Hi and welcome to the Ideas Road Show podcast. I'm Howard Burton, your host and creator of ideas for our show,
and I'm delighted to be partnering with the New Books Network to offer you a uniquely eclectic
blend of long format conversations with a wide array of intriguing and knowledgeable people.
That Sir Isaiah Berlin was a genius is incontestable, a deeply influential philosopher and historian of ideas, he's exceptionally wide.
Interests and abilities enabled him to develop such a vast array of seminal insights on literature, philosophy,
political theory and so much more that it's virtually impossible to imagine one person knowing even one tenth as much as he did in one lifetime.
And yet, despite all the accolades and awards,
despite his impeccable academic credentials as an Oxford don professor of social and political theory, founding president of Wilson College,
and a deep lifelong association with the eminent All Souls College,
there was always somehow the whiff of academic underachievement associated with Berlin.
Some of this, no doubt,
was due to his universally acknowledged conversational wit and unquenchable capacity for friendship that was bound to create academic jealousy.
He seemed to know and be admired by everyone from T.S. Eliot to Virginia Woolf, Anna Akhmatova to Alfred Brendel, Bertrand Russell to Howard Weitzman.
Everybody seemed to love Isaiah.
Some of it, too, resulted from Verlaine's own charming modesty and self-deprecating remarks about his so-called undeserved reputation.
But there was also a widespread belief that for all his genius, Berlin simply hadn't produced enough.
Perennially skating on his unique New York incomprehensibly broad knowledge.
As one of his colleagues famously put it, he thinks and says a great deal and has an enormous influence on our times.
Although, like our Lord and Socrates, he doesn't publish much.
The truth, however, turns out to be very different indeed, for Berlin wrote an enormous amount of deeply penetrating and insightful works,
but simply never bothered to present them in any coherent form. Indeed, he often never bothered to publish them at all.
And the reason we know this and why we are now blessed with so much of Berlin's thoughts so clearly presented and readily accessible,
is because Henry Hardy, who first met Berlin as a young graduate student in the 1970s,
has spent the better part of his life in bringing the lion's share of Berlin's voluminous writings to light a story.
He captivating the details in his book In Search of Isaiah Berlin A Literary Adventure.
I have some sense, not only through my general awareness of what editors are like, but also through reading your book,
where you reveal all sorts of very candid and intimate aspects of your editorial disposition and your character.
Yes, it's I. I don't I don't I don't want to get too far into that.
But I would like to begin actually by by addressing that, by all means.
So my first question pertains to this editorial disposition, as it were.
And it's a somewhat hackneyed question. I thought I'd begin with a hackneyed question.
That's a tradition of mine. And that is, in your view, are editors born or are they made?
My sense from reading your work is that you would agree with the position that you have an editorial disposition.
But perhaps that's not correct. So let me ask you if that's a fair comment, I would agree that the disposition of the nature I was born with,
the temperament I was born with, I put it this this way, I'd say it was very suited to editing.
Of course, the disposition is a a more general when it's a disposition to tidy up, to organise, to impose structures on things, to clarify things.
And of course, if you'd asked the 10 year old me, what do you think your profession is going to be in the future?
I wouldn't have said editing because I didn't know that editing existed.
So editing is just one manifestation of of a more general temperamental inclination.
What might you have said? Oh, Lord, I don't think I don't think I would have had any idea at the time.
I don't think I had any conception of what I was going to do at that age. No, I think the the choice of occupation, at least in my case,
sort of grows within you as a result of what you're put through by parental upbringing and the education that your parents choose for you.
I mean, some people, of course, react against that rather than with it.
But I'm in general, rather, I tend to do what I'm told, perhaps a bit too much.
And so I think I regarded the aims and objectives of education with some approval and sympathy and.
Of course, there's a if you like, there's there's an editorial element in the kind of work you get to do, particularly university,
where you go off and read a number of different pieces about a given topic and try and extract
from them the important elements and arrange them in some intelligible and persuasive form.
That's a sort of editorial function in a way. So you're editing your own research, your own reading,
and then your own writing when you when you put it down in an essay format at the end of the process.
I'm somewhat confused by that. Perhaps I misunderstood when you said I tend to do what I'm told.
That's not the impression that I had from reading your book,
so I take it by that that you meant those were the ideals or ideals that were inculcated in me from an early age.
Yes, exactly. That's a much better way of putting it. Yes, I tend to I tend to adopt the values that are inherent in the culture in which I grew up.
But you're quite right. I'm not, in a narrower sense, prone to do what I'm told, quite the opposite in a way.
I'm very iconoclastic and I'm very determined to not to accept things which seem to me wrong or unreasonable.
And indeed, in the case of editing, I billion if I.
Accepted any of a whole series of discouragements which I encountered along the way,
I would certainly have been stopped from doing what in fact I've spent my life doing.
So I was I have a very strong sense of contrary obstinacy in my character two years.
And you even mentioned at one point that there was a formative.
Period episode in your life, where you resolve to always be plain speaking, always tell the truth.
This this came out in one of your many letters between yourself and Isaiah.
But I'm just going to cut myself off because I say because I'm up in North America disposition, at least that's where I came from originally.
I say Isaiah, but my understanding is that one should say Isaiah. Is that correct?
Or does either work or what is the correct pronunciation?
Well, if you are in America and you're talking to Americans, it's it's correct to say Isaiah, because they all do.
But if you want to follow the pronunciation used by him and his family, then it's Isaiah.
I don't know what the rules are. It's like it's like is it is it correct to say, Perry or Paris?
Well, it depends where you are. Yes. Well, I suppose one should follow the the rules that the the individual himself adopted.
So I will say Isaiah. Yeah.
But in one of anyway, getting back to the point, you mentioned specifically that there was a I don't know if epiphany is the right word,
but there was a formative instance in your life when you had resolved to speak the truth, come what may.
And and you you clearly have a desire to do so at the risk of of obduracy at times.
Is that is that is that a fair summation? That is a fair summation of my general disposition.
I can't I can't reliably recall the episode that you're referring to unless it was one to do with my stepmother, which it could have been.
Yes. Is that the one you're thinking of? Yes. Yes, that's right.
Yes. That experience was was formative. But I think it only, if you like, reinforced or enhanced a pre-existing disposition in that direction anyway.
So I don't think that was something that was borne out of a vacuum at that point, but it was strengthened and and reinforced.
You can be very self-deprecating and you begin the book by contrasting your disposition that you explicitly say borders on.
If not moves directly into pedantry with Isaiah Berlin's extremely creative, free flowing attitude towards perhaps being more,
shall we say, cavalier with specifics, with facts, with annotations, with sources and so forth.
To what extent do you think if you can look at the situation objectively,
this was a match made in heaven that that someone of his creative powers and prolific ness met
someone of your borderline pedantry disposition to be able to extract the full content of his works?
Yes, I've had that thought many times myself,
and if I was in the slightest way inclined to believe in fate or predestination or any of that range of phenomena,
I would regard our meeting as absolutely a prime example of that in action because it did seem to be so remarkably well adjusted in both directions.
I mean, the the wonderful free flowing imagination,
the kind of great unrestrained way in which he courses through the world of ideas is is in human nature,
not very often applied to the kind of concern with accuracy which which I seem to have been born with.
And, you know, obviously, if I could choose to have one or the other, I'd have the one he had.
But it was I thought, put it this way, it was a terrifically good piece of luck or good fortune or serendipity that I met him from my point of view,
because it meant that a tendency in me, which could so easily have been deployed in some unimportant way or less important way,
I can think of any number of occupations that I could have had which would have utilised my temperament.
Well, this was given.
An unbelievably wonderful way of functioning to enhance what he brought to the world, and I really feel that that was a great good fortune for me.
I have to admit that I think it was quite good for him to in some ways, of course.
So it was, if you like.
Yes, it was a marriage made in heaven, although, of course, I don't believe in heaven, but I still choose his gifts over mine any day of the week.
Nonetheless, I'd like to explore the idea of editing a little bit more detail because it may have a reputation which it doesn't fully deserve.
One of the things that struck me when I was reading your book was how editing can be and often seems to be a very creative process.
It is not at all merely a list of cataloguing and notetaking and checking for accuracy.
There is a great deal of creativity that goes into the the work and certainly your work with with what he was doing.
And you break it into two different parts. In your book,
you talk about the selective writings and and collecting and republishing all of his previously published works and and lectures
and let's just say previous previously formalised or finalised works as opposed to the the second part of the process,
which was much longer, much more involved, which involved bringing so many of his notes and fragments and on formulated ideas into finished form.
And and in both cases, I would imagine there was a tremendous amount of creativity or at least a significant amount of creativity that went into that.
