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The significance of Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment

Bernard Yack European Journal of Political Theory 2013 12: 49 originally published online 3 December 2012 DOI: 10.1177/1474885112463649 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ept.sagepub.com/content/12/1/49

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European Journal of Political Theory 12(1) 4960 ! The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1474885112463649 ept.sagepub.com

The significance of Isaiah Berlins Counter-Enlightenment

Bernard Yack
Brandeis University

Abstract This paper takes a close look at Berlins claim that the emergence of CounterEnlightenment pluralism marks a momentous historical watershed. It concludes that Berlin is right to draw our attention to the importance of this event, but that he seriously misinterprets its significance. He has good reason, in particular, to treat Herder as the most formidable adversary of the French philosophes and their German disciples, but not because Herder put a stop to the ancient creed of monism on which they relied. For Berlins monistic interpretation of the French Enlightenment, I shall show, badly misrepresents that intellectual movement and its impact on the world. The great significance of Herders pluralist critique of the Enlightenment lies, instead, in the way in which it rehabilitates prejudice as a source of human virtue and creativity, a critique that directly attacks the core mission of the philosophes: to remove the obstacles to the gathering, preservation and dissemination of useful knowledge. Keywords Isaiah Berlin, Counter-Enlightenment, Enlightenment, Herder, moral pluralism

Isaiah Berlins enthusiasm for the early German critics of the Enlightenment has puzzled many of his readers. Why, they wonder, would someone who made his name defending individual liberty want to pal around with intellectuals who celebrate Volkisch passions and fashions? The answer, of course, is that Berlin believed that he had discovered in their writings a momentous insight, one that all good children of the Enlightenment ignore at their peril: the incommensurability of values and hence the inadequacy of the moral monism that has dominated western thought for 2,500 years. For Berlin the German revolt against the French

Corresponding author: Bernard Yack, Department of Politics, MS058, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454, USA. Email: yack@brandeis.edu

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Enlightenment marks a decisive turning point in Western intellectual history,1 a challenge to rise free of some of our oldest and most persistent habits of thought. The inuence of Berlins ideas about monism and value pluralism has begun to equal, perhaps even surpass, that of his famous distinction between negative and positive liberty. But because his approach to intellectual history, with its sweeping generalizations about epochs, is no longer fashionable, the historical claim that inspired his theory of value pluralism has received very little critical analysis. Berlins supporters are inclined to treat Berlins depiction of the Enlightenment as monistic in its basic assumptions about truth and value as both correct and not particularly controversial.2 His critics, in contrast, are inclined to treat it as a trie embarrassing,3 and complain about Berlins overly monolithic account of the Enlightenment.4 They suggest that the great pluralist succumbed to a monistic account of that tremendously complex and varied movement and insist that serious study of the period has to begin by pluralizing the Enlightenment(s) that began to emerge in the 18th century. As a result, neither Berlins critics nor his followers devote much sustained attention to what is probably Berlins most important historical claim. I nd that quite ironic, since it seems to me that Berlins penchant for sweeping, epoch-embracing claims is largely responsible for our continuing interest in his work. If he had avoided the broad generalizations that oend so many contemporary historians and pluralized his account of historical movements,5 then it is hard to believe that we would be still be debating the meaning of his ideas today.6 This article takes a serious look at Berlins claim that Herders pluralist critique of the Enlightenment marks a momentous historical watershed, one that we can no longer aord to ignore. It concludes that Berlin is right to draw our attention to the importance of this event, but that he seriously misinterprets its signicance. He has good reason to treat Herder as the most formidable adversary of the French philosophes and their German disciples,7 but not because Herder put a stop to the ancient creed of monism on which they relied. For Berlins monistic interpretation of the French Enlightenment, I shall argue, badly misrepresents that intellectual movement and its impact on the world. The great signicance of Herders pluralist critique of the Enlightenment lies, instead, in the way in which it rehabilitates prejudice as a source of human virtue and creativity. This critique strikes at the core of the mission of the philosophes party of humanity: to remove the obstacles to the gathering, preservation and dissemination of useful knowledge. For it suggests that these characteristic activities of enlightenment will break down the partial and limited horizons within which the perfection of dierent human virtues must take place. It is quite easy, I shall argue, to pursue the philosophes vocation without a commitment to moral monism. Hence, the decline of moral monism marks no great watershed in human history. But the rehabilitation of prejudice is another matter, since it is so much more antithetical to Enlightenment goals. Pace Berlins renegade disciple John Gray, the rejection of monism by no means strikes a deathblow. . . to the project of the Enlightenment.8 There are places of honour in modern museums for the achievements of every culture and sympathy for the

