Commenting on those who “look for light” in “dark times” in “the life and work of others,” Jeremy Waldron confessed himself “skeptical” about the “expectation” that this strategy would help, or “about any such question: ‘What would the Framers do?’ ‘What would Leo Strauss do?’ ‘What would Jesus do?’” (Jeremy Waldron, “What would Hannah Say?” New York Review of Books, March 15, 2007).
In his new book, which summons Isaiah Berlin’s wisdom instead, George Crowder asks what his hero would say about various quandaries, in a series of chapters on classic tropes of Berlin scholarship such as pluralism or current themes like COVID-19 or neoliberalism. Crowder avoids the concern that one of Berlin’s successors as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford expressed about treating past thinkers “as a source of sibyllic inspiration” (ibid.). And Crowder effectively accepts Waldron’s point that an indispensable part of interpretation is assessing “limitations” of our ancestors, not just asserting their enduring relevance.
For much of his book, Crowder buries rather than praises. Fortunately, if a bit jarringly, Crowder’s plea for the Berlin’s relevance goes along with the concession that he needs updating in certain respects, and sometimes almost completely. Crowder is too expert on Berlin’s writings and too honest an observer not to be harsh on certain matters, in the course of ranging widely across possible topics on which to seek his protagonist’s opinion, from economic neoliberalism to feminist politics to international relations. Indeed, Crowder does so much work negating the plausibility of apologetics for Berlin (before commencing them anyway) that his book is also one of the finest and most unsparing compendia around of why to leave Berlin behind.
For example, Crowder cautions against the Berlin’s apparent dismissal of what he immortally called “positive freedom,” in the name of defending negative liberty in the political realm; he covers Berlin’s Cold War hawkish stance, which left him inconsistent and unclear on the Vietnam War even once Cold War liberals began to conclude it had been a mistake; he grants that Berlin makes a highly unlikely feminist icon, given judgmental and shortsighted remarks he offered about the campaign against patriarchy when it had barely begun.
Uniting most of Crowder’s pleas is his belief that Berlin’s theory of value pluralism has been neglected, including by the Oxford don himself in several domains. Most of Crowder’s chapters have the structure of conceding so many censorious interpretations of Berlin to a great extent, or his questionable relevance on the evidence of his writings, before going on to redeem him on the grounds that value pluralism will save the day (and with it, Berlin’s reputation).
For better or worse, it is not always clear that the redemption—while always fair-minded in its argumentation—works. On foreign policy, Berlin should have adapted his own value pluralism, Crowder reports. But, unlike in a fascinating interview with Nathan Gardels in 1991 in which he did so with a vengeance, he should never have put his commitment to Enlightenment universalism in question (and the truth is that Berlin did so often and revealingly so). Crowder thus suggests that Berlin should have adapted his value pluralism to foreign affairs while balancing it with a liberal internationalism. The trouble isn’t just that Berlin didn’t adopt this perspective himself (unlike Michael Ignatieff, most prominently among his disciples). It is also that liberal internationalism has been subject for some time to the worry that it justified many wars, without ever clearly resolving how it could overcome the dilemma between universalism and difference. “Liberal pluralists will not be happy with the periodic US abandonment of multilateralism in favour of unilateralism,” Crowder writes disarmingly, before leaving the matter there, and without reckoning with just how often Berlin’s fans argued for such outcomes (143).
Or take Crowder’s chapter on a Berlinian feminism beyond Berlin’s own strictures against “the fierceness, the loudness, the sometimes rigid intolerance” (cited on 172) of the feminists he knew (or didn’t know). Crowder forthrightly concedes there is no evidence Berlin ever read liberal feminists, even in the case John Stuart Mill, on whom he lavished attention in one of his more brilliant essays. Not only does Berlin’s negative freedom bear on patriarchal interference with women’s liberty, Crowder points to the potential of value pluralism for feminist purposes.
At first hearing, this claim seems unpromising, for the same reason that Crowder is anxious about Berlin’s affection for nationalism in international affairs: the claims of victims depend on some set of credible non-local norms, and in the feminist case, on criticizing patriarchy based on transcendent standards binding everywhere and on everyone if there are no or not enough local resources to do so. But as in his international affairs chapter, Crowder limits himself to the claim that, since Berlin defended liberal pluralism, a Berlinian feminism could probably balance a universalistic perspective with a pluralism about values—even if Berlin himself failed to do so over and over again.
A lot of one’s evaluation of Crowder’s thoughtful book depends on how abstract a version of Berlin’s philosophy one is willing to parse out of his writings, and how far one is willing to see him nudged even at this level of abstraction towards an adequately universalistic vision of value pluralism. Even then, the details have to be filled in. To even know that Berlin should or would have been against neoliberal marketization of recent decades requires a raft of empirical and moral assumptions. Crowder makes them, but in the face of generations of those citing and revering Berlin who failed to do so when it counted.
What would Isaiah do? In spite of Crowder’s fine and worthwhile book, the answers to that question are at best “no one knows” and at worst “the wrong thing” too often, extenuation or pleading to one side. The point is not the need to think entirely for ourselves. Perhaps the best reason to take seriously the errors of our ancestors is that we should more openly risk our own mistakes.