Would you agree or would you disagree with that? No, I do agree with that. I do.
There was a facility which Berlin had, which he himself acknowledged, and there's a nice passage in a letter about this where he's writing, in fact,
to George Kennan and he says about his work as a diplomat in the war that he had what he calls an ability to see the pattern on the carpet,
that is to, you know, absorb a vast mass of of disparate data and somehow to extract from it a structure which makes sense of it and allows it to be
presented in a way that people can assimilate rather than just lots and lots of unrelated facts and so on tumbling over each other.
And I think to take the two stages that you referred to, the first one was the business of republishing scattered essays,
and that meant sitting down and reading them all and trying to see how certain parts of it belong together and other parts belong together separately,
so that as I relate, it was fairly obvious to me, as I as I read through, that there were certain areas,
certain intellectual areas, which one could use as headings under which to group some of what he'd written.
So I would say that the editor, too, in that process needs to be able to see the pattern on the carpet.
And that is a creative process because the material could have been put together in any number of ways.
I just put it together the way it seemed to make sense to me. And one element in that is the choice of titles.
I think a lot of books have very dull off-putting titles and one of his own essays is a very good example of that.
He wrote an essay in 1951 called Live Tolstoy's Historical Scepticism.
That's a really boring title which would send you straight to sleep when George Weidenfeld, who had the gift of titles,
as I believe I do to some extent as well, republished it as a book called The Hedgehog and the Fox.
And of course, that's now absolutely a central part of the culture.
And everybody talks about hedgehogs and foxes all the time. And if you I have a Google alert phrase billion.
And every day, literally every day, I get more instances of somebody quoting this way of subdividing human beings.
So there is definitely yes, there's a pattern there to be seen and it's important to be able to.
That ability is important, and that's that is beyond pedantry that is different, I would have to agree I'm one side my own in my own case,
for instance, the title of a later volume, which was The Crooked Timber of Humanity.
I think that was a very good title and was the one time I suggested the title to him when he accepted it without hesitation.
So I think that's important. And as you say, then the later process.
Was going through absolutely masses of material, some of it in note form,
some of it more written out, some of it just recordings of lectures and so on.
And again, seeing what the best material was, seeing how to organise it, seeing it, seeing in it the potential for a book or books.
Yeah, that's creative. I agree. It's interesting to the dynamics of the relationship between you and and I say
obviously that was a major thrust of what you were trying to bring across in the book.
And it did come across in all sorts of ways. I was struck by several things on a more substantive level in terms of what you were just discussing,
the creativity involved in selecting, framing the content, the fact that you went through it yourself.
You, of course, had to have a sufficient background to be able to do that.
You mentioned very, very obliquely the fact that you first met him as you were interviewing at Wilson College for a year before.
And then later on, you did a D fill in philosophy.
You're very sparse about what you actually did and your own work and your own philosophical background and orientation.
As I said before, you're quite self-deprecating.
It's almost as if you were completely ignoring any of your own professional work, that is to say, professional academic work.
Although, of course,
there is a large section later on in the book when you actually talk about the ideas and the interchange that you had with him on various themes.
But I didn't get the sense that that was directly tied in any way to any of your academic work.
That was no more you as an individual who was and couldn't figure this out or was or disagreed about this point to that point.
And hopefully we'll get back to it. But anyway, I'm rambling a little bit.
What I wanted to say is that it seemed particularly remarkable to me that someone of his stature
would be so willing to work and trust an individual such as yourself who was so obviously Jr.,
you were in your 20s, your mid 20s, when you I believe when you began this this project and the respect that he seemed to
give you and the relationship that you had struck me as quite singular in and of itself.
Would you agree with that or would you disagree? No, I do agree with that.
I think it was remarkable. And I think anybody from outside considering the project was wondering whether to embark on and indeed,
perhaps people from the outside did say this to him at the time.
I don't know if it breaks all the canons of of normal employment systems or management systems, if you like.
You know, you look for somebody with it would have to be somebody with a track record, in this case, a track record of editing,
of which I had really none except in trivial ways like producing college magazines or something of that kind.
A no no real experience in the world of book publishing.
I think it was I think are two two reasons that come to mind where he did so.
I mean, one is, as I think I say in the book, that I was at Wolfson College and that he was president of Wilson College in Oxford.
And I think it was part of his general attitude to that role that he wanted to believe in and support the people in the college,
perhaps without too much respect to objective criteria.
I mean, I'm sure he formed his own personal judgement and he wouldn't have he wouldn't have made
such an arrangement with somebody he didn't feel was likely to be capable of doing it.
So it wasn't purely sort of an automatic approval of anybody who just happened to be a member of Wills.
But I think that was a strong a strong factor in his decision.
And the other was his general in general.
He's a remarkably open, uncalculating person.
Was such a person. He didn't. He didn't.
When somebody wrote to him about something out of the blue, whoever they were, he would reply as if it was a friend.
You know,
he didn't there was there was no caution of the normal kind that you would expect people in such a role to display as a very open disposition.
And that, I think, is also a very strong part of what happened.
But you're absolutely right. It was it was it was insane.
I mean, you know, but if he hadn't been insane in that way, then it would none of it would have happened.
So I can't regret it. Not at all.
And these things also perhaps it's worth.
Thinking about or reflecting upon happened over a period of time, I'm sure there was a process by which you gained his trust, you gained his respect.
Your candour, your honesty, I would imagine, appealed to him, your probity, your diligence and your straightforwardness.
And these are things that take time as you're establishing a relationship.
And I would imagine it wasn't as if he said, oh, you're at Wolfson, as you so pointedly brought to our attention.
He needed convincing on just about every matter, all the time.
And so nothing was automatic. It wasn't as if he agreed to to to anything in an instant.
And I'm sure as time went on, he developed an increasing amount of respect for you.
That's me surmising. But it seems not unreasonable to come to that conclusion.
I suppose that must be right. But but you also write that it didn't ever lead him to delegate the actual important decision to me entirely.
I mean, he would let me work on stuff and come up with suggestions. But the final decision was always with him.
And the most poignant, if you like, example of that in process is that he actually signed an agreement with me,
which involved the initial four volumes. And then after I finished work on one of them volume called Concepts and Categories,
he suddenly decided out of the blue that he didn't want it to be included for reasons which I had a long argument with him about.
But the fact that he had committed to it both formally and informally and the fact that I
had done all the work absolutely made not a blind bit of difference if he didn't want to,
didn't want it. So he retained the always retained the right of veto, if you like, and and, you know,
even more than once exercised it and had to fight back from that position.
Yes. And the fighting occurs, at least in the book.
Perhaps there were all sorts of other means and vehicles of of battling.
But the one that is cited by far the most in the book is letters.
And for again, for myself as an outside observer,
I'm wondering why the heck are these guys writing so many letters to each other when they're living often in the same city?
Not always, but often and certainly always in the same country. Often they would be seeing each other with some regularity.
This certainly seems to speak of a of a cultural distinction between that time in our own mind.
You, of course, we have email now, but I'm very grateful that we that we have those letters,
as I'm sure you were when you were writing this book, and likely well before.
But it did seem very odd to me.
The two people who were in such close contact with each other geographically were writing letters to one another on such a regular basis.
I agree. I quite agree. And I may be wrong, but I thought I had said some something about that.
But I'll certainly say it now, which is that. The nature of meetings,
personal meetings with him was such that one just couldn't make any progress of a practical kind because he was always going off at a tangent.
He was he was one of the world's greatest digresses, you know, and he would go off on the most terrific riffs, which were frightfully entertaining.
He would tell you about people he knew. Associations came to his mind from one topic to the next.
And you'd have an absolutely terrific time. But you might be there for three hours.
You come away. You hadn't got an answer to any individual question or very few the most.
So it became clear to me early on that it was necessary to do it on paper and fortunately, in a way that perhaps is hard to understand.
He was quite different when he was replying to a letter.
If you, if you knew, numbered the paragraphs or the points that you wanted settled in your letter from one to 20,
you'd get 20 replies and he would think about them.
But you couldn't you couldn't translate that letter exchange into a conversation.
It just didn't work. It wasn't that kind of chap. Did other people do that as well today?
What did he have an enormous amount of correspondence because because other people were in that situation where they
wanted to get a straight answer from him and they found they couldn't actually get that done in a conversation.
I'm sure that happened. I couldn't say how often I'm sure it did happen.
I was always also I mean, it was slightly overawed and intimidated by him in person, although we were very good friends by the end,
I never felt completely relaxed in the same way that one of his NERA contemporaries, such as his close friends,
Bernard Williams or Stuart Hamshire, would feel, I'm sure, and when they were in his company.