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communal bonds that inspired them in a world in which we are all multiculturalists now, as Nathan Glazer put it.9 But whether human beings are maimed or perfected by their shared prejudices, that is an issue for which we have no easy solutions. We have been struggling with it intently since that watershed moment to which Berlin draws our attention.

Berlins misrepresentation of the French Enlightenment

Let me begin with what seems to me Berlins misunderstanding of the French Enlightenment, a misunderstanding that is widely shared. Ironically, this misunderstanding diminishes the signicance of the Counter-Enlightenment revolt that Berlin celebrates. For who today is ready to endorse the kind of monism that Berlin ascribes to the philosophes? Correcting Berlins view of the French Enlightenment thus not only improves the accuracy of an important historical category, it allows us to see the importance of the pluralist revolt against it. Berlin takes the Enlightenments monism to be clear and easily conrmed, a well-established premise upon which to build, rather than a controversial view that he needs to demonstrate.
No matter how deeply relativity about human values or the interpretation of social, including historical, facts entered the thought of social thinkers of this type they too retained a common core of conviction that the ultimate ends of all men at all times were, in eect, identical . . . Despite profound dierences of outlook, there was a wide area of agreement about fundamental points: the reality of natural law . . . of eternal principles by following which alone men could become wise, happy, virtuous, and free . . . Thinkers might dier about what these laws were, or how to discover them, or who were qualied to expound them; that these laws were real, and could be known, whether with certainty, or only probability, remained the central dogma of the entire Enlightenment. It was the attack upon this that constitutes the most formidable reaction against this dominant body of belief.10

Similar passages abound in Berlins essays,11 passages in which he interprets the Enlightenment as the product of western rationalisms original sin, the pursuit of a singular understanding of the good.
At some point I realized that what all these views had in common was a Platonic ideal: in the rst place, that, as in the sciences, all genuine questions must have one true answer and one only, all the rest being necessarily errors; in the second place, that there must be a dependable path towards the discovery of these truths; in the third place, that the true answers, when found, must necessarily be compatible with one another and form a single whole, for one truth cannot be incompatible with another that we know a priori. This kind of omniscience was the solution of the cosmic jigsaw puzzle. In the case of morals we could then conceive what the perfect life must be, founded as it would be on a correct understanding of the rules that governed the universe.12

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Berlin recognizes that some key Enlightenment gures, such as Montesquieu, Hume and even Diderot, t poorly into any movement dened by a commitment to natural law and its singular answers to our moral questions. He therefore devotes considerable eort to showing that their scepticism about such ideas was not perceived as a source of danger to its general acceptance among Enlightenment thinkers.13 But if the philosophes celebrated sceptics like Montesquieu and Hume, why should we think of a commitment to the monistic ideal as their central dogma? My problem with Berlins monistic conception of the French Enlightenment is not that it excludes some important thinkers whom we ordinarily associate with that movement, but rather that it misrepresents the common core of conviction and commitment that gave this movement its distinctive character. The monistic conception misrepresents the French Enlightenment in at least three signicant ways. 1) It denes a movement that welcomed scepticism as if the movement were dened by a commitment to a singular conception of the human good. 2) It characterizes a movement inspired by common understandings of what is wrong or evil in the world as if it were inspired by a common understanding of the good. 3) It treats the French Enlightenments celebrated concept of progress as movement towards some ideal, when it is much better understood as endless movement away from recognized evils a point that becomes clear when you look closely at its most famous example, Condorcets account of indenite perfectibility.14 If the French Enlightenment were dened in terms of the kind of moral monism that Berlin ascribes to it, then scepticism and cultural relativism would be its greatest enemies, a conclusion that Zygmunt Baumann, for one, works out with considerable gusto. Baumann suggests that scepticism and pluralism represent the evil genius of [modern] European philosophy; anybody suspected of not fortifying doctrine against it tightly enough was brought to book and forced to defend himself against charges, the horrifying nature of which no one put in doubt.15 Needless to say, Berlin does not share this wild exaggeration of the Enlightenments commitment to moral certainty, with its visions of philosophic inquisitions and torture chambers. He is well aware that the philosophes toasted rather than roasted sceptics like Montesquieu and that it was the moralist Rousseau, not the sceptic Hume, whom they ostracized. Yet he still feels compelled to conclude, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the very tone of Montesquieu, the whole tenor of his work was somehow felt to be subversive of the principles of the new age.16 That is a conclusion that Diderot and dAlembert, the guiding spirits behind the great collective project of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopedia, would have found very strange indeed. For they not only celebrate Montesquieus work,17 they seem quite comfortable with his scepticism. In the end, it is the Cartesian quest for certainty that worries dAlembert much more than the scepticism displayed by Bayle or Montesquieu or Hume. Descartes, he suggests, inspires us with his doubts, his revolt against scholasticism, opinion, and authority, not with his pursuit of a singular and certain moral truth.

