READING: Alan Ryan on Isaiah Berlin on Karl Marx
Alan Ryan’s 1995 “Foreword” to Isaiah Berlin’s: Karl Marx: His Life & Environment. Very much worth reading as a take on Karl Marx, even more so as a take on Isaiah Berlin, and perhaps as a take...
Alan Ryan’s 1995 “Foreword” to Isaiah Berlin’s: Karl Marx: His Life & Environment. Very much worth reading as a take on Karl Marx, even more so as a take on Isaiah Berlin, and perhaps as a take on Alan Ryan…
Alan Ryan: Forward to: Isaiah Berlin: Karl Marx: His Life and Environment: ’Karl Marx was Isaiah Berlin’s first book. He was just thirty years old when it appeared. In Oxford and London he was already known as a dazzling conversationalist and a strikingly gifted young philosopher; but it was in Karl Marx that he first revealed his special talent as a historian of ideas—the discipline in which he enthralled his readers for the rest of his writing life.
That talent is, as such gifts often are, a talent that is easier to admire and enjoy than it is to describe; but it emerges as an astonishing ability to do justice both to the thinker and the thought—to paint a picture of the personalities of the men and women he writes about, without for a moment forgetting that we want to know about them because of their ideas rather than their marital adventures or their tastes in dress, and to make the picture vivid just because, although ideas have a life of their own, they are also stamped with the characters of the men and women whose ideas they are.
It is a talent that made Berlin’s essays on great ideas and great men a considerable art form. As readers of his collected essays know, Personal Impressions—the volume devoted to encounters with his contemporaries, memorial addresses, and accounts of the greatness of the century’s great men—is hardly different in tone and style from his Russian Thinkers or Against the Current—the companion volumes of essays in the history of ideas. It seems almost inconsequential that Berlin never talked to Turgenev as he talked to Anna Akhmatova, that he never discussed the history of Florence with Machiavelli as he did discuss the history of eighteenth-century England with Lewis Namier.
It has been suggested that all serious thinkers inhabit an ‘invisible college’, where a silent conversation goes on between the living and the immortal dead, and Plato is as present as the newest graduate student wrestling with his work. Berlin’s writing suggests the image of something livelier and more spirited than most colleges, perhaps a vast intellectual soirée where the guests come from every social stratum and all possible political persuasions. Whatever one’s favourite metaphor, the effect is to bring all his subjects fully and thoroughly to life.
All the same, historians of ideas are not novelists, nor even biographers. Although Berlin gave Karl Marx the subtitle ‘His Life and Environment’, it was Marx’s life as the theorist of the socialist revolution that Berlin was chiefly concerned to describe, and the environment that Berlin was interested in was not so much the Trier of Marx’s boyhood or the North London of his years of exile, but the political and intellectual environment against which Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto and Capital.
The moral of Karl Marx, however, must be taken as a comment on both Marxism and Marx himself; in his final paragraph, Berlin observes:
[Marxism] sets out to refute the proposition that ideas govern the course of history, but the very extent of its own influence on human affairs has weakened the force of its thesis. For in altering the hitherto prevailing view of the relation of the individual to his environment and to his fellows, it has palpably altered that relation itself, and in consequence remains the most powerful among the intellectual forces which are today permanently altering the ways in which men think and act…
Marxism, by way of the activities of the communist parties it inspired, turns out to be a cosmic philosophical joke against the man who created it….
Berlin’s Marx is an interesting figure because he was simultane- ously so much a product of the Enlightenment, and so much a product of the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenment. Like the French materialists of the eighteenth century, Marx believed in progress, believed that history was a linear process, not, as the ancient world had thought, that it was a repetitive cycle of growth and decay; but, like critics of the Enlightenment such as Burke, Maistre and Hegel, he thought that social change had not occurred in the past and would not occur in the future merely because some enlightened persons could see that it would be more reasonable to behave in a different way. It was violent and irrational forces which brought about significant change, and the rationality of the whole historical process was something we could understand only after the event….
The Marx of the first edition of Karl Marx was, as Berlin acknowledged, the Marx of official Marxism, the Marx of the Second and Third Internationals, hailed by his followers as a social scientist, not as a humanist philosopher. Now that the dust has settled, it is clear that Berlin was right to do no more than adjust his account a little [in his later-edition revisions]; the more one thinks about the theory of alienation, the clearer it is that Marx was right in later life to think that anything he had said in the obscure language of Hegelian philosophy, he could say more plainly in the language of empirical social analysis….
The book Berlin first wrote was not the book that the Home University Library published. According to his 1978 preface, the first draft was more than twice as long as the series allowed, and he dropped most of what he had written on Marx’s sociology, economics, and theory of history, recasting the book as an intel- lectual biography. Less may have been lost than that suggests. Berlin’s account of Marx’s life turned out to be more lastingly interesting than the innumerable interpretive disputes that have dominated academic discussion since. Astonishingly, the literary and expository personality that has since made Berlin’s work so instantly recognisable was already on full display.
A thumbnail sketch of Marx drawn from the Introduction to the first edition might have been written at any time in the next fifty years—one sentence lasts for a whole paragraph, powerful adjectives hunt in threes, the argument is carried by sharp an- titheses. The reader takes a deep breath and plunges in, to emerge several lines later exhilarated and breathless:
He was endowed with a powerful, active, unsentimental mind, an acute sense of injustice, and exceptionally little sensibility, and was repelled as much by the rhetoric and emotionalism of the intellectuals as by the stupidity and complacency of the bourgeoisie; the first seemed to him aimless chatter, remote from reality and, whether sincere or false, equally irritating; the second at once hypocritical and self-deceived, blinded to the salient features of its time by absorption in the pursuit of wealth and social status…
Few commentators even now have struck such a persuasive balance between psychological portraiture and intellectual analysis. Berlin leaves the reader with the sense that if Marx were to walk into the room we would know what to say to him—and, unless we were spoiling for a fight, what not to…
<https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781400848119-002/pdf>