So if you were writing a letter, you're less nervous. You can think it through, you can think carefully, you can make the point.
You want to make it raise the question you want to ask as precisely and clearly as you can.
Whereas if you were actually there sitting on the sofa in front of him, you might be a bit lost for words and you might fumble a bit.
So that's another another ingredient in it. But there is I mean, as you can probably see from the volumes of letters,
there was an absolutely vast correspondence, but of course, not all of it would have been so motivated.
It was from people all over the world who couldn't have been with him.
Yeah, I'd like to pick up a little bit on the when you mentioned the friendship with Bernard Williams and Stuart Homeshare and other people,
he seemed to be someone who had just a remarkably large number of deep personal friendships,
inconceivable, quite frankly, to say to myself, I don't I don't want to sound like a misanthrope, but but it just seemed difficult for me to imagine.
He was, of course, a very famous conversationalist. He was somebody who had a veritably encyclopaedic knowledge of so many different areas.
He was clearly an extremely, exceptionally charming individual.
But when I read about the tales of not so much from this book, although it was certainly alluded to,
but through biographies and and other accounts, one is hard pressed to imagine how he had time to do anything.
I mean, it seems like he had such an enormously white circle of friends.
It I just can't understand how we how we fit all this activity into into several lifetimes, let alone one lifetime.
Was there any sense of that for you on the outside looking and asking yourself,
how is it possible that this individual can be reading and producing and being engaged
in so many different things and at the same time have so many seemingly very,
very deep and meaningful friendships? Absolutely. I mean, I would say that his life is a is a clear.
Example of the impossible happening, I mean, it just it having known him for so long, I still think it's impossible.
I mean, he I suppose, you know, we all I mean, we all have different limits to our capacity.
And most of us have fairly low ceilings. And, you know, we can only to a certain amount in one lifetime.
And certainly his ceiling, his capacity for different forms of action and relationship and so on was far,
far greater than that of anybody else I've ever known.
It helped that what he was most interested in, above everything else, was people and personal relationships.
So to him, that was, if you like, the highest value.
And that meant that he gave himself to that very fully.
And part of what he liked was the enormous variety of people,
which in itself entails the desirability of a wide range of friendships and acquaintances.
The only thing that came close to that, I would say, in his system of values was music, which was fantastically important to him.
And there's something quite different from personal relationships, I take it. But yes, how he I mean, he he accepted invitations to speak.
He answered all the letters that were sent to him almost generally more fully and more carefully than many of them deserved.
So he gave a lot of energy to that. He would meet people for hours on end if they wanted to meet him.
And it didn't matter if they were very junior, unimportant people, he would give them the same degree of attention and the same generosity of time.
So it seemed to me that he crammed a number of lifetimes into one.
He hated work. He hated writing and indeed stopped writing increasingly as the years went by.
He wrote his first book on Karl Marx on paper.
But even the later draughts of that were dictated from notes to to a typist.
And by the time he came to the end of his life, everything was dictated in the first instance.
And he always said to his secretary, Is there anything else we can do now or do I have to do some work?
And, you know, considering that that was his attitude, the amount he wrote,
wrote or dictated, as you can see from the books I've produced, was fantastically large.
I just it is it is amazing. I don't pretend to be able to account for it, but all I can say is it really happened.
I didn't make it up. So, you know, there are some people who just have a greater capacity for all these sorts of things than most of us,
you know, and he must have been reading constantly as well. Well, that's another thing I was thinking of saying in reply to your previous question.
And he seemed to me to have the capacity to absorb the essence of a book with terrific rapidity.
And I think he probably was able to sort of hone in on what you might call the
most essential elements in a book by scanning rather than reading very slowly,
word by word. Nevertheless, he had a very compelling understanding of the centre of the guy's thought and this ability to
connect it with with other thinkers and other times exactly as all of that he had in spades.
And and that was something which both impressed me and made me feel very jealous.
So perhaps this isn't fair for me to say my next question, but this is a candid conversation, so I'm going to be candid.
So there was there was one moment. When I was reading this in the selected writings part, when you give this anecdote,
which is quite a long and detailed anecdote of a debacle of which you had almost a fight,
I guess you could you could say between yourself and Anberlin about the introduction
to what was then memoirs and tributes and what later became personal impression by.
And my summation of the situation was you felt compelled to to have an introduction.
You asked a desire to write an introduction. He declined.
And moreover, he said, I don't want any introduction because after all, it would amount to something like,
I met this chap in this chap and this chap, and they were all interesting or they left an impression upon me.
And I don't see why you need an introduction at all. And then you went ahead and and in your own determined fashion, did procure an introduction.
And and then eventually he capitulated and things move forwards.
And there were further complications that we don't need to go into. But my question was, why did you care?
I mean, why didn't you just say, I'm reading this and I'm thinking he doesn't want an introduction, don't have an introduction?
Why are you so determined as the editor that you need to have an introduction?
What was going through your mind at that at that point? And if you could turn back the clock, would you do exactly the same thing that you did then?
Or would you say, OK, fine, we won't have an introduction? That left me quite feeling quite bemused.
Yes, perhaps naturally. Part of the reason for wanting an introduction was that it was part of the conception of the series of books.
I mean, there were four books and the previous three at all had introductions.
So I didn't see why we shouldn't keep the pattern going and have an introduction for the fourth.
But that's an example of exactly what distinguish me from him.
I mean, to me, the mere consideration of consistency required an introduction to him.
He would be perfectly happy to say, well, three, have an introduction and one doesn't.
Who cares? You know, they're different sorts of books. Maybe he was right, but I.
I still think that it's a good idea to have an introduction, which, as it were,
spells out what the linking characteristics of the contents of the volume are and
draws out themes which reappear in the different chapters or something of that kind.
And particularly in that case, where we're talking about Berlins way of perceiving,
relating to describing, evaluating other people, which for him was such a central part of life.
I mean, the central part of life, as I said just now.
So it seemed to me that there was something to be said about the general personality that informed all these essays.
And indeed, I think Annan's peace, whether well or badly, I think quite well, does elicit that and then stated.
I think if I had my time over again, knowing what I know about his reaction to Anand's account, I would have chosen a different author.
I would probably have chosen Stuart Hamshire.
And indeed, I said to me later on in some context, I wish you'd chosen Stewart rather than Noel, and I think he was probably right.
I think the reason I didn't choose Stewart was that.
I didn't think he was likely to write such an interesting introduction because he he had been my supervisor at the time,
he was my doctoral student supervisor at Oxford, and I found his his conduct of supervision sessions somewhat abstract and unengaging, if you like.
So I didn't have an image of him as somebody who was likely to write such a good thing.
I think I was wrong.
I've subsequently read a couple of his books in particular, one called Innocence and Experience, which I thought was absolutely terrific.
Not quite as not quite as I mean, Alan is is a man of the world.
He's a he was an education administrator. He was he was provost of Kings, Cambridge and all this kind of thing.
So he taught more in concrete terms about people than and Stewart taught more in terms of abstractions.
But given that it would have been a good piece nonetheless,
and given that it would have been one that I would have accepted much more readily, that would have been a better course to take.
So I can't give you a knock down argument why it was right or why I thought it was right to insist on
the introduction and obviously the way in which it caused a pain or what he claimed it caused in pain.
And I've no reason to suppose he was lying. Caused me pain because the last thing I wanted to do in any of these various battles that we had,
the last thing I wanted to do was cause him discomfort or inconvenience or pain.
But for me, the overriding imperative,
the overriding value was the desirability that his work should be made available to the public
in the best possible form and provided with introductory material when it was appropriate.
And, you know, it was worth putting him through a certain amount to achieve that end.
And of course, at any stage during that saga, he could simply have said, no, I'm not having an introduction.
End of story. Please stop trying to achieve one. And I would hope that if he'd put it in those clear terms, I would have accepted it.
Obviously, I would have done I would have had to, and it would have been self destructive not to.
But it's interesting to me, and I don't know if you feel the same, that he never did that in any of these things.
He almost seemed to like to go through the period of resistance and counterargument, knowing that probably in the end he would yield.
Exactly the same happened when he tried to cancel the philosophy volume. In the end, he suggested that we ask Bernard Williams for his opinion.
And when Bernard voted with me, he says, I well, you see, I'm made of wax after all.
You know, he liked he he felt he had to sort of hate against me all the way, which was, you know, it was upsetting and I'd rather it hadn't happened.
But I don't regret I don't regret it because of the outcome. Yes.
Well, that certainly did occur to me. So I mentioned just now how I was perplexed by your determination to have an introduction.