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If he concluded by believing he could explain everything, he at least began by doubting everything, and the arms which we use to combat him belong to him no less because we turn them against him.18

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I am not suggesting that scepticism about singular conceptions of the good is what brought the French philosophes together as a movement. I am insisting, however, that it did not exclude anyone from the party of humanity that they constructed.19 Moral monism was not a plank in that partys platform. Berlin insists that the philosophes subscribed to the doctrine that the good is one, but evil has many faces; there is one true answer to every real question, but many false ones.20 But a closer look at their social criticism points to precisely the opposite conclusion, that they were much more condent answering questions about what to avoid than how to live ones life. Take Diderot, for example. His great dialogue, Rameaus Nephew, held up to ridicule beliefs about the equation of the good with the virtuous life. But that did not deter him from his extraordinary eorts to collect and disseminate useful knowledge in the Encyclopedia. That is because, like so many of his fellow philosophes, he was much more concerned to diminish evil, darkness, linfame, as Voltaire called it, than to push us towards some vision of the good. Visions of a summum bonum meant little to him. He was, however, much more comfortable with assumptions about the summum malum: pain and discomfort and the forces of darkness that impede our eorts to relieve such conditions. Ironically, Berlin reproduces this sensibility himself when he suggests that when values collide, as they inevitably do, our rst public obligation is to avoid extremes of suering.21 The philosophes, in this regard, were inclined to follow Locke, who taught in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding that the primary motive for all human action is the need to relieve uneasiness, rather than the pursuit of some good.22 That is clear not only from the praise that dAlembert lavishes on Lockes moral psychology,23 but from the way in which he explains why and how we come to seek knowledge.
The necessity of protecting our own bodies from pain and destruction causes us to examine which among external objects can be useful or harmful to us, in order to seek out some and shun others. But hardly have we begun to survey these objects when we discover among them a large number of beings who seem entirely similar to ourselves, that is, whose forms are entirely like ours and who seem to have the same perceptions as we do, so far as we can judge at rst glance. All this causes us to think that they also have the same needs that we experience and consequently the same interest in satisfying them. Whence we conclude that we should nd it advantageous to join with them in nding out what can be benecial to us and what can be detrimental to us in nature.24

From the Encylopedists point of view, progress is a movement away from a negative condition of pain and discomfort, rather than a movement towards some ideal good dened by the laws of nature, a point developed at length in the

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French Enlightenments most famous celebration of this idea, Condorcets valedictory Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. This book climaxes in a wonderfully optimistic vision of our future, a vision that certainly deserves the adjective utopian for its hopefulness. But even here Berlins monistic image of the French Enlightenment is misleading. For Condorcet presents us with a vision of endless improvement away from constraint and discomfort, rather than continuing movement towards some ideal. Indenite perfectibility is his creed, rather than the pursuit of the ideal. He sets out to show that
. . . nature has set no term to the perfection of human faculties; that the perfectibility of man is truly indenite; and that the progress of this perfectibility, from now onwards independent of any power that might wish to halt it has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has cast us.25

