Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty
- Book Review,
by Isaiah Berlin
Amazon.com
The Isaiah Berlin lectures collected in this volume were originally aired on BBC radio in 1952. They appear here in print for the first time, thanks to editor Henry Hardy, who produced these fine essays from BBC transcripts and Berlin's own notes. It is perhaps better to read Berlin than hear him; as Hardy points out in his introduction, the late thinker had the unfortunate habit of speaking rapidly. A contemporary once said he was "the only man who pronounces 'epistemological' as one syllable." Yet they are a joy to have in any form, as Berlin is a clear and crisp communicator of ideas. Political theory is not always the most engaging subject matter, but on these pages Berlin makes it accessible as he probes the legacies of "six thinkers who were hostile to liberty"--namely Helvetus, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Saint-Simon, and Maistre. He doesn't exactly beat around the bush. Rousseau, he writes, "claims to have been the most ardent and passionate lover of human liberty who ever lived." But Berlin's own verdict is quite different: He "was one of the most sinister and most formidable enemies of liberty in the whole history of modern thought." Reading these jarring essays is like listening to a favorite college professor lecture on a topic he knows well. --John Miller
From Booklist
*Starred Review* In 1952, the BBC broadcast six lectures by Berlin on philosophers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who profoundly affected subsequent European history and, balefully, traditional understandings of personal freedom. The talks captivated an enormous listenership and established Berlin as the premier popular authority on philosophy in Britain and America. This book publishes those lectures for the first time. Their subjects are Helvetius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Saint-Simon, and Maistre; that is, five progressives who favored the proposition that a person should be able to choose what he wants to do and acquire, provided he harms no others, and one conservative who distrusted such liberty. As each progressive developed his political thought, he saw the need for negating that kind of liberty. Helvetius' utilitarianism, Rousseau's concept of the general will, Fichte's triumphalist nationalism, Hegel's historical dialectic, and Saint-Simon's elitism all militate against personal freedom of choice because all assume that what is good for every human is ascertainable by reason and, because it is good, enforceable upon all. Practical politics informed by those progressive ideas produced those twentieth-century plagues, fascism and communism. Well before then, Maistre denounced reason, asserted that humans were basically self-destructive, and that only such irrational institutions as the church and hereditary monarchy, enforcing such irrational social arrangements as marriage and the loyalty of soldiers, kept societies intact. Of course, the tenor of Maistre's conservatism helped rather than hindered the revolutionaries he loathed after they seized power. Berlin's first great public successes remain utterly, indeed inspirationally, absorbing. Ray Olson
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Noel Malcolm, The Sunday Telegraph
The most famous lectures Berlin ever gave.... Never before [has] someone addressed such abstract topics with such fluency and intensity.
Stein Ringen, Times Literary Supplement
[Berlin] says . . . liberal values are simple truths which are always in danger of being crowded out by philosophical systems.
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