Ya know, I completely agree about the incompatibility of total liberty for the gifted and powerful with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted, and I can appreciate the differentiation between specialization compared to a broad worldview as underpinnings of expertise, but honestly? Isaiah Berlin sounds like kind of a dick.
Berlin guarded his reputation fiercely. One of the more absurd letters in the volume, and one which leaves a very nasty taste, is one he wrote to Anna Kallin, a fellow Russian Jewish émigré who was a producer of talks on the Third Programme. Kallin got Berlin to record eight hours of spontaneous, unscripted lectures on European thinkers for the radio. These were in turn advertised in Radio Times. The fact that they were spoken off the cuff was mentioned. "Mr Berlin is renowned for his fluent and witty expositions of abstract ideas. He has a reputation as a conversationalist which extends far beyond Oxford." The self-importance with which Berlin savaged Kallin for this little advertisement is breathtaking. He sees it as "revolting". Even in his apoplectic rage, he turns to the formula of the list. "I cannot understand why it was allowed to appear: after all, the R.T., would not or at least has not said things like that about Alan Pryce Jones or Eddie Sackville West or David Cecil or Stephen Spender". Then he adds, "Don't distress yourself about this letter. I cannot help writing it".Yeah, you know what? Fuck Isaiah Berlin.
I can't imagine why he might have been paranoid about antisemitism and anti-Jewish snobbery in the London of his day!
But from the names he mentions, this is clearly his point: to him, the ad may have sounded more like: "See the performing Jew, not terribly serious, not much of an intellectual, but as glib as they come!"
Oy? Oi!
Guy was ahead of his time. This is essentially what... some.. ah.. people I know... do on Facebook. Some "friend" posts one meaningless link to some article and then those people (who are certainly NOT me) comment with a 650-word screed about why it's so wrong and fucked up. Imagine what Berlin would do on Facebook.
The subject of a very funny Craig Brown parody in a recent Private Eye that I can't c and p because they keep their stuff offline forcing me to buy a sub.
'The web knows many small things but the Eye knows one big thing etc.'
A.N. Wilson seems to think Isaiah Berlin failed at being a dude because he failed to turn out a definitive massive tome, was chatty and made a lot of lists. I wonder what he thinks about Montaigne. (Or Berlin's and Kierkegaard's pet anti-hedgehog, J.G. Hamann, Kant's own Underminer.) Maybe Wilson is not all that into IB's whole autobiographical hedgehog/fox thing, but hedgehogs have grand theses whose truest expressions are tomes. Foxes write chatty, list-making, detour-taking essays. And so fuck hedgehogs. -- Also, eminent dead guy's private letters, some written when he was pissed off and maybe a little drunk, reviewed by literary journalist, metareviewed by blogger ... Hmm. Pot? Kettle?
Whenever someone's ready to start comparing jellyfish to slugs I'll probably have something bitter to say about it.
Balk, please - consider the source, booboo. A N Wilson is a prick par excellence, a petty, self-important, malicious snob who has neither the wit or the intellectual muscle he longs for and so never resists a chance of a smug side-swipe at the frailties of others: this 'review' is so laden with projection that it's veering into the surreal. Pull out that slim, elegant copy of the Four Essays on Liberty and remind yourself why Berlin matters.
Yeah! What she said!
I gotta agree. Wilson is in a perpetual snit because he's not G.K. Chesterton.
(I read that at first as "perpetual shit", and somehow that really worked for me too.)