While reviewing the key findings presented in the previous chapters, this final chapter considers the legacy of the interwar European federalist movment and why our knowledge of these activists has been limited. It suggests how and why historians should continue to search for more evidence regarding who interwar federalists were, pointing out promising new lines of research and methods provided by new technology. The tools employed in this book have far greater implications for historians beyond the focus of this book. Additionally, it calls on future scholars to engage with the suggestion presented in this book, that there was a first-wave federalist movement, by undertaking different investigations to explore the attitudes, values, and trends in various federalist organizations.

Aggregate analysis was central in political economy from its very inception. Early economic thought (sixteenth–eighteenth centuries) focused on national issues like inflation and trade, leading to proto-macroeconomic theories. Mercantilism advocated state control to accumulate wealth (primarily precious metals) through trade surpluses supported by colonialism. Concurrently, early monetarists, observing inflation following New World discoveries, developed precursors to the quantity theory of money, arguing that money accumulation primarily fuels price increases, not real wealth improvements. Hume refined this approach, arguing that an increase of the money stock may increase income in the short run while in the long run this translates in inflation. The French physiocrats, led by Quesnay, offered the first systemic model (Tableau Économique) of the entire economy, comparing the circulation of wealth to that of blood and identifying agricultural labour as the ultimate source of value. Smith, inspired by Newtonian mechanics, proposed market gravitation towards equilibrium as the unifying principle of market economics. His followers, like Say (introducing Say’s law stating that supply creates its own demand), Ricardo (focusing on value theory and income distribution), and Marx (analysing capital accumulation and economic crises) further developed aggregate analysis, often diverging significantly in their theses despite sharing Smith’s Classical roots.

Material inference opens up an exciting prospect for pluralism in reasoning: because the conceptual content of descriptive language is open-ended and variable, legitimate inferences can take unlimited forms. How many forms of legitimate reasoning are there, and how is legitimacy determined? Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom recognise that practices can be legitimate by virtue of their material forms – that is, with respect to their specific vocabularies. Pluralism also finds a foundation in the work of William James and John Dewey. It will be interesting to examine the diverse styles of reasoning found in the history of science, following the models of A. C. Crombie, Nicholas Jardine, and Ian Hacking. A key observation is that historically generated forms provide the standards for reasoning rightly. It is always a social judgement when something is deemed incorrect, even when prompted by external impulses. Legitimate reasoning is constrained by the rules of a community. Intersubjective assessment provides the required and sufficient objectivity. Unfortunately, Brandom is not fully consistent on this point, as he allows for a user-independent means of determining correctness.

This chapter examines Wilfrid Sellars’s idea of material inference – the view that there are valid inferences expressed in non-logical language that are irreducible to logical principles. Material inference can be characterised by three features: it is non-enthymemic, non-logical, and non-monotonic. However, the exact sense in which material inferences are valid remains unclear.After exploring various attempts to define the validity of material inference – such as through truth-preservation, analytic entailment, or reduction to general principles – I argue that material inference is not valid in the strict sense. Typically, validity refers to deductive validity, where the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion.Nonetheless, pragmatists do not apply an external standard to our reasoning practices. Material inference can be understood not as valid, but as a legitimate and rationally authoritative form of reasoning. The key concept here is pragmatic propriety, which designates the social-normative entitlement to infer – rendering an inference either legitimate or illegitimate.

Chapter 6 focuses on Iran’s thirteen minority ethno-nations. These nations differ from the ethno-nation formed by Iran’s ruling Persians (who are discussed in other chapters). These minority ethno-nations differ from one another but also share some features. Their affiliates, social organizations, leaderships, and cultural systems vary but they all provide structure and meaning for adherents in ways that are often lacking for other citizens. Many affiliates of minority ethno-nations do not identify as Iranians. Undergoing discrimination and persecution in Iran, they respond by enhancing their distinctive groupings and furthering their internal cohesion. Iran’s minority peoples formed political coalitions outside Iran, in their pursuit to oust the theocracy, form a secular democracy, and improve conditions for Iranians of all ethnicities. Most affiliates of these movements support a pluralist federal Iran in which communities could achieve regional autonomy. Some affiliates consider separating from Iran and joining their compatriots in adjoining countries. A few of them advocate for independence as new nation-states, just as the fifteen republics of the former Soviet Union had done in 1991.

The political failure of community is the background against which a range of post-Marxist European philosophers have sought to rethink what community could be. This chapter focuses in particular on Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben, who have made substantial contributions to what we might call a new philosophy of community. Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben ask how community, not least because of its promise of solidarity, can continue to serve a political purpose, despite the violence of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, which appears to be the logical endpoint of any conception of community. But Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben also respond to the failure of community’s presumed revolutionary potential to become a site of resistance against both capitalism and the modern state. Should community be conceived in the plural (Nancy), as a gift economy (Esposito), or as a coming community of stateless refugees (Agamben)? Such attempts to save community come at a considerable cost, both philosophically and politically, since they make community irrelevant for a normative theory of democracy.

