conflicts of impersonal forces: they “began with ideas in people’s heads: ideas about what relations between men have been, are, might be, and should be.”^[5] Hence his belief that in order to understand and be able to act rationally in our dangerous world, it is imperative that we examine with every intellectual resource we have, the roots, growth, essence and above all the validity of the goals and motives that guide human action.
As he notes in that essay, Berlin devoted nearly half a century to this ethical project. It is strange therefore that so little attention has been given to his studies of the Russian thinkers who first sparked his interest in the social and political consequences of alternative ways of perceiving the world. The first monograph on his liberalism mentions only one Russian name – Lenin;^[6] while John Gray’s decision in his book on Berlin’s thought not to address what he calls his subject’s “important contribution to Russian studies” seems to reflect a common view that, significant though Berlin’s essays on Russian themes are, they represent a personal interest in an area peripheral to his main intellectual enterprise.^[7]
On the contrary: they were central to it, in two respects.
First, they gave him a way of discussing hedgehogs and foxes that avoided the risk of reductiveness. The Russian thinkers who interested him were influenced by a vast and very varied range of European ideas and movements – including Enlightenment rationalism, Counter-Enlightenment mysticism, Romantic individualism, German idealism, materialism, positivism, and Marxism. As a group they also shared an unparalleled commitment to ideas as integral visions of the world which, once adopted, must be acted out in private and public conduct. Hence their value as a rich source of concrete examples for Berlin’s discussion of the motives and consequences of monist and pluralist approaches to history and human life.
Secondly, Berlin’s admiration for the Russian archfox, Alexander Herzen, which has no equal in his estimation of Western theorists, helps to answer what are considered the most contentious questions about his own thought: in particular, the coherence of his vision and the relation of his pluralism to his liberalism.
The intrinsic connection between Berlin’s major writings on moral and political theory and his essays on Russian themes is reflected in their parallel chronologies. The principal essays that set down the essentials of his pluralism were published between 1949 and 1959 (and subsequently collected in the volume entitled Four Essays on Liberty). Nine of his ten essays on Russian thinkers first appeared between 1948 and 1960. (The exception was his later study of Turgenev). His critique of teleological approaches to history in the long essay “Historical Inevitability” was made in 1953, the same year as the appearance of “The Hedgehog and the Fox”, which depicts the struggle between Tolstoy’s sceptical realism and his quest for a universal explanatory principle.^[8]
There are no Romantic heroes or Enlightenment villains in Berlin’s portraits of Russian thinkers, which should remind us that (as he himself remarks in his study of Tolstoy) like all over-simple classifications the hedgehog/fox dichotomy, if pressed, becomes ultimately absurd. The human condition is such that we are all hybrids in this respect: we perceive the world and we reason simultaneously by means of universals and particulars. Berlin’s essays on liberty treat monistic doctrines as expressions of a deep and probably ineradicable human need to find a unitary pattern in experience: he stipulates only that we should not allow that need to determine our practice. But he stresses equally the disastrous moral and political consequences of extreme particularism and the irrationalist denial of all universal, generically human standards. The excesses of the Enlightenment helped call forth the excesses of its enemies. Both determinism and relativism, he argues, are founded on fallacious, because one-sided, interpretations of experience.^[9]
The Russian thinkers whom Berlin most admired were strangers to this kind of one-sidedness. He shows how, for historical reasons, they shared a pressing concern with the application of moral principles to concrete situations, which made them unusually sensitive to the competing claims of reason and feeling, freedom and equality, the individual and the social whole, and the relation of ends to means. He believed that we have much to learn from both the illusions and the insights that they revealed in the course of their tormented self-questioning and their passionate debates.
