Isaiah Berlin: A Life

Isaiah Berlin was an intellectual figure whose deep subtlety of thought never made him inscrutable. His reputation as a standard bearer of liberalism is also widely but imperfectly known. Michael Ignatieff has made good this state of affairs, aided by the decade-long co-operation of his subject, who put none of the usual obstacles of authorised biography in his path.Born in Riga to traditional Jewish parents and raised there and later in St Petersburg in the last days of Tsarist Russia and the early years of the Soviet Union, Berlin was taken providentially to Britain where he adjusted with ease to British education and mores. His detractors would later identify his defence of British institutions as a deformation of émigré idealisation. His school career gave only slight indication of the achievement to follow at Oxford, where he was elected at 23 a fellow of All Souls, perhaps the most rarefied, in its association of powerful men and untrammelled scholars, of Oxford colleges. The chaos and mounting dread left behind in Russia immunised Berlin from the millenarian ideologies that so infected his contemporaries.Chance took him to America during the war and into the service of the British Foreign Office, where he dazzled his superiors from Churchill down with the probity and depth of his copious reports on the American scene. Churchill would comment approvingly on his memoranda to Eden, an insecure politician who appreciated Berlin's brain but suspected expertise and who took the opportunity to note in margin, 'There is perhaps a too generous Oriental flavour' (p. 125). So impressed was Churchill with Berlin that he insisted that he be invited to dinner, where he quizzed his guest on the war and strategy, only to receive bland replies. "But when do you think the war will be over?" persisted Churchill. "Mr Prime Minister", Berlin replied, "I shall tell my children and grandchildren that Winston Churchill asked me that question". Perplexed, Churchill then inquired what was Berlin's best work. "White Christmas" came the reply from Irving Berlin (pp. 125-6). And so the celebrated tale of the wrong Berlin being invited to dinner was born. Ignatieff recounts these and other anecdotes with style and gentility. A life-long Zionist, Berlin appreciated that Jewish statehood had created the potential for normalcy in Jewish life, allowing Jews for the first time to decide how they might manage their individual lives. Nonetheless, he adjudged early that a life in Israel was not for him, though Weizmann, Ben Gurion and others all sought to harness his energies to the national enterprise.He could be sedulously aloof from Zionist work while serving in the Foreign Office, won points from colleagues for towing the official line, but grave times saw him side with his Jewish loyalties when, in 1943, he learnt of an Anglo-American initiative to defer Zionist claims till after the war. He let word out to the Zionists in America and gingerly covered his own tracks in do

Ignatieff has written a wonderfully warm and captivating biography of this Jewish public intellectual who occupied a place certainly as prominent in England as Walter Lippman did here or Raymond Aron in France. The reader should be familiar with the "The Hedgehog and the Fox," if not some of Berlin's other essays, and have heard at least one of Berlin's BBC broadcasts. Ignatieff can do little more than allude to these as he traces Berlin's complicated relationship to his Russian homeland, to England, to Zionism, to the United States and with his wide circle of friendship with the best and the brightest that each of them had to offer. Why is this book such a pleasure? I think it a combination of Ignatieff's felicitous style and compendious research, together with Berlin's wise observations, his humor, and, above all, his remarkable, if self-centered, modesty.

A prophet 'speaks for God' or (more loosely) is a 'truth-teller'. Berlin was a 'truth-teller' in his re-statement of political liberalism in the midst of the 20th century. Berlin was one of many intellectuals transplanted due to the revolutions and upheavals following WWI - he fell in love with England, and became an Oxford don. He might have remained for the rest of his life a little-known figure on the fringe of the 'Oxford philosophy' movement (called 'linguistic analysis') but for three things. One was his Zionism, though it was more the gentle Zionism of Weizmann, than the triumphalist variety of Ben Gurion. Another was the Second World War, where he became a key figure in British diplomacy in Washington, and got to know many New-Dealers. A third (and perhaps the decisive one) was his long stay in Moscow in 1945, where he met the poets Anna Ahkmatova and Boris Pasternak. As a result of this, there grew his fascination with the history of ideas, where he was to make his greatest mark on the intellectual life of the 20th century. Berlin's main thesis is the inconsistency (and opposition) of human ends, and against the theory that all rational human ends must be one. Thus 'Libery, Equality and Fraternity' is a zero-sum game - if you pursue equality, then a dimunition of some (or some people's) liberty is inescapable. This is an excellent biography with a crystal-clear exposition of Berlin's ideas, and a fascinating insight into 'one man's life'.

This is one of the most insightful, educated, emotional, and inspiring biographies I have ever read. Michael Ignatieff has accomplished one of the most difficult tasks for a non-Russian biographer writing about a Russian persona: Mr. Ignatieff has guessed and grasped the subdelties of one of the most interesting, and surprising minds of the times. The author throughout the book never let go of I. Berlin's Russian Jewish descent; M. Ignatieff never underestimated Berlins's belonging to his very spesific past and most vulnerable identity. Also the language of the biography is sympathetically emotional, sincere, eloquent, in other words totally in accordance with Isaiah Berlin's life. This book has become one of my most satisfactory literary experiences.

I would give this brilliant book six stars if I could. It was a great read, and I learned a lot about myself, as well as about Berlin. It gave coherence and voice to many of my beliefs that followed Isaiah Berlin's, even though I only knew of him, if at all, as a mythic English intellectual whose writings were Delphic and seemed opaque to me.I, too, could never identify with the smugness of idealogues on the left or the right. The narrow strand between these groups has been lonely terrain for the past 50 years of my adult life.I congratulate Michael Ignatieff on a masterpiece, an evocation of a great, courageous man who literally kept his cool over the better part of the century, when all about him were shouting fire. I hope his values take root for the next century.