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Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment 1st Edition
Laurence W. B. Brockliss
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Foreword
Hermione Lee, President of Wolfson College
The conference on Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment, on which this collection of essays is based, took place at Wolfson College, in Oxford, from 20 to 22 March 2014, with the support of Wolfson College, All Souls, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the Oxford Faculty of Modern Languages, and the Modern Humanities Research Association. I was very glad to host the conference at the college which Isaiah Berlin founded and where he was the first president, and which began its life as Wolfson College fifty years ago, in 1966, dedicated to those principles of liberty, tolerance, pluralism, and independence of mind in which Berlin so eloquently believed.
Since Berlin’s presidency, Wolfson College has maintained his legacy and posthumous intellectual life through its involvement with the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust and through its support of the work of Henry Hardy, Honorary Fellow of the College, in editing Berlin’s books, essays, lectures, and (with Mark Pottle, Jennifer Holmes, Serena Moore, and Nicholas Hall) his letters. The fourth and final volume of Berlin’s Letters, Affirming: Letters 1975–1997, was published in 2015.
Berlin ‘belongs’ to a number of Oxford colleges—Corpus, All Souls, New—but his creation of Wolfson as a new graduate college in the 1960s was a mark of his belief that historical institutions need to continue to change, and to incorporate differences, contradictions, and radical developments. The belief applies also to his intellectual work, and is expressed in this volume’s acknowledgement in its Introduction, that ‘he would have not have wanted his readings [of the Enlightenment] to be set in stone’. That the essays from this conference make up a re-evaluation of Berlin as a historian of ideas ‘not intended as an act of piety or an attempt at rehabilitation’, but as a critique which brings a wide variety of views to bear on his work, is as it should be.
The conference from which these essays arises was supported in part by the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson, a centre for the study of biography, autobiography, letters, and other forms of life-writing. It’s apt, then, that so many of these essays deal with the history of ideas and of differing approaches to the Enlightenment through individual cases: Marx, Meinecke, Hume, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, Hamann, Kant, Mill, Machiavelli, Vico, Herder, Hess, and Herzen. Berlin approached the Enlightenment as ‘the grounding of our belief in human individuality’, and his approach to history, ideas, and philosophy was very often through the study of individuals. He was profoundly suspicious of abstract principles and general theories, and of the sacrifice of the individual to ‘remote ends’. He rejoiced in the study of heroes, exceptional thinkers, and actors, and in those influential personages who, as he said of Chaim Weizmann, ‘must permanently transform one’s ideas of what human beings can be or do’. In his essay on Herder
(in Three Critics of the Enlightenment) he proposed that ‘all the works of men are above all voices speaking and that self-expression is part of the essence of human beings as such’. This volume takes on, critically and analytically, Berlin’s ‘self-expression’ on Enlightenment themes, and in doing so makes a significant new contribution to the study both of Isaiah Berlin and of the Enlightenment.
Acknowledgements
This book is the outcome of a conference on ‘Isaiah Berlin’s Enlightenment’, organized by Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson, and hosted by Wolfson College, Oxford, from 20 to 22 March 2014. The conference was generously supported by Wolfson’s Centre for Life-Writing, All Souls College, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the Oxford Faculty of Modern Languages, and the Modern Humanities Research Association. The conference was first conceived at a meeting of the Besterman Centre for the Enlightenment, now part of the Enlightenment research programme within the Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities (TORCH).
We are particularly grateful to Hermione Lee, President of Wolfson, for her enthusiastic support at every stage of this project, and to Henry Hardy, Isaiah Berlin’s devoted editor, for his participation in the conference and his willing advice to the editors and many contributors to this volume. At the conference Henry presented an audio-recording of Isaiah Berlin’s contribution to the 1975 Wolfson College lectures on ‘The Enlightenment and its Critics’. This was an absorbing and memorable experience for all who were fortunate enough to listen to it, and it is hoped that one day a transcription of the lecture can be published.
I. An Idea in Context
Berlin, Vico, and the Critique of Enlightenment
12. ‘Populism, Expressionism, Pluralism’—and God? Herder’s Cultural Theory and Theology
Kevin Hilliard
13. Discovering Isaiah Berlin in Moses Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem
Ken Koltun-Fromm
14. Isaiah Berlin and the Russian Intelligentsia
Derek Offord
Part IV. Berlin’s Legacy
15. Isaiah Berlin’s Neglect of Enlightenment Constitutionalism
Jeremy Waldron
16. Second Thoughts of a Biographer
Michael Ignatieff
List of Abbreviations
AC Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy, with an introduction by Roger Hausheer (London: Hogarth Press, 1979; repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
AE The Age of Enlightenment: The Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, selected with introduction and commentary by Isaiah Berlin (New York: Mentor Books, 1956); reprinted with same pagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
CIB Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Peter Halban, 1992).
CTH Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: John Murray, 1990).
FIB Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002).
IBAC Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration, ed. Edna Margalit and Avishai Margalit (London: Hogarth Press, 1991).
IBCE Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment, ed. Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 93 (2003), part 5 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003).
KM Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939).
KM5 Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, 5th edition, ed. Henry Hardy, foreword by Alan Ryan, afterword by Terrell Carver (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
L Isaiah Berlin, Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
L I Isaiah Berlin, Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2004).
L II Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, ed. Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009).
L III Isaiah Berlin, Building: Letters 1960–1975, ed. Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle (London: Chatto & Windus, 2013).
L IV Isaiah Berlin, Affirming: Letters 1975–1997, ed. Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015).
MH Isaiah Berlin, The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1959).
PI Isaiah Berlin, Personal Impressions, 3rd edn, ed. Henry Hardy, with foreword by Hermione Lee (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
PIRA Isaiah Berlin, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006).
POI Isaiah Berlin, The Power of Ideas, 2nd edn, ed. Henry Hardy, with foreword by Avishai Margalit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
PSM Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, 2nd edn, ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (London: Vintage, 2013).
RR Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999).
RT Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (London: Hogarth Press, 1978).
TCE Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, 2nd edn, ed. Henry Hardy, foreword by Jonathan Israel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
VH Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London: The Hogarth Press, 1976).
Notes on Contributors
Laurence Brockli ss is Professor of Early Modern French History and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. His books include French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History (1987), Calvet’s Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France (2002), Magdalen College: A History (2008), and The University of Oxford: A History (2016).
Chri s topher Brooke is a University Lecturer in Politics at Cambridge, a Fellow of Homerton College, and author of Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (2012).
Kevin Hilliard is a University Lecturer in German at Oxford, a Fellow of St Peter’s College, and author of Philosophy, Letters, and the Fine Arts in Klopstock’s Thought (1987) and Freethinkers, Libertines and ‘Schwärmer’: Heterodoxy in German Literature, 1750–1800 (2011).
Marian Hobson is Professor Emerita of French at Queen Mary University of London. Her books include The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in EighteenthCentury France (1982), Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (1998), and Diderot and Rousseau: Networks of Enlightenment, edited by Kate Tunstall and Caroline Warman (2011).
Michael Ignatieff is President and Rector of the Central European University in Budapest and author of many books including A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750–1850 (1978), The Needs of Strangers (1984), Blood and Belonging (1993), Isaiah Berlin: A Biography (1998), The Rights Revolution (2000), Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (2001), The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (2004), and Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics (2013).
P. J. E. Kail is University Lecturer in the History of Modern Philosophy, a Fellow of St Peter’s College, and author of Projection and Realism in Hume’s Philosophy (2007).
Ken Koltun-Fromm is Professor in the Department of Religion at Haverford College, Pennsylvania, and author of several books including Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity (2001), Abraham Geiger’s Liberal Judaism: Personal Meaning and Religious Authority (2006), Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America (2010), and Imagining Jewish Authenticity: Vision and Text in American Jewish Thought (2015).
David Leopold is an Associate Professor of Political Theory, a Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford, and author of The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing (2007).
Avi Lif s chitz is a Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at University College London and author of Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century (2012).
Karen O’Brien is Professor of English and Head of the Humanities Division at Oxford. She has published Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (1997) and Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2009).
Derek Offord is Emeritus Professor of Russian at the University of Bristol. His books include Portraits of Early Russian Liberals: A Study of the Thought of T. N. Granovsky, V. P. Botkin, P. V. Annenkov, A. V. Druzhinin and K. D. Kavelin (1985), The Russian Revolutionary Movement in the 1880s (1986), Journey to a Graveyard: Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing (2006), and (co-edited with William J. Leatherbarrow) A History of Russian Thought (2010).
T. J. Reed is emeritus Taylor Professor of German at Oxford. His books include Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition (1974, revised version 1996), The Classical Centre: Goethe and Weimar 1775–1832 (1980), and Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment (2015).
John Robert s on is Professor of the History of Political Thought at Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare College. His books include The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (1985), The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (2005), and The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction (2015).
Ritchie Robert s on is Taylor Professor of German and a Fellow of the Queen’s College, Oxford. His books include Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (1985), The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749–1939 (1999), Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine (2009), and Goethe: A Very Short Introduction (2016).
Alan Ryan, formerly Warden of New College, Oxford, has taught the history of political thought at Oxford, Princeton, and elsewhere. His books include The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (1970), On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present (2012), and The Making of Modern Liberalism (2012). He edited The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin (1979).
Jeremy Waldron , formerly Chichele Professor of Social and Political Thought at Oxford, is Professor in the School of Law at New York University and author of many books including The Right to Private Property (1988), God, Locke and Equality (2002), Torture, Terror and Trade-offs: Philosophy for the White House (2010), and The Harm in Hate Speech (2012).