Berlin’s approach to Russian thought contrasts sharply with the dominant tendency in the 1950s and 60s to use the study of Russian history as an ideological weapon in the Cold War. Soviet historians exalted the pre-revolutionary radical intelligentsia as enlighteners and precursors of scientific socialism, while Western liberal scholars depicted the same people as fanatical, deluded utopians who prepared the ground for Bolshevik despotism.^[10] Steering clear of the preconceptions that led other liberals to present Russian radical thought as a catastrophic deviation from the tradition that produced the great writers, Berlin discerned the same underlying pattern of conflict in Russian thought of all ideological tendencies: a conflict between the thirst for absolutes, for final and irrefutable truths, and an iconoclastic humanism often expressed in devastating critiques of revered institutions and traditional authorities. He located the sources of this tension in Russia’s anomalous position with regard to her European neighbours: in the mid-nineteenth century it was still a huge backward country, where a despotic regime maintained a vast and primitive population in semi-medieval conditions of extreme poverty, oppression, and ignorance. As he observed, a crisis of conscience was bound to ensue among the tiny number who constituted Russia’s educated elite; and this, combined with the absence of any practical outlet for their reforming impulses, helps explain why so many sought consolation in the great utopian visions of the March of History as preached by Hegel and subsequently, Marx, which assured them that, as dictated by the universal laws of progress, all nations, including their own, were advancing inexorably toward a universal state of ideal harmony. At the same time, the vast differences between the Russian system and those of the West undermined their faith in universal panaceas, impelling them to look more closely at specific Russian problems, including the actual condition and needs of the people, for which neither Western socialism nor liberal parliamentarism seemed to offer convincing solutions. From this sober empirical standpoint a succession of thinkers – such as Herzen, the critic Vissarion Belinsky (who in a famous volte-face renounced his Hegelian quietism in favour of a militant humanism), Tolstoy, and the leaders of Russian revolutionary populism, – launched penetrating and prescient critiques of all teleological theories, both of the right and the left, which attempted to force individuals into any single mould or to explain present evils as a dialectical premise of future bliss.
Berlin observes that some of their most effective attacks were made through a procedure vividly expressed in Tolstoy’s didactic writings: – a “habit of asking exaggeratedly simple but fundamental questions” about cardinal issues of principle, which “cut far deeper, in the deliberately ... naked form in which he usually presents them than those of more “balanced” and “objective” thinkers.”^[11] Berlin often quoted one example of this technique: the following account by Herzen of how he interrupted the French socialist Louis Blanc who was orating on the duty to sacrifice oneself for society.

“Why?” I asked suddenly.
“How do you mean, “Why?” – but surely the whole purpose and mission of man is the well-being of society?”
“But it will never be attained if everyone makes sacrifices and nobody enjoys himself.”
“You are playing with words.”
“The muddleheadedness of a barbarian,” I replied, laughing.^[12]

But Berlin also shows how even those who were most suspicious of revered doctrines and absolutes were often drawn into self-contradiction by their yearning for ultimate solutions to intolerable moral and political conflicts. Tolstoy’s denunciations of the absurd reductiveness of all general theories about history or society were driven by the need to find some unitary truth that would resist his destructive attacks. The anarchist Bakunin demolished the pretensions of all systematisers who sought to prescribe and regulate the forms of human society, and warned of the authoritarianism behind Marx’s “scientific socialism”, but his own Romantic cult of the creative force of the will to destroy had no less sinister implications. Many of those who dismissed the populists’ faith in the uncorrupted virtue of the Russian peasant as utopian fantasy subsequently embraced the Marxist fantasy of the saving mission of the proletariat.
