Historical Inevitability [is not] The Proper Study of Mankind, by Isaiah Berlin
False Dichotomies in theories of history. Isaiah Berlin doth protest too much, but the debate remains relevant today ..
Isaiah Berlin wrote:
HISTORICAL INEVITABILITY
[LSE lecture delivered in 1953, abbreviated here]
Section 2
The notion that one can discover large patterns or regularities in the procession of historical events is naturally attractive to those who are impressed by the success of the natural sciences in classifying, correlating, and above all predicting. They consequently seek to extend historical knowledge to fill gaps in the past (and, at times, to build into the limitless gap of the future) by applying 'scientific' method: by setting forth, armed with a metaphysical or empirical system, from such islands of certain, or virtually certain, knowledge of the facts as they claim to possess. And no doubt a great deal has been done, and will be done, in historical as in other fields by arguing from the known to the unknown, or from the little known to the even less known. But whatever value the perception of patterns or uniformities may have in stimulating or verifying specific hypotheses about the past or the future, it has played, and is increasingly playing, another and more dubious role in determining the outlook of our time. It has affected not merely ways of observing and describing the activities and characters of human beings, but moral and political and religious attitudes towards them. For among the questions which are bound to arise in any consideration of how and why human beings act and live as they do are questions of human motive and responsibility.
In describing human behaviour it has always been artificial and over-austere to omit questions of the character, purposes and motives of individuals. And in considering these one automatically evaluates not merely the degree and kind of influence of this or that motive or character upon what happens, but also its moral or political quality in terms of whatever scale of values one consciously or semi-consciously accepts in one's thought or action. How did this or that situation arise ? Who or what was or is (or will be, or could be) responsible for a war, a revolution, an economic collapse, a renaissance of arts and letters, a discovery or an invention or a spiritual transformation altering the lives of men?
It is by now a familiar story that there exist personal and impersonal theories of history. On the one hand, there are theories according to which the lives of entire peoples and societies have been decisively influenced by exceptional individuals - or, alternatively, doctrines according to which what happens occurs as a result not of the wishes and purposes of identifiable individuals, but of those of large numbers of unspecified persons, with the qualification that these collective wishes and goals are not solely or even largely determined by impersonal factors, and are therefore not wholly or even largely deducible from knowledge of natural forces alone, such as environment, or climate, or physical, physiological and psychological processes. On either view, it becomes the business of historians to investigate who wanted what, and when, and where, in what way; how many men avoided or pursued this or that goal, and with what intensity; and, further, to ask under what circumstances such wants or fears have proved effective, and to what extent, and with what consequences.
Against this kind of interpretation, in terms of the purposes and characters of individuals, there is a cluster of views (to which the progress of the natural sciences has given a great and growing prestige) according to which all explanations in terms of human intentions stem from a mixture of vanity and stubborn ignorance.
These views rest on the assumption that belief in the importance of the motives is delusive; that the behaviour of men is in fact made what it is by causes largely beyond the control of individuals; for instance by the influence of physical factors or of environment or of custom; or by the 'natural' growth of some larger unit — a race, a nation, a class, a biological species; or … by some entity conceived in even less empirical terms - a 'spiritual organism', a religion, a civilisation, a … World Spirit; entities whose careers or manifestations on earth are the object either of empirical or of metaphysical enquiries, depending on the cosmological outlook of particular thinkers.
Those who incline to this kind of impersonal interpretation of historical change, whether because they believe that it possesses greater scientific value (that is, enables them to predict the future or 'retrodict' the past more successfully or precisely), or because they believe that it embodies some crucial insight into the nature of the universe, are committed by it to tracing the ultimate responsibility for what happens to the acts or behaviour of impersonal or ‘trans-personal' or 'super-personal' entities or 'forces' whose evolution is identified with human history.
It is true that the more cautious and clear-headed among such theorists try to meet the objections of empirically minded critics by adding, in a footnote or as an afterthought, … that they fully realise that all institutions 'in the last analysis' consist of individual men and women, and are not themselves personalities but only convenient devices - idealised models, or types, or labels, or metaphors - different ways of classifying, grouping, explaining or predicting the properties or behaviour of individual human beings in terms of their more important … empirical characteristics.