This Introduction provides an overview of the main themes of the book and questions the democratic potential we often attach to “community” and to “the common.” Community might be what we desire from political life, and it is tempting to hope that a return to community can correct much of the current disillusionment with liberal constitutional democracy and the state of civil society. Instead, I argue that, as models for the normative organization of political life as a whole, neither community nor the common are compatible with the normative demands of democracy. The communitarian desire of much political thought often stands in sharp contrast to the pluralism of democracy.

I start this chapter by briefly describing three possibilities for the future of capitalism and economic inequality. The first is that the rich continue to get richer; the second is a polar opposite approach that seeks to create economic equality at all costs; and the third involves the possibility of multiple forms of capitalism. Each possibility is explored in the next three chapters. In the remainder of this chapter, I explain why it is important to chart possibilities: doing so helps us understand potential paths forward and can meaningfully guide us toward the forms most congruent with our wishes. This world-making approach to psychology draws on theorizing around the psychology of imagination, which I develop here. I also return to value pluralism to help frame our understanding of the three futures that comprise Part III.

In the late 1960s, Protestants seemed in terminal demographic decline, while the Jewish population stagnated. At the same time, the old Catholic/Protestant divide retained much of its old political significance in Northern Ireland. As the Province descended into violence, the southern minorities were shocked to see how fragile were the achievements of half a century of democratic elections and self-government. The ‘minority question’ had not been answered, or perhaps the traditional response – submission or emigration – was no longer the one Northern nationalists were prepared to offer. This prompts us to consider one final point. As both Jews and Protestants claimed repeatedly throughout the period discussed in this book, what made their history noteworthy was not Ireland’s presumed exceptionalism, but the general significance of their experience as minorities in a democratic nation state. In this, they were basically right. Indeed, while a free society depends on the dignity of dissent, the challenge of how to make diverse democracies work is still with us, has become increasingly global, and has been renewing itself at every generation.

Berlin offers a typically high level and broad-based discussion of nationalism and its relationship to nationality or national consciousness and the idea of the nation. The first part of this chapter will explore the structure of his essay and then its main arguments. The chapter begins with subtle distinctions between nation, national consciousness and then nationality as an ideological form and explores the claim that nationalism has been relatively overlooked compared to the other main ideologies that emerged out of the post–French Revolution world. The language of nation was important for the development of the modern European nation state, and especially in the context of the retreat of empire. He argues that the success of the nation state system should have left the language of the nation to fade from view. However, nationalism surprises because of its prevalence, and Berlin seeks to explain this in terms of rectifying a national political wound and the rise of a new elite in that context seeking a political language to recreate a new political order. The final part of the chapter notes the surprising prevalence of this Eurocentric language in the post-Eurocentric world.

After making a few opening remarks about Berlin, the introduction will cover five topics, which are aimed especially at the general reader who may be unfamiliar with Berlin and his ideas. The first will provide a brief, descriptive account of Berlin’s life and times; the second will focus on (again briefly) his move from a rather narrowly focused Oxford academic philosopher to a wide-ranging historian of ideas and public intellectual (or, alternatively put, a far more capacious and historically inflected philosopher) keen to reach a readership beyond the academic groves; the third will discuss Berlin’s vision of philosophy as a fundamentally humanistic discipline; the fourth will explore his original and cogent pluralist defence of liberalism; and the fifth will consider some of the main criticisms that Berlin’s ideas have received both during and after his lifetime. The introduction will end with a brief rumination on his main legacy as a thinker.

This chapter considers a number of aspects of Berlin’s celebrated essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’. These include a consideration of the origins and evolution of Berlin’s famous essay; the connections between the metaphor derived from an ancient Greek poet and his more philosophically explicit visions of monism and pluralism; Tolstoy’s conflictual view of history and Berlin’s assessment of both; and finally, Tolstoy’s identity as a child of the Enlightenment and his accompanying inability to accept the foxy nature of historical contingency (even if his artistic talent expressed this peerlessly) but also his failure to discuss man’s inhumanity to man, namely evil, in the profound way we might expect of such a major writer as him.

‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ is Berlin’s best-known publication. This chapter has three main sections. The first sets the essay in the context of the Cold War and Berlin’s personal background and commitments. The second section reviews the main themes and arguments of the essay, which include the distinction between negative and positive liberty, Berlin’s association of the negative idea with liberal democracy and the positive idea with authoritarian politics, the relation between liberty and national identity, and the tracing of totalitarian thought to a foundation in moral monism, to which Berlin responds with his concept of value pluralism. The final section engages with some of the critical issues raised by ‘Two Concepts’. Is the essay too limited by Berlin’s Cold-War context? Is he too hostile to positive liberty and too uncritical of negative liberty? Is his account of identity too narrowly focused on nationalism, or is it an open-ended invitation to the excesses of identity politics? Is his value pluralism compatible with liberalism? I argue that in all these respects, Berlin’s position has problems, but also that he gives us the tools to respond to those problems.