In this particular case,
I was equally perplexed and I suspected something along the lines of what you've just mentioned about his reticence, his ongoing reticence,
his church of possessions, his his plaintive cries of protestation that seemed to happen with alarming frequency, particularly during the first stage.
It made more sense to me during the second stage of that, which is to say,
if one is confronted with one's unpublished writings and one's notes and one's inchoate ideas and unformed thoughts,
I can see there's a much greater temptation to say, I don't want to go back to this.
I don't want to look at this. I didn't publish it for a reason or what have you.
I can see that that being a much more problematic scenario, although, of course, I appreciate that it's not so black and white.
But when it comes to works that have already been published in some context, I don't really see what all the fuss is about.
And I was certainly tempted to conclude that there was there was some non-trivial amount of false modesty that was going on.
Would you agree or disagree with that, that assessment? No, I don't disagree.
Really false modesty? I don't know. I think what I put it slightly differently, I'd say that he was concerned.
To a degree which he would never admit with the impact that publication of recollections of his work would have on his reputation,
he always said that that wasn't what bothered him. And I think he was he misrepresented his own motives to himself to a degree.
So take the philosophy volume which he tried to get rid of. I think he thought that people would think this was an act of vanity.
It was somebody who hadn't been a particularly good philosopher, respectable but not outstanding,
who was collecting his philosophical articles together just because he saw himself as an important figure in the intellectual landscape.
All of his work should be made available in collected form, and he very much didn't want to come across as that sort of person.
He only wanted to accept volumes which he thought were justifiable in other terms are justifiable as contributions
to the area concerned which were worth keeping going with preserving in this more permanent format.
So if you call it a form of false modesty, will, perhaps it was, but it was it was a form of self protection.
He had he was very thin skinned. He hated he hated negative reviews.
I think he was terrified that somebody would say, oh, this is all very low grade stuff.
You know why Earth put together. He just isn't that good at it. So I think that was what was going on there.
Right. I'd like to turn to the ideas and have a discussion of of of your interpretation of them.
Obviously, it would be ideal to have Isiah here defending his views and interpreting his views, but we don't have that.
So we're just going to have to do the best that we can under the circumstances.
So please make make allowances for that and take it from the position from from whence it comes,
which is an interested reader who looks at this and says, I don't quite understand this or I'm not sure about that, or how does this fit in with that?
And so at several points in the book,
you contrast Isaiah's views with members of the Cambridge School of Intellectual History who who argue for
the pre-eminence of cultural context and who are talking about the idea that it is dangerously anachronistic.
These are my words. So. So that's that's the spirit in which they must be perceived.
But my interpretation is that they would argue that when it comes to looking at great thinkers,
one has to first and foremost appreciate the context in which they worked and they thought and they lived.
And it it may be dangerous. In fact, it is it is often dangerously inappropriate to take to look at their views from our modern day context,
because they that that is dangerously anachronistic and will therefore be an inappropriate way of looking at things.
And you contrast that with Berlin's views of people like Veeco and Huerter and you say his his reaction was something to the effect of.
Well, the reason we look at these people is precisely because their insights and their ideas transcend.
They are, of course, men of their time,
but they transcend the various cultures in which they live to the extent that they are still relevant to us, they provide insights into our world.
So this is, again, a long, rambling preamble to to set up my point, because as I'm reading this, I think are these views really that different?
Is there no middle ground or aren't they compatible to some extent? I mean,
can't one argue that one has to be sensitive to cultural context and and time and appreciate that person X wrote what Person
X wrote in full recognition of who he was responding to and and what the pressures of his time were and so forth and so on.
And yet at the same time say nonetheless, their insights are such that through their own particular experiences,
they they developed ideas and concepts that are relevant to us today.
I don't see that they're they're incompatible. Perhaps that's not what you had meant to say.
Or perhaps you think they are incompatible.
But that was my response to this, that there is a sense at least that there's Berlin and there are these guys at Cambridge.
And I'm not so sure that at least to my untrained eye and ear, they're all that different from what they have to say.
But perhaps I'm missing something. Well, I think there's a continuum of ways of doing with the history of ideas, if we can call it that.
And the extreme version is what you talk about as the method of the Cambridge School, which is some.
Practised in a more extreme way than others, and which you might call Scholastic,
or it's a sort of very narrow consideration or analysis of what's going on in a
particular period with constant reference to the circumstances of the time and without.
And I fixed very often or at all on on on wider questions that might be perennial.
And that's what a lot of scholarly work in in the history of ideas done from that viewpoint is like and reads like.
I can best perhaps illustrate that by an anecdote referring to one of them, Quentin Skinner, one of the leading members of the Cambridge School.
I was at the time commissioning a series of books at Oxford University Press called Past Masters,
which were short paperbacks discussing the ideas of intellectual originators of the past, if you like.
And Quentin Skinner, I commissioned to do the one on Machiavelli because he'd done work on him and he
wrote a very good little book on Machiavelli from that rather extreme viewpoint,
or so it seemed to me. And I was left having read the manuscript with the very strong need to ask the question.
Well, this is all very interesting, very skilful and a wonderful piece of scholarship.
But why should we today be interested in what Machiavelli thought and why and how it
different from what other people thought and what use we can make of it and so on.
And Skinner resisted several times, adding even a short passage at the end of the book, which which we urged him to do.
When I say we, I include Keith Thomas, who was the academic editor of the series, and in the end we thought of one he did.
If you look at the book, you'll find that there is at the end a section is only a couple of pages or something,
which does try to say something about the wider relevance or importance of Machiavelli's
ideas without really signing up fully to the kind of approach that Berlin would have taken.
Then the other extreme there is what you might call the ultra burlinson approach,
which is to treat any person thinker as if they were sitting in the room with you,
talking to you,
and you could have a conversation with them without any kind of problems of comprehensibility or conceptual clash or no difficulty of any kind,
you know. Yes, OK, Socrates, you say that. But what about this?
You know, and. OK, Veeco. No, just just let me put this point to you.
Whatever. I mean, that that is a sense that I say very often creates in his works because he he tends to.
Put across people's views by recreating them as if he was speaking them himself from within himself.
It's a form of intellectual ventriloquism, which has often been noted and I think is very effective, a very effective element in his style.
And that, you know, is obviously goes too far in the other direction.
But but nevertheless, I don't want to denigrate it or criticise it too much,
because I think that the value of the ideas of the past thinkers is it partly or if possibly even more than partly,
perhaps largely the way that they stimulate the person in the present to think about things differently?
And if that stimulus. Is caused by a somewhat misunderstanding version of the thinker that's being looked at then in a way,
although, of course truth is truth and accuracy is accuracy. And if you want to be scholarly, you've got to get things absolutely right.
If it's if it's productive in terms of new thinking, new ideas, and helps us to make progress intellectually, then it's performed a function.
And that's part of what past thinkers do. So I'm not entirely against that way of doing it.
Well, I suppose I'd like to move on, but just perhaps apparent that a comment.
I suppose part of my bemusement is that I've had the good fortune to speak to Quentin Skinner.
Yes, I thought he was one of your topics, but he wasn't a topic. He was a he was a person.
So, yes, it's going to be a subject. Yeah.
Yes. Well, you're not. Well, I don't even like the word subject, but it makes me sound like a lot of people just don't know something.
It just looks like this just as you are. Yes.
And I had a very so I am not a student of intellectual history, but I had a very different experience in my interaction with him.
I found that he was somebody who was consistently interested in examining the past.
Yes, absolutely. On its own terms in terms of appreciating the cultural context, appreciating the circumstances.
That was obviously an overriding preoccupation. But insofar as what lessons it might have for us today, when we spoke,
he was he talked about how one could take some of the ideas of the Neriman theory of freedom,
our interpretation of freedom, and apply them to government surveillance of emails, for example.
And and so he was very much motivated to, as I as I understood it,
to not only think about the contemporary relevance of of thinkers throughout the ages,
but also to investigate individuals for for whom, for whatever reason,
they haven't been given their due ideas that hadn't become popular routes not travelled.
And the idea of examining history to try to see if there was anything worth resuscitating or worth examining or worth exploring there.
So I had a previous conversation with yet another one of my interlocutors, Michael Fraser, who speculated that perhaps, like Wittgenstein,
there was an early Skinnerian, a late Skinner, and I've been encountering late Skinner and Charlie Skinner was quite different.
I think so. However, let me move on, because we're not talking about that.
We're talking about other issues. And I want to ask a specific question.
So you talk at length about the tension, as it were, between pluralism and relativism or intentional relativism.
And you give various pathways that I had dealt with that and demonstrated that his version of pluralism did not lead to relativism.
But I wanted to ask a very concrete question, which I,
I thought of when I when I read the book and I thought of before when dealing with these issues.
