Abstract
The chapter analyzes the contours of Cold War liberalism more broadly. Three central elements, which mutually supported each other, are identified: first, philosophical positions that can best be summed up with the concepts value pluralism and anti-determinism. Second, a set of distinct political principles, in particular a defense of negative liberty as the genuinely liberal conception of freedom and, in addition, liberal constitutionalism (which was not at all the same as an outright endorsement of electoral democracy, or a concern with electoral democracy as intrinsically valuable). Third, there was an insistence on a decent measure of social provision (or, put more directly: a sort of social democracy). Berlin’s political thought exhibits all these features to some degree and is analyzed accordingly.
This essay draws extensively on the following: my ‘Fear and Freedom: On “Cold War Liberalism”’, in: European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 7 (2008), 45–64, and my ‘Value Pluralism in Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Thought’, in: Modern Pluralism: Anglo-American Debates since 1880, ed. Mark Bevir (New York: Cambridge UP, 2012), 81–104.
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Notes
- 1.
The different meanings of ‘liberalism’ east and west of the Atlantic to some degree explain the uncertainties and confusions as to what is properly to count as Cold War liberalism—and whether it is ultimately a ‘right-wing’ or ‘left-wing’ phenomenon. In the United States, observers will generally not be shocked to learn that Cold War liberalism might have had something to do with trade unions and left-of-center political parties, whereas in Europe the tendency is much greater to group Cold War liberalism with neoliberalism, as preached by Friedrich von Hayek, who was, of course, famously hostile to unions and social democratic parties. Berlin—reflecting some of these tensions and confusions—once wrote in a letter: ‘I feel myself to be on the extreme right-wing edge of the left-wing movement, both philosophically and politically’. See Isaiah Berlin to Morton White, 22 March 1954, in: Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, ed. Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes, with the assistance of Serena Moore (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009), 436–38; here 437.
- 2.
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Political Judgement’, in: The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History, ed. Henry Hardy, with an introduction by Patrick Gardiner (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), here 48.
- 3.
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’, in: Isaiah Berlin, Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 94–165 and Isaiah Berlin, ‘Introduction’, in: ibid., 3–54.
- 4.
See also the article by Jonathan Riley, ‘Isaiah Berlin’s “Minimum of Common Moral Ground”’, in: Political Theory (forthcoming). Riley argues that Berlin held fast to the idea of a ‘common moral minimum’ as grounded in what we take to be normal human functioning—which needs to be protected by basic human rights. To counter the criticism that value pluralism and negative liberty do not go together, Riley holds that ‘the common moral minimum includes the idea of one common moral world composed of plural and conflicting basic values’. In other words, he sees the moral minimum, not value pluralism, as the foundation of Berlin’s political thought.
- 5.
Aron made it clear that he considered value pluralism a coherent philosophical position—but not one that was really ever lived in its strenuous, tragic Weberian version: ‘La formule de la « guerre des dieux » est la transposition d’un fait indiscutable—les hommes se sont fait des représentations incompatibles du monde—en une philosophie que personne ne vit ni ne pense parce qu’elle est contradictoire (toutes les représentations sont équivalents, aucune n’étant ni vraie ni fausse)’. In that affirmation Cold War liberals were in the end not all that different from Weber himself, who, after all, also stressed that everyday life was no exactly as matter of agonizing over how to choose among values in deadly conflict. Witness his remark that ‘eine nicht empirische, sondern sinndeutende Betrachtung: eine echte Wertphilosophie also, würde ferner, darüber hinausgehend, nicht verkennen dürfen, daß ein noch so wohlgeordnetes Begriffsschema der »Werte« gerade dem entscheidendsten Punkt des Tatbestandes nicht gerecht würde. Es handelt sich nämlich zwischen den Werten letztlich überall und immer wieder nicht nur um Alternativen, sondern um unüberbrückbar tödlichen Kampf, so wie zwischen »Gott« und »Teufel«. Zwischen diesen gibt es keine Relativierungen und Kompromisse. Wohlgemerkt: dem Sinn nach nicht. Denn es gibt sie, wie jedermann im Leben erfährt, der Tatsache und folglich dem äußeren Schein nach, und zwar auf Schritt und Tritt. In fast jeder einzelnen wichtigen Stellungnahme realer Menschen kreuzen und verschlingen sich ja die Wertsphären. Das Verflachende des »Alltags « in diesem eigentlichsten Sinn des Wortes besteht ja gerade darin: daß der in ihm dahinlebende Mensch sich dieser teils psychologisch, teils pragmatisch bedingten Vermengung todfeindlicher Werte nicht bewußt wird und vor allem: auch gar nicht bewußt werden will, daß er sich vielmehr der Wahl zwischen »Gott« und »Teufel « und der eigenen letzten Entscheidung darüber: welcher der kollidierenden Werte von dem Einen und welcher von dem Andern regiert werde, entzieht. »
- 6.
Berlin, Enlightening, 352.
- 7.