Nevertheless these protestations too often turn out to be mere lip-service … Thus nations or cultures or civilisations … are certainly not merely convenient collective terms for individuals possessing certain characteristics in common; but seem more 'real' and more 'concrete' than the individuals who compose them. Individuals remain 'abstract' precisely because they are mere 'elements' or 'aspects', 'moments' artificially abstracted for ad hoc purposes, and literally without reality … apart from the wholes of which they form a part …
… whether the tone is charitable or sardonic, whether one condemns the errors of foolish individuals or the blind mob, or applauds their inevitable annihilation, [the] attitude rests on the belief that everything is caused to occur as it does by the machinery of history itself - by the impersonal forces of class, race, culture, History, Reason, the Life-Force, Progress, the Spirit of the Age. Given this organisation of our lives, which we did not create, and cannot alter, it, and it alone, is ultimately responsible for everything. To blame or praise individuals or groups of individuals for acting rightly or wrongly, so far as this entails a suggestion that they are in some sense genuinely free to choose between alternatives, and may therefore be justly and reasonably blamed or praised for choosing as they did and do, is a vast blunder, a return to some primitive or naive conception of human beings as being able somehow to evade total determination of their lives by forces natural or supernatural, a relapse into a childish animism which the study of the relevant scientific or metaphysical system should swiftly dispel. For if such choices were real, the determined world structure which alone, on this view, makes complete explanation, whether scientific or metaphysical, possible could not exist. And this is ruled out as unthinkable, 'reason rejects it', it is confused, delusive, superficial, a piece of puerile megalomania, pre-scientific, unworthy of civilised men.
The notion that history obeys laws, whether natural or supernatural, that every event of human life is an element in a necessary pattern, has deep metaphysical origins: infatuation with the natural sciences feeds this stream, but is not its sole or, indeed, its principal source. In the first place there is the teleological outlook whose roots reach back to the beginnings of human thought. It occurs in many versions, but what is common to them all is the belief that men, and all living creatures and perhaps inanimate things as well, not merely are as they are, but have functions and pursue purposes. These purposes are either imposed upon them by a creator who has made every person and thing to serve each a specific goal; or else these purposes are not, indeed, imposed by a creator but are, as it were, internal to their possessors, so that every entity has a 'nature' and pursues a specific goal which is 'natural' to it, and the measure of its perfection consists in the degree to which it fulfils it. Evil, vice, imperfection, all the various forms of chaos and error, are, on this view, forms of frustration, impeded efforts to reach such goals, failures due either to misfortune, which puts obstacles in the path of self-fulfilment, or to misdirected attempts to fulfil some goal not 'natural' to the entity in question.
In this cosmology the world of men (and, in some versions, the entire universe) is a single all-inclusive hierarchy … To know the 'cosmic' place of a thing or a person is to say what it is and does, and at the same time why it should be and do as it is and does. … To understand is to perceive patterns. To offer historical explanations is not merely to describe a succession of events, but to make it intelligible; to make intelligible is to reveal the basic pattern - not one of several possible patterns, but the one unique plan which, by being as it is, fulfils only one particular purpose, and consequently is revealed as fitting in a specifiable fashion within the single 'cosmic' overall schema which is the goal of the universe, the goal in virtue of which alone it is a universe at all, and not a chaos of unrelated bits and pieces. The more thoroughly the nature of this purpose is understood, and with it the pattern it entails in the various forms of human activity, the more explanatory or illuminating - the 'deeper' - the activity of the historian will be.
Unless an event, or the character of an individual, or the activity of this or that institution or group or historical personage, is explained as a necessary consequence of its place in the pattern (and the larger … the schema, the more likely it is to be the true one), no explanation - and therefore no historical account - is being provided. The more inevitable an event or an action or a character can be exhibited as being, the better it has been understood, the profounder the researcher's insight, the nearer we are to the one embracing, ultimate truth.
This attitude is profoundly anti-empirical. We attribute purposes to all things and persons not because we have evidence for this hypothesis; for if there were a question of evidence for it, there could in principle be evidence against it; and then some things and events might turn out to have no purpose and therefore, in the sense used above, be incapable of being fitted into the pattern, that is, of being explained at all; but this cannot be, and is rejected in advance, a priori. We are plainly dealing not with an empirical theory but with a metaphysical attitude which takes for granted that to explain a thing - to describe it as it 'truly' is, even to define it more than verbally, that is, superficially - is to discover its purpose. Everything is in principle explicable, for everything has a purpose, although our minds may be too feeble or too distraught to discover in any given case what this purpose is. On such a view to say of things or persons that they exist is to say that they pursue goals; to say that they exist or are real, yet literally lack a purpose, whether imposed from outside or 'inherent' or 'innate', is to say something not false, but literally self-contradictory and therefore meaningless. Teleology is not a theory, or a hypothesis, but a category or a framework in terms of which everything is, or should be, conceived and described. …
… Teleology is not, of course, the only metaphysics of history; side by side with it there has persisted a distinction of appearance and reality even more celebrated but of a somewhat different kind. For the teleological thinker all apparent disorder, inexplicable disaster, gratuitous suffering, unintelligible concatenations of random events are due not to the nature of things but to our failure to discover their purpose. Everything that seems useless, discordant, mean, ugly, vicious, distorted is needed, if we but knew it, for the harmony of the whole which only the Creator of the world, or the world itself (if it could become wholly aware of itself and its goals), can know. Total failure is excluded a priori, for at a 'deeper' level all processes will always be seen to culminate in success; and since there must always exist a level 'deeper' than that of any given insight, there is in principle no empirical test of what constitutes 'ultimate' success or failure. Teleology is a form of faith capable of neither confirmation nor refutation by any kind of experience; the notions of evidence, proof, probability and so on are wholly inapplicable to it. …
… What all these concepts - metaphysical and scientific alike - have in common … is the notion that to explain is to subsume under general formulae, to represent as examples of laws which cover an infinite number of instances; so that with knowledge of all the relevant laws, and of a sufficient range of relevant facts, it will be possible to tell not merely what happens, but also why; for, if the laws have been correctly established, to describe something is, in effect, to assert that it cannot happen otherwise.
