Isaiah Berlin Research Articles

Contours of Dread

AbstractHannah Arendt’s and Isaiah Berlin’s incomprehension of one another resulted in one of the great missed dialogues in political theory. Arendt’s civic-democratic values find freedom in participation on a par with others in the political realm. Berlin’s liberal-democratic commitments define freedom as the space where individuals are unconstrained by the state or others. Modern democracy introduces the social-democratic commitment to the state’s ability to reduce inequality and provide for the public good. The strife, varyingly creative or destructive, among the liberal-, civic-, and social-democratic dimensions animates modern democracies. Kai Hiruta provides a comprehensive account of the Arendt–Berlin relation. Adriana Cavarero draws on Arendt’s conception of political participation to illuminate contemporary protests against injustice and racism in Western countries. Dilip Gaonkar examines, with emphasis on India’s democracy, the role of direct action, including riots, as forms of political participation by the demos. Charles Taylor and Craig Calhoun, in their account of democratic “degeneration” in the US and Europe in light of globalization and populist and autocratic trends, postulate the social-democratic as the telos of democracy itself, diminishing the liberal- and civic-democratic and overlooking democracy’s ineluctable strife. By contrast, there is no telos in Arendt’s thought, which values beginnings and innovations.

Embedded agency: A critique of negative liberty and free markets

The concept of negative liberty as non-interference is operative in the concept of a free market and stipulates that market relations remain outside the purview of social control. As a purported self-regulating system, however, the market functions as a system of necessity that facilitates and rules social life. I argue that Isaiah Berlin’s defense of negative liberty leads to a paradox as it entails subjection to the external necessity of a self-regulating market. The argument for the self-defeating nature of negative liberty relies on two philosophical insights that have their roots in G. W. F. Hegel’s theory of self-determination. First, negative liberty fails to account for the inner and outer conditions of freedom and thus reduces to mere whim or arbitrariness, subject to heteronomous forces but masquerading as license. Second, individual freedom is intersubjectively mediated in its deliberative process and framed by social and political institutions in its exercise; thus, free agency must be theorized as embedded agency. I challenge the association of freedom and the market and the automatic and unchallenged implication of deregulation and freedom. Deregulation, rather, leaves the community’s future development to the whims of economic players using a rhetoric of freedom as both lure and principle.

The Enduring Radicality of Hannah Arendt

The Enduring Radicality of Hannah Arendt Shmuel Lederman (bio) Hannah Arendt. By Samantha Rose Hill. London: Reaktion Books, 2021. Pp. 232. Paper £12.99. ISBN 978-1789143799. An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities. By D. N. Rodowick. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2021. Pp. xi + 182. Cloth $35.00. ISBN 978-0226780214. Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity. By Kei Hiruta. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 288. Hardcover $35.00. ISBN 978-0691182261. Hannah Arendt. By Samantha Rose Hill. London: Reaktion Books, 2021. Pp. 232. Paper £12.99. ISBN 978-1789143799. An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities. By D. N. Rodowick. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2021. Pp. xi + 182. Cloth $35.00. ISBN 978-0226780214. Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity. By Kei Hiruta. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 288. Hardcover $35.00. ISBN 978-0691182261. Interest in the mid-twentieth-century German Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt seems to be anything but waning. For many, it seems, she remains an important companion to come to grips with the contemporary world, how it came to be, and how scared or hopeful we should feel. The three books reviewed here are centered on significantly different themes, but they all reflect thought-provoking attempts to keep Arendt as a companion for thinking about the present, even when they deal with the past or with seemingly abstract philosophical questions. Toward the end of the introduction to her biography on Arendt, Samantha Rose Hill notes that while Arendt did not expect her poems, journals, and love letters to be made public, she might have imagined others "discovering her papers and finding friendship in them as she had done with Rahel [Varnhagen]" (15). Perhaps more than anything, Hill's biography is indeed an intimate portrayal of Arendt, as if she was writing about an old friend. It is an especially common tendency among commentators on Arendt to write either with a sense of palpable hostility or, as here, a strangely deep familiarity and intimacy. One may even speculate that the choice to write a biography of Arendt was driven more by a wish to share this intimacy and familiarity than by a [End Page 145] scholarly need, as much of the story Hill tells about Arendt's life is already known. Hill herself explains that her biography is written more for newcomers to Arendt's thought than for Arendt scholars, although it does add details that have been left out of previous accounts. It does not attempt to be as comprehensive as Elizabeth Young-Bruehl's classic biography of Arendt, and its relatively short length makes it more accessible to readers (15). Certain figures also appear in a more intimate light in Hill's biography. Hill emphasizes, for example, Karl Jaspers's lasting influence on Arendt, which in Arendt scholarship has remained in the shadow of Heidegger, but arguably had no less substantial impact on the core motivations behind Arendt's political thought. For Jaspers, Hill notes, "answers had to be found in reality looking towards the world, not in the mode of pure philosophical contemplation," and thinking about these answers had to take place in conversation with others (45). It is hard to imagine a better formulation of the guiding thread that runs through Arendt's political thought: whether in action and speech in the public sphere, in "going visiting" at the standpoints of others in our imagination, or in the silent dialogue of the "two-in-one" that is thinking, Arendt never tired of emphasizing that we need to find answers by looking towards the world, not away from it, and that the primary way of doing that is through communication with others. One of the challenges of writing a biography on a figure about whom so much has been written is how to offer interventions in long-standing scholarly questions and debates without getting into lengthy arguments that would burden the readers. Hill seems to implicitly respond in this spirit to critics of Arendt on various important points. Consider, for example, Arendt's sharp distinction between the private and the public...

