Isaiah Berlin

The Crooked Timber of Humanity

The armies of Richelieu and of Louis XIV had crushed and humiliated a large part of the German population, and stifled the natural development of the new culture of the Protestant renaissance in the north. The Germans, a century later, rebelled against the dead hand of France in the realms of culture, art and philosophy, and avenged themselves by launching the great counter-attack against the Enlightenment. It took the form of glorification of the individual, the national and the historical, against the universal and the timeless; of the exaltation of genius, of the unaccountable, of the leap of the spirit that defies all rules and conventions, of the worship of the individual hero, the giant above and beyond the law, and an assault upon the great impersonal order with its unbreakable laws, and its clear assignment of its own place to every human function and group and class and purpose, which had been characteristic of the classical tradition, and had entered deeply into the texture of the western world, both ecclesiastical and secular. Variety in the place of uniformity; inspiration in the place of tried and tested rules or traditions; the inexhaustible and the unbounded in the place of measure, clarity, logical structure; the inner life and its expression in music; worship of the night and the irrational: that was the contribution of the wild German spirit, which broke like a fresh wind into the airless prison of the French Establishment. This great revolt of the humiliated Germans against the dead and levelling rationalist pedantry of French thought and taste in the mid-eighteenth century had, in its beginnings, a life-giving effect upon art and ideas about art, upon religion, upon personal relationships between human beings, upon individual morality. Then the tidal wave of feeling rose above its banks, and overflowed into the neighbouring provinces of politics and social life with literally devastating results. All forms of going to the bitter end were thought more worthy of man than peaceful negotiation, stopping half-way; extremism, conflict, war were glorified as such.

Few things have played a more fatal part in the history of human thought and action than great imaginative analogies from one sphere, in which a particular principle is applicable and valid, to other provinces, where its effect may be exciting and transforming, but where its consequences may be fallacious in theory and ruinous in practice. It was so with the romantic movement and its nationalist implications. The heroic individual, the free creator, became identified not with the unpolitical artist, but with leaders of men bending others to their indomitable will, or with classes, or races, or movements, or nations that asserted themselves against others, and identified their own liberty with the destruction of all that opposed them. The notion that liberty and power are identical, that to be free is to make free with whatever stands in your path, is an ancient idea which the romantics seized on and wildly exaggerated. Even more typical of romanticism is the insane, egomaniacal self-prostration before one's own true inner essence, one's private feelings, the composition of one's own blood, the shape of one's own skull, the place of one's birth, as against that which one shares with other people—reason, universal values, a sense of the community of mankind.

The neo-rationalism of Hegel and of Marx, in a sense, tried to oppose the unbridled subjectivism of the romantics, and their self-worship, by an effort to discover objective standards in the inexorable forces of history, or the laws of the evolution of the human spirit or the growth of productive forces and relations But they were themselves sufficiently infected by romanticism to make progress consist in the defeat and absorption of the rest of society by one victorious section of it. For Hegel, progress and the liberation of the human spirit consist in the triumph of reason as embodied in the state over other forms of human organisation, the victory of the historic nations over the unhistoric, of 'Germanic' culture over the rest, and of Europe over other 'discarded' human cultures, the 'dead' civilisation of China, for example, or the barbarous Slav nations. Without conflict, struggle, strife (so Hegel tells us) progress ceases, stagnation sets in. Similarly for Karl Marx, the proletarians can only become free by suppressing their adversaries with whom they, ex hypothesi, can have nothing in common. Progress is self-assertion, the conquest of an area in which the agent can freely develop and create by eliminating (or absorbing) whatever obstructs it, both animate and inanimate. In Hegel it is the nation organised as a state. In Marx it is the class organised as a revolutionary force. In both cases a large number of human beings must be sacrificed and annihilated if the ideal is to triumph. Unity may be the ultimate goal of humanity, but its method of attaining it is war and disintegration. The path may lead to a terrestrial paradise, but it is strewn with the corpses of the enemy, for whom no tear must be shed, since right and wrong, good and bad, success and failure, wisdom and folly, are all in the end determined by the objective ends of history, which has 'condemned' half mankind — unhistoric nations, members of obsolete classes, inferior races — to what Proudhon called 'liquidation', and Trotsky, in an equally picturesque phrase, described as the rubbish heap of history.

Yet there is a central insight given us by romantic humanism—this same untamed German spirit—which we shall not easily forget. Firstly that the maker of values is man himself, and may therefore not be slaughtered in the name of anything higher than himself, for there is nothing higher; this is what Kant meant when he spoke of man as an end in himself, and not a means to an end. Secondly, that institutions are made not only by, but also for, men, and when they no longer serve him they must go. Thirdly that men may not be slaughtered, either in the name of abstract ideas, however lofty, such as progress or freedom or humanity, or of institutions, for none of these have any absolute value in themselves, inasmuch as all that they have has been conferred upon them by men, who alone can make things valuable or sacred; hence attempts to resist or change them are never a rebellion against divine commands to be punished by destruction. Fourthly—and this follows from the rest—that the worst of all sins is to degrade or humiliate human beings for the sake of some Procrustean pattern into which they are to be forced against their wills, a pattern that has some objective authority irrespective of human aspirations.

This conception of man, inherited from the romantic movement, remains in us to this day: it is something which, despite all that mankind has lived through, we in Europe have not abandoned. For this reason, when Hegel and Marx prophesied inevitable doom for all those who defied the march of history, their threats came too late. Hegel and Marx, each in his fashion, tried to tell human beings that only one path to liberty and salvation lay before them—that which was offered them by history, which embodied cosmic reason; that those who failed to adapt themselves, or to realise that rationality, interest, duty, power, success were, in the long run, identical with one another and with morality and wisdom, would be destroyed by 'the forces of history', to defy which was suicidal folly. But this line or metaphysical intimidation proved on the whole ineffective. Too many men were prepared to defend their principles even against the irresistible power with which Marx threatened to annihilate them. The ideals of individual human beings commanded respect and even reverence, even if no guarantees of objective validity could be provided. Fidelity to an ideal, indestructible regard for what a man himself, whatever his reasons, believed to be true, or right, became something in the name of which men were prepared to defy the big battalions, even if these were identified with the mysterious power of history or reality itself. It was no longer possible to persuade men that Don Quixote was not merely foolish and unpractical and obsolete (which no one had denied), but that because he had ignored the historic position of his nation, or race, or class he was defying the forces of progress and was therefore vicious and wicked too. Men stood up, as they had always done, and became martyrs for their beliefs, and were admired for it, at times even by those who destroyed them. They were tortured and died for principles which, so at any rate they believed, were universal and binding on all men, part of the human essence in virtue of which men were rightly called men. They could not break these principles, without feeling that they had forfeited all right to human respect. They could not betray them and face themselves or others. For this reason the appeals to realism made to defeated countries in 1940 by victorious German leaders, who said, reasonably enough, that resistance was useless, that the new order was coming, that this new order would transform the values of all the world, that to resist was not only to be crushed, but to be written off as fools or enemies of the light by later generations, inevitably conditioned by the morality of the victors—this type of argument failed to break the spirit of those who truly believed in universal human values.