Introduction
Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment
Laurence Brockliss1
Has Isaiah Berlin any relevance today as a living political philosopher and historian of ideas, or is he primarily a historical figure of the Cold War era whose oeuvre is a reflection of the challenges and problems of a past age? In the eyes of philosophers and intellectual historians, the answer would seem to be largely the latter. Berlin in recent years has been the focus of a number of important academic studies,2 and he is the subject of a forthcoming Cambridge Companion, but his ideas seem to have a limited resonance among modern philosophers. On the other hand, Berlin remains an enormously respected thinker among the wider educated public. His works continue to sell well around the world, the argument of his 1958 inaugural lecture ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ has become an intellectual commonplace, and the warm reception of Henry Hardy’s four volumes of collected letters demonstrates that he has a large and loyal following.3 The aim of the present collection of essays is to probe this paradox by focusing on Berlin and his reputation as an interpreter of the Enlightenment and its critics, two groups of political and social thinkers of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century who engaged his closest attention. By the end of the book, it will become clear that Berlin’s commitment in the post-war era to building liberal ethical and political thought through a constructive but critical engagement with past philosophers
1 In writing this chapter I am greatly indebted to the invaluable assistance as a reader and critic of my co-editor, Ritchie Robertson.
2 E.g. John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (London: Harper Collins, 1995), reprinted as Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation of his Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998); Mark Lilla et al., The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001); George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (Cambridge: Polity, 2004); Neil Burtonwood, Cultural Diversity, Liberal Pluralism, and Schools: Isaiah Berlin and Education (London: Routledge, 2006); Arie Dubnov, Isaiah Berlin. The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2012); Joshua Cherniss, A Mind and its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); David Bruce Baum and Robert Nichols (eds), Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom: ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ Fifty Years Later (London: Routledge, 2015).
3 Details of all publications by Berlin mentioned here and in other chapters will be found in the Bibliography. Berlin’s main works are cited as explained in the list of abbreviations.
was inevitably destined to fall foul of an ever-expanding academic world which encouraged and valued disciplinary compartmentalization and painstaking research. It will also be clear that Berlin’s work as a historian of ideas is of continuing value. Whatever its deficiencies, his oeuvre stands as an important contribution to our understanding of the era of the Enlightenment. Since the Second World War, the West has tended to see the legacy of the movement in black and white. As a philosophy of subversion that liberated the individual from traditional constraints and prioritized fulfilment in this life rather than the next, it has been considered as either a force for good or a force for evil.4 Berlin’s approach was more nuanced. In his view, the novel emphasis that the Enlightenment placed on the freedom of the individual was to be heartily welcomed, and its leading lights were ‘liberators’ with whom he identified. But he also recognized that the movement had a darker side: its supporters inevitably had to explore how far individual liberty should be constrained in the name of the common good, which often led to authoritarian conclusions. At the same time, Berlin’s concern for liberty placed the Enlightenment debates over its limits at the centre of modern political thinking. As he believed that there was a continual tendency for all states to restrict the freedom of the individual in the name of the common good, the liberty that the Enlightenment championed had to be continually defined, defended, and promoted in each generation or it would atrophy. The Enlightenment was thus an ongoing and living movement.
When Isaiah Berlin went up to Corpus Christi College as an undergraduate in 1928, Oxford University was still little changed from the late nineteenth century. Although it was theoretically open to all, the vast majority of its junior and senior members were male, public-school educated, Protestant, and Anglo-Saxon. Oxford remained an undergraduate university dominated by the arts where few dons were committed to research or interested in new intellectual developments on the Continent. It was a university too with its own peculiar raison d’être which it shared with Cambridge. An undergraduate, whatever the subject he read—and despite the existence of women’s colleges, many people assumed that an undergraduate was normally male—was supposed to emerge from Oxford a better and wiser man ready to take on the burdens of imparting civilization and Christianity to benighted souls at home and abroad; an Oxford education was a moral as well as an intellectual training.5 Between the wars,
4 The term ‘the Enlightenment’ is a historical construct. Eighteenth-century philosophers often talked about themselves as being enlightened, and the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1784 set a famous essay question for debate entitled ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’ But no one talked about ‘the’ Enlightenment until the late nineteenth century, when German intellectuals began to use the term to group together thinkers in the period before the French Revolution who sought to reconfigure the state so that it could be used as a vehicle for moral and material improvement.
5 The seriousness with which the university was wedded to this mission had meant that new subjects could only be introduced into the undergraduate curriculum if they could demonstrate their moral and mental credentials. It was for this reason that courses in English and modern languages were built around philology, which was thought to be sturdy and masculine, rather than literature, which was seen as soft and feminine. Science courses on the other hand supposedly demonstrated the same commitment to Bildung by eschewing any reference to the practical utility of their study: engineering for instance was only able to
continuity rather than change was the university’s hallmark. But beneath the surface, the university was beginning to stir, to the dismay of many of the more contented college fellows, and radical developments in the 1930s would lay the foundations for the university’s intellectual pre-eminence in the years after 1945. Scientific and medical research, greatly strengthened by an influx of Jewish refugees from Germany, began to flourish as never before, while a number of precocious young arts dons began to challenge the existing orthodoxies.
The discipline which was particularly affected was Classics, or Literae Humaniores (Lit. Hum.) as it was known at Oxford, which was the flagship faculty not just in the arts but in the university as a whole. As a four-year undergraduate course, Lit. Hum. comprised the study of classical literature in the first two years, and ancient history and philosophy in the latter two.6 Even more than any other faculty, its study was a course in active citizenship.7 In the 1930s young Turks in the faculty began to challenge the traditional paradigm. Maurice Bowra at Wadham, following in the footsteps of Walter Pater in the late nineteenth century, set out to use classical literature to subvert rather than sustain the status quo, and deliberately lured the most gifted undergraduates of the day into his circle of sybaritic acolytes.8 More importantly, a band of young philosophers, led by the Christ Church tutors Gilbert Ryle and Alfred (Freddie) Ayer, came under the influence of the Viennese school of logical positivism and turned their back on the great questions of human existence. Instead, they began to forge a new and more restricted science of philosophy based on the analysis of language, which was heralded in 1936 with the publication of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic
The young Berlin was an immigrant and a Jewish outsider, as well as a brilliant undergraduate reading first Lit. Hum. and then the new combined school of Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE).9 Unsurprisingly, he was a member of Bowra’s circle by the beginning of his fourth year. The great man, having learnt of his existence, lured Berlin into his web by getting him to check a translation of a Russian
become an Oxford undergraduate course in 1909 when its promoters promised it would remain a theoretical study. The claim that all undergraduate courses had the same underlying aim was made the more plausible by the fact that Oxford was a collegiate university where the values of an Oxford education were also inculcated through common living and sport: Laurence Brockliss, The University of Oxford: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), esp. ch. 10, sect. A.
6 The first part of the course was examined in Moderations (or Mods) taken after five terms, the second in Schools: the first was a more sophisticated version of a pass-qualifying exam where candidates might sit for honours or a simple pass, the second equivalent to finals.
7 See Brockliss, University of Oxford, pp. 334–6 and 485–9; Peter Slee, ‘The Oxford Idea of a Liberal Education: The Invention of Tradition and the Manufacture of Practice’, History of Universities, 7 (1988), pp. 61–87; Heather Ellis, ‘Efficiency and Counter-Revolution: Connecting University and Civil Service Reform in the 1850s’, History of Education, 42:1 (2013), pp. 23–44. Lit. Hum. remained the most prestigious of Oxford undergraduate schools until 1945, even if its numbers dwindled.
8 Leslie Mitchell, Maurice Bowra: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); also Maurice Bowra, Memories 1898–1939 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966).
9 Berlin took a first in Lit. Hum. Schools in 1931, then turned to PPE, where he gained a second first after only a year's study. PPE was established in 1920. It was known as ‘Modern Greats’ in that it allowed undergraduates to concentrate entirely on modern philosophers and contemporary economic and political systems. Traditional ‘Greats’ (i.e. Lit. Hum. Schools) did allow students to read Kant and Mill as well as Plato and Aristotle.
poem. Berlin’s introduction to Wittgenstein and the Viennese school came a few months later when he listened to a paper on the Tractatus given by Ayer at Christ Church. Both encounters were to prove formative moments of his life.10 Once elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls in November 1932, he became one of the university’s most prominent bowristas, while his rooms became the gathering point for Oxford’s growing band of analytic philosophers.11 Berlin, however, always remained his own man. As he later confessed, his friendship with Bowra gave him a new confidence to be himself and in company to express his ideas, however controversial, openly. But he never embraced the hedonistic lifestyle of Bowra’s coterie whose members deliberately set out to shock, though in public he always asserted that Bowra was a force for good.
Nor did Berlin ultimately commit himself wholeheartedly to Oxford analytic philosophy. He wrote and delivered a number of significant and original papers but he was never fully engaged in creating the new school. Indeed, he spent his time as a prize fellow writing a book on Marx for a series, the Home University Library, at the request of H. A. L. Fisher, the Warden of New College. This in itself was a radical undertaking. In the Oxford of the 1930s many middle-aged dons had broken with Christianity after their experiences in the trenches, but there were few materialists and scarcely any who thought Marx worthy of serious study.12 Berlin accepted the commission because he recognized Marxism’s contemporary influence and importance and wanted to understand why Marx had so many followers. As Michael Ignatieff also suggests, Berlin, like many others, was intrigued by the industrial and cultural achievements of the Soviet Union and felt a desire to ‘take the measure of the challenge that [Marxism] represented to his own inchoate liberal allegiances’.13 Nonetheless, writing a critical account of a philosopher who claimed to know the end of human history and how it would be achieved seems an inappropriate venture for someone at the cutting edge of Oxford philosophy. Its completion demonstrated that Berlin was one analytic philosopher who continued to take the big questions seriously.