What did he think of something like the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights did?
A very, very concrete example. Would he say? I mean, you talk a little bit about the Soviet hierarchy and for example, there's this.
And for example, there are some basic needs of food and shelter and so forth and so on.
But had you had you ever heard him comment specifically one way or the other of whether something like
the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was a was a good thing was it was a not so good thing,
was an appropriate thing to be doing?
I don't recall him speaking about that in particular, although I bet he did in certain contexts where I was probably not present.
He did talk about rights. And I think I have a section on a passage on that.
Yes. And I think the line he would take on the United Nations would be related to that.
I mean, he took the view that there were not it didn't exist some kind of pre-existing abstract set of entities called human rights,
which we simply had to reach down from a shelf and and recognise and and deal with.
But that human rights were provisions made by some set of rules.
So it might be the law of the country.
It might be the international law, as in the case of the United Nations, and that, if you like, they were related to human needs and desires.
So choosing which rights to ensconce in legal instruments was a matter of your understanding of what was important for human beings?
What would the central needs and interests of human beings? And those would be turned into into rules in one system or another.
So he might have said that some of the. Rights that are provided for in the United Nations system or some other system
would be less central and perhaps less defensible as universal human rights,
whereas others were quite clearly central human needs and there was no question about it.
Mean, I've heard people people often parody the more marginal fringes of human rights legislation, don't they?
And they say the idea that there's a natural human right for paternity leave is absurd.
You know, that's just to some people might choose that. Some people mightn't.
Whereas the idea that there's a natural human right to safety from cruelty or or to a reasonable standard of living or whatever it might be,
is much easier to argue for. So, yes, he would have I'm sure he would would have been in favour of the principles involved in those.
But he might have argued the toss about specific ones. Sure. But this idea of a core which is established.
Yes. And to which everyone agrees. Well, one hopes that everyone agrees with it.
But the trouble is that there are, as we see in the world today,
there are so many political systems which seem of their essence to involve denying some of the most central human rights that we wish to observe.
Well, I mean, as a formal process to be a signatory to the treaty. Yes.
It's that you are formally admitting that you agree to it, whether or not in practise you adhere to those or not.
Yes, very sadly is a very different question, of course. Yes. Well, and some some people won't even sign, will they?
But some people will sign but neglect. Some people won't sign and other people will try and do both.
Yes. But I mean, in in arguing for particular rights to be part of the package, you know,
you have to be arguing in terms of human nature what your conception of human nature is, what its central needs and interests are.
And people can disagree about that, obviously.
But most people most of the time agree on at least the central things in the chapter you have on pluralism and religion.
You talk about the epistolary battle or discussion that you have where you try to highlight
what to you seems to be a logical incompatibility between pluralism and religious universalism.
Yeah, and my interpretation of what you're saying is if you believe in one particular
religious interpretation that this is the way that one should live one's life,
there is one true way towards salvation.
There is one true way towards living a holy and a divinely ordained life, then that very idea is logically incompatible with a pluralistic viewpoint.
And that's a view that many people I think would agree with, I would personally agree with as well.
So unfortunately, it means that we're not going to have a great deal of sparks flying over this issue, I imagine.
But but he it's a very it's a very strange series of letters because he he
seems that perhaps this is just you exercising marvellous editorial control,
but he seems to be going all over the place and backtracking here and there and
agreeing with you at this point and then disagreeing with you on another point.
And and it's very difficult to to see a real sense of coherence there.
So, again, he's not in a position to defend himself. It's inappropriate to be going down that road.
But but the question that I have to ask is, what, if any,
response did you have to that chapter from other philosophers and and his colleagues or erstwhile colleagues and peers?
Did you have a torrent of opinion saying you didn't understand this and that an up and down or what sort of response did you get to that?
Well, funnily enough, the book, although it was very, very widely reviewed in the sort of dailies and weeklies,
has not been reviewed, to my knowledge, a single time in a professional journal.
It's obviously regarded as a piece of froth, you know, as far as they're concerned,
which is rather disappointing because although it was informally written in an autobiographical style,
I mean, the were, I thought, some serious issues that I raised,
even if I didn't settle in those chapters in which I wanted people to react to and disagree with and argue with me about.
But there's been very little. However, there have been to two things I might mention.
The first is that one or two people who've read the book have just and written to me about
it have said informally that Berlin just seems to be wrong or muddled in these exchanges.
And I think I agree with that. I mean, I think I I caught him towards the end of his life.
Was an area which he wasn't, which he hadn't written about much,
and he was somewhat perhaps fixed in his views by that point, I wish I'd had the discussions with him when he was younger.
He also had a personal relationship to religion, which is very different from mine.
His was a relationship to Judaism, which has a very important cultural formative function, particularly in view of the Holocaust and so on.
So he he was very ready to regard Judaism as a as a cultural entity rather than a religious one.
And he didn't, I think, subscribe to the religious tenets of the faith.
But he did very much subscribe to the culture. And so he wasn't prepared to throw out the baby with with the bathwater.
There has, though, been a series of recent articles, not reviews of the book,
but articles about the question of the relationship between pluralism and religion in in a journal.
I can't now remember which it is, or indeed, I'm not even sure it's the same journal.
But there have been three or four academic articles which consider.
What I say, as well as what some other people have said about the topic and to the last man or woman,
I think they were all men, they all disagree with me.
And they think that there must be some way to reconcile the universal religious belief with pluralism.
I suspect that they're all religious believers themselves and and of them, you could well say.
Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? You know, obviously a religious believers is going to be very reluctant to accept that
there's a knock down argument against what gives his life meaning and value.
So it's a bit disappointing. I haven't heard anybody arguing on my side yet in that kind of context.
But my interpretation of what you're saying is it's much more from a logically consistent perspective.
Yes. Other than that, a moral judgement. So let me give you my my interpretation.
Yes, my question, because I do I do think it's relevant. Of course I do.
Otherwise, I wouldn't be saying it. So I'm biased, clearly, but let me be quite particular.
So. So let me talk about a punitive conversation I might have with Pope Francis, who,
by the way, parenthetically strikes me as as an incredibly impressive individual.
Mm hmm. And my parenthetical comment is, isn't it odd how the world seems to be turned upside down,
whereas now the genuine shining lights of the geopolitical spectrum come from places like the Vatican and the chancellor of Germany?
And isn't that ironic, given what we now see from America in the come?
But that's a fantastic comment. So when I say these comments, I am saying them with a tremendous amount of respect for the pope,
which is, again, a phrase I wouldn't have imagined myself saying a few decades ago.
But I do I do believe that. But nonetheless, if I were to sit down with with the pope and I would have to ask him,
is it the case that Christianity is the one true path towards understanding and salvation?
To the extent that everybody else is is misguided, they've missed the boat.
You cannot I would imagine being the head of a Catholic Church saying, oh, no,
our roads are are equally valid at some level or are are are equally within the firmament or
who am I to say that to make a judgement as long as you're devout or having a good moral life?
Clearly, as the head of I would imagine, clearly as the head of the of the Catholic Church,
you would have to say something along the lines of I represent the one true faith, of course.
And by saying those words, it seems to me to be just completely, patently, obviously logically inconsistent with the notion of pluralism.
Unless you redefine pluralism in 180 degrees from what any otherwise rational person would define it as.
I mean, it seems extremely straightforward to me. Absolutely. Me, too.
OK, so we can't get much further than that, so let's let me turn to another question that is completely different,
different question, which you're probably not not expecting. Perhaps you weren't expecting any of these bust up your correspondents.
You show a diagram that you created when you were discussing your interpretation of Berlin's notion
of the moral core and the human horizon that people outside of that psychopath's and what have you.
And you create what at least what I was told when I was a young boy to be a ven diagram and you call it an either diagram.
So perhaps that's another cultural difference.
But anyway, you create a diagram and then there's there's this interesting development where where Berlin says, yes,
the diagram is spot on and then goes on to later say to argue with you in a completely different direction, which seems to contradict himself.
And so I don't I don't really want to go there. What I was struck by is that it seemed that this without trying to sound too grandiose,
it seems like this idea of taking a philosophical argument and actually representing it pictorially is an interesting idea.
And I don't see that sort of thing very often. I've had a discussion with other people, in particular a philosopher mathematics,
who talks about the ideas of picture proofs and mathematics and the opportunity to actually use pictorial representations to prove things.
It seems to me that that the very idea of representing a philosophical argument and pictorial form was a good idea and often under utilised.
And I was again wondering if any other people had commented on that, let alone whether they agreed with you or disagreed with you.
Just the notion of that as a way of expressing an argument, because all too often philosophical arguments,
it seems to me, tend to naturally get extremely wordy and verbose and and difficult to pass.