The question 'Why?' for teleologists means 'In pursuit of what unalterable goal?'; for the non teleological metaphysical 'realists' it means 'Determined unalterably by what ultimate pattern?'; and for the upholders of the Comtean ideals of social statics and dynamics it means 'Resulting from what causes ?' … which are as they are, whether they might have been otherwise or not.
The inevitability of historical processes, of trends, of 'rises' and 'falls', is merely de facto for those who believe that the universe obeys only 'natural laws' which make it what it is; it is … the justification as well as the explanation for those who see such uniformity as … brute fact, something unchangeable and unquestionable … as patterns, plans, purposes, ideals, as thoughts in the mind of a rational Deity or Universal Reason, as goals, as aesthetic, self-fulfilling wholes, as metaphysical rationales, theological other worldly justifications, as theodicies, which satisfy the craving to know not merely why the world exists, but why it is worthy of existence; and why it is this particular world that exists, rather than some other, or no world at all; the solution being provided in terms of values which are either somehow 'embedded' in the facts themselves or 'determine' them from some 'transcendent' height or depth.
All these theories are, in one sense or another, forms of determinism, whether they be teleological, metaphysical, mechanistic, religious, aesthetic or scientific. And one common characteristic of all such outlooks is the implication that the individual's freedom of choice … is ultimately an illusion, that the notion that human beings could have chosen otherwise than they did usually rests upon ignorance of facts; with the consequence that any assertion that they should have acted thus or thus, might have avoided this or that, and deserve … praise or blame, approval or condemnation, rests upon the presupposition that some area, at any rate, of their lives is not totally determined by laws, whether metaphysical or theological or expressing the generalised probabilities of the sciences. And this assumption, it is then maintained, is patently false. The advance of knowledge constantly brings new areas of experience under the sway of laws which make systematic inference and prediction possible. …
… Different though the tone of these forms of determinism may be - whether scientific, humanitarian and optimistic or furious, apocalyptic and exultant - they agree in this: that the world has a direction and is governed by laws, and that the direction and the laws can in some degree be discovered by employing the proper techniques of investigation; and moreover that the working of these laws can only be grasped by those who realise that the lives, characters and acts of individuals, both mental and physical, are governed by the larger 'wholes' to which they belong, and that it is the independent evolution of these 'wholes' that constitutes the so called 'forces' in terms of whose direction truly 'scientific' … history must be formulated. To find the explanation of why given individuals, or groups of them, act or think or feel in one way rather than another, one must first seek to understand the structure, the state of development and the direction of such 'wholes', for example, the social, economic, political, religious institutions to which such individuals belong; once that is known, the behaviour of the individuals (or the most characteristic among them) should become almost logically deducible, and does not constitute a separate problem. …
… What the variants of … these attitudes entail, like all forms of genuine determinism, is the elimination of the notion of individual responsibility. It is, after all, natural enough for men, whether for practical reasons or because they are given to reflection, to ask who or what is responsible for this or that state of affairs which they view with satisfaction or anxiety, enthusiasm or horror. If the history of the world is due to the operation of identifiable forces other than, and little affected by, free human wills and free choices (whether these occur or not), then the proper explanation of what happens must be given in terms of the evolution of such forces. And there is then a tendency to say that not individuals, but these larger entities, are ultimately ‘responsible'. …
… [It] is in effect to say that I must either seek not to praise or blame at all, or, if I cannot avoid doing so because I am a human being and my views are inevitably shot through with moral assessments, I should seek to do so justly, with detachment, on the evidence, not blaming men for failing to do the impossible, and not praising them for it either. …
And yet it is this, it seems to me, that is virtually denied by those historians and sociologists, steeped in metaphysical or scientific determinism, who think it right to say that in (what they are fond of calling) 'the last analysis', everything … boils down to the effects of class, or race, or civilisation, or social structure. …
Section 3
… Any form of moral censure … tends, so far as possible, to be explained away as one or other sophisticated version of primitive taboos or psychical tensions or conflicts, now appearing as moral consciousness, now as some other sanction, growing out of, and battening upon, that ignorance which alone generates fallacious beliefs in free will and uncaused choice, doomed to disappear in the growing light of scientific or metaphysical truth.