The tension between utopianism and sceptical realism in Russian thought is most vividly conveyed in Berlin’s essay on the Russian populist movement, which arose in the 1850s and culminated in the assassination of Alexander II, after which it rapidly declined. While its leaders had very dissimilar outlooks, and groups within the movement tended to differ sharply on questions of ends and means, they all shared “one vast apocalyptic assumption: that once the reign of evil – autocracy, exploitation, inequality – is consumed in the fire of the revolution, there will arise naturally and spontaneously out of its ashes a natural, harmonious, just order, needing only the gentle guidance of the enlightened revolutionaries to attain its proper perfection.”^[13] They believed that the foundations of such an order already existed in the Russian peasant commune, which they saw as a cornerstone on which a loose federal structure of self-governing units of producers and consumers could be built, thereby avoiding the development of large-scale industry and the creation of a pauperised proletariat. While noting that they largely idealised the commune, Berlin questions whether they were as deluded as is generally thought in their belief that full-blown capitalism was neither desirable nor inevitable in Russia. He observes that they criticised (on ethical and humanitarian grounds) such sacred cows of nineteenth-century liberal and radical theory as centralisation and large-scale industrialisation long before such criticism became common in the West. They were justified in protesting that there were no a priori reasons why Russia, which had not yet embarked on unrestrained industrialisation, should inevitably follow the West along this path, with its dehumanising consequences: it was not abstract dogma, but moral revulsion against the brutal cost of that process that made them seek a social revolution before capitalism became entrenched in Russia. The populist conspirators of the 1870s are often cited as the model for Lenin’s party of professional revolutionaries, but Berlin argues that their strict discipline was a necessity imposed on them by the specific situation in tsarist Russia and did not derive from a belief in hierarchy as a principle desirable in itself. Most were deeply democratic: faith in individual freedom was fundamental to their outlook, and their most thoughtful and scrupulous leaders, such as Nikolai Mikhailovsky and Piotr Lavrov, honestly and painfully confronted such problems as the contradictions inherent in an intellectual elite making a democratic revolution for the masses. Above all, they never invoked historical inevitability to justify what might otherwise have been patently unjust or cruel:

If violence was the only means to a given end, then there might be circumstances in which it was right to employ it; but this must be justified in each case by the intrinsic moral claim of the end – an increase in happiness, or solidarity, or justice, or peace, or some other universal human value that outweighs the evil of the means – never by the view that it was rational or necessary to march in step with history, ignoring one’s scruples and dismissing one’s own “subjective” moral principles ... on the ground that history herself transformed all moral systems and retrospectively justified only those principles which survived and succeeded.^[14]

The conflict between the populists’ millenarianism and their faith in human freedom was a source of much moral confusion within the movement. Only one Russian thinker – Herzen – made the view that “history has no libretto” the core element of his philosophy, and thereby moved onto wholly new ground.
Herzen’s vision of the self and the world, based on a radical rejection of monistic systems, is so close to Berlin’s own outlook (he often referred to Herzen in conversation as “my hero”) that his exposition of Herzen’s thought provides answers to some of the most debated questions about his own pluralism.
Berlin frequently affirmed that Herzen’s genius and originality have as yet been poorly understood. At the time that Berlin’s first essays on him appeared, he was known principally in the West as the proponent of an obscure variant of early agrarian socialism – an injustice that Berlin urged must be remedied. Herzen was a European thinker of the first importance, as well as “one of the three moral preachers of genius born on [Russian] soil”: he grasped, “as very few thinkers have ever done, the crucial distinction between words that are about words, and words that are about persons or things in the real world.” Berlin’s writings on Herzen all focus on what he regards as his central perception: “that any attempt to explain human conduct in terms of, or to dedicate human beings to the service of, any abstraction, be it ever so noble – justice, progress, nationality – even if preached by impeccable altruists like Mazzini or Louis Blanc or Mill, always leads in the end to victimisation and human sacrifice.”^[15] Herzen devoted his life as a radical journalist to the cause of freedom, but rejected all the theories of rational progress that underpinned the radical optimism of his time. He argued that our empirical experience of the complexity of human lives and relationships, the infinite variety and changeability of human needs and aspirations, and the role of chance in life, cannot be reconciled with the belief that history has a libretto and a final destination. There can therefore be no eternal norms and standards: within certain limits (Herzen believed in the existence of what Berlin called a minimum of values, a “human horizon” without which societies could scarcely survive),^[16] we create our own morality.