And and and sometimes I would think that a visual representation would be a great way to move forward on a whole host of matters.
And I was wondering if you had any specific feedback about that. Yes,
I have a general horror of over abstract philosophical argument because partly
because I find it very difficult to follow or to understand or to get a grip on.
And I have to make notes or draw diagrams on a piece of paper to try and keep in my head the structure of the argument.
And I have a kind of personal rule which I probably fail to follow as much as I succeed in following it,
which is that whenever you make an abstract point, you should always give a concrete example of it so that you know exactly what it entails.
And sometimes the difficulty of thinking up a concrete example acts as a critique of the abstract idea,
because if the abstract idea can't produce a concrete example that makes sense,
then there's probably something wrong with the abstract idea if it can produce a concrete example.
And that's very useful in a pedagogical sense because it helps you to understand what the point of the argument is.
And a sort of related to this is, is my feeling for me, at any rate,
that I can portray an argument or a philosophical situation in a picture that helps very much to to fix it in the mind and to
enable when to think about certain aspects of it more easily than if you've just expressed it in words in an abstract form.
So that's partly an idiosyncratic personal feature of my own character.
I just like examples and I like pictures to help me understand philosophy.
As a matter of fact, that particular diagram has been picked up by one by one philosopher, a man called Jonathan Reilley,
who doesn't agree entirely with my view, but agrees that having a diagram of a kind helps to illustrate views in this area.
So he presents slightly different versions of it.
He adjusts it in ways which I don't need to go into. But if you look at his articles in the literature, you will find it reappears there.
But he's the only one that that I know of. I think it appealed to as a two.
And I think that's why he agreed with it in the first instance, because I think it worked for him, too, as a representation of his point of view.
It's of course, it's not perfect.
I mean, there are many aspects of the area that it's supposed to illustrate which are not captured by the diagram, but it gives you a starting point.
There's one very, very important. Thing that it doesn't illustrate, which is the difference between right and wrong?
It seems to me, but to generate that, that's a whole nother discussion.
But I, I would I would certainly be interested to have more people reacting to the disagreement, what to do the states than have done so.
But that's all part of what I said, that I really haven't heard any response to that kind of thing.
Yes. Well, I was again, I was referring not so much to the merits of your particular interpretation.
No. Or this particular diagram.
But but very much, as you say, the act of creating diagrams as a way of presenting arguments in such a way that they can be clarified,
that counterexamples can be seen to see whether they are sufficiently coherent.
As you were speaking and speaking about the merits of specific examples,
to be able to highlight general patterns or general arguments in general context.
That's very much in keeping. Of course, as you know, with the scientific disposition.
I mean, physicists do this all the time. They look for for test particles.
They look for individual examples.
They look at very often they they look for diagrammatic representations which are not necessarily equivalent and can sometimes be misleading.
And there's no question that that they're not necessarily isomorphic are exactly the same as, you know, as what the equations are.
But they provide another way and they provide another process pedagogically or
just in terms of rumination or what have you to be able to explore the argument.
And it seems to me, again, as an outsider, that this would be of considerable benefit to the philosophical community.
Here's a very abstract question of a moral framework which which can at least be initiated, at least in some way within a diagrammatically context.
And that strikes me as potentially helpful.
And so that's that's how I wanted to say, as you were speaking before, about particular cases and you mentioned than Judaism and so forth.
Another concept that comes up quite often, a specific example is this example of not only right and wrong,
as you alluded to before, but the question of evil and whether evil could be said to exist.
And if so, how can it be defined with respect to a pluralistic viewpoint and so forth.
And I wondered because you mentioned on several occasions that he maintained that the Nazis weren't so much evil,
but they were profoundly, tragically, empirically wrong and in particular beliefs.
So that was his academic view, as it were, that fit in with his overall philosophy and his moral framework.
But my guess is that he was naturally very sensitive to how that would be interpreted outside.
And that was perhaps another reason why he was opposed to the idea of the creation of a volume
of writings on Judaism or a Jewish volume that you had suggested early on in the process.
Do you think that there's some link there?
Do you think that I'm right in that conjecture, or do you think that it's more complicated than that or that I'm just completely wrong?
I'm not sure.
I mean, he he one of the reasons he gave why he didn't want either a Jewish volume or in one case, a particular essay on Jewishness to be included,
is that he knew that when it had first been published, it had caused a controversy which had led him to have to reply in public to various objections.
And he simply didn't want to get involved in that kind of argument again.
So that was an article called Jewish Slavery and Emancipation, which was quite famous at the time.
And he had an argy bargy with T.S. Eliot about it, with the Custer about it.
And he didn't want to start that all up again so that I could sort of understand, although I thought.
I mean, I tried to be critical of him at that stage, and I allowed myself to be a little critical of him,
I said, you know, come on, surely these are your views and you ought to be prepared to stand up for them.
And he was as sharp with me on that occasion as he ever was.
I mean, he says it's not for you to tell me when I'm being cowardly or courageous.
And I felt very ashamed of myself and I thought he was probably right. But that's nonetheless that's what I thought.
And I still half think it even now. But there was another another kind of argument or consideration,
which was that he tried to maintain or did maintain that his ratings on Jews and Jewishness were,
in a sense, not part of his general intellectual professional life.
They were kind of family matters, if you like. They were to be to be broadcast and discussed only within the Jewish community.
I thought that was unsustainable in the end.
I mean, apart from the fact that everything else there are some essays which he did allow into his corpus,
which are very much about Jewishness as one about Disraeli and Marx in one of the volumes,
which is about the very different ways in which Disraeli and Marx handled the fact that they were Jews.
And so that's clearly continuous with his general for I would say.
And also Zionism, which is the is really the centre of his views on Jewishness, is a strong,
specific example of something which he stressed in quite general terms in his work,
which was the human need to belong to a culture, a group of some kind,
to have some some sort of collective identity narrower than that of humanity as a whole.
And this was what he attributed to Hedda as having discovered so that he discussed in general terms in a number of essays.
And it seemed to me that the Jewish aspect of that was it was special.
It was special to him. It was his form of belonging because he was a Jew.
But it was still part of the the big theme which he was concerned with, which which was the nature of human beings and what they needed,
not to mention the fact that the great horrors of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany occurred in his lifetime.
Exactly. I think cry out for some sort of. Discussion or treatment or or at least mention when one is talking about human values and pluralism and
trying to make sense of how something that horrific could possibly have happened and what it means.
Absolutely. And to go back to the point you mentioned a little while ago, the the idea of explaining Naziism,
particularly its attitude to Jews as simply due to empirical error struck and strikes me and I think many,
many, many other people as woefully inadequate.
You know, it's it may be part of the story, but the idea that that's all there is to it is just something I've never been able to accept.
And I can't see why he should.
I mean, I think he probably did accept that there was some evil in the behaviour of many of the people who were involved.
But he never went as far as I think I and a number of other people would want
to go and didn't want to characterise the whole doctrine as evil in itself,
which I would, you know. Well, yes.
But of course, it's very tempting to do that. And my instinctive reaction would very much be that way, too.
But but as obviously, you know far better than I, that opens up a rather difficult can of worms.
Once one starts to posit the existence of evil, where do you put that within his his framework?
Absolutely. It's highly problematic. It is highly problematic.
You are absolutely right. And one has to add that I feel very positive about a basic a very basic principle of his in analysing these things,
which is that you always start by trying to understand something before you go on to condemn it.
So you do your best on the level of understanding.
You sort of wring every last drop of understanding out of it that you can before you take the step into the area of taking a judgement,
condemning it, saying it's evil. You're a true student of Isaiah.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I wanted to talk a little bit about some sociological issues, one of which I mentioned to you in an email where I talked about British eccentricity.
Mm hmm. And let me see if I can embellish upon that and culminate in a question which I have a tendency not to do.
So I'm an extra effort to do that because I understand that's what you're supposed to do when you have these sorts of conversations.
You mentioned the consistency. You've mentioned it during our conversation.
You mentioned it repeatedly throughout your book, the inherent consistency between Berlin's philosophical or academic or moral framework.
However, one wants to put it his his dedication to the notion of plurality was mirrored in his general attitude towards life.
He was, as you wrote, entirely free of the wish to organise and regiment people, how he gloried in personal various asness,
how he had this wide circle of friends, and in that way, as he mentioned earlier, exploring the human condition in all its splendid variety.
And that was something that clearly gave him a tremendous amount of satisfaction and was indicative, indeed, a necessary part of a life well lived.
So that's something that to me and maybe I'm making an extra step, but to me, I've long associated with.