Or, again, we find that the adherents of a sociological or historical or anthropological metaphysics tend to interpret the sense of mission and dedication, the voice of duty, all forms of inner compulsion of this type, as being an expression within each individual's conscious life of the 'vast impersonal forces' which control it, and which speak 'in us', 'through us', 'to us', for their own inscrutable purposes. To hear is then literally to obey - to be drawn towards the true goal of our 'real' self, or its 'natural' or 'rational' development - that to which we are called in virtue of belonging to this or that class, or nation, or race, or Church, or station in society, or tradition, or age, or culture. The explanation, and in some sense the weight of responsibility, for all human action is … transferred to the broad backs of these vast impersonal forces - institutions or historic trends - better made to bear such burdens than a feeble thinking reed like man …
… Vice, pain, folly, maladjustment, all come from failure to understand, from failure, in E. M. Forster's celebrated phrase, to ‘connect'. This is the sermon preached to us by great and noble thinkers of very different outlooks, by Spinoza and Godwin, by Tolstoy and Comte, by mystics and rationalists, theologians and scientific materialists, metaphysicians and dogmatic empiricists, American sociologists, Russian Marxists and German historicists alike. …
… Tradition or blood or class or human nature or progress or humanity; the Zeitgeist or the social structure or the laws of history or the true ends of life; know these - be true to them - and you will be free. From Zeno to Spinoza, from the Gnostics to Leibniz, from Thomas Hobbes to Lenin and Freud, the battle-cry has been essentially the same; the object of knowledge and the methods of discovery have often been violently opposed, but that reality is knowable, and that knowledge and only knowledge liberates, and absolute knowledge liberates absolutely - that is common to many doctrines which are so large and valuable a part of Western civilisation. …
Section 4
… The historian is, we are told, not a judge but a detective; he provides the evidence, and the reader, who has none of the professional responsibilities of the expert, can form what moral conclusions he likes. As a general warning against moralising history this is, particularly in times of acute partisan emotion, timely enough. But it must not be interpreted literally. For it depends upon a false analogy with some among the more exact of the natural sciences. In these last, objectivity has a specific meaning. It means that methods and criteria of a less or more precisely defined kind are being used with scrupulous care; and that evidence, arguments, conclusions are formulated in the special terminology invented or employed for the specific purpose of each science, and that there is no intrusion (or almost none) of irrelevant considerations or concepts or categories, that is, those specifically excluded by the canons of the science in question.
I am not sure whether history can usefully be called a science at all, but certainly it is not a science in this sense. For it employs few, if any, concepts or categories peculiar to itself. Attempts to construct special sets of concepts and special techniques for history have proved sterile, for they either misdescribed - over schematised - our experience, or they were felt not to provide answers to our questions. …
… But just as our ordinary speech would become fantastically distorted by a conscious effort to eliminate from it some basic ingredient - say, everything remotely liable to convey value judgements, our normal, scarcely noticed, moral or psychological attitudes - and just as this is not regarded as indispensable for the preservation of what we should look upon as a normal modicum of objectivity, impartiality and accuracy, so, for the same reason, no such radical remedy is needed for the preservation of a reasonable modicum of these qualities in the writing of history. There is a sense in which a physicist can, to a large degree, speak with different voices as a physicist and as a human being; although even there the line between the two vocabularies is anything but clear or absolute. It is possible that this may in some measure be true of economists or psychologists; it grows progressively less true as we leave mathematical methods behind us, for example, in palaeography, or the history of science or that of the woollen trade; and it comes perilously near an absurdity when demanded of social or political historians, however skilled in the appropriate techniques, however professional, how ever rigorous. History is not identical with imaginative literature, but it is certainly not free from what, in a natural science, would be rightly condemned as unwarrantably subjective and even, in an empirical sense of the term, intuitive. Except on the assumption that history must deal with human beings purely as material objects in space - must, in short, be behaviourist - its method can scarcely be assimilated to the standards of an exact natural science.