The Second World War confirmed Berlin in his nascent belief that iconoclasm in whatever form and however fruitful was insufficient to build a life or frame a philosophy. The fate of European Jewry, the four years spent working for the British Foreign Office in the much more egalitarian, liberal, and pluralistic United States, and his visit to Moscow in 1945 convinced him that western democracy, for all its faults, was the system of government best suited to humankind as it was. It alone could give individuals the space to practise their many beliefs and fulfil their myriad needs, and allow philosophers like himself the freedom to develop the life of the mind. As a result, Berlin returned to Oxford in 1946 determined to explore and promote the political and social
10 Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), pp. 50–1.
11 For Berlin’s account of the weekly discussions that began in his rooms in 1936–7, see ‘J. L. Austin and the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy’, in PI 101–15.
12 Most anti-Christian sceptics were idealists, like the Magdalen tutor and Kantian Thomas Weldon, who believed in the possibility of building the New Jerusalem using reason and good will. One of the few ardent Marxists was his history colleague, the medievalist K. B. McFarlane.
13 Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, p. 70.
conditions in which the liberty of the individual could best be preserved and enhanced. This was to be done principally, not by looking at liberty in the abstract, but by building on his earlier analysis of Marx and critically elucidating the works of past philosophers, poets, and novelists who had taken the individual and the liberty of the individual as their theme. The approach was to be historical, but not historicist. Initially, Berlin appears to have intended to concentrate on nineteenth-century Russia, an obvious choice given his background and his enthusiasm for Pushkin, Turgenev, and Tolstoy.14 But at the beginning of the 1950s he turned his attention to the thinkers of the Enlightenment and their opponents and thereafter immersed himself ever more deeply in their writings. This was a natural decision in the light of his self-appointed task. For most of the Christian era, philosophers had accepted the account of man and his end that was given in Scripture as unimpeachably true. What they argued about was how far this was consistent with the vision of man developed by the Greeks and Romans, and to what extent it could be substantiated by reason or was a simple matter of faith. It was only in the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement conventionally associated with the eighteenth century but stretching both backwards and forwards in time, that philosophers began to construct an independent science of society and politics built on a purely secular account of human psychology. The Enlightenment was the logical starting point for a philosopher devoted to charting the history of mankind’s independent study of itself.
In the post-war era, Berlin was not the only historian of ideas giving the movement a primary role in the making of the western world. The most important study of the Enlightenment between the wars was written by Ernst Cassirer, a Hamburg professor forced to flee Hitler’s Germany who eventually moved to the United States. His Philosophie der Aufklärung, published in 1932 just before he left, offered a clear and positive account of a movement whose intellectual origins he traced to Newtonian science; he saw it as the beginning of the modern liberal age which, in the Germany of 1932, desperately needed defending against the forces of unreason and barbarism. A decade later two other German philosophers, members of the Frankfurt School of unorthodox Marxists, also in exile in the United States, took a diametrically opposite view. According to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung, which first appeared in 1944 and then in a revised edition three years later, the Enlightenment had been an unmitigated disaster: its blind confidence that reason could ensure the conquest of nature and the beneficent restructuring of society had paved the way for twentieth-century totalitarianism.15 Cassirer’s position had a second airing in 1951 when his book was translated into English and published by Princeton, but the
14 Not all of the great Russian nineteenth-century novelists found favour with Berlin. In general, he disliked Dostoevsky’s moral conservatism. On the other hand, he fully sympathized with the anti-utilitarianism of Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov: see his letter to George Kennan, 13 Feb. 1951, on Karamazov’s defence of the sanctity of human life, in L II 215.
15 Now available as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmidt Noerr, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
pessimists responded immediately. In 1952 the ideas of Adorno and Horkheimer were echoed in J. L. Talmon’s Totalitarian Democracy, published in London, which specifically blamed the philosophes for the excesses of the French Revolution.16 Thereafter the pessimists seemed to make the running to such an extent that yet another, but younger, German exile living in the United States, Peter Gay, decided to dedicate the first half of his academic career to defending the Enlightenment’s liberal credentials.17 In 1959 he began the campaign appropriately with a study of Voltaire’s politics which emphasized the philosopher was no idle dreamer but deeply engaged with concrete issues. This was followed five years later with a collection of essays on the philosophes called The Party of Humanity, which made his allegiance clear in its title. This in turn formed a taster and a prelude to his two-volume magisterial The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, which appeared in 1966 and 1969.18
Like Cassirer, Gay, a professor of history at Columbia, saw the Enlightenment as an unqualified good, accepting Kant’s belief that the movement signalled mankind’s release from immaturity. What gave the book its strength was its attempt to place the Enlightenment in its historical context. Whereas Cassirer had been content to look at Enlightenment thinkers as discrete authors, feeding off one another while contributing to an emancipatory project, Gay placed them squarely in their contemporary milieu and discussed them as part of a much larger and pan-European network of writers and critics who targeted the abuses and absurdities of their own day. In his view, what distinguished the Enlightenment philosophers from their peers, a Voltaire from a Samuel Johnson, was their rejection of their Christian inheritance. They were self-consciously modern pagans, building a new science of man on the same empirical foundations that Newton had built the new science of multiple-force physics. As such, however much they might differ in their conclusions, they formed a family whose central location was Paris.19 Gay, too, was not content to describe the Enlightenment as a movement of ideas. Enlightenment philosophers sought to change their own world and were frequently close to political power. The Enlightenment, then, was not just the harbinger of modern liberalism; it helped to bring the modern liberal world into being through its influence on the founding fathers of the new United States. Cassirer’s book
16 Reprinted in 1961 and 1970. Talmon reactivated a debate which went back to Edmund Burke and the French Catholic abbé Barruel in the 1790s. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s work would not appear in English until 1979. Talmon was born in Poland.
17 Gay (1923–2015) had escaped with his family from Germany in 1939 to Cuba. From there he moved to the United States, where he attended university. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the socialist philosopher Eduard Bernstein, who in the 1890s proposed a major revision of Marxism, before turning his attention to the Enlightenment in the early 1950s.
18 Gay believed that the Americans’ view of the Enlightenment was particularly formed by Carl Becker, whose Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, which treated the philosophes as dreamers, had been also published in 1932 by Yale. In 1956 Becker’s work was the subject of a symposium: Carl Becker’s Heavenly City Revisited, ed. R. O. Rockwood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958). See in particular Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. vii.
19 Gay here distanced himself from the French historian Paul Hazard, who in La Pensée européenne au XVIIIe siècle: de Montesquieu à Lessing (Paris: Boivin, 1946; English translation, London: Hollis & Carter, 1954) had subsumed within the Enlightenment critics of all kinds, even Augustinian Christians.
ended with Kant, whom he saw as the culmination of Enlightenment debate. Gay’s ended with the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution.20
Gay’s account of the Enlightenment gave the liberal university elites of the AngloAmerican world a suitably flattering pedigree, and they immediately succumbed to its charm. For the rest of the twentieth century, Gay was the first port of call for anglophone students of the Enlightenment and his arguments were largely taken on trust. Historians concentrated on probing more deeply the contextual side of his argument rather than challenging his account of the Enlightenment as idea. Was his distinction between the family of the philosophes and the more mainstream, largely Christian, critics of the status quo as clear-cut as he had imagined? How far was this family a self-conscious coterie or was its coherence and unity a construction of its enemies? Was the movement Paris-centred or multi-centred, its practitioners stretching not just across Europe but the globe? And most importantly, if the movement was an immediate and political force, how were Enlightenment thinkers accessed and absorbed, and what was their contribution to other revolutions, especially the French? These questions were ardently and creatively pursued by a large number of Anglo-American historians after 1970 but their work never seriously damaged Gay’s synthesis.21 The leading exponent of the social turn in Enlightenment studies has been the Princeton historian Robert Darnton, who has used his unrivalled knowledge of the French underground book trade to argue that the influence of the great Enlightenment writers in undermining the Ancien Régime was essentially indirect: the French bourgeoisie was politicized not by Voltaire and Rousseau but by reading pornography and scurrilous political satires written by second-rate thinkers who had absorbed the ideas of the great minds and were jealous of their social success. But Darnton has never challenged Gay’s narrative. His Enlightenment remains a Paris-based, liberal, and liberationist event.22 Gay’s argument, however, did not completely escape unscathed and by the end of the twentieth century it was beginning to look tired. From the 1980s a growing number of historians of ideas had begun to challenge the idea that there was a single Enlightenment. The critics might accept that the Enlightenment’s supporters shared a
20 Gay’s argument in the second volume of his study had been anticipated a few years earlier by the Harvard professor of American history Bernard Bailyn. See Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).
