England’s Isaiah

Letters

Vol. 13 No. 1 · 10 January 1991

From John Bayley

From where does Perry Anderson (LRB, 20 December 1990) get ‘black-white-gold colours flying again in Moscow’? True, the Tsarist house flag was the black dvuglavyi orel on a gold field, but the Imperial banner of all the Russias, now waving in the Red Square, was borrowed by Peter the Great from the Dutch red-white-blue horizontal tricolour, the white stripe being put at the top. A very pretty flag it is too.

John Bayley
Oxford

Vol. 13 No. 2 · 24 January 1991

From Noël Annan

Perry Anderson (LRB, 20 December 1990) called me Isaiah Berlin’s panegyrist, and in one respect his critique pleased me. Characteristic of his prodigious industry, he has read virtually everything Berlin has written or said in ephemeral interviews; and he is serious – not one snide personal remark. Yet Berlin has long been a thorn in his flesh. More than twenty years ago Anderson wrote an article explaining why no Marxist interpretation of British culture existed: indeed, why no sociology of any kind illuminated the scene. The explanation was that the wrong kind of émigré had decided to stay here. America got real radicals like Marcuse and his Frankfurt colleagues. Britain got reactionary liberals, or worse, like Namier, Hayek, Popper, Gombrich, Wittgenstein – and Berlin. The Establishment fawned on them, whereas Isaac Deutscher, ‘the greatest Marxist historian in the world’, was ‘reviled and ignored by the academic world’.

In 1990, Anderson revised his account of British culture in two long articles. He had changed his tone, which was no longer contemptuous. Sociology now flourished, stalwart interpretations by the Left had been made of every branch of humane studies, and the failure of Labour governments and the depredations of Thatcher had radicalised the by now far more numerous intelligentsia. Mysteriously, however, socialism had collapsed in Europe, and even more mysteriously, capitalism displayed a saucy resilience. No mention of Deutscher now. Nor of Berlin. But it looks as if Anderson has a need somehow to get Berlin out of his system – and out of ours. Has he succeeded?

His first step is to declare Berlin an anachronism. Quentin Skinner and other scholars followed Butterfield’s injunction to study the past in its own terms and reveal what concepts such as liberty meant to Hobbes and Locke. But Berlin played the game of ‘swooping pedigrees through time’: in other words, believing in the continuity of ideas through social change. Nor was he above wrenching a phrase from Kant out of context. This is a curious argument for a Marxist to use. Skinner’s method is as inimical to Marxist as to Whig interpretations of political thought. Is Anderson appointing himself clerk of the course and ruling that some historians of ideas should not come under starter’s orders?

But the horse Anderson wants to nobble is pluralism. How does he do it? He first accuses Berlin of inconsistency. Pluralism means accepting diversity of values and the conflicts such diversity brings. He says Berlin believes such conflicts can be resolved by trade-offs. Whereas Weber admitted that the conflict of ends was inescapable, Berlin pretends it isn’t. But Berlin says no such thing. Sometimes some conflicts can be resolved by trade-offs. Sometimes not – and the parties agree to let each other live. That presupposes some minimum common ground exists between them. But at other times as in Northern Ireland, no common ground exists. Then authority has to step in and others judge how humanely it acts.

Lastly Anderson produces an argument to clinch matters. Let us allow that trade-offs are possible within a nation. But when rival nations clash there can be no trade-offs. There can be only stand-offs. The disaster of the Great War was caused, he says, by a liberal civilisation plunging Europe into war and the 20th century into ‘modern barbarism’. That, and not ‘the obscure eddies in tiny circles of socialist émigrés’, should have been Berlin’s concern.

Well, really! So liberalism and Berlin’s cautious pluralism were responsible for 1914! The ‘liberal’, civilisation of Wilhelmine Germany, Franz-Josef’s Austria-Hungary, the Sultanate of Turkey, Tsarist Russia! Where is the barbarism in Weimar Germany, the France of Poincaré and Blum, the Britain of Baldwin and Churchill? If we are to search for the progenitors of barbarism, where better than in those émigré circles in which Lenin moved and which were to institute the barbarism of Stalin’s regime and its antidote Hitler?

Anderson believes in ideological systems, and like a warder in a lunatic asylum is determined to put Berlin in a straitjacket. But Berlin does not believe in such systems. He never intends to square the circle and distrusts those who do so whether they are Ayer, Condorcet or Marx – though he has written with much sympathy about each of them. Instead of trying to prove that Berlin’s pluralism is really monist, should not Anderson reconsider the validity of his system, which, wherever it has been put into practice, has brought tyranny, has ignored what people want, and has been indifferent to the health of the industrial workers whom allegedly the state exists to protect?

Noël Annan
London NW8

From Keith Flett

Perry Anderson’s lengthy discussion of the work of Isaiah Berlin brings to mind Anderson’s 1969 essay ‘Components of the National Culture’, in which he notes of Berlin’s work that ‘the end-product is typically a mythical genealogy in which ideas generate themselves in a manichean morality tale, whose teleological outcome is the present struggle of the free world against totalitarian communism.’ Quite.

Anderson now describes Berlin as a man of the ‘moderate Left’. I do not sense that Berlin’s ideas have changed all that much these last 20 years. But as for Anderson: what went wrong, comrade?

Whenever I read a piece by Ken Jones, author of ‘The National Curriculum’ (LRB, 10 January), the same question comes to mind. Yes, there has been a lot to defend in education these last ten-odd years. And perhaps those on the left, like Jones, have ended up having to defend what in happier times might have been subjected to stringent criticism. The very concept of a national curriculum, for example. But it goes further than this.

In the Seventies Jones amongst many others was associated with a view of education which was very critical of state provision from above and none too happy about the Labour Party’s role in it either. There is still a lot of this feeling in what Jones writes: when he refers to ‘informed popular involvement’ in children’s education, for example. But the whole emphasis has changed from democratic radical education from below to progressive policy from the top. And Jones as an educational commentator is, sadly, the worse for it.

Keith Flett
London N17

Vol. 13 No. 4 · 21 February 1991

From Perry Anderson

John Bayley (Letters, 10 January) wonders where I found a Russian tricolour of black, gold and white. The answer is: from the Imperial decree of 1858 which made it the correct flag of the Empire, in concord with the Romanov arms – and from the processions in Moscow today, in which rival banners express attachment to different aspects of the old order. There are those for whom it is more handsome a symbol of the past than the Batavian colours of which Bayley is fond.

Perry Anderson
Los Angeles