The invocation to historians to suppress even that minimal degree of moral or psychological insight and evaluation which is necessarily involved in viewing human beings as creatures with purposes and motives (and not merely as causal factors in the procession of events) seems to me to spring from a confusion of the aims and methods of the humane studies with those of natural science. Purely descriptive, wholly depersonalised history remains, what it has always been, a figment of abstract theory, a violently exaggerated reaction to the cant and vanity of earlier generations. …
Section 6
… Historians or philosophers of history … warn us about the dangers of moralising, of applying dogmatic standards … yet we must be on our guard lest we protest too much, and, on the plea of curbing excesses, use means which promote some of the diseases of which they purport to be the cure. …
… These are proper sentiments. It follows that we must, if we are to judge fairly, have adequate evidence before us; possess sufficient imagination, sufficient sense of how institutions develop, how human beings act and think, to enable us to achieve understanding of times and places and characters and predicaments very unlike our own; not let ourselves be blinded by prejudice and passion; make every effort to construct cases for those whom we condemn - better cases … than they made or could have made for themselves; not look at the past solely through the eyes of the victors; not lean over too far towards the vanquished, as if truth and justice were the monopoly of the martyrs and the minorities; and strive to remain fair even to the big battalions.
All this cannot be gainsaid: it is true, just, relevant, but perhaps hardly startling. And we can add as a corollary: other times, other standards; nothing is absolute or unchanging; time and chance alter all things; and that too would be a set of truisms. Surely it is not necessary to dramatise these simple truths, which are by now, if anything, too familiar, in order to remember that the purposes, the ultimate ends of life, pursued by men are many, even within one culture and generation; that some of these come into conflict, and lead to clashes between societies, parties, individuals, and not least within individuals themselves; and furthermore that the ends of one age and country differ widely from those of other times and other outlooks.
And if we understand how conflicts between ends equally ultimate and sacred, but irreconcilable within the breast of even a single human being, or between different men or groups, can lead to tragic and unavoidable collisions, we shall not distort the moral facts by artificially ordering them in terms of some one absolute criterion; recognising that … not all good things are necessarily compatible with one another; and shall seek to comprehend the changing ideas of cultures, peoples, classes and individual human beings, without asking which are right, which wrong, at any rate not in terms of some simple home-made dogma. We shall not condemn the Middle Ages simply because they fell short of the moral or intellectual standard of the revolte intelligentsia of Paris in the eighteenth century, or denounce these latter … Or, if we do condemn societies or individuals, we shall do so only after taking into account their social and material conditions, their aspirations, codes of value, degrees of progress and reaction, measured in terms of their own situation and outlook; and judge them … as we judge anyone or anything: in terms partly of what we like, approve, believe in and think right ourselves, partly of the views of the societies and individuals in question, and of what we think about such views, and of how far we, being what we are, think it natural or desirable to have a wide variety of views; and of what we think of the importance of motives as against that of consequences, or of the value of consequences as against the quality of motives, and so on. We judge as we judge, we take the risks which this entails, we accept correction wherever this seems valid, we go too far, and under pressure we retract. We make hasty generalisations, we prove mistaken, and, if we are honest, we withdraw. We seek to be understanding and just, or we seek to derive practical lessons, or to be amused, and we expose ourselves to praise and blame and criticism and correction and misunderstanding. But in so far as we claim to understand the standards of others, whether members of our own societies or those of distant countries and ages, to grasp what we are told by spokesmen of many different traditions and attitudes, to understand why they think as they think and say what they say, then, so long as these claims are not absurdly false, the 'relativism' and 'subjectivism' of other civilisations do not preclude us from sharing common assumptions, sufficient for some communication with them, for some degree of understanding and being understood.
This common ground is what is correctly called objective - that which enables us to identify other men and other civilisations as human and civilised at all. When this breaks down we do cease to understand, and, ex hypothesi, we misjudge; but since by the same hypothesis we cannot be sure how far communication has broken down, how far we are being deluded by historical mirages, we cannot always take steps to avert this or discount its consequences. We seek to understand by putting together as much as we can out of the fragments of the past, make out the best, most plausible cases for persons and ages remote from or unsympathetic or for some reason inaccessible to us; we do our utmost to extend the frontiers of knowledge and imagination; as to what happens beyond all possible frontiers, we cannot tell and consequently cannot care; for it is nothing to us. What we can discern we seek to describe as accurately and fully as possible; as for the darkness which surrounds the field of our vision, it is opaque to us, concerning it our judgements are neither subjective nor objective; what is beyond the horizon of vision cannot disturb us in what we are able to see or seek to know; what we can never know cannot make us doubt or reject that which we do. Some of our judgements are, no doubt, relative and subjective, but others are not; for if none were so, if objectivity were in principle inconceivable, the terms ‘subjective’ and 'objective', no longer contrasted, would mean nothing; for all correlatives stand and fall together. So much for the secular argument that we must not judge, lest … we be judged, with the equally fallacious corollary that no individual in history can rightly be pronounced innocent or guilty, for the values in terms of which he is so described are subjective, spring from self-interest or class interest or a passing phase of a culture or from some other such cause; and the verdict has therefore no 'objective' status and no real authority.
