Isaiah Berlin’s Freedom and Its Betrayal claims that the idea of liberty was undermined by six European thinkers. Countless others followed their lead.
In 1952, Berlin gave six radio lectures on Helvétius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Saint Simon and Maistre. In Berlin’s account, each thinker became an enemy of the idea of individual choice.
The underlying theme in their thinking is that the central questions involving human life have only one true answer.
What’s the best way for a human being to live?
There might appear to be myriad answers. But these thinkers claimed that’s an illusion. There is only one true answer and many false pretenders.
And so thinker after thinker addressed the natural tension between individual liberty and communal authority in favor of authority.
The idea that there is only one true answer is ancient. You can find it in the scriptures of many religions and in the Greek philosophers. But Berlin is wonderful at tracing the evolution of ideas. He suggests that the scientific revolution had a profound effect.
People thought that, with Newton, the principles underlying nature had been discovered. Everything had been made clear.
Why was it that there were no such principles underlying ethics, and by extension politics? It was a scandal.
And so, one after another, inventive minds claimed to find such underlying principles in nature that answer those fundamental questions about what it means to live a good life.
And in case after case, what ordinary humans think is liberty — the freedom to make choices about their own lives without constraints — was found to be wanting. “Real” liberty was losing one’s individual life in something larger: a religious movement, a class struggle, a nationalist identity.
• Source: Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal; Princeton University Press, 2002.
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