Britain, the idea that there's a tolerance of indeed at times a direct encouragement of people being different, being eccentric,
having their own views, trotting their own path and and willing to engage in an unfashionable activities if it's what they actually believe in.
I've seen this in my own rather limited capacity in the scientific world.
When I look at great scientific thinkers, someone who comes to mind just from my experience as Roger Penrose,
the great Oxford mathematical physicist who has made a career of doing his own thing in his own way and coming up with spectacular insights and ideas.
And in my experience, this is something which is, if not endemic to the British academic life and perhaps even beyond academic life.
But it's really part and parcel of one of the great characteristics of British thinkers.
And in my judgement, I see that there's a lot less of this now than there used to be now.
So what I want to ask you is.
First of all, do you concur with the general assessment that is to say that this has been statistically significant in Britain,
this notion of individual pursuit of of of scholarship and knowledge, independent of what prevailing views might have been?
Do you agree with me, if so, that it is on the wane or or is this am I just representing the rantings of a cranky old man who thinks that
everything is going to [INAUDIBLE] in a handbasket now that I'm over a certain age and that sort of thing?
Do you think that that is typical of British intellectual life and and is it waning?
Yes, I think I agree with absolutely everything you've said.
And I think that the there are various culprits which are responsible for the
decline and in eccentricity or in the glorying and variety or difference,
if you like. I'm one of them is the educational system, the evaluation of academic articles submitted to journals,
the kind of terrific kind of groupthink that is imposed on academia by some hard to pin down sociological forces.
I don't know where they come from quite, but I think they're related to another area that that is having a similar effect,
which is the effect of the Internet and indeed particularly social media,
where which has a tendency to form little cliques of self reinforcing viewpoints that
people get sucked into because they choose the people they follow and they choose,
and then the people choose to follow them. And so they see ever amplified versions of their own prejudices again and again,
day after day, and become more and more entrenched in in the viewpoint.
And there's also this this tendency to require that everybody else in the same area as yourself
or indeed everyone else in society in some degree has to subscribe to certain shared.
Ideological principles which have somehow worked their way to the surface for one reason or another,
and so that taking in and taking a view that is at odds with the consensus in a certain group is now frowned on and fought against and and repressed,
whereas in the past it would have been gloried in and welcomed.
And I find this not just depressing, but frightening as well.
Actually, it seems to me the independence of thought and originality of mind are valued less and less, not neither explicitly or implicitly.
And I feel it's running away with us and I don't know what to do to.
To turn things around, I mean, it's absurd to think that you or I could turn it around, but you know where to look,
where to look for countervailing forces, which might take us back to the old way of thinking.
I'd love to know if you have some ideas on that. Well, my first reaction is a metal reaction.
I agree entirely that it's absurd to imagine that we would have the power to be able to do that.
But I equally agree that until you can formulate this is what I would do if I would have that power, then you can't move forward.
So I think the very first step is to be able to say what should be done.
And then you start worrying about the the tactical details, as it were, about how feasible that might be or how realistic that might be.
But if you can't even imagine what it is that you're trying to shoot for, as it were, it's difficult.
I'm not sure that one should think about going back.
You know, and this is interesting because it makes me think very much about Berlin's great essay,
The Sense of Reality, which I recently reread prior to our conversation, one of his greatest essays.
And when I first discovered it in his cellar, he said, Are you sure?
I wrote this sort of microcosm of our relationship.
But in that essay, he explicitly mentions the the inappropriateness of trying to go back.
Absolutely right. Even if we could 15th century Florence or what have you.
Yes. Yes. So in a similar spirit, I would say that's not what we should be thinking about doing to say let's go back to the days
when Isaiah Berlin was on the BBC and have other people being on the BBC or what have you,
that sort of culture. But we should we should be trying to imagine what could be conceivable or feasible as a as a
possible reasonable future for us to shoot for no citizen of planet Earth or what have you.
And I think a necessary first step is to grapple with this notion of public intellectual, grapple with this notion of leadership.
It's a very strange state of the world. We seem to find ourselves in.
One one thing that you've highlighted very clearly and I think is particularly pernicious,
is this idea of popularity somehow being a proxy for intelligence authority that
as long as I have a sufficient number of followers and I am sufficiently popular,
then my words carry weight. And I think that is in lock step with the contemporary devaluing of knowledge.
One of the things which is so impressive about somebody like Berlin and of course,
and all of his colleagues, is that they actually know a lot of stuff.
You can you can say, OK, he didn't read as rigorously or he ran in a different way.
But the sheer command of of an incredible wealth,
of knowledge and understanding of past human activities that he's able to weave together seemingly
seamlessly in a compelling thesis is unique and deserves an enormous amount of respect.
And what we're facing now, I think, in our society. So I'm always happy to go off on a social commentary tilt.
But what what now is the case is that the arguments themselves are given far less weight and far less
credence and far less attention than just how popular you happen to be and how many followers you have.
And and so the very notion of what it means to be influential, it's not this person is influential because they are so impressive.
And being able to come up with this interesting idea or link these things together or or play the piano in this particular way or what have you,
it's it's it's just simply tautologically the fact that they have so many followers.
And I think that's just unbelievably pernicious and the irony of of living in such a narcissistic,
follower driven world, when you contrast that with Berlin's reticence to publish anything is striking.
It is striking. I quite agree with everything you've said. And but there's another thing which I find just as bad,
which I perhaps didn't include clearly enough in my previous answer, which is the role of coercion in academic life,
the idea that you should be coerced to tow a line, which is the approved line of the Bampton song Intellectual Culture or something like that.
Let me just give you one specific example to write an article.
Recently, I was asked to write an article on Berlin for the Corpus Christi College Oxford House magazine,
because both he and I were undergraduates and they were interested, I think, partly because of my book in hearing something about him.
So.
I wrote an account of his time at Corpus and and then ended up with a summary of his position, and I made a point of stressing how important it was,
how important he thought it was that you should think for yourself and not simply follow the herd.
And I included the phrase when I was trying to describe the kind of attitude he would have been against,
I included the phrase Taking thought is replaced by taking the knee, which seemed to me to be OK.
And, you know, you have to take the knee. I mean, either literally when you're on a football pitch or in some other way, you know,
you have to sign up to the current consensus on racial awareness or or variety in the employment policy of your
college or university or or negative attitude to statues of slave owners of the past or whatever it might be.
You have to be politically correct. In effect, you have to to sign up to the to the current shared views.
And I was leant on heavily by Corpus,
and it was almost intimated to me that they wouldn't be able to publish the article unless
I took this phrase out because they said they'd been having a a campaign of racial
awareness and a campaign to make sure that the college was fully respecting of diversity
in its employment policy and and in its choice of undergraduates and so on and so forth.
And I mean, that may not be a particularly good example,
but the mere fact that the experience of being asked not to say something because it was out of line with an official policy,
really, I find it very chilling, actually. I mean, it may be a trivial example in a way.
And I did I did alter it while making the same point.
But, you know, in the past and I hope in the future to take up your point, I hope that won't happen.
I mean, the idea that an academic of all people.
Yes, one of the most discomforting aspects of all of this is that there are these false dichotomy that are presented all over the place.
Mm hmm. And one of the false dichotomies and not just false, but offensive, morally egregious dichotomies that are presented.
So one is that if you believe independence of thought and not following the herd, then you are a racist.
The implication is that that if you are saying I refuse to toe this particular line or I'm not
necessarily going to say a knee jerk comment about the inclusion of diversity or what have you,
then you are against diversity because those things don't follow at all.
Not you are not saying that at all? No.
And what's what's most discomforting about this is that there is a large segment of the population, the global population,
but perhaps most significantly pronounced in the United States of America,
but exists everywhere of individuals who protest vehemently against what they interpret to be political correctness.
And they are racist. And so you find yourself by by protesting against being forced into this this kind of groupthink.
You find yourself woefully associated with and grouped with people who hold incredibly repugnant beliefs.
Yes. And the inability to be able to distinguish between the fact that, no, you are not arguing against this.
You are not against diversity. You are not opposed to people of one fashion or another.
You are not saying any of that. You are just saying that it is the responsibility of everyone and most of all people in a in an academic environment
to be able to say what it is that they particularly believe in and they should be attacked on the merits or the ah,
the demerits of their argument, as opposed to necessarily subscribing to some preordained set of beliefs.
That's a very, very different statement than adopting some some crazy, you know, racially motivated, hate filled piece of absolute garbage.
Absolutely.
But sadly, that's the equivalence that seems to be being made and that the inability to distinguish between those two things is even more upsetting,
I think, than anything else. I agree with you. I do.
