In my introduction to this symposium, I indicated that “epochal age” constitutes a suggestive theme in Smith's book, one which is connected to a more explicit concern with historical optimism and pessimism. In considering these themes further, I begin with modernity's “youth,” with Machiavelli. Machiavelli makes youthfully bold claims for his own originality, revealing (as Smith stresses) a fascination with innovation, even with radical rupture, in politics (6, 27). But did Machiavelli see his own political “realism”—his focus on the verità effettuale of things—as just such a radical rupture? Smith suggests so; but Machiavelli's attacks on utopianism may be directed not against his ancient forebears, but his contemporary competitors. The most important quarrel may be not so much between ancients and moderns, as among moderns vying to define, and appropriate, the achievement of the ancients. Yet Machiavelli's use of (selected) ancients does seem to embrace a modern project of mastering history and nature, which departs not just from Plato and Aristotle (Smith's frames of reference) but from the ancient “realists”: Thucydides, Sallust, and Tacitus. Compared to this latter group, it is Machiavelli who seems more “utopian” in supposing that political teachings can, through wisdom, and will be translated into new and better political realities.

This seems to bespeak the youthful optimism and ambition of Machiavelli's outlook. Machiavelli, as Smith stresses, identifies age with foolishness as well as weakness, and youth with both spiritedness and cleverness. Yet there are complications: as Smith's subtle reading shows, it is not always clear how much the impetuous youths who seem to be Machiavelli's protagonists are actually in control of their own stories—or whether they are the true heroes of his. Regarding progress, Machiavelli is more ambiguous than Smith portrays him. He seems to accept the ancient view of history as cyclical, and revolutions as returns to beginnings. There is a tension within Machiavelli's thought between the promise that fortune can be mastered through the new science and a tragic awareness of fortune's power—the way in which even the most excellent prince may encounter unforeseeable and uncontrollable circumstances, and be crushed by them. Smith's observation that Machiavelli's work “arouses in its readers a sense of optimism and confidence that the future belongs to them” (31) is a perceptive comment on how Machiavelli has affected many modern readers (and how he predominantly affects contemporary American undergraduates). But we should not ignore the presence, at what many would identify as modernity's dawn, of an undercurrent of subversive doubt.

With Isaiah Berlin (who wrote a masterful essay on Machiavelli), we find ourselves in a different epoch and emotional atmosphere; Smith, who stresses the comic in Machiavelli, aptly identifies Berlin's liberalism as “tragic.” While it may be surprising to find included among the “discontents” of modernity a thinker who championed “the bourgeois virtues” and “the not-to-be-transgressed-against rights of the individual,”Footnote ³ Smith is right to stress Berlin's rejection of the modern trope of progress. This rejection was partly ethical, a repulsed reaction to the sacrifice of human beings on the “altar” of progress. But Berlin also rejected the notion of progress insofar as it rested on monistic premises. According to Berlin's tragic pluralism, any solution invariably leads to new problems; gains in terms of some values are offset by losses in terms of others.

Does this pluralist liberalism, with its rejection of earlier liberalism's faith in progress, reflect the wisdom—or the world-weariness—of an “old” civilization, as Berlin himself sometimes suggested? This thought raises two further questions, relevant to Smith's account. First, how far is Berlin a historicist, who sees the values to which he is committed as historically relative? Berlin sometimes seems to endorse the view that values derive their value from being valued by human beings, so that values that only (some) moderns have valued (e.g., negative liberty) cannot claim universal validity. Yet scattered remarks throughout his writings indicate a philosophical anthropology according to which certain human needs, capacities, and aspirations are essential and have an intrinsic value, which all human beings at all times can and should recognize—even if they do not always do so.

Second, the suggestion that Berlin's liberalism is the product of an aged civilization raises doubts as to whether liberalism, purged of its youthfully confident, even arrogant belief in its superiority, can sustain itself. This reflects a serious anxiety, which I detect in Smith's book: that if liberalism “lacks all conviction,” it will fall in the face of its enemies’ “passionate intensity”—or its unappreciative beneficiaries’ nihilism or negligence.

This worry should trouble all defenders—and beneficiaries—of (liberal) modernity. But Smith's apprehension may also reflect another, premodern, influence, which Berlin resisted and to which he counseled resistance. Smith identifies as the core of Berlin's thought “the conflict between the claims of moral diversity, pluralism, and openness and the need for order, permanence, and stability” (289). This is almost correct. For Berlin, moral diversity and pluralism were simply facts about the way human beings are; on the other hand, although maintaining a minimum degree of public order and civic peace was a political priority, permanence and stability were never real possibilities in life. To sacrifice the reality of pluralism and variety for the sake of such illusive goals was one of the central follies of monism. The invocation of an ideal of “order, permanence, and stability” sounds a note of Platonism, which Smith movingly expresses through Lampedusa's Don Fabrizio, who yearns “for eternity, for what transcends the transitory and vulgar” (319). Berlin would likely see in this yearning a rejection of life itself.

If Smith is, unlike Berlin, drawn to this Platonic discontent with modernity, he ultimately affirms Berlin's vision of our condition as one in which we accept elements of both rationalist and romantic, Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment outlooks, “and shift from one foot to the other in a fashion that we cannot avoid if we are honest with ourselves, but which is not intellectually coherent.” Berlin was not bothered by this lack of coherence, which “causes more logical than moral discomfort,” and represents a “historically and psychologically enriched capacity for understanding men and societies.”Footnote ⁴ In embracing this enriched capacity against Platonic nostalgia, Berlin may have evinced faith in progress—or at least youthful optimism—after all. It is not clear whether Smith does—or we can—share this remnant of hope.