A commemorative lecture delivered at the Harvard Club in New York on 2 June 1998

In television parlance, Isaiah Berlin was what is called a talking head. Not only that inimitable voice but his whole face was continually animated, his eyes sparkling – and they were beautiful eyes, as Greta Garbo once had occasion to remark. Those eyes had witnessed much calamity, particularly to Russians and Jews whose communal identity Isaiah shared, and they moistened as well at the loss of lifelong friends, like Stephen Spender, about whom Isaiah spoke with tender affection when we met two summers ago, by chance just a few days after Spender's death. But it was more generally the vitality of his enthusiasms – social, intellectual, perhaps above all musical – which his eyes displayed. He was continually bemused at his own good fortune, at the excess of the esteem in which he was held over his actual achievement, which he would not have failed to stress this very evening if he could speak for himself. ‘What have I done in my life?’ he used to ask when such honours as the Order of Merit or the Presidency of the British Academy were bestowed on him, even before Henry Hardy had begun so assiduously to assemble and edit his occasional publications and broadcasts for a wider audience. ‘A little book on Marx and a handful of essays,’ he would reply to his own question. ‘Grossly overrated. Long may it last!’

It was of course his voice that we remember most of all – its richness, its humour, its velocity. If he completed a lecture in less than the allotted time, he might apologise for having arrived a fraction late by leaving early: ‘Goodbye.’ In virtually every one of his public lectures in Oxford, New York and elsewhere, his was the face that launched a thousand quips. I recall his hurtling through the twenty-eight alternative readings of Machiavelli which were to become a chapter of Against the Current, as entranced students listened while the insecure stenographers among them hopelessly failed to get it all down. Isaiah himself, of course, had not brought along a text at all. He spoke from memory, without props, apart perhaps from a crumpled sheet of paper at the lectern or even in his pocket, which he seldom consulted.

In framing our original plan of this work, we adopted a number of guidelines which formed our prospectus for the contributors and which, by and large, still lend direction to and map the limits of this volume. We were determined in the space available to provide as comprehensive a treatment as possible of eighteenth-century political thought in the diverse historical contexts of the period, instead of a series of essays on our subject’s acknowledged masters. We wished to give due weight to the polemical character of eighteenth-century disputations and to the circumstances surrounding the composition of the works at issue, rather than to subsume their differences of principle or perspective in separate chapters manifesting the internal logic of each author’s career. We accordingly aimed for a largely thematic framework in preference to an interconnected collection of intellectual biographies. In addition to focusing on the seminal writings of the vanguard of the eighteenth-century’s republic of letters, we also wished to address the texts of relatively minor figures who often couched their contributions to both national and international debates in locally specific contexts and idioms. We sought to survey not only the towering treatises of the age of Enlightenment but also a large number of its disparate pièces fugitives, in part because we thought it necessary to fill in the valleys from which the peaks arose, but more generally because, in our judgement, some of the most centrally recurrent topics of eighteenth-century political thought were pursued in works that were perhaps of greater historical than philosophical significance.

The invention of the modern nation-state

The American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century were each preceded and accompanied by lofty debates about constitutional principles, whose prospects of imminent enactment lent a sense of urgency to the fulfilment of philosophical ideals. Notions of a state of nature and a social contract had long been decried as illusions that could not account for the complexity of even our most primitive associations, but in overthrowing the trappings of government in two widely separated continents, legislators of modern republicanism in the United States and France made such abstractions appear credible, as if through their endeavours an earthly paradise might be regained and the first liberated citizens of large and durable republics since the demise of classical Rome could aspire to genuine self-rule. No less than in England around the time of its Civil War of the 1640s, there appeared, in America for about a decade before 1787 and in France for a similar period from 1789, a collection of classic works, some by leading statesmen or major figures in public life, each of which sought to plot a fresh path for civil institutions that had still to be born. These include Paine’s Common Sense (1776), Hamilton, Madison, and Jay’s Federalist Papers (1787–8), and, in France, Sieyès’s Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? (What is the Third Estate?, 1789) and Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progregrave;s de l’esprit humain (Sketch of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind, 1795).

Unless it was Immanuel Kant, who declined to believe it, practically no one who lived in the age of enlightenment ever took note of that fact.1 The term The Enlightenment made its inaugural appearance in only the late nineteenth century, The Scottish Enlightenment was first ushered into print in the early twentieth century, and the Enlightenment Project, about which virtually every contemporary social philosopher now speaks with authority, is an expression invented more than thirty-five years after the demise of the Manhattan Project, whose adherents, by contrast, at least knew its name. Throughout its relatively brief history, The Enlightenment has largely assumed the identity assigned to it by its inventors determined to denigrate its achievement. The Oxford English Dictionary still defines The Enlightenment as an age of “ superficial intellectualism,” marked by “insufficient respect for authority and tradition” adding, for good measure, that a philosophe is “one who philosophizes erroneously” In the French language, matters are, if anything, worse still, as no Frenchman has ever managed to coin a term for The Enlightenment at all. At least God, even if He never existed either, somehow managed to get Himself invented, as Voltaire famously remarked, but not, alas, The Enlightenment. Frances Hutcheson in Glasgow observed that he was called New Light there, but no sparkling luminary in Paris, so far as I know, ever noticed that he was one of les lumières.

Introduction

The subject I mean to address here is the institutionalisation of political thought in English universities in the twentieth century, and the establishment of its various identities, in the light of the most notable professorial appointments which have been made in that field. In seeking to identify an academic discipline's scope and trajectory by way of the careers of scholars entrusted to define its purpose, I shall not at the same time attempt to provide a historiographical survey of the major writings devoted to it throughout this period, nor shall I consider the ways in which political theorists in England interpreted their civic culture or national crises. The differences between the themes pursued in this chapter and those devoted to French and German political thought may no doubt be partly characterised as differences of national style, in so far as the extra-curricular prominence of intellectuals and of their fashionable doctrines in France, and of ideological and bureaucratic regimes in Germany, lend themselves well to treatments of the circulation of texts, on the one hand, and the social dimensions of power, on the other. But I do not in these remarks wish to emphasise such contrasts, since I have no doubt that there is ample scope for textological or social scientific studies of English political thought in the twentieth century, and room too for curricular histories of French and German universities.

If the meaning of words were accessible only to those who actually employed them, neither multiculturalism nor ethnic cleansing could have been intelligible to anyone in the age of Enlightenment. In addressing themselves to what is always local and peculiar, historians must be specially attentive to their use of words, alert to anachronisms and the perils of ascribing timeless significance to ideas plucked out of context like magician's rabbits from a bottomless hat. Multiculturalism and ethnic cleansing are terms which pertain to the political world of the late twentieth century, in one case predominantly with respect to notions of community generated in North America, in the other with respect to the conduct of a civil war in Bosnia. My choice of title here is deliberately anachronistic, not because I believe that our current political vocabularies would have had the same resonance 200 years ago but, rather, because I am convinced that certain features of the discourse of the civic and religious life of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have persisted and thus remain strikingly familiar, rather than alien, in our time.

The allegedly Eurocentric or, alternatively, gendered nature of Enlightenment philosophy is often identified as underpinning the most blameworthy practices of intolerance today, and in the light of the Holocaust – made possible according to some commentators by the self-destructive tendencies of Enlightenment notions of science and reason – it has come to be maintained that ‘the fallen nature of modern man cannot be separated from social progress’.