David Herman
David Herman Interviews Michael Ignatieff on his Book “Isaiah Berlin: A Life”
David Herman - Interviews Michael Ignatieff on his Book “Isaiah Berlin: A Life”
- Hello, my name is David Herman, and it is my great pleasure to be interviewing Michael Ignatieff about the new edition of his fascinating biography of the great political philosopher, Sir Isaiah Berlin. Born in Canada, Michael was a well-known broadcaster, writer, journalist, and public intellectual in Britain for over 20 years. Arriving a young Canadian historian, when he left, he was one of the best known cultural figures in Britain. His second career was in America, where he was Director of The Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard. And here he played a leading part in debates on contemporary war, terrorism and human rights. And then in 2005, he left for Canada and his third career as a politician, first as a Liberal MP, then as leader of the Liberal Opposition Party. Fourth, but I hesitate to say finally, Michael was the Rector and President of the Central European University in Budapest, and then in Vienna from 2016 until July, 2021. And he now teaches history at the CEU. Over more than 40 years, Michael has written and edited almost 20 books, four of which are being republished in paperback this year in Britain, including his book on Berlin. Michael and I will talk about Berlin for about 45 minutes, and then there’ll be a chance for you to ask questions for the last 15 minutes or so. Michael, how did you first meet Isaiah Berlin?
Isaiah was having dinner on a Saturday night watching television, and he saw me on television, and I had been asked to comment on the controversy that arisen about a play about Jewish collaboration in the Holocaust, by which I mean the ways in which Jewish organisations in Europe, in occupied Europe had to cooperate with the Nazi authorities. It’s a horrible story, and someone wrote a play about it, and it was going to go on the Royal Court Theatre in London, which some of you may know, big famous theatre. And a lot of Jewish groups objected. And I was sent a text of the screenplay or the play and asked what I thought about it. And I said, look, if you’re going to do a play about this, it’s very important subject, but for God’s sake, don’t turn it into a tendentious piece of anti-Zionist propaganda because this stuff is just too serious, you know? And it’s too painful a subject. Anyway, Isaiah heard me say that and drop me a little note saying, I seem to remember that I taught your father at Oxford in the 1930s. Would you like to have lunch, blah, blah, blah. I didn’t, you know, I was never a student of Isaiah. I was just, but I was kind of impressed by this. So I went to All Souls and had lunch with him in 1985, and we then became friends, and over a long process, I became his biographer, and I stayed with him until he died in 1997. And it was one of the most wonderful relationships of my life. And I think next to my father is the person I felt closest to among the older generation.
What were your first impressions of him back in 1985?
Well, he was loaded with honours by then. He was a, you know, Order of Merit, which is a very fancy decoration. He was a Sir, he lived in the Albany, one of the most splendid residences in London. He was married to an extremely rich and charming woman, and they lived in Headington House in grandeur. So my first impression was, you know, this is a man who’s had about as much success as you can have in academic life. And so he was successful, but mostly he was just very funny. And he loved to gossip, and he loved slightly malicious gossip. And he was extremely interested in finding out all about me very quickly. I think one of the subtext of our relationship that I wasn’t aware of at all, it was that I’m not Jewish, and he is obviously Jewish. And our initial encounter, that initial encounter when I made a comment about whether you should make a play about Jewish so-called collaboration with the Nazis, turned out to be absolutely pivotal to the whole story of our relationship. One way to think about it was, it was a kind of 12 year manoeuvre between a Gentile and a Jew to get the trust necessary to talk about some very painful history. He wasn’t, I mean, it’s hard to get this right. He wasn’t especially Jewish. He didn’t kind of advertise it. If you asked him what kind of, you know, if you asked him, are you proud, Isaiah, to be a Jew? He would say, I’m not proud. It’s just a fact, and you can’t be proud about facts. Well, that was true, but I think what he wanted to be sure was that I understood the specificity of the Jewish experience in the 20th century. And the connection here was very direct, because my name is Ignatieff, I’m a Russian, I come from a tradition that is notably antisemitic in its historical traditions. There was a very big antisemite in my family way, way back. And so he wanted to know, you know, what kind of guy I was. And because he was born in Riga, in imperial Russia, as then was, and since he saw the Russian Revolution in Petersburg, there was a connection between our two families. My father was born in Petersburg. He saw the Revolution too, so did Isaiah. So there was this connection, but it was a connection between a Gentile and a Jew. And they needless to say, had radically different experiences of the revolution. And so one way to think about our, the 12 years we spent together was figuring out whether we trusted each other in some deep way. And I have to tell you, this in my, what I’m telling you now is not what I thought at the time. It was all kind of under the table, but he was kind of feeling me out. I was having to show that I understood as best I could, what it was to be a Jew in the 20th century.