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

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.

КУЛЬТУРА СКАСУВАННЯ: ЕТИЧНИЙ ТА ПОЛІТИЧНИЙ АСПЕКТИ (ДО ПОСТАНОВКИ ПРОБЛЕМИ У КОНТЕКСТІ РОСІЙСЬКО-УКРАЇНСЬКОЇ ВІЙНИ)

Today Ukraine is struggling with the war on its own territory. Russian invasion has provoked many discussions in the cultural sphere. In the end of February 2022 Ukraine's Minister of Culture and Information Policy Oleksandr Tkachenko called the world to impose cultural sanctions on the Russian Federation. It means to cancel Russian culture. Cancel culture refers to the popular practice of withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. Cancel culture is generally discussed as being performed on social media in the form of group shaming. What ethical issues this phenomenon implicates? What does it mean for Ukraine? Cancel culture is a complicated phenomenon in the modern world. We can begin our analysis of the contemporary problem of the culture of cancellation in ethics and politics by analyzing the classic works of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Michael Oakeshott. Oleksandr Klekovkin, a Ukrainian theater expert, actively promotes the idea of abolishing Russian culture in Ukraine. American lawyer Alan Dershowitz sees a negative aspect of the cancel culture phenomenon. So far, a clear understanding of this phenomenon has not been developed academically. The purpose of the article is an attempt to analyze the phenomenon of "cancellation culture" in ethical and political aspects, actualized in the conditions of the Russian-Ukrainian war in the context of the cancellation of Russian culture in Ukraine. If in a certain society, even under the conditions of a democratic political regime, the idea of at least a hypothetical possibility of solving all problems prevails, it will stop at nothing to achieve such an ideal state. This is the lesson we should have learned after two world wars. However, in practice, in many modern societies, there are again attempts to instill value monism, which manifests itself as "cancel culture". By legitimizing "cancel culture" as a modern trend, political systems significantly limit discursiveness and pluralism within society. After all, it becomes too uncomfortable to express an opinion that contradicts the generally accepted one. This threatens career, social status, and sometimes even safety.

Romanticism, Skepticism, Liberalism: Reading Isaiah Berlin

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is neither to challenge nor to defend Isaiah Berlin’s thought but rather to identify the main influences on his concept of liberalism. Berlin’s justification for liberalism is distinctive in that it reflects influences of Romanticism and Augustinianism. Unlike some liberals, his liberalism does not reflect unambiguous confidence in the products of the Enlightenment. Berlin valued the freedom of expression and identity, yet he feared that these freedoms faced potential threats from both left and right. These considerations led Berlin to found his liberalism on the notion of limited government, as is reflected in his bias towards negative, rather than positive, liberty. Negative liberty implies restraint on the part of the state in order to limit anything that might act as an impediment to individual freedom. In contrast, positive liberty implies that the state may have to be active even to the point of imposing restrictions on individual freedom in order to ameliorate effective limits on liberty imposed as a consequence of societal inequities. Berlin is justly deemed to have been one of the great political theorists of the twentieth century. Few, even among his critics, would deny this, and even those who disagree with Berlin’s conclusions would acknowledge that his framing of the questions and his references to history have elevated and enriched the debate on liberalism.