And what of the other argument - the tout comprendre maxim? It appeals to the world order. If the world follows a fixed design and every element in it is determined by every other, then to understand a fact, a person, a civilisation is to grasp its relationship to the cosmic design, in which it plays a unique part; and to grasp its meaning is to grasp, as we have shown before, its value, its justification, too. …
The empirical versions of this view take the form of belief in some kind of universal sociological causation … [or] they may take a neutral attitude and seek only to establish that there exists an inexorable sequence of cause and effect; that everything, both mental and physical, is subject to discoverable laws; that to understand them is not necessarily to approve, but at least makes it pointless to blame men for not having done better; for there was no other alternative which such men could - causally could - have chosen; so that their historical alibi is unbreakable. … For if we are unhappy, because we cannot have something we want, we must seek happiness by teaching ourselves to want only what we cannot anyhow avoid. That is the lesson of the Stoics, as it is, less obviously, that of some modern sociologists. Determinism is held to be 'demonstrated' by scientific observation; responsibility is a delusion; praise and blame are subjective attitudes put to flight by the advance of knowledge. To explain is to justify; one cannot complain of what cannot be otherwise; and natural morality … is the morality and the life whose values are identified with the actual march of events, whether it be metaphysically deduced from some intuitive insight into the nature of reality and its ultimate purpose, or established by scientific methods. …
Section 7 [final]
Two powerful doctrines are at large in contemporary thought, relativism and determinism. The first of these, for all that it is represented as being an antidote to overweening self-confidence, or arrogant dogmatism, or moral self-satisfaction, is nevertheless founded on a fallacious interpretation of experience; the second, for all that its chains are decked with flowers, and despite its parade of noble stoicism and the splendour and vastness of its cosmic design, nevertheless represents the universe as a prison. Relativism opposes to individual protest and belief in moral principles the resignation or the irony of those who have seen many worlds crumble, many ideals turned tawdry or ridiculous by time. Determinism claims to bring us to our senses by showing where the true, the impersonal and unalterable, machinery of life and thought is to be found. The first, when it ceases to be a maxim, or merely a salutary reminder to us of our limitations or of the complexity of the issue, and claims our attention as a serious Weltanschauung, rests on the misuse of words, a confusion of ideas, and relies upon a logical fallacy. The second, when it goes beyond indicating specific obstacles to free choice where examinable evidence for this can be adduced, turns out to rest either on a mythology or on a metaphysical dogma. Both have … succeeded in reasoning or frightening men out of their most human moral or political convictions in the name of a deeper and more devastating insight into the nature of things. Yet, perhaps, this is no more than a sign of neurosis and confusion: for neither view seems to be supported by human experience. Why then should either doctrine (but especially determinism) have bound its spell so powerfully on so many otherwise clear and honest minds?
One of the deepest of human desires is to find a unitary pattern in which the whole of experience, past, present and future, actual, possible and unfulfilled, is symmetrically ordered. It is often expressed by saying that once upon a time there was a harmonious unity - 'the unmediated whole of feeling and thought', 'the unity of the knower and the known', of 'the outer and the inner', of subject and object, form and matter, self and not-self; that this was somehow broken; and that the whole of human experience has consisted in an endless effort to reassemble the fragments, to restore the unity, and so to escape or 'transcend' categories - ways of thinking - which split and isolate and 'kill' the living reality, and 'dirempt' [separate something forcefully or violently] us from it. We are told of an endless quest to find an answer to the puzzle, to return to the seamless whole, to the paradise whence we were expelled, or to inherit one which we have still not done enough to earn.
This central conception, whatever its origin or value, is surely at the heart of much metaphysical speculation, of much striving for the unification of the sciences, and of a large proportion of aesthetic and logical, social and historical thought … [where] claims have been made, widely varying in degree of generality and confidence, to be able to trace a structure of history … to discover the one and only true pattern into which alone all facts will be found to fit.
But this is not, and can never be, accepted by any serious historian … For he does not perceive one unique schema as the truth - the only real framework in which alone the facts truly lie; he does not distinguish the one real, cosmic pattern from false ones, as he certainly seeks to distinguish real facts from fiction. The same facts can be arranged in more than one single pattern, seen from several perspectives, displayed in many lights, all of them valid, although some will be more suggestive or fertile in one field than in another, or unify many fields in some illuminating fashion, or, alternatively, bring out disparities and open chasms. … historians will instinctively perceive that some kind of violence is being done to the facts, that the relation between evidence and interpretation is in some way abnormal; and that this is so not because there is doubt about the facts, but because there is an obsessive pattern at work. Freedom from such idees fixes … distinguishes true history from the mythology of a given period; for there is no historical thought, properly speaking, save where facts can be distinguished not merely from fiction, but from theory and interpretation … to a lesser or greater degree. …
… The attempt … to shuffle off responsibility, which, at an empirical level, seems to rest upon this or that historical individual or society, or on a set of opinions held or propagated by one of these, on to some metaphysical machinery which, because it is impersonal, excludes the very idea of moral responsibility, must always be invalid; and the desire to do so may … be written down to the wish to escape from an untidy, cruel and above all seemingly purposeless world, into a realm where all is harmonious, clear, intelligible, mounting towards some perfect culmination which satisfies the demands of 'reason', or an aesthetic feeling, or a metaphysical impulse or religious craving; above all, where nothing can be the object of criticism or complaint or condemnation or despair.