The context of those years, ‘85 to '97 seems particularly important in that it sees the fall of the war, the fall of Soviet communism. Was that context looking back particularly important, do you think then?
Oh, it was extraordinarily important because Isaiah’s entire experience was framed by essentially the Russian Revolution and by the 80 years of tyranny that followed the Revolution. And so when the wall came down in '89, I think he felt enormous. It’s complicated, gratification, but also alarm. He was at one of life’s sceptics. He didn’t succumb to, you know, enthusiasm. He could see immediately that the collapse of the last European land empire was going to be a long drawn out and difficult process. And boy, was he ever right about that, where that’s what the Ukraine war is on about is all about now in 2022. He would not be surprised that Vladimir Putin is unwilling to accept the national independence of the Ukrainian people. The whole drama of liquidating or ending this land empire is still playing out. He wouldn’t be surprised by that. But that was, I think, the decisive event in the period when I was his friend and talking to him. And what I remember most, as I say, is a kind of sceptical disabused. He was never carried away. He had a sense of, this history is going to be messy and difficult. And so it proved.
Is that partly what drew you to him? Do you think that he, that like you, he was a liberal, but there was a sort of dark side to his liberalism?
Yes, for me, he’s the liberal thinker in the 20th century whose liberalism is most informed by a sense of tragedy, by a sense that we are the contrast between, with, for example, John Rawls is extremely interesting. He admired Rawls, they had very good relationships, he had deep respect for John Rawls. And Isaiah was the kind of mind that could never produce the systematic reflection that Rawls produced. But Rawls’ reasons about liberal choices in a state of extremely deliberate abstraction, you make choices in a veil of ignorance. And for Isaiah, this was just completely antithetical to how we thought about the dilemma being a liberal. A liberal makes choices in history. A liberal makes choices within an identity that is historically shaped, whether it’s Jewish, Gentile, rich, poor, white, black, he’s the liberal with the deepest respect and understanding of the force of nationalism in impersonal identity. If all these choices are structured by these identities, then the possibility of conflict, deep conflict, murderous conflict is just inevitable. So, you know, liberalism gets a wrap for being kind of complacent, managerial and individualistic. And whatever else was wrong with Isaiah, he was never complacent, managerial or individualistic. It’s a liberalism that says, we choose as we choose as historical creatures with imperfect information. We’re never in the veil of ignorance. We’re ignorant, but we certainly don’t have systematic grasp of our situation. And we make choices, but not between good and evil, but often between goods, between justice and mercy, between liberty and equality. And it isn’t an exact science, it’s politics. The thing about him, is that he understood that we make choices in political situations, contending forces, and the choices are always suboptimal, confused, unsatisfying to most people. I found him, in other words, a deeply realistic liberal. And I admired him for that.
Where and when was he born?
He was born in Riga in 1909. He was the son of a timber merchant, a Jewish timber merchant, a very mild, nice man. His dad and his mother was the much more formidable person. They had deep family connections to some of the oldest traditions of Eastern European Jewry. And he always saw himself as a, as what he would say, an Eastern European Jew as opposed to a, you know, Western European German kind of Jew. He felt he was never from the shtetl, but in some weird way he kind of identified with the shtetl. And he was, they moved to Petersburg or Petrograd as it was in and around the Revolution. And so he saw the February Revolution in Petersburg, and that gave him a lifelong weariness about Revolution. A lifelong sense that if you play with Revolution, you’re always dealing in violence and chaos and in tragedy.
Even as a young child, what he witnessed in revolutionary Petrograd made a lifelong impression.
Yes, it’s a kind of primal memory for him that he was, what was he, six, five, out with a nurse maid on a February morning in 1917, and he saw a gang of Petersburg workers and sailors, and the city was swarming with demobilised soldiers carrying off a policeman. And the policeman looked scared to death. And Isaiah had a strong intimation that this would not end well for the policemen. And many policemen who tried to stop the Revolution were killed by insurrectionary crowds like this. And from the first moment, in other words, he saw revolutions as moments of violence that were terrifying. And it, I think, structured his view of everything thereafter. I mean, that is to say it made him think that the great goal of a decent politics is to avoid violence, you know, and muddling through is not such a bad thing if you’ve seen people killed in revolutionary violence. And he was very sceptical, I think, properly so of revolutionary enthusiasm. He believed very strongly and had enormous respect for conviction, adamantine conviction. Some of his greatest heroes were people of enormous political conviction. But he feared greatly when conviction justified violence and cruelty.