Prison as the gateway to freedom? The position of traditional Judaism regarding imprisonment

Aim: According to Jewish religious philosophy, the purpose of life is to transform the world into a deeply spiritual place pleasing to God. To put someone behind bars is to prevent him from fulfilling this duty. Yet, there is good reason to believe that prison, with proper spiritual guidance, is also an opportunity for prisoners to evaluate themselves realistically and objectively and to plan steps for improvement and spiritual growth. It is the truth of this view that I wish to explore in this paper.Methodology: To prove this hypothesis, I drew on relevant passages from the Jewish religious tradition, as well as the well-known theory of Sir Isaiah Berlin, one of the most prominent twentieth-century exponents of contemporary social philosophy, who described two possible approaches to the concept of freedom, and my own experience as a prison chaplain in Hungarian penitentiaries.Findings: The prisoners were all men of Jewish origin between the ages of 20 and 60. Although the Jewish religion has also built up a system of institutions for the administration of justice, the practice of imprisonment is absent from Jewish religious law. Yet, in the light of my experience, it can be said that for the perplexed, the state of deprivation of freedom creates a valuable opportunity for repentance, for choosing a moral life. The task of the prison chaplain is to catalyse the process of spiritual growth.Value: In the course of my pastoral ministry, it became clear to me that in the prison environment – away from social pressures and in forced solitude – inmates have the opportunity to evaluate themselves realistically and objectively, and to plan steps for improvement and spiritual growth.

“Then at last we may actually see free men in the streets”: Freeing the People in the Non-Fiction of D.H. Lawrence

Focusing on Lawrence’s non-fiction, and particularly on Studies in Classic American Literature and Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, I argue that Lawrence’s interest in people was motivated by a particular vision of human freedom, which saw humanity as being in need of salvation. To see how Lawrence articulates this vision involves looking at the different senses of freedom, firstly in a negative and positive sense (as defined by Isaiah Berlin and Erich Fromm), subsequently in a deeper, more Spinozistic sense. Lawrence thinks that what we ordinarily call freedom is illusory, and that genuine freedom can only be won by developing alternative ways of understanding what it means to be free. Consequently, Lawrence rejects collective solutions to the problem of freedom, and sees liberation as an essentially individual experience. These ways of looking at freedom also shed light on Lawrence’s attitude towards America, democracy and equality.

Consent, Sovereignty, and Pluralism: Harold Laski's Doctrine of Allegiance in British Legal Philosophy

AbstractThis paper analyses the intertwinement of legal philosophy and political theory in the British intellectual framework between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with specific regard to Harold Laski's works. I will try to illustrate the transition from 19th‐century utilitarianism to H. L. A. Hart and Isaiah Berlin as evolving through important debates which include Laski's contribution. I will argue that a discussion of “juridical” obligation, i.e., the conditions of legal validity, may lie implicitly in these concerns that Laski and other early 20th‐century British authors had about “political” obligation—viz., about the nature of the state and its claim to obedience. By approaching Laski's theories and their genealogy through a legal‐philosophical perspective, I will contend that this debate about political obligation anticipates to a considerable extent some of the most renowned conceptions of obligation in 20th‐century British legal theory.

Are Honest Brokers Good for Democracy?

ABSTRACT In Roger Pielke Jr.’s The Honest Broker (2007) he discusses different roles a scientist can adopt when giving advice to policymakers. The honest broker role focuses on clarifying and expanding the scope of choice for others. This role has the virtues of being sensitive to known problems with experts being partisan by stealth, dominating policy decisions by controlling knowledge input, and reducing the scope of considerations deemed relevant to decision-making. Yet I argue that to the extent the honest broker role involves expanding the scope of choice, an array of problems arises. These include ambiguity about which and whose consensus ought to guide scientists in their decisions about what role to adopt, an implicit tendency to insulate politics from science, and a possible replication of the anti-pluralism of political populism. Drawing upon Phillip Pettit’s critique of Isaiah Berlin’s account of freedom as non-interference, I argue that the honest broker role for scientists inherits the problems afflicting accounts of freedom as the non-restriction of options: namely, the problems of adaptive preference formation and ingratiation. On this basis I suggest not advising scientists to be honest brokers, because doing so might fail to help them be reflexive scientists.