The matter is more serious when empirical arguments are advanced for a historical determinism which excludes the notion of personal responsibility. We are here no longer dealing with the metaphysics of history … as obvious substitutes for theology. We have before us the great sociological theories of history - the materialistic or scientific interpretations which began with Montesquieu and the philosophes, and led to the great schools of the nineteenth century, from the Saint-Simonians and Hegelians to the followers of Comte, Marx, Darwin and the liberal economists; from Freud, Pareto and Sorel to the ideologists of Fascism. Of these Marxism is much the boldest and the most intelligent, but its practitioners, much as they have added to our understanding, have not succeeded in their gallant and powerful attempt to turn history into a science. Arising out of this great movement we have the vast proliferation of anthropological and sociological studies of civilised societies, with their tendency to trace all character and behaviour to the same kind of relatively irrational and unconscious causes as those which are held to have so successfully explained the behaviour of primitive societies; we have witnessed the rebirth of the notion of the 'sociology of knowledge', which suggests that not only our methods but our conclusions and our reasons for believing them, in the entire realm of knowledge, can be shown to be wholly or largely determined by the stage reached in the development of our class or group, or nation or culture, or whatever other unit may be chosen; followed, in due course, by the fusion of these … quasi-scientific, doctrines with such non-empirical figments - at times all but personified powers both good and bad - as 'the collectivist spirit', or 'the Myth of the Twentieth Century', or 'the contemporary collapse of values' (sometimes called 'the crisis of faith'), or 'modern man', or 'the last stage of capitalism’. …
… There has grown up in our modern time a pseudo-sociological mythology which, in the guise of scientific concepts, has developed into a new animism - certainly a more primitive and naive religion than the traditional European faiths which it seeks to replace. This new cult leads troubled persons to ask such questions as 'Is war inevitable?' or 'Must collectivism triumph?', or 'Is civilisation doomed?' These questions, and the tone in which they are posed, and the way in which they are discussed, imply a belief in the occult presence of vast impersonal entities - wars, collectivism, doom - agencies and forces at large in the world which we have but little power to control or deflect. Sometimes these are said to 'embody themselves' in great men, titanic figures who, because they are at one with their age, achieve superhuman results … the great capitalist combines, which work for ends that their members scarcely understand themselves, ends towards which their economic and social position 'inevitably' drives them; sometimes in huge inchoate entities called 'the masses', which do the work of history, little knowing of what mighty forces they are the 'creative vehicles'. … It is perhaps not to be wondered at that, with so luxurious a growth of similes and metaphors, many innocent persons nowadays tend to believe that their lives are dominated not merely by relatively stable, easily identifiable, material factors - physical nature and the laws dealt with by the natural sciences; but by even more powerful and sinister, and far less intelligible, factors - the impersonal struggles of classes which members of these classes may not intend, the collision of social forces, the incidences of slumps and booms which, like tides and harvests, can scarcely be controlled by those whose lives depend upon them - above all, by inexorable 'societal' and 'behavioural' patterns, to quote but a few sacred words from the barbarous vocabulary of the new mythologies.
Cowed and humbled by the panoply of the new divinities, men are eager, and seek anxiously, for knowledge and comfort in the sacred books and in the new orders of priesthood which afect to tell them about the attributes and habits of their new masters. And the books and their expositors do speak words of comfort: demand creates supply. Their message is simple and very ancient. In a world where such monsters clash, individual human beings can have but little responsibility for what they do; the discovery of the new, terrifying, impersonal forces may render life infinitely more dangerous, yet if they serve no other purpose, they do, at any rate, divest their victims of all responsibility - from all those moral burdens which men in less enlightened days used to carry with such labour and anguish. … Some human beings have always preferred the peace of imprisonment, a contented security, a sense of having at last found one's proper place in the cosmos, to the painful conflicts and perplexities of the disordered freedom of the world beyond the walls.