And how old was he when he and his parents came to England?
They came to England kind of 1920, so he would’ve been 10, 11, and they moved into suburban London. And his father, who had an extensive timber business with Britain, was able to resume his timber business. And so it’s a family that knew immigration and exile, but never experienced the downward mobility, the poverty, the suffering, the alienation, the exclusion that so often goes with exile. He learned English very quickly. He integrated into his English schools very quickly. He never had an experience of antisemitism that, or there were tiny expressions of antisemitism, but nothing that would make him feel rejected by English society. And one of the stories about Berlin, it seems to me is this Russian speaking Jewish child goes into English society and is accepted by English society, works his way into English society, and he becomes deeply loyal to things British. I mean, he becomes deeply loyal to moderation, sense of humour, muddling through parliamentary democracy, you know, the wonderful sense of irony that often characterises British characterizations of themselves. All that stuff he loved and it became part of his character.
You tell a wonderful story very early on in the book about his first meal in England and a tune he plays at the piano afterwards.
That’s right. I can’t even remember my own book, but he, you know, he came to England and had, you know, a very non-kosher bacon and eggs very early on. And he also got out, sat behind the piano, and I think, unless I’m completely mistaken, picked out, you know, God Saved the King, you know, I mean, he very quickly loves the place, and that’s a key to his character. He’s a person on the one hand with a deep sense of tragedy, a deep sense of sympathy for exiles. But he himself never experienced the alienation of exile in any deep way. And he had an extraordinarily successful career in England. And it helps to explain his bonhomie, his sense of humour, his ease, his charm. And he had a very lucky life. And some of it had to do with his own extraordinary emotional quickness, his sensitivity to situations. He always characterised that as a Jewish characteristic, that as a Jew is always wanting to make sure that, you know, am I doing okay here? I mean, Jewish radar is very important, and he had a strong sense of Jewish radar. But the radar wasn’t picking up signs of menace and harm and hostility ever in Britain. Whereas right across the channel in France and in Germany, he saw terrifying antisemitism. And some of the relatives that he left behind in Riga were to feel the full force of the horror of that antisemitism in 1941.
So he was an insider of sorts, but also in some ways, an outside, you quote Virginia Woolf, an astonishingly anti-Semitic remark by Virginia Wolf, when she met him at Oxford, Anthony Eden wrote a little memo about Berlin, which smacks also of anti-Semitism. It’s a complicated story, it seems in some ways.
Yes, I think you’re urging me not to be so nice about the British, and I’m happy not to be nice about the British. I’m trying to keep the balance here. You know, Virginia Woolf called him a swarthy Portuguese Jew by the look of him, you know, when she met him in an Oxford College in 1936. But he charmed her and she charmed him, and they had a quite close, there was a real sparkle between the two of them. And Anthony Eden didn’t want to take Berlin to the Potsdam Conference with Stalin and Truman at the end of the war because he thought, you know, Isaiah was a little too clever for his own good and had made certain remarks about Eden and that had reached home. So, and Isaiah picked up hostility from, but it’s complicated because he then, that is Isaiah, became one of the closest friends of the woman that Anthony Eden married. So yes, Jewish radar is picking up hostility, but he always found a way to kind of force his way, not force his way, would kind of get into the inner circle. And so he’s a absolutely fascinating case study and the full complexity of the Jewish presence in English life.
He went to Oxford in 1928. Was Oxford the making of him, do you think?
Oh, he got there and just thought, yeah, I’m made for this place. He went to a small college corpus. He wasn’t brilliant. He didn’t take off right away. One of the likeable things about him is that he was smart enough to see that he was very shallow and facile and he needed to be knocked into shape. And he found a tutor, philosophy tutor who just whacked away at his imprecision, at his vagueness, at his kind of charm, you know, and taught Isaiah that he had to be much more rigorous and much more focused. And that was a crucial moment in his success. And then of course, he was, he went for the fellowship at All Souls in 1932 and became the first Jew ever to win that fellowship, which is like dying and going to heaven in English life. All Souls at that point was the absolute pinnacle of English academic life. And so a young man in his 20s suddenly is hobnobbing with all the great and the good who would flock to All Souls in the ‘30s. And there’s no question in other words that, as you say, it was the making of him.