Berlin was eager never to leave any doubt about his hostility to Rousseau. As he affirmed to Popper in a letter dated 16 March 1959: ‘I feel at least as hostile to Rousseau as you do.’ See Berlin to Popper, 16 March 1959, in: ibid., 680–82; here 681.
- 8.
Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1955). See also Malachi. H. Hacohen, ‘Jacob Talmon between Zionism and Cold War Liberalism’, in: History of European Ideas, vol. 34 (2007), 146–57.
- 9.
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Democracy, Communism and the Individual’, at: The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library, at http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/nachlass/demcomind.pdf, referring to James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873) [last accessed 4 February 2018].
- 10.
‘Isaiah Berlin in Conversation with Steven Lukes’, in: Salmagundi, no. 120 (Fall 1998), 52–134; here 108.
- 11.
Isaiah Berlin, ‘My Intellectual Path’, in: The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), 1–23; here 12.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
For Berlin’s and Williams’ answer, see ‘Liberalism and Pluralism: A Reply’, in: Political Studies, vol. 41 (1994), 306–09.
- 14.
I use this term to stress that Cold War liberals, given the emphasis they placed on constitutionalism, would in fact, I believe, have been entirely sympathetic to the republican (or ‘neo-Roman’) objection that non-interference cannot depend on favours or good-will, but must be secured with a proper legal framework.
- 15.
I am reluctant to employ an expression here which has become very common, namely ‘life-plans’, for reasons well explained by Charles Larmore in ‘The Idea of a Life Plan’, in: Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 16 (1999), 96–112.
- 16.
Robert B. Talisse, ‘Does Value Pluralism Entail Liberalism?’, in: Journal of Moral Philosophy, vol. 7 (2010), 302–20.
- 17.
Stuart Hampshire probably reflected most consistently and continuously on the theme of conflict in this broadly speaking liberal context. He held that conflict was inevitable and often intractable, but, according to Hampshire, ‘balanced adversarial reasoning’, or audi alteram partem, was universally recognized as the right (and, above all, fair) response to it: as Hampshire put it, ‘fairness in procedure is an invariable value, a constant in human nature’. The ‘universally acceptable rational procedures of negotiation’ and the ‘intellectual procedures for adversary reasoning and compromise’ were also the crucial protection ‘against the perennial evils of human life—physical suffering, the destructions and mutilations of war, poverty and starvation, enslavement and humiliation’. This was the ‘proper business of politics, as Hobbes perceived’—and it remained the same over time. See his Innocence and Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989), Justice is Conflict (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), and, especially, Morality and Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983).
- 18.
Most famously in John Kenneth Galbraith’s American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power—naïve as that account might appear in retrospect.
- 19.
I borrow this phrase from Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities (London: Verso, 2017), 2.
- 20.
Karl R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (London: Fontana, 1978), 116. At another point Popper claimed: ‘Eine vollkommene Gesellschaft ist unmöglich, wie man leicht einsehen kann. Zu fast allen Werten, die eine Gesellschaft verwirklichen sollte, gibt es andere Werte, die mit ihnen kollidieren.’ See Karl R. Popper, Auf der Suche nach einer besseren Welt (Munich: Piper, 1989), 129.
- 21.
For a subtle view of Aron’s account of political judgment as located between Kantianism and Weberian value pluralism, see Philippe Raynaud, ‘Raymond Aron et le jugement politique entre Aristote et Kant’, in: Raymond Aron et la liberté politique: Actes du colloque international organisé par la Fondation Joseph Károlyi et l’Université de Sciences économiques et d’Administration publique de Budapest (Paris: Fallois, 2002), 123–31.
- 22.
Witness Bernard Williams’s observation: ‘Theory typically uses the assumption that we have too many ethical ideas, some of which may well turn out to be mere prejudices. Our major problem is actually that we have not too many but too few, and we need to cherish as many as we can’.
- 23.
See also the insightful essay by Jonathan Allen, ‘What’s the Matter with Monism?’, in: Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, vol. 12 (2009), 469–89.
- 24.
‘Isaiah Berlin in Conversation’, 76. Ignatieff called Berlin a ‘New Deal Liberal’ (see Ignatieff, Berlin, 228); he also asserted that Berlin ‘was in fact committed to exploring and widening the divide that separated liberalism from socialism’. But the evidence for this claim—Berlin’s dismissal of Laski and his controversy with E. H. Carr—only shows that he was clearly an anti-Marxist, not that he was distancing himself from the Left as such. See Ignatieff, Berlin, 235–236.
- 25.
Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper—The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000). For criticisms of this reclaiming of Popper for Social Democracy, see Bruce Caldwell, ‘Recovering Popper: For the Left?’, in: Critical Review, vol. 17 (2005), 49–68.
- 26.
As he put it in the preface to the Opium of the Intellectuals: ‘Personellement, keynésien avec quelque regret du libéralisme…’.
- 27.
Isaiah Berlin and Beata Polanowska-Sygulska, Unfinished Dialogue (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2006), 122.
- 28.
Raymond Aron, ‘La definition libérale de la liberté’, in: Archives Européennes de Sociologie, vol. 2 (1961), 199–218; and, in particular, ‘Liberté, libérale ou libertaire?’, in: La liberté et l’ordre social: Textes des conferences et des entretiens organises par les Rencontres Internationales de Genève (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1969), 67–112.
