The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas

There is an index for this collection of essays, but it does not find much to point to about the United States of America, except where particular examples get mixed in with the clutter of events that are described as the context of the rise of nationalism:"So too, it may be that no minority that has preserved its own cultural tradition or religious or racial characteristics can indefinitely tolerate the prospect of remaining a minority forever, governed by a majority with a different outlook or habits. And this may indeed account for the reaction of wounded pride, or the sense of collective injustice, which animates, for example, Zionism or its mirror-image, the movement of the Palestinian Arabs, or such `ethnic' minorities as Negroes in the United States or Irish Catholics in Ulster, the Nagas in India and the like. Certainly contemporary nationalism seldom comes in its pure, romantic form, as it did in Italy or Poland or Hungary in the early nineteenth century, but is connected far more closely with social and religious and economic grievances. . . ."A footnote which quotes the organ of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party for 20 July 1972 shows an awareness of the global side of the picture:"Between national and international interests not only is there no contradiction, but, on the contrary, there is a full dialectical unity."By implication, the index identifies the policies of the United States of America with the belief that it can foster countervailing forces "as a barrier to unbridled chauvinism - seems about as realistic (at least so far as lands outside western Europe are concerned) as Cobden's belief that the development of free trade throughout the world would of itself ensure peace and harmonious co-operation between nations. One is also reminded of Norman Angell's apparently unanswered argument a short while before 1914 that the economic interests of modern capitalistic states alone made large-scale wars impossible."For me the most interesting part of THE CROOKED TIMBER OF HUMANITY by Isaiah Berlin is in the middle of the book: "Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism." Written in the twentieth century, it is not surprising that this essay attempts to consider the political ideas which had previously supported an old order as the ideological foundation for the worst enemy of freedom as a realm of modern thought. The Bible serves as an easier reference for me, particularly the books of Kings, in which it is reported, "Ahab also put up a sacred pole and committed other crimes as well, provoking the anger of Yahweh, the God of Israel, more than all the kings of Israel who were his predecessors." (I Kings 16:33). Bad governments can come in many forms, but a prime example of how they operate can be found in I Kings 21:10 :"Confront him with a couple of scoundrels who will accuse him like this, `You have cursed God and the king.' Then take him outside and stone him to death."Joseph de Maistre is presented

The late Isaiah Berlin was one of the foremost liberal thinkers of the 20th century, a man and scholar who developed and promoted some of the most powerful arguments for individual liberty and liberal societies while, at the same time, wrote some of the most powerful essays in the history of ideas, particularly with respect to Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment thinkers, political philosophers, and ideologues of various persuasions. Some of his essays have become legendary: the essays on liberty, on Karl Marx and Disraeli, on Tolstoy. He left behind a significant body of work, most of which has been edited by Henry Hardy (if you read all of his essays, you will find they overlap quite a bit, but that is the product of an engaging thinker who preferred conversation to writing). "The Crooked Timber of Humanity" is among his finest collection of essays.If there is any theme to this anthology, it is that human societies are like "crooked timbers"; trying to bend them is unnatural and only results in disastrous consequences. The attempts to bend them--essentially experiments in social engineering--marked the 20th century, from Lenin's Russia to Hitler's Germany to Pol Pot's Cambodia. These experiments had deep roots in modern political thinking, extending back into the nineteenth century. They manifested themselves in illiberal, totalitarian regimes in the 20th century and took an untold number of lives.But "The Crooked Timber of Humanity" is not a study in history, although it comes from the mind of a man who lived across the span of the century he was writing about. It is a history of ideas and, in particular, of the belief that the interests, motivations, and goals of people can be, and are, the same at all times and in all places. This type of philosophical monism holds to a single vision of how societies ought to be arranged; is characterized by an idealism and utopianism that are to be attained at all costs; and is found in a number of modern ideologies such as fascism and nationalism. Berlin's essays cover idealism, utopianism, Vico, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the views of de Maistre, all of which held to some form of singular, monistic political thinking.Berlin's answer is reasonable and humane, a pluralstic point of view that holds that human desires and ends are varied, that utopianism in its many forms (Communism and fascism, to cite two) is conceptually incoherenet and unnatural to the experience of being human, and that human experience is multi-dimensional and constantly changing.This collection of essays exhibit Berlin's pronounced clarity of thought (one of his wonderful trademarks) and illustrative prose (with all those rolling sentences). Berlin once said in an interview that, given his experience of the 20th century, all we should and can expect is a "minimally decent society," one that is free and liberal and open enough to allow human beings to realize their own ends, whatever imperfections such a society might have

Martin Gardner has an excellent review of this book in his collection of essays, _The Night is Large_, and I can add little to what he says. The opening essay is a short, partly autobiographical account of how Berlin came to embrace his distinctive pluralism. It provides the clearest, most concise explanation I have seen to date of why Marxism and its ilk are wrong. His essay on de Maistre is longer than its subject deserves, but not uninteresting. All of Berlin's essays display his encyclopedic knowledge and shrewd judgment. It is said that he was one of the fastest talkers on record; he writes with equal volubility, packing into each sentence a book's worth of history and theory. These essays are not for the neophyte or the casual reader -- the forthcoming _Power of Ideas_ (March 2000) promises to be more accessible -- nevertheless, they are virtuoso examples of the much praised but little practiced art of sympathetic critical interpretation.