And he made all these lifelong friends, like the poet, Stephen Spender, and the philosopher, Stuart Hampshire, and Morris Bauer, and all these people. Was there one in particular, do you think, who was most important to him?
Hmm. Well, friendship, first of all was incredibly important. We often think of academic life as kind of solitary, but the reality is that I think it’s very hard to be a great academic unless you have a circle, unless you value friendship. And he understood that immediately. I think Stuart Hampshire, for example, a young don, much influenced biological positivism coming out of Vienna was very important. Precisely, and I think this is the point about friendship, because Stuart Hampshire was by his own description, caricaturely English, that is remote, reserved, sort of uptight. And he absolutely loved this ebullient charming, sort of central European Jewish guy who couldn’t stop talking and was firing off ideas here and there. And Berlin for his side understood what he needed from Hampshire, which is Hampshire’s rigour, his discipline, his focus, and that’s a counterpoint throughout Isaiah’s life. He was smart enough to link up to people who he actually acknowledged were smarter than he was. And the great example of that is J.L. Austin, who’s really the father of English linguistic philosophy. And Austin, again, was a kind of narrow, thin kind of, you know, cold glass of water kind of guy. But he just loved Isaiah. And they walked through the gardens together, and Isaiah became more rigorous and more systematic as a philosopher as a result. And I think Austin appreciated this kind of strange, empathetic gift and historical reference that Isaiah had. And it’s to the credit of Oxford, that this kind of connection between different intellectual temperaments became possible in the 1930s.
And then Isaiah had what they used to call a good war. And in what way was his a good war?
Well, he began the war absolutely terrified in 1940 that the Germans would invade. He was worried, literally worried about the survival of his mom and dad, and moved them to Oxford. And then he went to the United States. It’s a complicated story, but he ended up working for the British Information Service in Rockefeller Centre in New York, basically trying to get the Americans into the war. And he absolutely loved being a kind of journalist. His mandate was to form connections to the American Labour Movement and to Jewish groups in the United States and get them off a kind of isolationist path towards the direction that I think Roosevelt wanted to take them to, which is to support Britain at a moment when, we need to remember, Britain was completely alone. And he loved America. He loved American politics. He loved these big, burly American labour leaders he spent time with, he loved their conviction, he loved their directness. I think it had a long-term effect in terms of awakening a kind of social democratic progressive side of Isaiah. And then he, you know, rejoiced when the United States joined the war. His view, frankly, was that Franklin Roosevelt wanted to win the war without having to fight it. That is, it was not inevitable at all that America would join and fight on Britain’s side. It was only obviously Pearl Harbour that changed everything. But once Pearl Harbour happened, he then moved from New York to Washington and spent the rest of the war doing something that made him famous, which is that he wrote a weekly dispatch for the British cabinet, which was read by Churchill, Eden, all the leaders describing American public opinion. And this was extremely important for the British to know exactly what was going on inside Washington. And Berlin’s account of this was so widely circulated in Whitehall that there came a famous moment when Churchill heard from Clementine Churchill, his wife, that Berlin was in town, and Churchill said immediately, “Oh, I must see Berlin, bring him to lunch.”
And so Berlin came to lunch and it was the wrong Berlin. It was Irving Berlin, the man who, you know, was a absolutely fantastic popular composer and composed White Christmas and all this stuff. And there was this kind of, it became a famous conversation in which Churchill kept grilling Irving Berlin about the state of American public opinion. And when do you think the war will be over Mr. Berlin? And Mr. Berlin, you know, said, look, I’m going to tell my grandchildren that Winston Churchill asked me when the war’s going to be over. And, you know, finally Churchill realised that he got the wrong Berlin, and that did Isaiah no end of good, because the story then circulated around Whitehall, and Churchill and Berlin eventually hooked up, and eventually Churchill asked Berlin to help him with his memoirs in the post-war period. But that misunderstanding, this mistake between Irving Berlin and Isaiah Berlin was one of the things that kind of created the Isaiah Berlin myth in post-War Britain.
And immediately after the war, he goes somewhere very, very different. He goes to the Soviet Union in the heyday still of Stalinism, not long after the purges, really. What did he learn from these encounters in Moscow and Leningrad?