21 The best introduction to the many-faceted developments in Enlightenment studies since the publication of Gay’s Enlightenment is Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Geneaology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). See also Vincenzo Ferrone, The Enlightenment: History of an Idea, tr. Elisabetta Tarantino (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
22 Darnton did his doctoral thesis at Oxford with the historian of the French Revolution Richard Cobb: ‘Trends in Radical Propaganda on the Eve of the French Revolution (1782–1788)’ (1964). His position is most completely stated in his Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1995). His earliest statement appeared shortly after the publication of Gay’s two volumes in Past and Present, 51 (1971), pp. 81–115. In the same year, he wrote a lengthy review of Gay’s work, which was hostile only insofar as he felt that the author had not successfully shown how the Enlightenment was taken up: ‘In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas’, Journal of Modern History, 43 (1971), pp. 11–62. His continuing support for Gay’s narrative was summarily stated in his ‘George Washington’s False Teeth’, New York Review of Books, 27 March 1997, pp. 35–8.
common belief in the possibility of moral and material improvement, but they doubted its deeper homogeneity. Some historians argued for the existence of a series of national Enlightenments with their own intellectual antecedents, characteristics, and centres of concern. Historians of the German Enlightenment in particular were alienated by Gay’s thesis, which removed from the narrative all German thinkers before the mid eighteenth century because they were influenced by Descartes, Leibniz, and the latter’s disciple Christian Wolff, rather than by Newton.23 Other historians, unwilling to accept that the movement was a clear-cut pagan event, began to identify a Socinian and even a Catholic Enlightenment.24 Gay’s thesis also came under attack from feminists and other groups dissatisfied with the late twentieth-century status quo. Whereas Gay had seen it as a positive movement that laid the foundations for the post-war liberal state, radicals saw it as an ideology that supported a particular form of liberalism and individualism that only emancipated one part of the population. Enlightenment thinkers took a limited interest in other races, women, the working-class, and sexual minorities, and when they did take a stand, they usually supported mainstream opinion. In consequence, Gay’s book, which had nothing to say about the limits of Enlightenment thought, was celebrating a form of liberalism that was already being superseded when it appeared. It was not a radical manifesto for the present but could easily seem like a cosy account of the intellectual underpinnings of the best of all possible educated white male worlds.25
To save the Enlightenment’s radical and progressive credentials, Gay’s thesis had to be reworked. This was finally done at the beginning of the present century in three monumental studies by Jonathan Israel.26 Israel, an English historian now based at
23 The first hint of the reaction against Gay’s cosmopolitan Enlightenment in English appeared in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich’s The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) but the editors did not pursue the point with much rigour in their introduction. For a recent English-language account of the German Enlightenment which maintains Gay’s emphasis on the liberal significance of the movement while demonstrating how Gay has been superseded, see T. J. Reed, Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Other historians continue to insist on the unity of the Enlightenment: see John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
24 E.g. John Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). For a recent refinement and critique of the Catholic Enlightenment, see Mark Curran, Atheism, Religion and Enlightenment in Pre-Revolutionary France (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012), chs 7 and 8; see also Ulrich L. Lehner and Michael Printy (eds), A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
25 The limits of the Enlightenment are summarized in Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Among critics, the French philosopher Michel Foucault went so far as to see the liberal agenda of the philosophes as imposing a new form of control: in the name of humanity, the supervised prison replaces the gallows and the structured hospital random but personal care at home, while sex between men and women is liberated but all other forms of sex demonized.
26 Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1659–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); id., Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and id., Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Princeton, had already forged an impressive reputation as a historian of the early modern Netherlands. His first volume reflected his scholarly past in that he sought the origins of the Enlightenment, not in Newton, but the Dutch philosopher Spinoza, whose intellectual progenitor was Descartes, Newton’s philosophical enemy as an aprioristic systematizer rather than a cautious empiricist. As a result what now defined membership of the Enlightenment was not the rejection of Christianity and the Bible as the privileged word of God but the positive endorsement of Spinozan materialism.27 In the first book such materialists were everywhere, except perhaps Spain, and virtually anybody who raised a critical voice was placed in their camp. Membership of the Enlightenment was no longer confined to a family, but was an expanding tribe for whom Paris had no particular significance. In his second and third book, Israel gave fewer hostages to fortune and accepted that the Spinozists were relatively thin on the ground, but they continued to play a central role in his argument. Supporters of the Enlightenment were now divided into two non-Christian groups: the deists and the atheists. The former, philosophes such as Voltaire and Rousseau, were moderates who had limited objections to the society of Ancien Régime Europe. The latter, particularly the coterie around Helvétius, were radicals who anticipated the agenda of the modern left through their views on democracy, republicanism, secularism, racial equality, and female emancipation. As a result, the Enlightenment remained a movement with great resonance for the present, pace its radical critics, provided it was no longer seen as a unitary but as a fractured movement. Only the Spinozist materialists carried the flag for modernity.28
The conception of the Enlightenment that Isaiah Berlin developed in the course of the 1950s and 1960s was noticeably different from the one that Gay was constructing over the same period. Like Gay, Berlin saw the Enlightenment as a progressive and modernizing movement but his verdict was much less positive. While he was always careful not to align himself with Talmon and other critics, he shared their belief that the Enlightenment had a totalitarian edge.29 The philosophes were engaged in a project to liberate human beings from the control of organized religion and build a new political society where everyone would be happy and fulfilled. This was something Berlin applauded. On the other hand, they saw human nature as no different from nature tout
27 Israel was not the first to highlight the role of the United Provinces at the turn of the eighteenth century in the creation of the Enlightenment: see Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981). When it was published, Jacob’s book received mixed reviews: some thought Jacob was too quick to see freemasons as godless radicals.
28 Israel hammered home the point in a much shorter book published in 2010, which looked at the political and social ideas of the French materialists in the decades before the Revolution: see A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
29 Cf. Berlin’s letters to Herbert Elliston and Jacob Talmon, 30 Dec. 1952 (L II 349, 354–5). Berlin has left no substantive comment on Gay’s work. Cassirer’s work, however, was known to him. He had had some contact with Cassirer when the latter had temporarily found a billet at All Souls on coming out of Germany in 1933. It is not known if he read his book at this juncture but he definitely knew the 1951 English version, which he accused of naiveté: see chapter 3 in this volume.
court and subject to immutable laws which could be uncovered by the same scientific methodology. Consequently, they had a one-dimensional view of human needs and desires which encouraged many among them to follow Rousseau in envisaging a frightening future where we would all be constrained for our own good to do what our peers or the technocrats and visionaries deemed appropriate.
Berlin’s earlier work on Marx was crucial for his understanding of the Enlightenment. From Marx he worked back to the progressive philosophes of mid eighteenth-century Paris, admiring their commitment to liberty but repelled by what he considered their excessive tidy-mindedness, their view that humanity was essentially uniform and could have all its problems resolved by the determined application of reason. This over-confidence in reason had led, via Marxism, to the delusions of Communism, which was in practice incompatible with any robust conception of liberty. So when Berlin later wrote about the Enlightenment, the looming shadow of Communism always qualified his professed admiration for the movement. His interpretation of the Paris philosophes (whom Berlin tends to identify with the Enlightenment) also needs to be seen against the background of the Cold War. Berlin was tracing the genealogy both of the liberal values upheld by the West and of the illiberalism, however wellintentioned in its origins, whose triumph he had witnessed in the Soviet Union. Part of his achievement, as Stefan Collini has pointed out, was to give liberal values a grounding in intellectual history and thus present them with much more depth and subtlety than the more shrill and shallow spokespeople of the time. ‘During these years there was no shortage of Cold War liberals in the West ready to denounce (certain kinds of) oppressive political systems, but there were few, if any, who could make such a position seem the natural outcome of a properly reflective, properly sensitive engagement with the great minds of the Western intellectual tradition.’30
The project of forcing people to be happy was anathema to Berlin’s liberalism. In Berlin’s eyes we all had our individual desires and goals and should be free to make a mess of our lives as long as we did not harm other people. For this reason, he came to feel increasing warmth for the under-studied contemporary opponents of the Enlightenment, who emphasized that human beings were irrational, unpredictable, and idiosyncratic, or that their common desires, to the extent they could be identified, were the product of their historical context. These thinkers, whom he eventually dubbed the Counter-Enlightenment, frequently had their totalitarian side as well: De Maistre with his veneration of the executioner was an obvious monster. But for Berlin the more moderate offered an extremely important corrective to the one-dimensional view of humanity promoted by the philosophes. Their critique ensured that the thinkers of the first half of the nineteenth century who, in his eyes, laid the foundations of the modern liberal state of the West, such as Benjamin Constant and J. S. Mill, were
30 Stefan Collini, English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 206.
much more alive to the nobility, sanctity, and perversity of the individual than their predecessors.31
After 1970 Berlin’s account of the Enlightenment received limited attention from historians of thought working on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was Gay’s version that became canonic. There were several reasons for this. To begin with, Berlin was deliberately present-orientated. The philosophes and their opponents were the point of departure for our modern world with all its hopes and horrors. We needed to know what they had to say to understand ourselves. Gay was just as committed (as were Cassirer and Israel) but he was far less open about it and aimed to place the philosophes and their programme in their historical context: he was an historian not a polemicist. Berlin always viewed political and social thought of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century in the light of his own liberal predispositions, in particular his contrast between negative and positive liberty. His own concerns as a political philosopher transparently affected how he approached individual thinkers and coloured how he represented them.
More importantly, Berlin never produced a properly footnoted book-length study of social and political thought across the long eighteenth century, though he contracted to do so on several occasions. His only book-length publication which could be said to constitute an overview was an anthology of Enlightenment thought, published in 1956. And this seems nothing if not eccentric with its emphasis on a largely anglophone Enlightenment, with copious extracts from Locke, Hume, and Berkeley but only a brief extract from Voltaire and nothing by Lessing or Kant. What Berlin produced was a constant stream of private letters, public lectures, radio broadcasts, and insightful essays where his basic idea of the two Enlightenments was explored and refined through individual cases. His work was highly approachable, his style urbane and engaging, but there was nothing solid to stand beside Gay’s two-volume synthesis. Indeed, it was only once Henry Hardy, in the mid-1970s, singlehandedly took upon himself the task of collecting together Berlin’s oeuvre that his ideas became widely accessible to the public.32 Moreover, once they did so, they struck a younger generation of historians and literary critics as already outdated. In the 1950s and 1960s the number of scholars working in the field of Enlightenment thought, high or low, was relatively small. In the last three decades of the twentieth century, research on the movement in Britain, Europe, and North America exploded and Berlin’s simple distinction between the philosophes and their opponents seemed trite and forced in the light of much more careful textual study. Key members of his Enlightenment, such as Hume, could not be reduced to rationalist
31 The Swiss Constant who opposed Napoleon and strove to create a liberal France after the Restoration was one of Berlin’s liberal heroes: see L II 353 (to Denis Paul, 30 Dec. 1952) and 644 (to Gladwyn Jebb, 1 Sept. 1958); L III 151 (to Steven Lukes, 4 Apr. 1963). Constant knew only too well through his troubled relationship with Madame de Staël how difficult it was for human beings to know what they wanted. The inconstancy of human beings is explored in his novel Adolphe (1816).
32 His Roots of Romanticism for instance first appeared in print after his death in 1999, but it had begun life in 1965 as the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
systematizers; while seminal figures of his Counter-Enlightenment, like Herder, appeared mislabelled. Berlin’s tendency to associate the Enlightenment with France, and the Counter-Enlightenment with Germany, seemed equally unhelpful. The reality, be it in regard to individual authors or countries, was far more complex than Berlin had believed.
It would be wrong, however, to dismiss Berlin’s contribution as outdated and unworthy of consideration in the early twenty-first century. His insistence on seeing the Enlightenment as a dialectical movement or a dialogue between two opposing sides might appear perverse and empirically challengeable but the approach has been and continues to be fruitful. On the one hand, it introduced Anglo-Americans to three leading philosophers of the eighteenth century who had been hitherto largely ignored: Vico, Hamann, and Herder. On the other, it destabilized the comfortable division of European thought in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century into two successive ages: the age of Enlightenment and the age of Romanticism. Berlin’s belief that the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment were contemporaneous rather than successive movements of thought may be open to question, but it forces us to think more deeply about a traditional periodization, which still prevails. This periodization made sense when the French Revolution was considered the break between Europe’s Ancien Régime and the modern world. Today, when many historians think in terms of a long eighteenth century which is only brought to an end as industrialization gathers pace on the Continent about 1850, it makes sense to consider whether the history of thought over the previous century and a half should also be seen as more of a unity.
This book begins from the assumption that a historian of ideas whose view of the Enlightenment has served to focus attention on neglected thinkers and unsettle our conception of its boundaries is deserving of attention, irrespective of his scholarly limitations.33 Where, as with Berlin, the historian has also a large educated following— indeed, one that seems to be growing thanks to the efforts of Henry Hardy—the need to take his contribution seriously is all the greater. Far more people have learnt and will learn about the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment from Berlin’s essays than have dipped into or will ever open Gay and Israel. This does not mean that this book is intended to as an act of piety or an attempt at rehabilitation. It aims rather to give both Berlin’s fans and foes a deeper understanding of his work on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century thought by placing it in the context both of present-day scholarship and the author’s own intellectual and historical milieu. The book is an evaluation of Berlin, not as a philosopher or defender of western liberalism, but as a historian of ideas.34
33 Berlin’s approach has not just encouraged interest in significant and original thinkers who doubted the Enlightenment project. He has also more recently inspired studies of more mundane opponents. Darrin McMahon has gone so far as to suggest these people actually helped to create the Enlightenment by identifying their antagonist and thus conferring unity on it: see his Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
34 There has only been one attempt hitherto to look at Berlin in this way: see Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler (eds), Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003). As the book’s title emphasizes, most of the contributors are interested in only one side of Berlin’s two
This book, then, is a critique not a panegyric, though the editors feel that Berlin would appreciate its intention. Berlin’s own narrative of the Enlightenment was shaped by his obsession with human freedom, the peculiar circumstances of his life, his intellectual milieu and voracious reading of the disparate primary and secondary sources he had to hand. As an enterprise, it was also initially a lonely venture, for few Oxford philosophers or historians had been traditionally very interested in the history of ideas beyond the Renaissance.35 Before the rise of the Nazis, the history of modern ideas had been monopolized by German scholarship. Unsurprisingly, then, as the following pages will show, Berlin’s reading of individual authors and his conception of the movement as a whole often appear one-sided and unsophisticated to most modern scholars. He was a lone soldier with a personal agenda: they are part of a vast army of dix-huitièmistes with their own journals and foundations, anxious to grasp the text ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’, and armed with a panoply of hermeneutic tools completely unknown to their predecessors. However, the criticisms levelled against his work today would not have troubled Berlin. Believing as he did that all intellectual enquiry was an ongoing and eternal debate that only dictators shut down, he would not have wanted his readings to be set in stone. He would have seen modern scholarship as his legacy and been particularly pleased that so much of it is related to Oxford through the Voltaire Foundation.36 We believe that a book that treats Berlin’s Enlightenment as a point of departure and his work as the beginning of a debate would command his respect.
37
This book is divided into four sections. The first, An Idea in Context, is a commentary from different perspectives on Berlin’s conception of the two Enlightenments. The second and third sections examine and critique Berlin’s account of individual authors from Machiavelli to J. S. Mill, whom Berlin saw as important representatives of the two movements. The individuals in question form a cross-section of thinkers in whom Berlin took an interest. They include figures he studied in detail, philosophers he rescued from obscurity, and thinkers to whom he frequently referred but never analysed Enlightenments. The essays show little appreciation that Berlin thought both Enlightenments gave birth to the modern world and that both had their strengths and weaknesses; Berlin tends to be viewed as a Counter-Enlightenment man drawn to outsiders and only comfortable within his tribe for all his cosmopolitanism.
35 This reflected the bias of the undergraduate curriculum: courses in modern (!) history, modern languages, and English literature privileged the study of the Middle Ages. And politics in PPE before the Second World War was largely taught by historians and linguists. The most important study of political ideas to appear by an Oxford don in the first half of the twentieth century was R. W. Carlyle’s History of Medieval Political Theory in the West, 6 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1903–36).
36 Founded in 1976 as a result of a bequest from the Genevan scholar Theodore Besterman. Besides undertaking a new edition of the complete works of Voltaire, through the Studies and other initiatives it provides a forum for current cross-disciplinary Enlightenment scholarship.
37 This is not to deny that in old age Berlin liked to present himself as a lone English wolf even when there was a pack of hungry juniors nibbling at his heels: see L I 489 for a quotation from a radio interview of 1979 where Berlin pretends the history of thought is still not widely pursued.
closely. They are all thinkers with whom Berlin expressed an affinity, if not absolutely. The final section of the book explores Berlin’s legacy as a historian of ideas.
The opening essay of the first section by David Leopold documents Berlin’s initial encounter with the Enlightenment in his intellectual biography of Marx, where the movement was generally explored positively. This is followed by an essay by the two editors which charts the development of Berlin’s mature view of the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment in the 1950s and 1960s and introduces the reader to its quirks and limitations. The final essay of the section by Avi Lifschitz shows that Berlin’s division of political and social thought into two hostile camps was not completely his own invention. On the contrary, Berlin’s conception of the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment was anticipated in the work of the German historian of ideas of the first half of the twentieth century, Friedrich Meinecke, who had already grasped the importance of Vico as a critic of Descartes and his followers’ treatment of human nature as timeless and human beings as rational.
The second section deals with philosophers that Berlin placed within his Enlightenment. It begins with an essay by Peter Kail on Hume, where the author shows that the Scottish philosopher had a much more relativist view of human nature than Berlin had understood. As a result, Hume and Berlin had a lot in common and were potential allies. The next essay, by Karen O’Brien, is devoted to Montesquieu, one of the philosophes who, in Berlin’s eyes, escaped the straitjacket of Enlightenment monism to a degree. As O’Brien shows, Berlin was attracted to Montesquieu as an Enlightenment thinker who rejected utopianism: he appreciated that Montesquieu continued to recognize an absolute standard value embodied in natural law, but he viewed the Frenchman with approval as supposedly the one philosophe who understood that man’s desires and goals were complex and varied and reflected their historical milieu. In contrast, the third essay, by Christopher Brooke, looks at the one Enlightenment figure Berlin claimed to be unable to situate: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. On the one hand, he accepted that Rousseau was a genuine libertarian; on the other, he distrusted the Genevan’s view of the general will.38 According to Brooke, Berlin’s reading of Rousseau was heavily influenced by the earlier accounts given by Plekhanov, Irving Babbitt, and Talmon, plus his own background in analytic philosophy which meant he had little time for philosophical idealism. Berlin’s real difficulty with Rousseau, however, stemmed from the fact he could not reconcile the rational and emotional elements in the philosophe’s thought. The essay on Diderot and Hamann by Marian Hobson then takes us on to a central Enlightenment figure whom Berlin all but ignored. For Hobson, in this essay, Diderot represents the playful, sceptical, and instinctual side of the Enlightenment. By showing how much Diderot and Hamann, an icon of Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment, have in common, she illustrates particularly clearly why many modern-day literary critics as well as historians of ideas have difficulty in accepting Berlin’s monist conception of
38 Berlin commented on the difficulty with getting to grips with Rousseau in a number of letters: e.g. letter to Jakob Huizinga, 21 Nov. 1972 (L III 511–13).
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
AMERICAN DIPPER.
C A , S .
PLATE CCCLXX. M F .
The specimens from which figures here given have been taken, were procured on the Rocky Mountains, on the 15th of June, when they were supposed to be breeding, so that they were probably adults in full plumage. Having little taste for critical discussions, I shall refrain from inflicting on the reader a long and elaborate review of all that has been said on the subject of this interesting but little-known bird, which was figured by the Prince of M from a specimen obtained near the sources of the Athabasca River, under the name of Cinclus Pallasii; and has been described by Mr S , first as C. Mexicanus, and again, in the Fauna Boreali-Americana, as C. Americanus. The latter name I prefer to that of C. unicolor, which is in fact incorrect, the bird not being of one single colour. Unfortunately very little is known respecting the habits of the American Dipper, which however, being in form and size so very similar to that of Europe, probably resembles it in its mode of life. I therefore cannot do better than endeavour to supply the deficiency by presenting you with the history of the latter species, as given in detail by my friend W M , who, among the wild hills of his native country, has studied its habits with a zeal and acuteness certainly not exceeded by those of any ornithologist. His account, which first appeared in a periodical named “The Naturalist,” and which he has
revised and amended for insertion here, is in truth a model of histories of this kind.
