David Herman
David Herman Interviews Michael Ignatieff on his Book “Isaiah Berlin: A Life”
Summary
Since the 1980s, Michael Ignatieff has been one of the leading public intellectuals of our time on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1998 he published a superb biography of the political philosopher and historian of ideas, Sir Isaiah Berlin titled ‘Isaiah Berlin: A Life’. A new edition of this book was recently released. David Herman will be talking with Ignatieff about Berlin’s extraordinary life and work.
David Herman
David Herman is a freelance writer based in London. Over the past 20 years he has written almost a thousand articles, essays, and reviews on Jewish history and literature for publications including the Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Quarterly, Jewish Renaissance, the Guardian, the New Statesman, and Prospect. He has taught courses on Jewish culture for the London Jewish Cultural Centre and JW3. He is a regular contributor to Jewish Book Week, the Association of Jewish Refugees, and the Insiders/Outsiders Festival on the contribution of Jewish refugees to British culture.
Michael Ignatieff
Born in Canada, educated at the University of Toronto and Harvard, Michael Ignatieff is a university professor, writer, and former politician. He is a member of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and holds thirteen honorary degrees. Between 2012 and 2015 he served as Centennial Chair at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. Between 2014 and 2016 he was Edward R. Murrow Chair of the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Michael was until recently the Rector and President of Central European University in Budapest. He stepped down at the end of July 2021 to stay as a professor in the history department. He has written biography, reportage, history, and philosophy. His recurrent themes are the fate of human rights and liberal values in a time of convulsive change. His novel Scar Tissue (2000) was nominated for the Booker Prize and his defense of academic freedom and liberal principles earned him the Dan David Prize in 2019.
Oh, what a wonderful question. This is an odd reply, but I never actually asked him what he thought about me. I think he liked me. I think he liked my company, I loved his company. But part of the anxiety about being with him, ‘cause he was in a way, a great man, is you kind of sometimes found yourself asking him, does he think I add up to anything? Do I measure up? You know, he had that effect on people. He was the gold standard of intellectual quality for many people. So it was wonderful to be in his presence, but it was also slightly anxiety making. So the question I never asked him is, what do you think of me?
Well, Israel, much of what happened in Israel, he died, remember in 1997, but he saw Intifada 1, he saw Intifada 2. The violence shocked him, but it didn’t surprise him. That is, he always felt from the very beginning, from his first visit to Israel in 1932 or something. He was there in 1948 as the first War of Independence broke out. He had a kind of commonsensical view of this, which is I think a view that many people hold, which is that there were two rights here. There were two absolute claims. Jews would fight and they would fight to the death to defend their right, to have a state in Palestine. And the Palestinians equally would fight and to the death. And that’s where we are. He was not surprised, he was not shocked. He was not, what he didn’t believe was that, you know, Israel was full of kind of nice liberal people believing in kind of Jewish universalist values. Yes, there were plenty of those, but they would fight, you know, and some of his best and deepest friends in Israel were thoughtful, liberal, cosmopolitan philosophers. But they served in the military and they’d fought in 1973 to keep their country from being destroyed. And so he understood that. His sense of being a Jewish liberal was that, yes, you seek a two state solution, you seek accommodation with the self-determination claims of other people, but when you’re attacked, you fight, and you defend yourself. And that’s how we saw it. And that it seems to me, it is a good way to think about being a liberal. Liberals are not always going to split the difference. They understand clearly there are moments when both sides will fight and fight to the death. That’s the nature of national claims. That’s the nature of moral claims. That’s the nature of self-determination claims. And I rather respect that realism in his view of this.