Well, he was a native Russian speaker. He was born in the Russian Empire. He loved Russian poetry and literature more than anything else. And he wanted, he was invited to go to the British Embassy in Moscow in 1945, and he then decided to go to Petersburg, Leningrad as was, and while he was in a bookshop in Petersburg, he heard that the greatest poet of the 20th century in Russia, Anna Akhmatova was still alive. And he said, can I go and meet her? So that was arranged, and he spent a very extraordinary night. In fact, there were several meetings with Anna Akhmatova, and Akhmatova was the great poet of the Silver Age before the First World War. After the First World War and after the communist takeover, she was basically prevented from publishing for about 20 years and survived by making translations. And then her son was arrested, and she had a absolutely horrible period during the worst of the Stalin persecutions. But she’d survived all of it. And she was alive and well in 1945. And she and Berlin spent several nights, all night talking. And it was for Akhmatova, it was the first time that she had seen anybody from the western world since about 1920. And for Isaiah, it was the first time he’d met a poet of genius who was also a heroic defender of poetry, culture, civilization against tyranny. And it changed him forever. Her moral seriousness, her passion, the power of her prose, the power of her poetry, created an unforgettable impression. And he came back, I think in love with her. And as he said, turned over, just turned over by the experience. I think he had never, and I think it deepened his visceral hatred of Soviet tyranny because this woman had been crushed by this regime and had not broken. And her integrity, I think, became a kind of touchstone of how to think about tyranny ever after. And he then wrote a very famous account of these meetings, and I think it began to orient him away from philosophy, which he’d been doing in the 1930s. It oriented him back towards the history of thought. It oriented him back towards Russian thinkers. And he became the great, you know, post-war exponent of Russian thought. And at the same time, the great exponent of, he wrote extremely important articles about the Soviet system and what the Soviet regimes were thinking. So it was both a return to Russian culture and civilization, but it also made his reputation as an expert on Soviet communism.
And this places him in a very interesting way, in what becomes the Cold War, the culture of the Cold War, because he knew at firsthand what the Soviet regime was like. He’d met some of the great Soviet writers. He spoke Russian. So, and he’d spent time in America. So the two great superpowers of the Cold War, he knew them both in different ways.
Yes, yes. He spends a lot of time in the United States after the second war at Harvard, at Bryn Mawr, at various places. And he begins to give some extremely important lectures on the Western tradition. And he gives a famous series of lectures on freedom and its betrayal, trying to trace the roots of the liberal idea of freedom and the forces within Western thought that were hostile to it, Rousseau and others. So that he’s a liberal, who after the war, begins to try and uncover the historical roots of his own tradition. And he sets that against the other thing he wants to understand, which is how this, how a great culture and a great civilization succumbed to this fantasy, this murderous fantasy of a revolutionary utopia. And it was clear to him that this didn’t come out of, you know, Russian culture. This came from the West and reached its grim apotheosis with Stalin. But he wanted to understand the European roots of this fantasy that human beings could be engineered to want one thing, that all of the conflicts, the moral conflicts, the tragic conflicts that divide human beings could be solved by the engineers of human souls as Stalin called them. He wanted to understand, how could we have ever believed that? And so these became the two great master projects of his period after the Second World War, one, to understand the origins of Soviet tyranny and trace it back to the European enlightenment before, and then to trace the Western ideas of liberty and their derivation. And so that’s what he set out to do, and more or less did it.
So he’s riding in a way, in the 1950s in Oxford, two very different horses. He’s perhaps the leading liberal political philosopher of the time, and he’s perhaps the leading historian of ideas at the time.
Yes. And he tries to bring together in a way that I find exciting, convincing, philosophy and history and tries it every occasion to root political conviction, political passions in a historical context so you can see what they’re made of, and above all connect them to personal lives. One of the things I learned so much from them is that, you know, ideas are never an abstraction. They’re what people live and die for. They shape an entire character and identity. The people who truly believe something, believe it all the way down, as we say. And so you need to understand that. You need to understand the way you idea, character, identity, and fate all come together in one person. And that’s what makes his studies of Russian intellectuals so fascinating. He incredibly, I just love his essays on Turgenev, on Herzen. He adored Alexander Herzen and got really inside them. And you could see, you get a clear sense of what makes these people angry, what makes them care for about things, what makes them fight forever. Again, that’s a, I think a heritage from the meeting with Akhmatova. He’d met one of these people and he wanted to know what made them tick. So it’s, I think, very important that he lives this life, which is in Oxford terms, you know, safe, comfortable, pleasant, convivial. And he spends a lot of time dealing with tormented agonised outsiders whose souls are consumed by ideological passion. And this is a thing about him that I find fascinating and also rather appealing.
