In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure
By Henry Hardy
Tauris Parke, 2020

Upon his death in 1997 at the age of 88, the philosopher and historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin, was considered by many to be the dominant British scholar of his generation. His name was synonymous with erudition, voluble talk, and scholarly sophistication. Born in Riga in 1909, then part of the Russian Empire, his first language was Russian and he forever spoke a distinctive accented English with a rapid-fire delivery, as his ideas seemed to tumble out faster than his words. It was once said that he was the man who pronounced ​epistemological ​with one syllable. The British historian A.L. Rowse remarked that Isaiah was “unintelligible in several languages.”

Berlin’s family immigrated to Great Britain in the early 1920s resulting in the mature thinker identifying with three distinct selves: British, Russian, and Jewish. He believed it was to his Russan origins that he owed his lifelong interest in ideas.

As a Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, he generated a reputation as a young philosopher of promise. At the age of 30 he published his biography of Karl Marx, the work that would first reveal his talent as a historian of ideas. It was here that he first employed his “use of a profuse descriptive verbal cascade to create a cumulative pointillist picture of his subject,” a method that would mark his mature style in the years to come.

In a widely-read essay from the 1950s on Tolstoy’s philosophy of history, which Berlin entertainingly entitled ​The​ ​Hedgehog and Fox ​(“a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one important thing”), he argued that thinkers could be divided into two distinct categories: Those who relate everything to a single vision, one system, or universal organizing principle (hedgehogs); and those who pursue many ends, often unrelated or contradictory, related by no single moral or aesthetic principle (foxes). By Berlin’s lights great hedgehogs were Dante, Hegel, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche; while Montaigne, Goethe, and Shakespeare were foxes. While intended as a kind of parlor exercise or metaphor the distinction stuck and was later picked up by other writers.

Berlin was “centrally concerned with the life of the mind” yet had a taste for gossip that livened his prose with curious or idiosyncratic details. Exhibiting almost no interest in day-to-day politics, he dwelled rather on “the permanent aspects of the human world,” which is one of the characteristics that make his writing endure.

Yet, much of the writing of Isaiah Berlin nearly did not endure.

Upon receiving the Order of Merit in 1971 at the age of 62, an honor bestowed by the sovereign and limited to just 24 living persons, Maurice Bowra in a letter to Noel Annal, praised their mutual friend but noted that “..like our Lord and Socrates he does not publish much, he thinks and says a great deal and has had an enormous influence on our times.”

This was the rub of Berlin’s otherwise distinguished career, the perception that he had not written very much. There was no magnum opus, no grand work of originality and scholarly weight. Oh, there had been the biography of Marx, but it was a spare volume and published long ago, in the 1930s. He had said some interesting things in essays and addresses but these were often published in obscure journals, largely forgotten or inaccessible, or not published at all. There was talk of a big book, a study of Romanticism. He had delivered a series of talks in the mid-1960s on the topic for the Mellon Lectures in Washington. There was much note-taking and dictation for the future text but like Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, endlessly working on his ​Keys to All Mythologies,​ it came to naught.

It was in the following year that the author of the present work, the then 23 year old Henry Hardy met the Great Man. A student at the newly created Wolfson College, Oxford, where Berlin served as its first president, he came to know Isaiah Berlin. Berlin would “sit in the common room, talking to anyone who cared to listen...astonishingly present and accessible as president of Wolfson.”

Within two years Hardy approached Berlin, offering to be his editor and track down some of his unpublished or scattered notes. What began as a scavenger hunt for lost manuscripts and fading carbon copies of addresses and speeches slowly turned into a multi-decade relationship that would transform the lives and reputations of both men. Searching through boxes of documents stored in the enormous basement at Headington House, the grand Queen Ann style residence in Oxford that Berlin shared with his wife, Hardy uncovered scores of manuscripts, written and discarded over the years. He searched the attic, the library at Bodleian, uncovering old dictaphone recordings, essays with missing pages, letters dispersed among friends and in the process as Hardy describes it “the most fulfilling life an editor could dream of opened up to me.”

In ​The Search for Isaiah Berlin,​ Henry Hardy tells the story of two men: “the genius and the pedant.” For all his talent Berlin could be a careless scholar, producing works with missing or incorrect footnotes. Often there were misquotations as Berlin recalled passages from memory or blended similar ideas drawn from different sources. Further, Berlin was freighted with a genuine diffidence toward his own work, often claiming that he had been “systematically overestimated” throughout his life, and unlike most writers, had little interest in publishing much of his own work. He had been an “intellectual taxi” he said, hailed by others in the moment to produce a lecture or an essay but he was too much of a “fox,” too diverse in his interests and he believed that philosophy and intellectual history had moved on from many of the questions that had interested him in his earlier years.

The task before Henry Hardy was more than finding and dusting off old manuscripts. He found meaning in bringing to publication much that would have been lost. He recounts:

Editorial work is thought of - if it is thought of at all - as a kind of low-grade literary drudgery best kept behind the scenes. It has been well said that the best editorial work is the least visible. But the form of intellectual midwifery practiced by editors in their best moments can prove surprisingly exhilarating...To be sure, there are large tracts of drudgery to navigate. But the vision that informs the drudgery can infuse it with life and make it the instrument of a higher creative purpose.

Through Hardy’s labors, and the retiring participation of Berlin, new books began to be published, eight between the beginning of the collaboration in the mid-1970s and Berlin’s death in 1997. Hardy continued his process after Berlin was gone, for 23 more years, making it his life’s work. Seven more volumes would be published, plus four volumes of collected letters. Before he died, in a letter, Berlin acknowledged that Hardy had “transformed my reputation forever.”

It may be difficult for​ In Search of Isaiah Berlin​ to find a general audience.The author’s self-described “pedantry” is at times on full display as he reproduces pages of letters between himself and Berlin, clarifying a recondite point on cultural pluralism or negative liberty. Undoubtedly specialists, or those quite familiar with the writings of Isaiah Berlin or this unusual four-decade editorial relationship, will find the work of most interest. Nevertheless, Henry Hardy has produced a capstone to a remarkable story of letters, a Boswellian tale, a 40-year literary adventure.

—Randall A. See is a publisher living in Virginia. He holds an M.A. in Modern European History from James Madison University.