Isaiah Berlin and the problem of counter-enlightenment liberalism.

Abstract

This thesis will explore the complex relationship between Isaiah Berlin’s liberalism and his work in the history of ideas. While Berlin’s explicitly political thought reads like a scion of the Enlightenment, albeit with a pronounced Cold War inflection, his work in the history of ideas appears to indict the Age of Reason as partially responsible for the rise of totalitarianism. As a liberal thinker, therefore, Berlin seems Janus-faced. He appears to charge the Age of Reason with complicity in the rise of totalitarianism, yet continues to defend the most legitimate child of Enlightenment thought: liberalism in a negative form. As some of his critics have observed, notably Mark Lilla and Zeev Sternhell, Berlin seems intent on divorcing liberalism from the its foundation in the Enlightenment. This project, they are united in charging, is philosophically incoherent and politically ill-judged. The thesis will present an alternative reading of the relationship between Berlin’s liberalism and his intellectual history. Instead of interpreting Berlin’s turn to the Counter-Enlightenment as an assault on the Enlightenment and a blow against his own liberalism, his interpretation of the Counter-Enlightenment, especially the proto-fascist work of Joseph de Maistre, will be read as a search for a ‘lens’ with which to examine the nature of totalitarian thought. In this context, Berlin’s lengthy and neglected essay on Maistre is of greatest importance: the darkly prescient thought of the reactionary and ultramontane Savoyard – strikingly out of place in his own time, yet an intellectual contemporary of the twentieth century – provides an analytical ‘window’ onto the presuppositions and character of totalitarianism. Berlin’s turn away from the Age of Reason, therefore, is guided by an overarching methodological conviction: it is Maistre, rather than Voltaire, who is the better guide to the twentieth century’s most shockingly original contribution to political thought and practice, totalitarianism.