Yet this is odd. For the assumptions upon which this kind of determinism has been erected are, when examined, exceedingly unplausible. What are these forces and these inexorable historical laws? What historiographer, what sociologist, can claim as yet to have produced empirical generalisations comparable to the great uniformities of the natural sciences? It is a commonplace to say that sociology still awaits its Newton, but even this seems much too audacious a claim; it has yet to find its Euclid and its Archimedes, before it can begin to dream of a Copernicus. … The eponymous hero to honour whose memory these words are being uttered, Auguste Comte, founded it a full hundred years ago, and its great nomothetic conquests are still to come. It has affected other disciplines most fruitfully, notably history, to which it has added a dimension; but it has as yet succeeded in discovering so few laws, or wide generalisations supported by adequate evidence, that its plea to be treated as a natural science can scarcely be entertained … In the great and fertile field of sociology (unlike her more speculative but far more effective younger sister, psychology) loose generalisations of historically trained minds still … seem more fruitful than their 'scientific' equivalents. …
… If social and psychological determinism were established as an accepted truth, our world would be transformed more radically than was the teleological world of the classical and medieval ages by the triumphs of mechanistic principles or those of natural selection. Our words - our modes of speech and thought - would be transformed in literally unimaginable ways; the notions of choice, of responsibility, of freedom are so deeply embedded in our outlook that our new life, as creatures in a world genuinely lacking in these concepts, can, I should maintain, be conceived by us only with the greatest difficulty.
But there is, as yet, no need to alarm ourselves unduly. We are speaking only of pseudo-scientific ideals; the reality is not in sight. The evidence for a thoroughgoing determinism is not to hand; and if there is a persistent tendency to believe in it in some theoretical fashion, that is surely due far more to the lure of a 'scientistic' or metaphysical ideal or to a tendency on the part of those who desire to change society to believe that the stars in their courses are fighting for them. Or it may be due to a longing to lay down moral burdens, or minimise individual responsibility and transfer it to impersonal forces which can be accused of causing all our discontents, rather than to any increase in our powers of critical reflection or improvement in our scientific techniques. Belief in historical determinism of this type is, of course, very widespread … Yet … a contrary trend is discernible today. Our best historians use empirical tests in sifting facts, make microscopic examinations of the evidence, deduce no patterns, and show no false fear in attributing responsibility to individuals. …
… Those who are concerned with human affairs are committed to the use of the moral categories and concepts which normal language incorporates and expresses. Chemists, philologists, logicians, even sociologists with a strong quantitative bias, by using morally neutral technical terms, can avoid these concepts. But historians can scarcely do so. They need not - they are certainly not obliged to - moralise: but neither can they avoid the use of normal language with all its associations and 'built in' moral categories. To seek to avoid this is to adopt another moral outlook, not none at all. The time will come when men will wonder how this strange view, which combines a misunderstanding of the relation of value to fact with cynicism disguised as stern impartiality, can ever have achieved such remark able fame and influence and respectability. For it is not scientific … principally it seems to me to spring from a desire to resign our responsibility, to cease from judging, provided we ourselves are not judged and, above all, are not compelled to judge ourselves; from a desire to flee for refuge to some vast amoral, impersonal, monolithic whole - nature, or history, or class, or race, or the 'harsh realities of our time', or the irresistible evolution of the social structure - that will absorb and integrate us into its limitless, indifferent, neutral texture, which it is senseless to evaluate or criticise, and against which we fight to our certain doom. …
… It is one of the great alibis, pleaded by those who cannot or do not wish to face the fact of human responsibility, the existence of a limited but nevertheless real area of human freedom, either because they have been too deeply wounded or frightened to wish to return to the traffic of normal life, or because they are filled with moral indignation against the false values and the, to them, repellent moral codes of their own society, or class, or profession, and take up arms against all ethical codes as such, as a dignified means of casting off a morality which is to them, perhaps justifiably, repulsive.
Nevertheless, such views, although they may spring from a natural reaction against too much moral rhetoric, are a desperate remedy; those who hold them use history as a method of escape from a world which has, for some reason, grown odious to them, into a fantasy where impersonal entities avenge their grievances and set everything right, to the greater or lesser discomfiture of their persecutors, real and imaginary. And in the course of this they describe the normal lives lived by men in terms which fail to mark the most important psychological and moral distinctions known to us. This they do in the service of an imaginary science; and, like the astrologers and soothsayers whom they have succeeded, cast up their eyes to the clouds, and speak in immense, unsubstantiated images and similes, in deeply misleading metaphors and allegories, and make use of hypnotic formulae with little regard for experi ence, or rational argument, or tests of proven reliability. Thereby they throw dust in their own eyes as well as in ours, obstruct our vision of the real world, and further confuse an already sufficiently bewildered public about the relations of morality to politics, and about the nature and methods of the natural sciences and historical studies alike. [END]
The Sources:
Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, edited by Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer, with a foreword by Noel Annan and an introduction by Roger Hausheer, Random House 1997
The chapter exhibited here is:
Historical Inevitability, the first Auguste Comte Memorial Trust Lecture, delivered on 12 May 1953 at the London School of Economics and Political Science, published by Oxford University Press in London in 1954, and reprinted in revised form in Four Essays on Liberty (London and New York, 1969: Oxford University Press).
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.