How to Reconcile Equality with Freedom? On the Two Ways in Liberalism

The article examines the relationship between the two central political ideas and values, equality and freedom, and its implications within the theories of two liberal thinkers Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls. The current debate around basic income and COVID-19 around the world, alarmist predictions about the future of humanity, and possible other issues, both global and local, provide enough incentive to reconsider this issue. While making some general remarks on both theories, and especially highlighting the rival nature of the relationship of equality with freedom, the article uses the method of comparative analysis to explore how these liberal thinkers reconcile these two central political ideas in their own way. Two different ways of reconciliation, developed by Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls, show a discrepancy with the initial attitudes of the authors. And, finally, equality and freedom demonstrate paradoxical relationships, both contradictory and mutually supportive.

Wolność człowieka w poglądach Arystotelesa ze Stagiry. Analiza kategorii doktrynalnej z wykorzystaniem rozszerzonej formuły wolności Geralda MacCalluma

Among contemporary researchers of the concept of freedom, there is complete agreement about the importance that Isaiah Berlin’s October 31, 1958, inaugural lecture “Two Concepts of Freedom”, given at the University of Oxford, has contributed to science. Published later and reprinted many times, it reorganized reflection on the concept of freedom by introducing the terms positive and negative freedom. Despite the appearance of numerous critical voices in the literature on the subject, it is certainly impossible to practice science today without recalling the aforementioned dichotomy. Nine years later, Gerald MacCallum – inspired by, i.a., Berlin’s theory – presented his own triadic model of freedom. In my research, I use this model, but extend its scope with an additional dimension of internal and external freedom. Therefore, the aim of this article is to reconstruct the category of human freedom present in the views of Aristotle of Stagira, carried out precisely by applying the extended formula of MacCallum and building its model with the use of the introduced research instruments. The adopted multidimensional perspective of observing human freedom allows for a comprehensive approach to various planes of human life, on which we can see the manifestations of this enigmatic and ambiguous concept that we call freedom.

The ‘morality of compromise’: David Owen, human rights diplomacy and the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty

Following his appointment as Foreign Secretary in February 1977, David Owen framed human rights promotion as a guiding principle of British foreign policy. Sensitive to Iran’s significance as a pro-Western power in the Middle East and appreciative of the opportunities that the Shah’s custom provided for British business, Owen would continue to champion human rights promotion as a central pillar of Britain’s international agenda while simultaneously providing support to the Shah’s dictatorship. This article scrutinises Owen’s attempts to rationalise this fundamental contradiction by constructing a ‘morality of compromise’ which drew inspiration, inter alia, from the value pluralism espoused by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. In so doing, analysis not only complements and builds upon existing coverage of Anglo-Iranian relations and the marginalisation of human rights concerns therein; it also highlights the importance of moral psychology and its role in shaping ethical foreign policymaking at an individual level.

Play and liberty: A brief incursion into some ideological currents in the history of systems-oriented family therapy.

We reflect on family therapy and its history from two points of view, as an entity that becomes understood with the help of a twofold concept of a game, and a twofold concept of liberty. Systemic family therapy has always been comprehended with the help of game theory. Its development becomes more properly understood if we keep in mind that game itself is a dualistic concept entailing both a cultural and a logico-mathematical interpretation of a game. We show how cultural ethos has molded the ways how game metaphor have been implemented to systemic thinking. In the same manner we show how Isaiah Berlin's idea of two incompatible concepts of liberty helps to contextualize family therapy in a way that its connections to sociopolitical theories of liberty become obvious. We believe that we have been able to demonstrate, how this twofold recontextualisation enriches the understanding of the ideological history of the family therapy. We claim that our reflections imply that family therapy is essentially a dualistic endeavor, that in the amid of it is a rift that cannot become repaired but only contemplated, that integrity of family therapy requires that we preserve both conflictual views, and don't try to simplify situation by abandoning one or the other. As a result, our article intends to develop further and deepen the idea that is originally presnted in the article "Strategy and intervention or non-intervention: A matter of theory" by Harold Goolishian and Harlene Anderson.