As we nd new means of easing old constraints on our development, completely new and undreamt of capacities await us. Singular visions of the good human life therefore represent constraints on human progress as Condorcet conceives it, not their goal. No matter how idealistic his vision of the future may be, with its elimination of war, hunger, even death,26 it is not inspired by a monistic understanding of the good. That said, it should be emphasized that the pursuit of knowledge that eases the human condition is not neutral with regard to dierent ways of life. It rules out many ways of life, in particular those dependent upon shared prejudices and the defence of constraints on the pursuit of useful knowledge, even if it does not endorse any particular way of life as the good to follow. But this understanding of enlightenment and progress does not invoke the monistic ideals emphasized by Berlin. If it is the desire to uncover, preserve and disseminate useful knowledge that brings these gures together, then they have little to fear from a sustained critique of intellectual and moral monism. Why does Berlin exaggerate the intellectual and moral monism of the philosophes? Part of the answer is biographical. As Berlin recalls it, his rst serious consideration of the French Enlightenment occurred when, in preparing his book on Marx, he began reading Marxs forerunners, the Encyclopedists, Helvetius, dHolbach, Diderot.27 Viewed from this perspective, as forerunners of Marxs eorts to demonstrate that communism represents the riddle of history solved,28 it is not surprising that Berlin focused on the more monistic ideas he found in the texts of the French Enlightenment. Moreover, Berlin seems to share the general inclination of intellectual historians to exaggerate the importance of positive ideals and discount the importance of objects of hatred in the construction of systems of thought. Think, for example, of how much scholarship has been devoted to utopianism and how little work to the study of dierent ways of understanding what keeps human beings from achieving their goals. Even when social critics, such as Marx or Nietzsche, devote almost all of their eorts to identifying a new way of understanding the obstacles to our satisfaction, many historians are inclined to treat the utopian

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scraps that are strewn throughout their work, the few vague outlines of a positive ideal, as the source of their discontent with the world.29 Similarly, they assume that the French Enlightenment must have been inspired by their own version of a heavenly city, as Carl Becker puts it, rather than by their tremendous outpouring of words about what is holding us back. Berlin seems to share this disposition and therefore exaggerates the importance of the monistic ideals he nds in some corners of the French Enlightenment. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, there is the way in which Berlin constructs the Enlightenment as a residual category, as a negation of the new pluralist approach that he celebrates.30 We are inclined to construct residual categories when we use the absence of what we nd most striking and novel in a later period to dene the period that preceded it. In this way, primitive society is dened in terms of the absence of certain recognized features of civilization; antiquity in terms of the absence of certain novel features of modernity, and the modern world in terms of the absence of the post-modernists celebration of irony and rejection of foundations. Similarly, when you think that the most striking and original feature of Counter-Enlightenment arguments is their endorsement of value pluralism, then you are likely to be disposed to treat the negation of value pluralism as the glue that held the Enlightenment together. The problem with most residual categories is that they are not simply wrong and therefore hard to counter. Characteristically modern forms of social organization are absent from the worlds that preceded them; irony and anti-foundationalism are not prominent features in early modern thought; and the assertion of value pluralism is relatively rare among the philosophers of the French Enlightenment. But just because the distinctive feature of the later period plays little role in the earlier one, that does not mean that the earlier period was organized around the negation of that feature, the pre-modern world around something called tradition, the modern world around foundationalism or the French Enlightenment around the assertion of intellectual and moral monism. Berlin, I am suggesting, identied the French Enlightenment with monism not so much because he found overwhelming evidence of its importance to the philosophes, but rather because he found little evidence of any commitment to the new ideal of value pluralism that he found so intriguing.

The significance of Herders cultural pluralism

The great signicance of Herders revolt against the French Enlightenment lies in is his account of the way in which we create and nurture values, rather than his mere assertion of their variety and incommensurability. For Herder argues that the plural values he celebrates are the spontaneous product of limited cultures, rather than the result of rational and self-conscious choices among incommensurable goods. He insists that the perfection of humanity proceeds through the generation and collection of partial, as well as inconsistent virtues. Only by closing our eyes to much of the world can human beings create anything like either the sublimity of the biblical patriarch or the playfulness of the Classical Greeks.