There’s a very interesting moment in the book where you talk about the fate of many of his relatives in Riga who were taken out to the forests outside of Riga and shot by the Nazis. And yet despite these losses, you write, it was Stalin’s crimes, not Hitler’s that roused his most intense imaginative response. Why do you think that was?
David, I do wish I understood that. I don’t think I do. He did devote an essay or two to this question, but saw Nazism as a, and Stalinism, saw them both together as consequences of a fanaticism ideas, a fanatical desire to eliminate the conflicts, the intimidates, the conflicts inside us to create people who believe one thing and obey one thing and follow one law as being the great danger that produced both of these. But I don’t think there’s anything in his writing that’s systematic about how it was that the most civilised law abiding society of the 19th century produced mass extermination of his own people. I don’t see anything in his writing that really explains that. The one place where he engages viscerally with this issue was in conflict with Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem published in the mid '60s, aroused the kind of fury in him. He was a very, you know, he almost never, you know, got into controversy with people, but he just hated that book. And he hated that book for a very particular reason, which is that she was critical for reasons that are quite easy to explain, of the ways in which the Judenrat, Jewish organisations in occupied Europe cooperated with the Nazi authorities and sometimes provided the Nazis with lists to, of Jews in order to save themselves and possibly save the people they put on the list, whatever. And she condemned this behaviour as ignoble collaboration. And this aroused rage in Isaiah because he felt here was this woman judging people faced with life and death choices. Almost anything they did would end with their deaths. And so the idea that you could judge and condemn these people for these decisions seemed to him a kind of arrogance. It’s not coincidental needless to say that one of his uncles was a member of the Riga Judenrat, and did, was forced to negotiate with the Nazis in Riga during the occupation, didn’t save anybody in the family, and all of Isiah’s relatives still in Riga in 1941 were taken up, marched out of the sea and exterminated and buried in mass graves. But that’s the only place where he engages directly with this catastrophe. He is, as you say, much more focused on Stalin’s crimes, I think in part because of his Russian origin, his Russian language, and also because of the impact of a Akhmatova.
When he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, a very prestigious award, he said there were three crucial strands in his life, Russian, English, and Jewish. What did he mean by that and which do you think mattered most to him?
Well, Jewish was his mom and dad. It was ancestral deep roots. He was not an observant Jew. He used to joke with me that the Orthodox synagogue is the synagogue I am not attending. But he observed Jewish high holidays in a serious manner. He knew the Hebrew Bible astonishingly well. It was deeply part of his ancestral makeup. And he was a Zionist of a complicated kind that is a two-state Zionist, someone who also believed that Palestinians must have a state of their own. And almost his last public pronouncement was in support of a state for the Palestinian people living in peace with the Jewish state. So that’s the Jewish side. The English side was just extraordinary gratitude for having been accepted by a society that was so, you know, was in a way so alien, but contained in its institutional architecture, something he deeply respected, which was democratic freedom, democratic institutions. And the civility, I think he had an incredible respect and admiration and affection for the civility of English life. I don’t know whether that civility is still in place, but in the '40s and '50s it felt, you know, central. And the Russian side, I think is, again, it’s Akhmatova, it’s the Russian, it’s Turgenev on the one hand, Herzen, and also Akhmatova. Turgenev, because he loved the kind of, this equivocating, mild mannered liberal who was an artist of genius.
So there was that side. He loved the Herzen who was the radical who had, you know, been subjected to czarist persecution and was also an artist of genius and stuck to his principles. And then finally, Akhmatova this, you know, consummate genius of the poetic art who I think changed his life. But he sensed, and this is I think his achievement as a person. He braided these together. The Jewish, the British and the Russian were all braided into one personality that was at peace with all these conflictual sides of him. And I think it’s one of the things that if you ask me what I learned from him, that’s what I learned. This extraordinary achievement of braiding identities that are different. And the other thing, if you allow me just to go on for one more minute about Jewishness, I said at the beginning of this, you know, that our whole encounter was basically him figuring out whether to trust me as a Gentile to tell his story, and me as a Gentile trying to figure out what it was to be Jewish. And the thing about his Jewishness that I ended up admiring so much was that being a Jew is not easy. You know, are you a Zionist or an anti-Zionist? Are you going to make Aaliyah or aren’t you? Are you going to be religious? Are you going to be secular? What kind of a Jew are you going to be? And because he became famous, people then began saying, what kind of a Jew are you? Isaiah, come on. Are you this, are you that? And in his stubborn, quiet way, he said, I will be the kind of Jew I want to be. And that, I admire it. If there’s something I learned from him, it’s a thing that people didn’t see. He was such a mild mannered nice kind of guy, and so charming and funny. They didn’t see the adamantine determination that he had to be himself. And that’s, you know, what I really, really loved about him.
