An unrealised project? —Isaiah Berlin and the philosophy of history

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay traces the development of Isaiah Berlin's conception of history from the 1930s to the 1960s, extrapolating the ways in which he responded to and dismantled the monist and determinist claims by logical positivists and scientific rationalists, which were alleged to repudiate unrealised possibilities and men’s voluntary power in history. Berlin’s elaboration of such notions as ‘concepts and categories’ as governing principles dictating the intellectual features of a given society not only lays a conceptual foundation for intellectual history, but also underscores historicity as a dimension of paramount importance to the study of mankind. Making use of Berlin’s correspondence with the American philosopher Morton White, this essay examines their abortive project on the philosophy of history. Apathetic about any analytic anatomy of historical knowledge, Berlin was much more interested in exploring the emergence of historical understanding as a distinctive type of knowledge demarcated from other—in particular scientific—forms of knowledge in European history of ideas. Berlin’s ideas of history thus make a case for the history of ideas as an intellectual practice, whereas his history of ideas delineates the development of a particular idea of history.