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Herder would have us appreciate all of these fragmentary virtues, even when they run counter to some of our deepest commitments. But he insists that these partial perfections of human character are nurtured within the horizons provided by somewhat closed communities. That is why Herder insists, in Another Philosophy of History, that prejudice is good31 as programmatically Counter-Enlightenment a statement as you could ask for. Prejudice is good not just because it keeps us warm and cosy in a cold world of self-interested calculation. Nor is it good because, as Burke argued, it smoothes the harsh edges of our natural drives.32 No, shared prejudice is good because it provides us with the selective focus that allows partial perfections to emerge and ourish. Shared prejudice pushes people together at their center; making them stand rmer upon their roots, more ourishing in their way, more virile, and also happier in their inclinations and purposes.33
[Nature] placed manifold dispositions in the heart and assembled some of them in a circle around us, at our disposal: then she moderated the human gaze so that after a short period of habituation this circle became mans horizon. Not to look beyond: hardly even to suspect what lies beyond! Everything that remains akin to my nature, that can be assimilated into it, I envy, pursue, appropriate; beyond this, kindly nature has armed with insensitivity, coldness, and blindness. She may even turn to contempt and disgust yet she has no purpose but to push me back upon myself, to give me suciency at the center that sustains me. [Emphasis in original text.]34

From this point of view, the deepest problem with the French Enlightenment is not its supposed attachment to a monistic understanding of human goods, but rather its assault on shared prejudice as the primary obstacle to human happiness. In their eort to free human beings to pursue happiness as we choose to understand it the philosophes undermine the means by which peoples achieve happiness and nurture humanitys most distinctive virtues. Herder would never say, with Nietzsche, that you have to love your virtue innitely more than it deserves to be loved in order to be creative;35 for he believed that the succession of fragmentary perfections produced by dierent cultures were part of the unfolding of humanitys full, natural potential. But he would agree with Nietzsche that the preachers of Enlightenment unwittingly undermine our capacity for creativity by indiscriminately illuminating the dark shadows of our cultural inheritance. Herders insistence on the plurality and incommensurability of values is a relatively easy challenge for the heirs of the French Enlightenment to address. For, as we have seen, it was a shared commitment to gather and spread useful knowledge that brought the philosophes together, rather than a commitment to push us ever closer to some ideal vision of the good. You do not need to agree about the good life or even acknowledge the possibility of a singular understanding of the good in order to participate in the project of Enlightenment understood in this way. You need only agree that it is worthwhile to work together to relieve human discomfort and ght against those who would impede the discovery and dissemination of the knowledge that would help us do so. The philosophes party of humanity excludes

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sadists, masochists and all those who take satisfaction from keeping others in a condition of suering, ignorance and subordination. But it has plenty of room for competing and incommensurable visions of the human good. Herders rehabilitation of prejudice, in contrast, poses a far more dicult challenge to the French Enlightenment and its heirs, since it strikes so forcefully at its core commitments. The breaking down of the barriers to the spread of useful knowledge was and is, as practised today designed to empower human beings to enjoy and perfect their lives by freeing them from the discomforts and constraints that stie human happiness and creativity. But if Herder is right, these eorts to empower human creativity are, to a certain extent, self-defeating, since they rob us of the shared cultural horizons that we need to perfect the dierent and incompatible virtues of which human beings are capable. I would suggest that we nd it rather easy to reconcile the pursuit of enlightenment, as the philosophes understood it, with an acknowledgement of the plurality and incommensurability of human values. We devote tremendous resources to the preservation and celebration of the disparate achievements of all great cultures and civilizations, not just the classical rationalists whom we are inclined to see as our political and intellectual ancestors. And we expect people to show sincere respect for those who value religious experience, so much so that the recent burst of antireligious diatribes has been worth noting as a cultural event and social provocation.36 Our default position, it seems, is acceptance and respect for the dierent paths that people take to the good, as long as we keep the engines of material progress moving full steam ahead. Like the Clarence Darrow gure at the end of the lm Inherit the Wind, a mainstream liberal take on the Scopes monkey trial, we want people to show respect to both Darwin and the Bible, two good books with something to teach us about how to live. There is, however, nothing like such a simple and easy accommodation between a commitment to spread useful knowledge and Herders rehabilitation of prejudice. To the extent that we have absorbed Herders lesson, it has left us uncertain and uncomfortable, which may help explain why Berlin shies away from it. It has not persuaded us to stie the institutions that produce a steady stream of useful and transformative knowledge. But it has, I would suggest, led us to associate a considerable sense of loss with the practice of enlightenment, one that goes well beyond mere nostalgia for a simpler world and way of life. Berlin misses or ignores these Nietzschean echoes in Herders critique of the Enlightenment. That may reect his eagerness to make Herder palatable to English and American liberals. But I believe that the primary reason Berlin misses the signicance of Herders rehabilitation of prejudice is that he looks at value pluralism from the perspective of the individual observers and consumers of human values, rather than from the communal perspective of their producers. When Berlin defends his theory of value pluralism against the charge of moral relativism, he is concerned to show that we can appreciate the values produced by alien cultures, that these values are not packaged and sealed in separate little boxes. Just because these values are not our own, he argues, that does not mean we cannot appreciate the objective goods that they perfect.37 For what makes these values