You wrote the first edition of this book, published the first edition in 1998, and now there’s a second revised edition. How do you think he’ll be remembered and has that changed between 1998 and today, 25 years on?
David, that’s a great question. And I think that needless to say, as his biographer, I want him remembered forever. I think he’s an important figure. And as I say, this combination of history, philosophy, and the sense that liberalism has to engage constantly with the tragedy of history and the tragedy of moral choice. Those things, I think are deeply enduring parts of his legacy. But, you know, the tide comes in, the tide goes out, and fashions in intellectual life change. We are in a dark moment at the moment. We’re at a moment where liberal democracies is under attack in many places. There’s a kind of conservative populist descendancy that regards as Isaiah as this kind of cosmopolitan, weak, accommodating, equivocating, kind of, you know, no guide to anything, and in fact, the enemy that we have got to get rid of. So there are many ties that are anti-Berlin 'cause there are many ties that are anti-liberal. So I don’t know how this will play out. All I know is that I’m hopeful that people will go back to some of the things he wrote and just experience what I experienced, which is illumination and also pleasure. But I think it’s important not to make too strong a claim about his posterity because Isaiah himself thought it was ridiculous to make claims about his posterity or about the posterity and future of his kind of liberalism. We just don’t know.
Q&A and Comments
Q - Thank you Michael. Let me just see, I can see there’s quite a few questions, not surprisingly. Steve Pakin asks, is there a question you never asked him for whatever reason that you wished you had?
A - 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?
Q - Kelly Shapiro asks, who are the people of great political convictions that Isaiah admired, and perhaps I should add apart from Akhmatova, because you’ve already spoken about Akhmatova, but are there others?
A - Well, he wrote a famous essay about Roosevelt. He got Roosevelt’s number. Roosevelt was a ruthless, consummate political genius. But he was also a man of adamantine conviction. And our world is very much still, thank God, Roosevelt’s world to one person. He admired Churchill for his courage in 1940. He didn’t like Churchill personally. He thought Churchill was a bully with a kind of love of violence and a love of war. But he respected Churchill’s courage when his back was against the wall. One of the people he also admires, not exactly a political figure, but he absolutely admired Arturo Toscanini. And he admired Toscanini because Toscanini would have nothing to do with Mussolini. And when he was attacked by fascist thugs demanded an apology. There was something about adamantine conviction in Toscanini that Isaiah admired all his life and he admired, needless to say, Akhmatova who never broke under pressure. And Berlin was extremely aware of the irony here. He admired adamantine characters who never buckled under pressure. And he himself was never under that kind of pressure. And that’s precisely why he admired them so much.
And Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, who we met already in New York and the war, and Washington and all.
He admired Weizmann for the, you know, 40 year determined commitment to the state. He admired Weizmann for being a kind of incredible political operator using all the tricks of the trade. He found Ben-Gurion, on the other hand, a kind of terrifying, he was like a kind of Polish peasant, you know, character kind of, you know? But again, with again that quality of adamining, unyielding conviction, and in other words, he admired his opposite. That’s what I’m saying. And that’s a good thing I think.
Q - I asked that partly because it allows me to ask you a question raised by Carol Stock. In the light of his belief that conviction didn’t justify violence, how do you think he would’ve responded to that which is happening in Israel now?
A - 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.
And he faced a sort of interesting dilemma himself when he was in America, when he was trying to negotiate with Weizmann about a possible independent Israeli state. At the same time, knowing that that’s the last thing, that was contrary to British foreign policy at the time, British policy at the time. And that was a difficult issue.
Yeah, he played a kind of double game. He was an employee of the British government, a close personal friend of Weizmann. Weizmann was trying to get the British government to grant state people of Israel and Jewish people. That was not British policy. He was, you know, betwixt in between, his loyalties pulled, but he didn’t agonise about that. He knew who was paying the bill, which is that he was a British citizen. He had obligations to the British government. He couldn’t play a double game beyond a certain point. But he was also, you know, one of Weizmann’s closest advisors and friends.
And that he and Ben-Gurion tried to persuade Isaiah to come to Israel to help the new state when it achieved independence, but he wouldn’t go.
Wouldn’t go, wouldn’t go. He was in and out of Israel from '32, right through almost to the end of his life. But he never felt at home there. He loved being there, but he never felt at home. He actually felt at home in London. I mean, it just, and he didn’t agonise about that. He just thought, that’s who I am.