Berlin emphasises that this view was free from the hyperbole of subsequent theorists of self-creation. Herzen was a sober empiricist who both stressed the emancipating role of reason and science, and took account of the biological and cultural situatedness of human beings and the part played by inheritance and tradition in shaping their values. Berlin credits him with grasping a fact that made him the forerunner of much twentieth-century thought:

that the great traditional problems which perennially agitate men’s minds have no general solutions; that all genuine questions are of necessity specific, intelligible only in specific contexts; that general problems, such as “What is the end (or the meaning) of life?”, or “What makes all events in nature occur as they do?” or “What is the pattern of human history?” are not answerable in principle, not because they are too difficult for our poor finite intellects, but because the questions themselves are misconceived, because ends, patterns, meanings, causes, differ with the situation and the outlook and needs of the questioner, and can be correctly and clearly formulated only if these are understood.^[17]

Berlin notes that Herzen’s contemporaries were nonplussed by his detachment from party and doctrine: the young radicals attacked him for being “too ironical, too sceptical,” insufficiently committed to the destruction of the enemy. His thought cannot be located on any political spectrum: it “hits both right and left: against Romantic historians, against Hegel, and to some degree against Kant, against utilitarians and against supermen, against Tolstoy and against the religion of art, against “scientific” and “evolutionary” ethics, against all the churches. It is empirical and naturalistic, recognises values that are absolute for those who hold them, as well as change, and is overawed neither by determinism nor by socialism. And it is very independent.”^[18]
We find much the same hit-list in Berlin’s attempts to distinguish his own pluralism from theories with which it has been confused. His outlook rested ultimately on what he termed a “sense of reality” – the capacity (whose importance was established by Herder) to understand empathetically the “inner feel” of historical situations, values, and forms of life that are not one’s own: a sense of the unique flavour and potentials of a given situation, which are compounded of the interplay of factors too complex, numerous, and minute to be distilled into laws.^[19] Berlin’s notion of empathy is sometimes interpreted as a form of Romantic subjectivism, but its distinctiveness emerges clearly in his discussion of Herzen.
He makes what may seem an extravagant claim: that Herzen’s “sense of reality, in particular of the need for, and the price of, revolution, is unique in his own, and perhaps in any age.” He defines Herzen’s greatest gift (reflected in his autobiographical masterpiece My Past and Thoughts) as the complexity of his vision: his “untrammeled understanding” of the tensions between individuals and classes, personalities and opinions both in Russia and the West, the degree to which he grasped the causes, nature and justification of conflicting ideals, including those most antipathetic to his own.^[20] He could understand and state the case, both emotional and intellectual, for violent revolution, for denouncing liberal constitutionalism, which offered the masses votes when what they craved were the basic material necessities of life; but he understood no less clearly the aesthetic and moral values of his own highly civilised, aristocratic generation.