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valuable is the way in which they develop and perfect objective goods, rather than their ability to gain subjective approval. Moral relativists, Berlin argues, insist that values are purely a matter of subjective preference: I prefer coee, you prefer champagne. We have dierent tastes. There is no more to be said. Value pluralists, in contrast, recognize that there are many things that have value, quite apart from whether or not we are attached to them. They merely insist that we cannot maintain all of these objective values together in a single life or even a single rank ordering.38 This defence of value pluralism certainly builds on and amplies one side of Herders argument. Few things get Herder angrier and Herder was famously quick to anger than the failure of the philosophes to make the eort to appreciate the virtues perfected by cultures alien to their own. It would be laughable for urbane Parisian intellectuals to emulate the sublime, awe-inspiring virtues of the biblical patriarchs; but it is sheer prejudice on their part not to recognize the extraordinary value of these virtues as partial perfections of human nature. Nevertheless, Herder also recognized that the producers of these values are nurtured by limited horizons rather than the perusal of a list of incommensurable human values. These values may be objective, in the sense that they can be explored and appreciated by people who do not begin with a taste for them. But appreciating these values is not the same thing as living by them, let alone producing them as new and distinct perfections of human faculties. For those who live by and produce these values, unlike those who observe and appreciate them, moral relativism is unavoidable: for these values can only be defended within the partial perspectives that nurture them. Herder, unlike Berlin, looks at value pluralism from both the observers and the producers perspective. He is concerned with nurturing the connections that will produce and preserve dierent human values, not just appreciating the worth of values that are not our own. As an observer, Herder, like Berlin, decries the prejudices that blind us to the achievements of alien cultures. As a lover of humanity, however, he seeks to protect, not just appreciate, our capacity to produce such dierent and incommensurable forms of human perfection. That makes his understanding of value pluralism much more complex and awkward than Berlins. But it also makes it a much more signicant challenge to the ideas and hopes of the Enlightenment. Herder is hardly alone in seeking to rehabilitate prejudice in response to the philosophes. But he did so without de Maistres misanthropy, Burkes fondness for hierarchy or Nietzsches dangerous and fallacious belief that since we cannot produce greatness without shared constraint, the imposition of shared constraint is bound to produce something great, something . . . for whose sake it is worth while to live on earth.39 That is what makes him, in Berlins words, the most formidable of the adversaries of the French philosophes and their German disciples in a world not ready to abandon its love of liberty, equality and fraternity.40 Ironically, however, Berlin himself was too much a child of the French Enlightenments commitment to easing the suering of individuals to recognize the full signicance of the Counter-Enlightenment revolt that he celebrated.