Language and liberty

Linguists consider language, the most important tool of human existence, as first and foremost, a cognitive experience actualized through speech. Liberty, a principal concept, has since the beginning of the renaissance attracted the attention of philosophers, jurists, political scientists, ethicists, media scholars, among others, as an indispensable facet of human life in the areas of governance and the constitution of order, peoplehood, and societal value systems. Following the philosophical traditions of Sir Isaiah Berlin and drawing on African (Akan) axioms, the paper presents a theory relating to the entwining between language and liberty by elucidating how one indexes the other in a political process and practice, judicial process, in the foundation of people’s social and moral value systems, as a healthcare construct, and in free speech. Also explicated is the fact that actors’ effective use of language (linguistic and discourse-pragmatic tools) ensures success in the fight for liberty. Finally, the theory calls for liberty to be rooted in a nation’s laws, politics, philosophical traditions, value systems, healthcare practice, and the construction and enactment of free speech in order to make the fight for it (liberty) a reality.

The genesis of Bobbio’s liberalism (1939-1955): between classics old and new

ABSTRACT This essay aims to reconstruct the ‘genetic’ phase of Norberto Bobbio’s research on liberalism, through the theoretical confrontation he developed with some reference liberal authors, which we usually call ‘classics’. The paper reconstructs, first of all, the path of Bobbio from the years of his liberal formation, which took place in the sign of the works of Benedetto Croce, to the first gradual departure from the Crocian concept of freedom during the years of the Resistance. After the end of the Second World War, also thanks to the encounter with Karl Popper’s work, Bobbio’s arrival to the methodological individualism took place as well as the definitive departure from the idealistic and Croce's conception of freedom. The systematic criticism Bobbio addressed to his idea of liberalism, was developed in the volume Politics and culture, a crucial work to understand what the philosophical foundations of liberalism are according to Bobbio. The interpretation he gave of Benjamin Constant’s thought is important for two different reasons: firstly, starting from Constant, Bobbio anticipated as early as 1954 the famous Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty; secondly, this interpretation is fundamental to highlight the particularity and the anomaly of Bobbio’s liberalism.

ISAIAH BERLIN AS A HISTORIAN

ABSTRACTIntellectual history's methodology remains dominated by the Cambridge school and its approaches, which focus almost exclusively on the discursive context of political debates. However, a different practice of historical investigation may be found in the works of Isaiah Berlin. Although he is best known as a political theorist and an ethicist, Berlin pursued his philosophical agenda mostly through his works in the history of ideas that focus on Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers. Nonetheless, this methodology has never been presented in a systematic way—not by Berlin, and not in scholarship on his thought. This article argues that Berlin's understanding of past philosophers was different from that of the Cambridge school: he did not neglect the fundamental importance of historical context, but he did not understand the “context” primarily as comprised of interventions in political discourse; rather, he attempted to understand every thinker in his or her own right. Berlin's methodology as a historian can be summarized as an empathetic reconstruction of somebody else's mental world, and it was derived from the idea of fantasia, which was developed by the early modern Italian writer Giambattista Vico (who is a protagonist in many of Berlin's historical essays), and from the concept of “absolute presuppositions,” which was forged by R. G. Collingwood. Berlin's methodology allows for more in‐depth comparisons between thinkers from different historical periods, as his approaches were founded on a philosophical belief in the existence of a transhistorical human nature that is confined by a horizon of shared human experiences.

Errant Humanity: Writing the Geopolitics of Migration

Abstract This essay reviews three books—Lyndsey Stonebridge’s Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (2018), Seyla Benhabib’s Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin (2018), and the essay collection, edited by JoEllen DeLucia and Juliet Shields, Migration and Modernities: The State of Being Stateless, 1750–1850 (2019). Examples of a growing concern in the humanities and cultural studies with “the geopolitics of migration,” these books share an interest as to how the transposition of the sovereign state across the globe not only regularizes citizenship, territoriality, and rights discourses, but also makes the stateless—and the “rightlessness” marking those who are stateless—a permanent, constitutive feature of global modernity. Engaging political theory as well as political history, they consider exiles and refugees not as incidental to the political and legal institutions of modernity, but as critically illuminating of them. In particular, this review essay focuses on how, in the authors’ accounts, varied conceptions of the relations among law, politics, cultural difference, and social formations shape the possibility of political thinking.

The Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under the Tsars and Bolsheviks by Jeffrey Brooks

Reviewed by: The Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under the Tsars and Bolsheviks by Jeffrey Brooks Svetlana Yefimenko The Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under the Tsars and Bolsheviks. By Jeffrey Brooks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2019. vii+330 pp. £29.99. ISBN 978–1–108–48446–6. The fraught century between 1850 and 1950 was driven in Russia by radical transformations in politics, social structure, economic activity, and religious practice. How these upheavals manifested in the cultural production of the time—namely, literature, art, music, and dance—is the subject of Jeffrey Brooks's The Firebird and the Fox. By helpfully arranging what he terms the 'creative century' into three periods, Brooks focuses his socio-politically and economically informed lens on the culture of each epoch. First, on how the arts responded to emancipation and reform between 1850 and 1889; next, dialogue between revolutionary politics and art from 1890 to 1916; and, finally, artistic expression under the Soviet regime from 1917 to 1950. Each section subscribes to Brooks's overarching theme: the opposition of firebird and fox, both ubiquitous folkloric figures in Russian nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture. With a nod to Isaiah Berlin's archetypal hedgehog and fox (The Hedgehog and the Fox (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953)), Brooks's dyad is introduced here as a poetic, rather than strictly rigorous, organizing principle. The dazzling firebird and the sly vixen invoke, respectively, the soaring imagination and practical wisdom that characterized Russian cultural production in this rapidly evolving, and often violent, political landscape. The first section of Brooks's monograph describes with lyricism and humour the raffish bandits, rebels, Holy Fools, and ordinary folk represented in the lubki (woodcuts), adventure novels, and print magazines that circulated widely between 1850 and 1889, reassuring the reader that the boundary between anarchy and order was always re-established in the end: '[F]ree spaces proved uninhabitable over the longer period. People must return to the realm of society and the law, where rebels may face punishment and death or win redemption' (p. 43). This formulation explains why popular fiction of the day embraced Christian kenoticism, why Gogolʹ and Turgenev extolled freedom, and why Dostoevskii and Tolstoi were preoccupied with spiritual salvation. It does not, however, explain Chekhov, who is shown to remain ambivalent to the last, and who, along with Tolstoi, helped inaugurate a tradition of civic obligation and activism among Russia's cultural producers that continues to this day. Brooks turns in the second section to the last days of empire and the new art forms emerging in an expanding market economy. As the tsarist regime struggled to maintain power through rhetoric and, when that failed, summary executions, Modernism, neo-Realism, and celebrity culture flourished, with experimental artists such as Mikhail Vrubelʹ and Natalia Goncharova on the ascendant. Realist writers such as Maksim Gorʹkii gradually fell out of vogue, replaced by Symbolism and satire. Brooks recounts how the innovations of Sergei [End Page 521] Diaghilev, Igorʹ Stravinskii, and the legendary Ballets Russes repositioned artists as beneficiaries, rather than critics, of autocracy. As art and empire collaborated to legitimize themselves by exporting Russia's artistic achievements, many avantgarde artists distanced themselves from the sense of collective responsibility that Chekhov, Tolstoi, and Gorʹkii had embraced: '[T]he best young artists of the early twentieth century [. . .] rejected the obligation to enlighten' (p. 148). Adopting the ambivalence of his vulpine hero, Brooks remains refreshingly free from judgement, neither condemning nor praising his subjects. Brooks's tolerance informs his survey of post-1917 cultural production, which studies how the economic and political realities of the New Economic Policy, Stalin's Five-Year Plan, and the Great Terror, along with tightening ideological control over the arts, contributed to one of the most dazzling periods in Russian intellectual history. This seeming paradox justifies Brooks's optimistic analysis of what cultural figures such as Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Maiakovskii saw as 'a new art for the Soviet people' (p. 168). Even in those hard times, poets, writers, artists, composers, film-makers, and cartoonists rallied to find unique avenues for subversion, self-expression, and even joy. Brooks describes how artists such as Vladimir Tatlin...

Kei Hiruta, Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity

Kei Hiruta, Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity