The trouble with the Enlightenment

Mark Lilla

• The Magus of the North: J.G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy
  Murray, 144 pp, £14.99, October 1993, ISBN 0 7195 5312 1

In his distinguished career as an intellectual historian, Isaiah Berlin has established himself as our foremost collector of stray philosophical puppies. Vico, Herder, Maistre, and now Hamann: these are not household names, not even in the upper reaches of what used to be called the Ivory Tower. Berlin’s interest in them is anything but pedantic, however. In essay after elegant essay he has laboured to persuade us that these half-forgotten thinkers can help us to answer the central question raised by modern historical experience: how did the optimistic, progressive spirit of the 18th-century Enlightenment give way to the two dark and dangerous centuries that followed? And while he has offered no final answer to this question, he believes one is to be sought in the clash of rival instincts and irreconcilable aims that have haunted the modern mind. Enlightenment versus Counter-Enlightenment, rationalism versus romanticism, monism versus pluralism, hedgehogs versus foxes, positive liberty versus negative liberty – it is in these oppositions that we must try to understand ourselves and our times.