Berlin sees Herzen’s sense of reality reflected in his belief that ultimate human goods are irreducibly diverse and often incompatible, even incommensurable – a view often regarded as the most controversial component of Berlin’s liberalism. He writes that Herzen could be at times utopian enough (particularly in the hopes he placed on the socialist potential of the Russian peasant commune); but, unlike his fellow-socialist Bakunin, he faced such genuine political problems as “the incompatibility of unlimited personal liberty with either social equality, or the minimum of social organisation and authority; the need to sail precariously between the Scylla of individualist “atomisation” and the Charybdis of collectivist oppression; the sad disparity and conflict between many, equally noble, human ideals; the nonexistence of “objective”, eternal, universal moral and political standards, to justify either coercion or resistance to it; the mirage of distant ends, and the impossibility of doing wholly without them.”^[21]
Berlin cites Herzen in support of what is perhaps his own most contentious position: that liberalism cannot plausibly stake out some privileged place in history on the ground that it has a universal claim on reason, or a foundation in human nature. There need be no stronger ground for defending liberty, Berlin argues, than the minimalist view that to be free to choose is an inalienable ingredient in what makes humans human. But given that individuals and cultures have frequently chosen values incompatible with political freedom, one cannot assert that liberal forms of life will always provide the optimal framework for human self-creation. One can answer only for one’s own culture and for oneself. Berlin dramatised this point with a reference to Herzen’s attack on those who justify their defence of liberty by such universal propositions as “Freedom is the essence of man”. Echoing an observation of Joseph de Maistre, Herzen remarked that, despite the existence of flying fish, we do not say of fish in general that their essence is to fly, since most fish display no tendencies in that direction. Yet we persist in arguing that the nature of man is to seek freedom, although throughout history the vast majority of the human race has shown a preference for other values, such as material security. “Why should man alone, Herzen asked, be classified in terms of what at most small minorities here or there have ever sought for its own sake, still less actively fought for?” This sceptical reflection, Berlin writes, was uttered by a man whose entire life was dominated by a single passion – the pursuit of liberty, personal and political.^[22]
The combination of scepticism and commitment that Berlin saw in Herzen accords perfectly with the position that (borrowing a quotation from Joseph Schumpeter) he described as his own: “To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions,... and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.”^[23] This formulation has been often questioned: if one’s (liberal) ideals have no morally privileged status, why defend them unflinchingly? Berlin frequently declared that he was not a relativist, but also that while he believed both in pluralism and liberalism, the two were not logically connected.^[24]
That last proposition has been variously interpreted, but I believe that what Berlin meant emerges clearly enough from his exposition of the argument in what he describes as Herzen’s “great polemical masterpiece”: his political testament From the Other Shore.^[25] Addressing the objection that the denial of eternal truths and absolute ideals can lead only to a nihilistic scepticism, Herzen responds that the fact that our ideals may die with us should comfort, not distress us, because this means that each historical period has its own complete reality; its goals and aspirations are ends in themselves, not a means to something else.
The quotations that Berlin selects to convey the essence of Herzen’s thought read like concentrated expressions of his own views on the nature of freedom. For example: “Why is liberty valuable? Because it is an end in itself, because it is what it is. To bring it as a sacrifice to something else is simply to perform an act of human sacrifice.” People are “confused by categories that are not fitted to catch the flow of life.” “If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of all life is death.” Or (from a passage to which Berlin often returns): “If progress is the goal, for whom are we working? ... Do you truly wish to condemn the human beings alive today to the sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others some day to dance on... a goal which is infinitely remote is... a deception; a goal must be closer – at the very least the labourer’s wage, or pleasure in work performed.”^[26]
“The historical process has no “culmination”. Human beings have invented this notion only because they cannot face the possibility of an endless conflict.”^[27] Thus Berlin sums up the central thesis of From the Other Shore. He emphasises that Herzen (unlike Bakunin, with whom his name is often linked) did not shy away from the consequences of his own logic. While he believed passionately that only socialism could redress the great economic injustices of his time and give the masses a decent life, he refused to regard his ideal as the ultimate goal of human progress. Socialism, he predicted, “will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own extremes and absurdities. Then there will burst forth from the titanic breast of the revolting minority a cry of denial. Once more a mortal battle will be joined in which socialism will occupy the place of today’s conservatism, and will be defeated by the coming revolution as yet invisible to us...”^[28]
Berlin remarks on the originality of the vision behind this prophecy – made in 1850 : even thinkers like Marx, who recognised the historical contingency of ideals, made an exception for their own. Berlin himself described the practical implications of a truly consistent historicism as follows: “if we allow that Great Goods can collide,... in short, that one cannot have everything, in principle as well as in practice – and if human creativity may depend upon a variety of mutually exclusive choices: then...What and how much must we sacrifice to what? There is, it seems to me, no clear reply.” There is a minimum of civilised values on which compromise is not justifiable. But on others collisions can be softened, claims balanced, compromises reached: so much liberty, so much equality, and so on. “The best that can be done, as a general rule, is to maintain a precarious equilibrium that will prevent the occurrence of desperate situations, of intolerable choices – that is the first requirement for a decent society”.^[29]
Compare this with the following passages from one of his essays on Herzen:

He knew that his own perpetual plea for more individual freedom contained the seeds of social atomisation, that a compromise had to be found between the two great social needs – for organisation and for individual freedom – some unstable equilibrium that would preserve a minimal area within which the individual could express himself and not be utterly pulverised...