“The Dipper is in many respects one of the most interesting of our native birds. Residing chiefly in the wild glens of the mountainous districts, it now and then presents itself to the wandering naturalist as it flits along the streams, or is seen perched on a stone in the midst of the water, the white patch on its breast rendering it conspicuous at a great distance. Even the mere collector of plants, who, of all men, seems to be the least capable of comprehending the harmonies of nature, pauses to gaze upon it, as it shoots past him in its rapid and even flight; the solitary shepherd, wending his way to the mountain corry, meets it with delight; and the patient and contemplative angler, as he guides his tackle over the deep pool, smiles upon the tiny fisher, whose frequent becks have attracted his notice. The singular circumstance of its obtaining its food under the surface of the water, although in form and structure it is allied to the Thrushes, Wrens, and other land birds, has especially drawn the attention of ornithologists to it; and the explanation of its mode of progression in that element has exercised their ingenuity, although very few have based their conjectures on actual observation. Lastly, the landproprietor, or his factor, too much occupied with other pursuits to inquire for themselves, and trusting to the reports of prejudiced persons, direct their gamekeepers and shepherds to destroy the lively and harmless creature, whenever an opportunity occurs, because it has been supposed to destroy the eggs and fry of the salmon.
“This bird having in a particular manner engaged my attention in the course of my many rambles, I have been enabled to trace its history in a satisfactory degree, so that the account here presented of it I consider as among the most accurate of those which I have written.
“It frequents the sides of rivers and streams of inferior magnitude, especially such as are clear and rapid, with pebbly or rocky margins.
I have met with it in every part of Scotland, as well as in the hilly parts of Cumberland and Westmoreland, and it is said by M to occur in Wales and Devonshire. In Scotland it is not peculiar to the mountainous regions, being found in the lowest parts of the Lothians, as well as on the alpine rills of the Grampians, and other elevated tracts, but it is generally more abundant in hilly ground, and, although never common in any district, is nowhere more plentiful than on the Tweed and its tributaries, in the pastoral counties of Peebles and Selkirk. It is also a well-known inhabitant of all the larger Hebrides. It is not only a permanent resident, but seldom shifts its station to any great extent, excepting during continued frosts, when it descends along the streams, and is seen flitting about by the rapids and falls. Mill-dams are also favourite resorts, especially in winter and spring. On lakes having a muddy or peaty bottom I have never observed it; but it may sometimes be seen on those which are shallow and pebbly at the margins, as on St Mary’s Loch in Yarrow, where I have shot it.
“The flight of the Dipper is steady, direct, and rapid, like that of the Kingfisher, being effected by regularly timed and quick beats of the wings, without intermissions or sailings. It perches on stones or projecting crags by the sides of streams, or in the water, where it may be seen frequently inclining the breast downwards, and jerking up the tail, much in the manner of the Wheatear and Stonechat, and still more of the Wren; its legs bent, its neck retracted, and its wings slightly drooping. It plunges into the water, not dreading the force of the current, dives, and makes its way beneath the surface, generally moving against the stream, and often with surprising speed. It does not, however, immerse itself head foremost from on high like the Kingfisher, the Tern, or the Gannet; but either walks out into the water, or alights upon its surface, and then plunges like an Auk or a Guillemot, slightly opening its wings, and disappearing with an agility and dexterity that indicate its proficiency in diving. I have seen it
moving under water in situations where I could observe it with certainty, and I readily perceived that its actions were precisely similar to those of the Divers, Mergansers, and Cormorants, which I have often watched from an eminence, as they pursued the shoals of sand-eels along the sandy shores of the Hebrides. It in fact flew, not merely using the wing, from the carpal joint, but extending it considerably and employing its whole extent, just as if advancing in the air. The general direction of the body in these circumstances is obliquely downwards; and great force is evidently used to counteract the effects of gravity, the bird finding it difficult to keep itself at the bottom, and when it relaxes its efforts coming to the surface like a cork. M has well described the appearance which it presents under such circumstances:—“In one or two instances, where we have been able to perceive it under water, it appeared to tumble about in a very extraordinary manner, with its head downwards, as if picking something; and at the same time great exertion was used, both by the wings and legs.” This tumbling, however, is observed only when it is engaged in a strong current, and its appearance is greatly magnified by the unequal refraction caused by the varying inequalities of the surface of the water. When searching for food, it does not proceed to great distances under water; but, alighting on some spot, sinks, and soon reappears in the immediate neighbourhood, when it either dives again, or rises on wing to drop somewhere else on the stream, or settle on a stone. Often from a shelving crag or large stone it may be seen making short incursions into the water, running out with quiet activity, and presently bobbing up to the surface, and regaining its perch by swimming or wading. The assertion of its walking in the water, on the bottom, which some persons have ventured, is not made good by observation, nor countenanced by reason and the nature of things. The Dipper is by no means a walking bird: even on land I have never seen it move more than a few steps, which it accomplished by a kind of leaping motion. Its short legs and curved claws are very ill adapted for
running, but admirably calculated for securing a steady footing on slippery stones, whether above or beneath the surface of the water. Like the Kingfisher, it often remains a long time perched on a stone, but in most other respects its habits are very dissimilar.
“The first opportunity which I had of observing this bird advancing under water occurred in Braemar, in 1819, when, from the bank of the stream which passes by Castletown, I noticed one “tumbling about” in the rapid current. In September 1832 I watched a Dipper for some time, on a part of the Tweed, where the current was very rapid. It flew off from the shore, and alighted in the middle of the stream, where it immediately dived. Reappearing a little way farther up the river, it floated for a few seconds, dived, emerged, and flew to the opposite bank, on reaching which it again disappeared under water for a short time, and thus continued its exertions. When perched on a stone near the shore, especially if the water be not much agitated around, it usually makes short incursions into it, apparently for the purpose of procuring food, and returns to its station. On these occasions it is not difficult to approach it, provided due precaution be used; but in general it is shy and easily alarmed. I have several times shot at an individual which observed me as I was quietly walking up to it; but it is not often that one remains until you come within shot. A method which I have often successfully practised was to mark the position of the bird at a distance, taking note of an object on the bank opposite to it, then make a circuit and suddenly come upon the spot. When one has been pursued either up or down a stream for a quarter of a mile or so, it usually turns, to regain its ordinary station, when it may be shot as it dashes past.
“In August 1834, while ascending White Coom, the highest mountain in Dumfriesshire, accompanied by my son, I observed a Dipper retreating behind a large stone, over which the water fell, in the midst of a streamlet that flowed along the bottom of a narrow sear or rut.
Imagining that its nest or young might be concealed there, we went
up to the place, and, on perceiving the bird behind the little waterfall, endeavoured to catch it, on which it sallied forth, plunged into a pool, and attempted to escape down the stream, but without success, for we met it at every turn, and it was obliged to betake itself again to its retreat. We now turned off the water from the stone, when it again plunged into the pool, and after some windings, at length effected its escape. On emerging at some distance it flew off, and I considered it strange that it had not used its wings at first, as it certainly could more easily have escaped through the air than through the water. The chase afforded another rare opportunity of viewing its subaqueous flight, which in all probability was caused by excessive alarm. It flew about in the pool, just as a bird would fly in a confined space in the air, but of course, with less velocity, and on diving at first seemed covered with small air-bubbles which adhered to its surface.
“On being wounded the Dipper commonly plunges into the water, flies beneath its surface to the shore, and conceals itself among the stones or under the bank. In fact, on all such occasions, if enough of life remains, it is sure to hide itself, so that one requires to look sharply after it. In this respect it greatly resembles the Common Gallinule. In the winter of 1829, I shot one on the Almond, which flew to the other side, walked deliberately out into the water, disappeared, and slowly emerged under a bank at some distance, where I found it after wading through the stream, which was partially frozen. Another had just strength sufficient to fly into a deep hole under a bridge on the Yarrow, partially filled with water, on which it was found floating dead. In August 1834, I shot a Dipper on Manor Water in Tweeddale, which flew off, dived, and hid itself under a bank, on which I forded the stream and endeavoured to secure it, but it slipped out under water, swam down the current twenty yards or so, and got under a large stone, where it was traced. The introduction of the gun-rod only caused the persecuted bird to retreat as far as it could, and when I was employed in removing some pebbles and gravel from behind the
stone, it slipped out under water, and proceeded down the stream a considerable way before it rose to breathe. I noticed the place where it dived in under the bank, and it being at length obliged to come up to respire, I met the bird with my hand and so secured it.
“When wounded and caught, it struggles hard, grasping firmly with the feet, but does not attempt to bite. I mention this circumstance as common to certain species of birds, such as the Fieldfare, Blackbird, and Starling, which without possessing the power of annoying their enemy, yet do not tamely suffer themselves to be destroyed, but struggle to the last, undismayed, and ready to use the slightest chance of escape. Other species, equal in strength, such as the Snipe, the Golden Plover, and the Lapwing, do not struggle so vigorously, but meet their fate in a quiet and apparently stupid manner. Some birds, again, such as the Tits and Warblers, although evidently extremely frightened on being seized, watch every opportunity of biting. I need scarcely add that some, as the Kestril and Sparrowhawk, grasp and bite with as much good-will as effect.
“The most melancholy ornithological exhibition that I remember to have witnessed, was that of a wounded Dipper which was shot through the lungs, above Cramond Bridge, near Edinburgh. It stood still, without attempting to fly off, apparently insensible to all external objects, its legs bent, its wings drooping, its head declined. The blood was oozing from its side, and gurgling in its windpipe, which the poor bird made ineffectual efforts to clear. At intervals, a convulsive heaving of the chest took place, followed by an effort to vomit; and in that state the sufferer stood for five minutes, until I got over the stream to it, when it expired in my hand. In the agony of death, the pupil became contracted to a mere point, and presently after dilated, when the lower eyelid gradually rose and covered the eye. This is commonly the case in birds, which do not expire with their eyes open, like man and most quadrupeds.