The most striking aspect of Berlin’s thinking about political judgement is how he treats moral principle or moral rules as a factor in political judgements. Political judgement, as he defines it, is a capacity that he praises irrespective of its moral character or its consequences. So how did Berlin believe moral considerations did shape political judgement? If he thought of political judgement as a skill, an experience-based ability to size up a concrete situation and evaluate risks and opportunities, in a time-bound context, he thought of moral judgement in exactly the same way. In both political and moral behaviour, he doubted that rules, principles, formalized ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ could be determinative. The situation was everything. An essay on Berlin’s idea of ‘political judgement’ will have to unpack Berlin’s moral psychology, confront the question of whether he praised moral ruthlessness a little too much and ask whether his conception of political judgement ends up sidelining ethics as a crucial factor in political decision-making.

Berlin’s essay on ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ was strikingly pivotal in renewing and extending his twentieth-century reputation as a towering contemporary intellectual giant: for the concept of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ became a central feature of his continuing relevance to intellectual debate in the 1970s and through the last quarter of the twentieth century. Among its strengths, it figured as a partially successful effort to draw attention in Anglophone lands to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German philosophy as a vital aspect of the early nineteenth century’s cultural shift to Romanticism and reaction to the Enlightenment. But its importance extends much further than that. For while it profoundly dismayed some, it proved profoundly thought-provoking for many with its eloquent promotion of intellectual history to centrality and front-rank status viewed as an aspect of the humanities and of philosophy itself. Its distinctive combining of philosophical study and insight, and delving into history, impressed many with burning secular, pluralist and ethical zeal.

Isaiah Berlin’s essays on Russian writers are among the most compelling in his oeuvre. Of these, ‘Herzen and His Memoirs’ is a particularly notable instance of scholarship, both for its insights into the ideas of Alexander Herzen and for what it reveals about Berlin himself. The purpose of this chapter is to review Berlin’s account of Herzen and then situate it relative to the literature on Herzen (particularly at the time it was written) and appraise it for the light it sheds on Berlin. For while it was initially written as an introduction to another writer’s work, it can also be regarded as a prompt to consider not only Berlin’s views about the reception of European thought by various Russian authors during the nineteenth century, but also his thoughts on Soviet scholarship in the West during his own day. Similarly, ‘Herzen and His Memoirs’ provides an exemplary instance of Berlin’s own scholarly style, where a strikingly personal tone is evident in his appreciation of Herzen’s work. Part commentary, part confessional, ‘Herzen and His Memoirs’ provides a singular account of one of Berlin’s favourite Russian writers, as well as a mirror of Berlin’s own beliefs and talents.

It is not uncommon for people to observe the impossibility of ever fully knowing others, but to affirm that with sustained contact, developed intimacy and empathy, we can at least gain some sense of their inner experiences and begin to imagine life from their perspectives. The method of historical understanding which mirrors this viewpoint was introduced into modern Western European thought by Vico and Herder, and thereafter transmitted by Croce to Collingwood, and by Collingwood to Berlin. It is also common for people to observe that in important respects they know others – friends and family – better than those others know themselves. The method of historical and cultural understanding which matches this insight is that of ‘outsideness’, pioneered by Bakhtin. This chapter shall discuss these radically different yet in some ways complementary approaches, arguing that Berlin’s historical method is not wholly dependent upon ‘immersion’ but relies also on the recognition of anthropological constants across historical and cultural boundaries, in a way that echoes Bakhtin’s view that certain ideas enter ‘great time’.

Berlin’s essay begins with a standard question: Given the apparent lucidity and precision of Machiavelli’s work, why is there such enduring disagreement about its core meaning and significance? There is, however, nothing conventional about Berlin’s answer. He diverges fundamentally from the conflicting interpretations that have long dominated debate about what makes Machiavelli unique and notorious and argues that the deeper revolutionary character of his thought lies not in divorcing morality from politics but in favouring a politics that has its own ethic, albeit one fundamentally at odds with the prevailing Christian morality of his time. After giving a brief synopsis of Berlin’s account of Machiavelli’s originality, the chapter will delineate and explore how his interpretation operates on three distinct and related levels – historical, philosophical and political. It will then critically examine the questions of whether Berlin’s view of Machiavelli is historically accountable, philosophically coherent and, finally, politically plausible. My aim will be to show that whilst Berlin’s essay is by no means immune to criticism on all three fronts, it holds up remarkably well.