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1. G. Garrard (2007) Strange Reversals: Berlin on Enlightenment and CounterEnlightenment, in G. Crowder and H. Hardy (eds) The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin, pp. 14158, 151. Amherst, NY: Promotheus Books. 2. Ibid. p. 146. 3. R. Wokler (2003) Isaiah Berlins Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, in R. Wokler (ed.) Isaiah Berlins Counter-Enlightenment, pp. 1337, 18. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. 4. G. Crowder (2004) Isaiah Berlin: Liberalism and Pluralism, p. 103. Cambridge: Polity Press. 5. I argue against those who argue that we cannot usefully generalize about the Enlightenment in (2006) Naming and Reclaiming the Enlightenment, European Journal of Political Theory 6: 34354. 6. As we do in conferences, like the one at Harvard celebrating Berlins 100th anniversary, for which this paper was originally prepared. 7. I. Berlin (1976) Vico and Herder, p. 145. New York: Viking. 8. J. Gray (1993) Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought, pp. 645. London: Routledge. 9. N. Glazer (1997) We are All Multiculturalists Now. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 10. I. Berlin (1982) The Counter-Enlightenment, in Against the Current, pp. 124, 34. New York: Penguin. 11. E.g. in Berlin (n. 7), pp. 145, 1756. Berlin (1991) The Pursuit of the Ideal, in Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, pp. 119, 56. New York: Knopf. Berlin (2002) Liberty, p. 212. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berlin (2000) My Intellectual Path, in Berlin, The Power of Ideas, pp. 123, 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 12. Berlin (1991, in n. 11), pp. 56. 13. I. Berlin, Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth Century European Thought (1991, in n. 11), 7090, 712. 14. A. N. de Condorcet (1967) Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. New York: Noonday Press. 15. Z. Baumann (1992) Intimations of Post-Modernity, p. 104. London: Routledge. 16. I. Berlin, Montesquieu (n. 10), pp. 13061. The complainers against Montesquieu in this essay are Bentham and Helvetius. 17. Especially in dAlemberts (1995) Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, pp. 99100. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. As well as in his Eulogy for Montesquieu, which he used as a preface to vol. 5 of lEncyclopedie. 18. DAlembert (1995, in n. 17), p. 80. 19. P. Gay (1964) The Party of Humanity. New York: Knopf. 20. Berlin (n. 7), pp. 1756. 21. Berlin (1991, in n. 11), p. 17. 22. J. Locke (1975) Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 23. DAlembert (1995, in n. 17), pp. 834. 24. Ibid. p. 11. 25. Condorcet (n. 14), p. 4. 26. See, in particular, his sketch of the tenth or future stage, of human progress, ibid. pp. 173202.

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27. I. Berlin and R. Jahanbegloo (1991) Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, p. 12. New York: Scribners. 28. K. Marx (1975) Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 296. New York: International Publishers. 29. In order to do so, to explain why such meagre positive ideals generate such intense dissatisfaction, scholars often hypothesize that these ideals draw on and secularize the stronger feelings associated with religious images of heaven and the Messianic end of days. For a discussion and critique of such secularization arguments, see B. Yack (1986) The Longing for Total Revolution, pp. 327. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 30. For a discussion of residual categories, focusing on the distinction between antiquity and modernity, see B. Yack (1997) The Fetishism of Modernities, pp. 501. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 31. J. G. Herder (2004) Another Philosophy of History, p. 29. Indianapolis: Hackett. 32. E. Burke (1998) Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp. 6776. Indianopolis: Hackett. 33. Herder (n. 31), pp. 2930. 34. Ibid. p. 29. 35. F. Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, in Nietzsche (1983) Untimely Meditations, p. 64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 36. The most prominent examples: R. Dawkins (2006) The God Delusion. New York: Houghton Mifflin. D. Dennett (2006) Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking. C. Hitchens (2007) God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve. 37. Berlin (n. 7), pp. 145, 169. 38. Berlin (1991, in n. 11), pp. 1011. See also Berlin (n. 13), p. 80, and (n. 7), p. 211. 39. Nietzsche declares that the one thing that is essential is that there be obedience over a long time and in a single direction: given that, something always develops, and has developed, for whose sake it is worth while to live on earth; for example, virtue, art music, dance, reason, spirituality . F. Nietzsche (1996) Beyond Good and Evil, p. 101. New York: Vintage. 40. Berlin (n. 7), p. 145.

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