“The food of the Dipper is said by authors to consist of small fishes, roe, and water-insects. Thus, according to W , “Pisces predatur, nec insecta aversatur.” M states that he saw an “old bird flying in with a fish in its bill,” and that “these birds will sometimes pick up insects at the edge of the water.” M. T alleges that its food consists of “insectes d’eau, demoiselles et leurs larves; souvent du frai de truite.” Mr S judiciously combines these statements, informing us that “water-insects and the fry and spawn of fish form its food.” Mr J , more wary, confines it to “aquatic insects.” It would answer no good purpose to bring forward the notions of other compilers. There is nothing incredible in all these statements, although it is to be remarked that no one states that he has actually observed fishes, or their eggs, in the stomach of this bird. I have opened a great number of individuals, at all seasons of the year, but have never found any other substances in the stomach than Lymneæ, Ancyli, Coleoptera, and grains of gravel. As to the ova and fry of the salmon, there is no evidence whatever that the Dipper ever swallows them; and, therefore, the persecution to which this bird has been subjected in consequence of the mere suspicion, ought to cease until the fact be proved. That the mollusca above mentioned form a principal part of its food was never suspected, and therefore I was much pleased with making the discovery, which satisfactorily accounted to me for all the subaqueous excursions of the species.
“The Dipper is generally seen in pairs, sometimes singly, and, for a short period, at the breeding season, in families but never in flocks. In some favourite places, such as a water-fall, or a series of rapids, one may in winter find so many as four or five individuals, but always scattered. Its song is short, but lively, and continued at intervals. It bears no resemblance to the full song of the Thrushes, but closely resembles the subdued winter warble of the Redwing and Starling, or the first notes of a young Song Thrush. This gentle warble is not
confined to any period of the year, but may be heard during sunny weather at all seasons. Its common note, which it frequently utters while perched on a stone or while flying along the stream, resembles the syllable chit.
“About the middle of spring it begins to form its nest, so that its first brood is abroad at the same time with that of the Blackbird. The nest, which is placed among the moss on the bank of a stream, or among the roots of a tree in a concealed place overhanging the water, sometimes in a crevice of a rock, or under a bridge, or even in the space behind a waterfall, varies considerably in form and size, according to its position; but is always very bulky, arched over, and resembles that of the Wren more than of any other bird. A perfect specimen found by my friend Mr W , in the county of Linlithgow, presents externally the appearance of a flattened elliptical mass, measuring ten inches from the front to the back part, eight and a half in breadth, and six in height. The aperture is in front, of a transversely oblong form, three inches and a quarter wide, and one inch and a half high. The exterior is composed of various species of mosses, chiefly hypna, firmly felted, so as to form a mass not easily torn asunder, especially in its lower part. This portion may be considered as forming a case for the nest properly so called, and in this respect resembles the mud case of the swallows. The nest itself is hemispherical, five and a half inches in diameter, composed of stems and leaves of grasses, and very copiously lined with beechleaves. I have examined several other nests, which were similarly constructed, and all lined with beech-leaves, one having a few of ivy, and another one or two of the plane, intermixed. M describes the nest as “very large, formed of moss and water plants externally, and lined with dry oak leaves”, and others have stated that the lining is of leaves of various trees, which may depend upon the locality. The eggs, five or six in number, are of a regular oval form, rather pointed, pure white, varying from eleven-twelfths to an inch and one-
twelfth in length, and averaging nine-twelfths in their greatest breadth. They are somewhat smaller than those of the Song Thrush.
“The genus Cinclus may be considered as placed on the limits of the families of Turdinæ and Myrmotherinæ, being in fact more allied to Turdus than to Pitta, although through Chamæza perhaps more obviously related to the latter. The digestive organs of the Common Dipper are entirely analogous to those of the Thrushes and allied genera, but bear no resemblance to those of the piscivorous birds, the œsophagus being narrow, and the stomach a true gizzard. The bird, being destined to feed upon aquatic insects and mollusca, which adhere to the stones under the water, is fitted for making its way to the bottom at small depths, and maintaining itself there for a short time, a minute or more; in conformity with which design its plumage is rather short and dense, its tail abbreviated, its wings short, broad, and strong, its bill unencumbered by bristles, and of the proper form for seizing small objects, as well as for detaching them from stones. Having its feet constructed like those of the Thrushes, but proportionally stronger, the Dipper thus forms a connecting link between the slender-billed land birds and the diving palmipedes, as the Kingfisher seems to unite them with the plunging birds of the same order.”
The only original observations respecting the habits of the American Dipper that I have to present here are the following, with which I have been favoured by Dr T :—“This bird inhabits the clear mountain streams in the vicinity of the Columbia River. When observed it was swimming among the rapids, occasionally flying for short distances over the surface of the water, and then diving into it, and reappearing after a long interval. Sometimes it will alight along the margin, and jerk its tail upwards like a Wren. I did not hear it utter any note. The stomach was found to contain fragments of freshwater snails. I observed that this bird did not alight on the surface of the water, but dived immediately from the wing.”
C P , Ch. Bonaparte, Amer. Ornith. vol. iii. p. 1, pl. 16, fig. 1.
C A , Swains. and Richards. Fauna Bor.-Amer. vol. ii. p. 173.
B W -O , or D , Nuttall, Manual, vol ii p 358
Adult Male. Plate CCCLXX. Fig. 1.
Bill rather short, slender, slightly ascending, much compressed toward the end; upper mandible with its dorsal line slightly arched, the ridge rounded, the sides convex, the edges sharp and inflected with an obscure notch close to the narrow slightly deflected tip: lower mandible slightly bent upwards, the angle medial and very narrow, the dorsal line ascending and slightly convex, the tip narrow and rather acute, the gape-line straight. Nostrils linear, direct, in the lower and fore part of the nasal membrane which is covered with very short feathers. Eyes rather small; eyelids densely feathered.
The general form is short, full, and compact; the head oblong, compressed, rather small; the neck rather short; the body rather deeper than broad. Legs strong, of ordinary length; tarsus compressed, covered anteriorly with a long undivided plate and four inferior scutella, posteriorly with two long plates meeting at a very acute angle. Toes rather large and strong; the first, second, and fourth, nearly equal in length, but the first much stronger, the third much longer; the third and fourth united as far as the second joint of the latter. Claws rather long, arched, much compressed, that of the hind toe considerably larger.
Plumage very soft and blended, the feathers oblong and rounded; those about the base of the bill very short and velvety. No bristles at the base of the bill. Wings rather short, broad, convex, and rounded; the first quill very short and narrow, being about a third of the length of the second, which is shorter than the fourth, the third longest, and with the next three slightly cut out on the outer web towards the end; secondary quills long, broadband rounded. Tail short, even, of twelve
rather broad feathers, which are slightly decurved. Legs feathered to the joint, but the tarsus entirely bare.
Bill brownish-black; iris hazel; feet flesh-coloured, toes dusky towards the end; claws yellowish-grey. The general colour of the plumage is blackish-grey or deep bluish-grey; the head and neck chocolate-brown, that colour extending lower on the fore part of the neck than behind; the downy feathers of both eyelids white; the quills and tail-feathers dusky; the secondaries terminally margined with white.
Length to end of tail 7 1/2 inches; extent of wings 10 1/2; wing from flexure 3 3/4; tail 2 1/4; bill along the ridge 9/12, along the edge of lower mandible 11/12 tarsus 1 1/12; hind toe 5/12, its claw 4/12; middle toe 10/12, its claw 4/12.
Adult female. Plate CCCLXX. Fig. 2.
The Female is in all respects similar to the male.
In form, size, and proportion, the American Dipper is almost precisely similar to the European.
COCK OF THE PLAINS.
T . B .
PLATE CCCLXXI. M F .
Although the Cock of the Plains has long been known to exist within the limits of the United States, the rugged and desolate nature of the regions inhabited by it has hitherto limited our knowledge of its habits to the cursory observations made by the few intrepid travellers, who, urged by their zeal in the cause of science, have ventured to explore the great ridge of mountains, that separate our western prairies from the rich valleys bordering on the Pacific Ocean. Two of these travellers, my friends Dr T and Mr N , have favoured me with the following particulars respecting this very remarkable species, the history of which, not being myself personally acquainted with it, I shall endeavour to complete by adding some notes of Mr D
“Tetrao Urophasianus, Pi-imsh of the Wallah Wallah Indians, Makesh-too-yoo of the Nezpercee Indians, is first met with about fifty miles west of the Black Hills. We lose sight of it in pursuing the route by the Snake River until we reach Wallah Wallah, on the banks of the Columbia, near the mouth of Lewis River. This bird is only found on the plains which produce the worm-wood (Artemisia), on which plant it feeds, in consequence of which the flesh is so bitter that it is rejected as food. It is very unsuspicious, and easily approached, rarely flies unless hard pressed, runs before you at the distance of a
few feet, clucking like the common Hen, often runs under the horses of travellers when disturbed, rises very clumsily, but when once started flies with rapidity to a great distance, and has the sailing motion of the Pinnated Grous. In the autumn they frequent the branches of the Columbia River, where they feed on a narrow-leaved plant. At this time they are considered good food by the natives, who take great quantities of them in nets. J. K. T .”
“On the north branch of the Platte (Larimie’s Fork) we begin to meet with the Tetrao Urophasianus in considerable numbers, always on the ground in small flocks or pairs, by no means shy, but when too nearly approached arising with a strong whirring noise, and uttering at the same time a rather loud but very short alarmed guttural cackle. The notes of the female indeed at such times almost resemble those of a common Hen. The old male when killed by Dr T turned out so different from the imperfect and unadult specimens figured, that we could scarcely recognise it for the same species. Its size seemed to promise a fine meal, but appearances are often deceitful, and after being nicely broiled, it truly deserved to be treated like the well-prepared plate of cucumbers, proving so very bitter, though delicately white, that our hungry hunters could scarcely swallow more than a morsel. In short, it feeds by choice on the bitterest shrubs of these sterile plains, and under-wood (several species of Artemisia) is literally its favourite food. Of its nest and breeding habits we ascertained nothing, but cannot for a moment hesitate to say that some mistake must exist in either asserting or supposing that a bird so constantly confined to the open desert plains, could retire to the shady forests and dark alluvial thickets of the Columbia to rear its young apart from their usual food and habits. We met with this very fine Grous near to the plains around Wallah Wallah, on the south side of the Columbia, but never saw it either in the forests of the Columbia or the Wahlamet, nor, so far as we know, has it ever
been found on the coast of California, or in the interior of Mexico. T. N .”
