The Realist Appeal

Abstract

With the beginning of Michaelmas term in 1928, the nineteen-year-old Isaiah Berlin left home and moved to Oxford, his alma mater and the most passionate, long-standing love of his life. He began to study Greats, the shorthand name given at Oxford to the detailed study of Roman and Greek history and philosophy, read in Latin or Greek. Before inspiring him intellectually, Oxford captivated Berlin’s social sensibility. “The great majority at Oxford are pleasant, often clever, careless, comfortable persons, some gentlemen, some not, who are very delightful so long as you do not ask too much of them,” he wrote sometime later to his aunt Ida Samunov in Palestine.¹ It was not an easy task to enter the prestigious university: Balliol College rejected Berlin twice, and the fact that he did not graduate from Eton did not help either. Even at Corpus Christi College, which eventually accepted him, he felt inferior. “Corpus tended not to take Paulines,” he explained to Steven Lukes year later, “because they were all regarded as dilettantes. Rotten before they were ripe. Too knowing. We were overworked at St. Paul’s—it was a cramming establishment. Then the Paulines came to Oxford exhausted and tended to fall by the wayside.” ²