The heart of his thought is the notion that the basic problems are perhaps not soluble at all, that all one can do is to try to solve them, but that there is no guarantee, either in socialist nostrums or in any other human construction, no guarantee that happiness or a rational life can be attained, in private or in public life. This curious combination of idealism and scepticism... runs through all his writings.^[30]

A similar ambivalence in Berlin’s thought has made him the target of attacks from both liberals and the left, who maintain that the broad Enlightenment tradition of rationalist universalism remains the only firm ground of defence against irrationalist creeds that threaten civilised values.^[31] Only an absolute, they imply, can defeat another absolute. But those who interpret Berlin’s defence of compromise as a retreat from moral commitment, rather like the myopic all-encompassing tolerance of some brands of Anglo-Saxon liberalism, are profoundly mistaken. He came from a different culture, which instilled in him a passionate intolerance of the central component of all evil: violence. He would sometimes describe in conversation the point at which he first became conscious of his loathing of violence: when as a child in Petrograd in February 1917 he witnessed from the balcony of his parents’ apartment the terror on the face of a tsarist policeman being dragged away by a revolutionary mob.
“The first public obligation,” Berlin asserted in his defence of compromise, “is to avoid extremes of suffering.” While desperate circumstances may demand drastic action, trade-offs of rules and principles may reduce the suffering of the innocent in specific cases. “The concrete situation is almost everything.”^[32]
Many of Berlin’s English-speaking readers, I believe, insufficiently appreciate the extent to which his attack on monistic visions of the world was inspired by a deep sense of outrage at the scale of suffering and destruction inflicted throughout history by those who claimed exclusive possession of the truth. Here is the root of his remarkable affinity with Herzen whose fundamental thesis, he wrote, was “the terrible power over human lives of ideological abstractions.”^[33] It is noteworthy that, like Berlin, Herzen traced his horror of violence inflicted in the name of ideals back to a specific experience – his witnessing of the bloodshed of 1848 on the Paris streets. Berlin remarks that Herzen was a rare kind of revolutionary: a man ready for violent change, never in the name of abstract principles, but only of actual misery and injustice, so extreme that it was not morally permissible to let it persist.
Herzen’s stand on violence led the Left to accuse him of insufficient commitment to the cause. His response is summed up in his essays “To an Old Comrade” addressed to Bakunin, where he affirms the absurdity of the primitive faith in absolutes that had led in the past to emancipation by means of the guillotine, enlightenment through the whip. A genuine commitment to freedom, he wrote, implied a continual readiness to seek accommodations between one’s ideal and competing values which were equally precious to others. “No! Great revolutions are not achieved by the unleashing of evil passions... I do not believe in the seriousness of men who prefer crude force and destruction to development and arriving at settlements... One must open men’s eyes, not tear them out.” Berlin cites these phrases to convey the flavour of this “magnificent” work, which he pronounces “perhaps the most instructive, prophetic, sober and moving” of essays on the prospects of human freedom written in the nineteenth century.^[34]
Berlin sometimes compared Herzen’s sense of reality with that of the most famous Russian liberal, the writer Ivan Turgenev, whose novels were deeply concerned with the social and political questions that divided the educated Russians of his day. He emphasises Turgenev’s efforts to do justice to the full complexity of the goals and beliefs of all the warring parties and ideological groupings of his time, including those with which he had least sympathy. He believed in gradualism, detested revolutionary violence and fanaticism, but admired the selfless courage of the radical youth and attempted to act as a conciliator between the opposing factions of mid-nineteenth-century Russian society. It is sometimes argued that it was with Turgenev, “the well-meaning, self-questioning, troubled liberal, witness to the complex truth,”^[35] rather than with the radical Herzen, that Berlin ultimately identified. But his comparison of the two men indicates otherwise. Fundamental to the outlook of both, he writes, was the notion of the complexity and insolubility of the central problems of human existence and the absurdity of trying to solve them by means of political or sociological nostrums; but the difference between them was that in the final analysis Turgenev was a detached, slightly mocking observer of the competing claims of equally ultimate but mutually irreconcilable values, “he enjoyed almost too much his lack of will to believe,... he saw life with a peculiar chilliness.” Herzen, on the contrary, “cared far too violently”;^[36] a cool detachment from life’s tragedies was alien to his nature.