Mr D ’s statement is as follows:—“The flight of these birds is slow, unsteady, and affords but little amusement to the sportsman. From the disproportionately small, convex, thin-quilled wing,—so thin that a vacant space half as broad as a quill appears between each, —the flight may be said to be a sort of fluttering, more than any thing else: the bird giving two or three claps of the wings in quick succession, at the same time hurriedly rising; then shooting or floating, swinging from side to side, gradually falling, and thus producing a clapping, whirring sound. When started, the voice is cuck, cuck, cuck, like the Common Pheasant. They pair in March and April. Small eminences on the banks of streams are the places usually selected for celebrating the weddings, the time generally about sunrise. The wings of the male are lowered, buzzing on the ground; the tail, spread like a fan, somewhat erect; the bare yellow œsophagus inflated to a prodigious size,—fully half as large as his body, and, from its soft, membranous substance, being well contrasted with the scale-like feathers below it on the breast, and the flexile, silky feathers on the neck, which on these occasions stand erect. In this grotesque form he displays, in the presence of his intended mate, a variety of attitudes. His love-song is a confused, grating, but not offensively disagreeable tone,—something that we can imitate, but have a difficulty in expressing—Hurr-hurr-hurr-r-r-rhoo, ending in a deep, hollow tone, not unlike the sound produced by blowing into a large reed. Nest on the ground, under the shade of Purshia and Artemisia, or near streams, among Phalaris arundinacea, carefully constructed of dry grass and slender twigs. Eggs, from thirteen to seventeen, about the size of those of a common fowl, of a wood-brown colour, with irregular chocolate blotches on the thick end. Period of incubation twenty-one to twentytwo days. The young leave the nest a few hours after they are
hatched. In the summer and autumn months these birds are seen in small troops, and in winter and spring in flocks of several hundreds. Plentiful throughout the barren, arid plains of the river Columbia; also in the interior of North California. They do not exist on the banks of the River Missouri; nor have they been seen in any place east of the Rocky Mountains.”
T U , Ch. Bonap. Amer. Ornith. vol. iii. pl. 21, fig. 1.
Female
T (C ) U , Richards. and Swains. Fauna
Bor.-Americana, vol. ii. p. 358.
C of the P , Nuttall, Manual, vol. ii. p. 665.
Adult Male. Plate CCCLXXI. Fig. 1.
Bill shortish, strong, somewhat compressed; upper mandible with the dorsal line arcuato-declinate, the ridge flattened at the base and narrowed on account of the great extent of the nasal sinus, which is feathered, the sides convex toward the end, the edges inflected, the tip narrow and rounded; lower mandible with the angle of moderate length and width, the dorsal line ascending and convex, the edges sharp and inflected, the tip obtuse, but like the upper thin-edged. Head rather small, oblong; neck of moderate length; body full. Feet rather short, stout; tarsus roundish, feathered, bare and reticulated behind. Toes of moderate size, covered above with numerous scutella, laterally pectinated with slender projecting flattened scales; first toe small, second a little shorter than fourth, third much longer. Claws stout, slightly arched, moderately compressed, obtuse.
Plumage dense, soft, rather compact, the feathers in general broadly ovate; those on the head very short, on the sides of the neck anteriorly at its lower part and across the fore part of the breast, small, very short, broad, stiff, and imbricated like scales; higher up on the sides of the neck a tuft of feathers having their shafts
elongated, bristle-like, and terminated by a few filaments. On each side of the lower part of the neck in front is a large bare space capable of being inflated into a hemispherical sac. On the fore part of the breast the feathers, although long, have the shaft thickened and elongated; the rest of the feathers are of ordinary structure. Wings rather short, concave, much rounded, the primaries stiff and very narrow, so as to leave a large interval when the wing is extended; the third, fourth, and fifth quills longest. Tail long, graduated, of twenty stiffish feathers, each tapering to a very elongated point.
Bill black; iris light hazel; superciliary membrane vermilion; toes brownish-grey; claws brownish-black. The upper parts are light yellowish-brown, variegated with brownish-black and yellowishwhite; the feathers of the head and neck transversely barred, of the back barred, undulated and dotted, with a whitish longitudinal line along the shafts of the wing-feathers. The quills chocolate-brown, their outer webs and part of their inner margins mottled with yellowish-white. Tail with about ten bands of yellowish-white on the outer webs, which are otherwise variegated like the back, the inner webs nearly plain brown. The throat and fore part of neck whitish, longitudinally spotted with brownish-black; a narrow white band across the throat; the sides of the neck and fore part of the breast white; the elongated shafts of the tuft-feathers, black; the sides variegated like the back with a broad line of white along the middle of each feather; the axillars and lower wing-coverts pure white; the hind part of the breast and the abdomen, brownish-black; the sides of the rump like the back, the lower tail-coverts brownish-black, largely tipped with white, the feathers of the tibiæ and tarsi pale brownishgrey, faintly barred with brown.
Length to end of tail 30 inches; extent of wings 36; wing from flexure 13; tail 12, shortest feathers 7; bill along the ridge 1 6/12, along the
edge of lower mandible 1 4/12; tarsus 2 1/2; hind toe 1/2, its claw 4/12; middle toe 2 1/4, its claw 6/12.
Adult Female. Plate CCCLXXI. Fig. 2.
The female is much smaller than the male, and differs in being destitute of the bare skin on the fore neck, in having the superciliary membranes smaller, the plumage entirely of ordinary texture; the tail less elongated, with the feathers less narrow and ending in a rounded point. All the upper parts, fore neck and sides are variegated with brownish-black, yellowish-grey and whitish disposed nearly as in the male; the throat whitish, the fore part of the breast white, the middle part brownish-black, the legs and tarsi as in the male, as are the quills; the tail-feathers mottled like the back and tipped with white.
Length to end of tail 22 inches; wing from flexure 10 1/2; tail 7 3/4; bill along the ridge 1 4/12; tarsus 1 10 1/2/12; middle toe 1 8 1/2/12, its claw 6/12.
The size of this species has been exaggerated, it having been by some compared to the Turkey, and by others to the Great Wood Grous of Europe, Tetrao Urogallus, whereas, in fact, it seems not much to exceed Tetrao hybridus. In some individuals, as I am informed by Dr T , the hair-like shafts of the feathers on the sides of the neck, are considerably longer than in my figure of the male.
COMMON BUZZARD.
F , L .
PLATE CCCLXXII. F .
The specimen from which the figure before you was taken, was shot by Dr T on a rock near the Columbia River, on which it had its nest. Unfortunately, however, he has not supplied me with any account of this species, and the only notice respecting its habits that I have seen, is that in the Fauna Boreali-Americana, by Dr R :—“The Common Buzzard arriving in the Fur Countries in the middle of April very soon afterwards begins to build its nest; and, having reared its young, departs about the end of September. It haunts the low alluvial points of land which stretch out under the high banks of a river; and may be observed sitting for a long time motionless on the bough of a tree, watching patiently for some small quadruped, bird, or reptile, to pass within its reach. As soon as it espies its prey, it glides silently into the air, and, sweeping easily and rapidly down, seizes it in its claws. When disturbed, it makes a short circuit, and soon settles on another perch. It builds its nest on a tree, of short sticks, lining it sparingly with deer’s hair. The eggs, from three to five in number, are equal in size to those of the domestic fowl, and have a greenish-white colour, with a few large dark brown blotches at the thick end. It was seen by the Expedition as far north as the fifty-seventh parallel of latitude, and it most probably has a still higher range.”
F B , Linn. Syst. Nat. vol. i. p. 127. Lath. Ind. Ornith. vol. i. p. 23.
B , C B , Richards. and Swains. Fauna Bor.Amer. vol. ii. p. 47.
Female. Plate CCCLXXII.
Bill short, strong, as broad as deep at the base, compressed toward the end. Upper mandible cerate, its dorsal outline declinate and a little convex as far as the cere, then decurved, the sides rapidly sloping, towards the end nearly perpendicular but convex, the edge with a slight festoon, the tip trigonal, acute; lower mandible with the angle short and rounded, the dorsal line convex and ascending, the edges sharp, arched, at the end deflected, the tip rounded. Nostrils irregularly obovate, in the fore part of the cere, nearer the ridge than the margin.
Head large, roundish, flattened above; neck rather short; body full. Feet short, robust; tarsi roundish, anteriorly feathered half-way down, anteriorly scutellate, laterally reticulate, posteriorly also scutellate; the lower part all round covered with series of small scales, as are the toes for half their length, the terminal portion being scutellate: they are strong, of moderate length, the hind toe stouter, with four large scutella, the inner with four, the middle with about eight, and connected at the base by a web with the outer, which has four large scutella. Claws long, arched, compressed, tapering to a point, flat beneath.
Plumage ordinary, full, rather blended beneath. Space between the bill and eye covered with bristly feathers; eyelids with soft downy feathers, and ciliate: the superciliary ridge prominent. Feathers of the head and neck ovato-oblong, of the back and breast ovate and rounded, of the sides and outer part of the leg elongated, of the rest of the leg short. Wings long, broad, the fourth quill longest, the third next, the fifth very little shorter, the second longer than fifth, the first