- 29.
See also Carl Joachim Friedrich, ‘The Political Thought of Neo-Liberalism’, in: American Political Science Review, vol. 49 (1955), 509–25, and Philip Manow, ‘Ordoliberalismus als ökonomische Ordnungstheologie’, in: Leviathan, vol. 29 (2001), 179–98.
- 30.
The classic work of neoliberal cultural pessimism was Röpke’s Die Gesellschaftskrise der Gegenwart (Erlenbach-Zürich: Eugen Rentsch, 1942), in particular the passages about modern ‘massification’, or what Röpke called, in an absolutely untranslatable phrase, ‘einen die Gesellschaftsstruktur zerstörenden Zerbröckelungs- und Verklumpungsprozeß’ (23).
- 31.
Of course, Shklar’s contribution to political thought is not exhausted by the liberalism of fear, even if it seems likely that she will, above all, remembered for this particular theory (or sketch of a theory). See Katrina Forrester, ‘Hope and Memory in the Thought of Judith Shklar’, in: Modern Intellectual History, vol. 8 (2011), 591–620.
- 32.
See Bernard Williams, ‘Realism and Moralism in Political Theory’, in: In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, ed. Geoffrey Hawthorn (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), 1–17.
- 33.
Judith Shklar, ‘The Liberalism of Fear’, in: Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 21–38; here 26 and 27.
- 34.
Ibid., 31–32.
- 35.
Ibid., 32 and 38. As said at the outset of this essay, I am somewhat skeptical of building political order in the name of direct experience only—because there is no direct experience which could immediately yield instructions for how to build that order.
- 36.
Bernard Williams, ‘The Liberalism of Fear’, in: In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, ed. Geoffrey Hawthorne (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005).
- 37.
See now Karl Popper, After the Open Society: Selected Social and Political Writings, ed. Piers Norris Turner and Jeremy Shearmur (London: Routledge, 2011).
- 38.
Witness Berlin writing the following to Popper about this lecture on two concepts of liberty: ‘The whole of my lecture, in a sense, is an attempt at a brief study—or prolegomenon to the study—of the way in which innocent or virtuous or truly liberating ideas … tend (not inevitably!) to become authoritarian & despotic and lead to enslavement and slaughter when they are isolated & driven ahead by themselves’. See Berlin to Popper, 16 March 1959, in: Enlightening, 682.
- 39.
Witness Melvin Lasky describing Berlin as follows: ‘He wasn’t a crusader. There are some crusaders with temperament who say, devil take the hindmost, and there are those who are prudent. In the heat of the campaign you feel let down, you want to say, like Henry the Fourth, ‘Where were you?’. Quoted in Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999), 385.
- 40.
Quoted by Nadia Urbinati, ‘Liberalism in the Cold War: Norberto Bobbio and the Dialogue with the PCI’, in: Journal of Modern Italian Studies, vol. 8 (2003), 578–603; here 586.
- 41.
Isaiah Berlin, ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’, in: Berlin, Liberty, 218–51; here 243.
- 42.
It is important not to be formulaic here: the right doses of ‘history’ and ‘psychology’ will not automatically result in ‘capacity for historical judgment’; if anything, we ought to imagine a circular process where history and psychology in turn are judged. It seems to me problematic to try to read ‘ineluctable necessities’ off the historical record (as suggested in the statement: ‘we shall need to study what history tells us of the ineluctable necessities of political life, and then work out what those necessities entail for the kinds of political prescriptions issued by political philosophers’.). See Jonathan Floyd and Marc Stears, ‘Introduction’, in: Political Philosophy versus History? Contextualism and Real Politics in Contemporary Political Thought, ed. Jonathan Floyd and Marc Stears (New York: Cambridge UP, 2011), 1–9; here 4. See also the chapter on ‘utopohobia’ in David M. Estlund, Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008) as well as Raymond Geuss, ‘Realismus, Wunschdenken, Utopie’, in: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. 58 (2010), 419–29.
- 43.
Robert E. Goodin and Frank Jackson, ‘Freedom from Fear’, in: Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 35 (2007), 249–65. But see also: Philip Pettit, ‘The Instability of Freedom as Noninterference: The Case of Isaiah Berlin’, in: Ethics, vol. 121 (2011), 693–716.
- 44.
Berlin, ‘Realism in Politics’, in: The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto and Windus), 134–42; here 139–40.
- 45.
Hence attempts to treat Cold War liberalism as a template for how to confront ‘Islamicist totalitarianism’ ought to be rejected. See, for instance, Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2003) and Peter Beinart, ‘An Argument for a New Liberalism: A Fighting Faith’, in: The New Republic, 13 December 2004.
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Müller, JW. (2019). The Contours of Cold War Liberalism (Berlin’s in Particular). In: Müller, JW. (eds) Isaiah Berlin’s Cold War Liberalism. Asan-Palgrave Macmillan Series. Palgrave Pivot, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2793-3_3
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