In contrast to Turgenev, who became increasingly inclined to a world-weary scepticism, Berlin’s hero preached his gospel of compromise with unremitting fervour, although he had ever fewer listeners in the polarised society of his time. Undeterred by his increasing isolation within the radical movement, he remarked in the essays addressed to Bakunin that in the progressive circles in which they both moved far more courage was needed to advocate gradualism than to call for the most extreme measures. Compare Berlin’s ironic postscript to his own defence of compromise, cited earlier: “A little dull as a solution, you will say? Not the stuff of which calls to heroic action by inspired leaders are made?” Yet (he quotes the philosopher C. I. Lewis): “There is no a priori reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting.”^[37]
It has been argued that the full subversive force of Berlin’s value pluralism has yet to be appreciated; that those who attempt to situate his thought within the Western liberal tradition often fail to perceive how radically it challenges the forms of rationalism at the heart of traditional varieties of liberalism – the conviction that all genuine moral and political questions have one right answer, and that fundamental human liberties and rights and the claims of justice are ultimately compatible.^[38] I believe that Berlin recognised in Herzen – arguably the most misunderstood and misrepresented of all Russian thinkers – a subversive much in his own mould: a radical humanist who maintained as he did himself, that the ultimate harmony in which all good things coexist is not only unattainable, but conceptually incoherent; that the answer to the perennial search for the meaning of life lies not in the poetic symmetry of some ordered system of principles, but in the messy, imperfect, and unfinished prose of daily existence. Serious scientists and philosophers now do not deny the powerful role of chance and contingency in nature and history, but for many it is a source of pessimism. Berlin, like Herzen, celebrated it as the ground of moral freedom. There is nothing in this summing-up of Herzen’s credo (from Berlin’s introduction to My Past and Thoughts) to which he did not subscribe himself:

He believed that the ultimate goal of life was life itself; that the day and the hour were ends in themselves, not a means to another day or another experience. He believed that remote ends were a dream, that faith in them was a fatal illusion; that to sacrifice the present, or the immediate and foreseeable future to these distant ends must always lead to cruel and futile forms of human sacrifice. He believed that values were not found in an impersonal, objective realm, but were created by human beings, changed with the generations of men, but were nonetheless binding upon those who lived in their light; that suffering was inescapable, and infallible knowledge neither attainable nor needed. He believed in reason, scientific methods, individual action, empirically discovered truths; but he tended to suspect that faith in general formulae, laws, prescription in human affairs was an attempt, sometimes catastrophic, always irrational, to escape from the uncertainty and unpredictable variety of life to the false security of our own symmetrical fantasies.^[39]

I conclude with one of Berlin’s comments on Herzen which seems peculiarly appropriate to Berlin himself: his particular sense of reality “led not to detachment or quietism – to the tolerant conservatism of a Hume or a Bagehot,” – but was allied to a passionate commitment to freedom, “which made him the rarest of characters, a revolutionary without fanaticism”.^[40]