And there are quite a number of questions. I mean, he loved America. He made lifelong friendships with a number of the new dealers around the Roosevelt White House. And so there are a number of questions about what he thought of the neocons in the 1970s and what he might have thought about the state of American liberalism and democracy today.
Alright, easy questions. Well, neocons, I think he was hostile to highly ideological characters of left and right. I think he found the neocons too ideological, too rigid. I mean, he was, you know, I think he didn’t, I don’t remember long conversations about American neocons, you know, Jeane Kirkpatrick and people like that. I do remember conversations about Thatcher. He rather liked Margaret Thatcher. He thought Thatcher was a necessary overdue response to the stagnation, decay and failure of British social democracy in the '60s and '70s. And he didn’t care who knew it. And I don’t think he’s necessarily wrong about that. Of course, Mrs. Thatcher, you know, did things that he opposed and regretted, but he thought, you know, he was non-ideological about his liberalism. I think sometimes, I don’t think he ever told me this, but I think he might’ve voted for Thatcher. I think he also voted Social Democrat. And I think he also voted for the Labour Party and voted for the Liberals. His sense of of liberalism was not, the extreme polarisation of the current political climate, he would’ve regarded with bafflement, because for him, liberalism is not a, you know, a political creed. It’s a personal disposition, a willingness to listen, a willingness to listen to what you don’t want, a willingness to compromise, a willingness to understand that political choice is often tragic choice. It’s a temperament that accepts accountability, responsibility. Some of that you can find in an American Republican, some of it you can find in American Democrat. That disposition was what he cared about. And it was that disposition that he exemplified as a human being.
I suppose this is what I was trying to get at about the context of the conversations you had during the late '80s and through the '90s, which was a sort of high point, if you like, of a certain kind of liberalism that he lived to see the defeat and the downfall of the two great ideological enemies of his life, Naziism and Stalinism, Soviet communism. And yet now, 25 years later, when the new edition of your book comes out, his beloved America is not what it was, his beloved Israel is not what it was. Russia is in many respects, exactly what it was that would’ve perhaps coloured your conversations differently, taken them in a different turn or not do you think?
Oh, sure, but none of us are what we were, my friend. None of us, we’re all changed and damaged and bruised. The thing I think I saw would be as concerned as we all are with things that we didn’t talk about very much, for example, climate change. I think he would be very concerned about the threats to democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. I think he would be appalled and baffled, I think, by the extreme polarisation of American political life, because he had, he comes from a absolutely vanished world in the wartime solidarity in which, you know, domestic political partisanship basically stopped during the Second World War, resume was constrained by the Cold War, so that you didn’t carry your arguments offshore. All that kind of, the Cold War constrained partisanship, it’s exploded since then. I think he would pick up the fact that this, some of this relates to inequality, some of it relates to privilege. He led an incredibly privileged life, but was aware of the ways in which this privilege, particularly the privilege of upper level academe, generates incredible ferocious resentment. Isaiah was extremely good historian of resentment, very clear about how much resentment powers political ideas. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a study in resentment and the terrible consequences of resentment as a driver in politics. He would’ve understood all of that. I think he’d also, however, be urges, one of his virtues was humility, historical humility. We just don’t know. At any moment our present looks very dark and very troubling and very difficult. And all he, I think would say to us, we don’t know. We don’t know. What we can say with certainty is that human beings are very resourceful, very ruthless, very determined, and where necessary, very courageous. We know that, those are facts, those are things you can count on. The resiliency and courage and determination of ordinary human beings. That was a load star to him. And he’d seen so much evidence of it that it grounded him and meant that he was not especially alarmed about the future. He said, you know, don’t worry about it. It’ll take care of itself. And when you’re dead, it’s not an event for you. I mean, he was very cynical, tough about this. He didn’t like hand wringing about the future and we shouldn’t engage in hand wringing. I did take that lesson from him.
My thanks to everyone who’s written in with questions. I’m sorry we didn’t get round to dealing with a lot of the questions that were asked. Michael, thank you for a fascinating hour. I loved reading your book in 1998 and I’ve loved rereading it in a slightly different form in 2023. And thank you for your time this evening, thank you.
Thank you and thank everybody who tuned in. I went on and on and on, didn’t I? But I hope it leads you to Isaiah Berlin and his work, and thank you very much for listening, and thank you, David, for being such a wonderful interlocutor. Thanks a lot.
A great pleasure, many thanks.