And I think one of the most appalling spectacles in academic life at the moment is people actually losing their jobs or being eliminated
from selection lists for new jobs simply because they are considering a hypothesis which is at odds with the currently accepted viewpoint.
And this is actually happening. And I think the same happens outside academia as well.
A lot you know, you have people who who perhaps don't get jobs that they deserve because their views aren't aren't acceptable.
But I think it's it's particularly upsetting in a.
Academia, because the whole point of the academic enterprise is to discuss questions objectively,
look at the evidence and not to be swayed by prejudices which are built in at the beginning.
Yes, and we should be insisting I mean, this is something that all people responsible for education should be insisting on at all levels.
I mean, school schools should be teaching pupils to think for themselves rather than to adopt a sort of set of officially approved.
I mean, it's like the Communist Party in China. What's going on here some of the time?
Oh, I think it's I think it's much worse than that.
I think basically the Communist Party in China doesn't care as long as you don't say anything bad about the Communist Party of China.
I think it's more like Pravda back in the. Yes. Yes, it is.
It is. OK, that's a better analogy, but you know what I mean.
Anyway. Yes. So let me let me turn my social commentary I or my ire, as it were, to see the publishing industry in particular.
So I said this before we started to speak, and I'll say it now during the conversation.
I think it's a wonderful thing that you what you have done to bring Isaiah Berlin's works to light.
It was a lifelong task for you.
And I think you did such a magnificent service to to the world by by bringing this man's insights
to us in a way which we can we can all go online and read them or buy a book or what have you.
I think it's a it's a magnificent accomplishment. And we all owe you a significant debt of gratitude, as he did himself and as he clearly recognised,
there have been other people who have done similar things. There's a famous book also that came out in the in the 70s.
So maybe this was a particularly fruitful time for this renaissance thought.
And its source is a series of lectures that were combined in a volume by Michael Mooney, who was also, I think,
roughly your age when he did this to summarise the work of the great Renaissance scholar Paul Oskar Christabella.
And I think these were things that somehow were generated and supported by the publishing industry of the day back in the 70s and 80s and so forth.
I don't see that sort of thing happening now at all.
So I recognise that that the circumstances that gave rise to you acting as
the editor for As I Berlins works were perhaps somewhat unique and so forth.
But nonetheless, they were supported by the publishing industry.
And I and I'm not sure that that sort of thing is as prevalent today as it was in days gone by.
Would you agree with that or would you disagree with that? I think I think I tend to agree.
I don't think I know enough in specific terms to to take another sort of well evidenced position on it.
It's more of a general impression. But I can I don't know if you would accept this, but I think it can be illustrated.
To be personal by the fortunes of my own book, which which we've been talking about now Berlin's work,
Berlin's own work was published by principly by Chatto and Windass in the U.K. and by latterly, at any rate, by Princeton University Press in the USA.
Also the most important book of all by a historical accident.
The book on Liberty was published by Oxford University Press.
So those were the three, as it were, major current publishers of Berlin's work at the time.
When I wrote my book and I asked all three of them whether they would be interested in publishing my book about Berlin,
and all three of them refused even to consider a proposal, say they wouldn't even look at a synopsis.
They just said a book by an editor about producing the works of a man is not of any interest to the market.
That was their line. Hmm. And I can't.
Yes, it was. It was because the publisher of my own book called Arab Terrorists at the time, although they've been taken over since by Bloomsbury,
they happened to make an offer at the same time as I was finishing my book for one of Berlin's books called The Age of Enlightenment,
which was the only book of his that was out of print at the time. So I knew they had an interest in Berlin.
I wasn't able to accept their offer for that book because the other trustees didn't think it should be reissued,
which is something I disagreed with, as you'll know from reading my book.
But yeah, it meant that they were receptive, I thought, to Berlin and ideas.
So I asked if they'd like to consider my book and they said yes. So I simply sent them the finished typescript and three days later they accepted it.
They said it was the best book or the most interesting book they had at their editorial meeting.
Now, that seems to me to speak to some degree to your question about publishing,
that all the official publishers of the past were just not interested anymore in Berlin or things about Berlin, but this rather eccentric.
If you like to go back to another point, this eccentric British publisher actually,
I think headed by a man who is of Arabian origin, and if I'm not mistaken, I picked it up and to judge by the response.
They were right to do so, but who knows? So that that's my my sort of anecdotal reply to your question.
Yeah, of course, these things have always been it's always been difficult to parse the different incentives associated with the publishing industry.
Money has always been an incentive. Nobody wants to be publishing a book which might be objectively fascinating, but nobody buys and nobody reads.
No, nobody wants to publish a book that isn't well reviewed.
So there is this unholy alliance between intrinsic quality and merit and objective verification by way of sales and reviews.
And it's difficult, difficult to draw that line to at some point in your in the in search of Isaiah Berlin book.
When you defend your own belief as to why something should be published,
you say the only thing that matters is whether publication is intrinsically justified,
which is a sentiment that I think everyone would agree with,
but is verging on the tautological because different people have different views as to what intrinsically justified means.
Mm hmm. Yeah. So what do you mean by intrinsically justified.
Oh, Lord. Well. I I suppose I believe that the that it means that the contents of the book are important in some way.
I think it helps if they're nicely written as well.
And I think both of those are certainly true of Berlin's work, different from whatever else is out there,
something which is unique, something which is sui generis, something which is really worthwhile.
People reading. Of course, you're right. Publishers need to believe that they're going to sell, sell the stuff.
And sometimes they wrote about that, but sometimes they're wrong as well.
I mean, the history of publishing is, as you know, littered with cases of books which are now very famous and commercially successful,
which were turned down many, many times by individual publishers.
And there's a certain this this, I think, reflects a certain conservatism in publishing circles,
the view that there are certain formulas, certain types of book which do well.
And if something comes into a category which doesn't exist or comes outside any known category, that it's a high risk strategy.
But equally, I think it's it's a high risk strategy that would pay off handsomely if it works because there isn't any competition for the thing.
I mean, Harry Potter would be an example of that, I suppose, or Watership Down.
Those are both kinds of books which which were unique in that way when they started coming, when they first came out.
There are a lot of publishers who think in terms of existing kinds of books, existing sorts of books, which have a track record of doing well.
And so when they're presented with something that doesn't belong to one of the recognised characters, they tend to be cautious,
cowardly, if you like, and say this isn't something that's going to do well, we don't have any kind of track record in this.
So this is a book about a boy wizard who went to a wizard school,
or this is a book about anthropomorphised rabbits who live in a rabbit warren in Berkshire or whatever it may be.
This is you know, this is just not something we know about.
But when these things are as they sometimes are gloriously accepted, often by very small publishers and then taken over later by the big boys,
they can become massively successful and I think probably more successful than the books in
the conventional genre simply because they are unlike anything that previously existed.
So taking risks with books that are interesting and original and unlike anything else is,
is what I've always found exciting in being a commissioning editor, as I was for a while.
Not that I had many successes of that kind, but that's certainly what gave me a buzz, not just finding yet another book of a certain well-known kind.
Yes, but I think at the risk of beating this to death, there's a difference.
There's a distinction. I'm in no way trying to deny the existence of the profit motive.
We all live in a in a capitalistic world of publishing industry is is like every other industry in that respect.
And we all understand the rules of the game. And I and I, for one, am not opposing those rules.
But there's something else that seems to be going on when you compare your work, for example, on producing this great wealth of this litany,
this corpus of Isaiah Berlin's writings that would not have otherwise seen the day and Harry Potter or what have you.
And that is that by by doing what you've done, you've done a great service to scholarship.
You've done a great service to world culture. I'm not trying to be sycophantic.
I really believe this is perhaps I'm acting in a sycophantic way,
but I hope that this is a great accomplishment of which you should be very, very proud and of which you clearly are.
And so in so doing,
you managed to create a series of products that were all very good for the publishers and added money to their coffers and were well reviewed.
And I don't know what the numbers are and I don't particularly care what the numbers are,
because my point is that one can understand that that was a principal motivation for them to be interested in the project.
But there's something else going on, which is to say that these are just intrinsically important works that need to be out there.
Unlike Harry Potter, I'm not an anti Harry Potter writer or whatever it is,
but I don't think you could make the argument that Harry Potter is an intrinsically important work that needed to be out there.
It's entertainment. It's good entertainment. It's that's wonderful that people like and and all the rest.
But it's in a different category. Yes. And and to me, when I think of and that's when I mentioned Renaissance style and its sources in the same.
In the same breath, independently of whether or not these books are financially successful,
they should be published because they are an important and integral even part of world culture,
and they will serve the interests of generations of scholars, hopefully long after you and I are gone.
And at some level, that's what I would have thought.
The difference is between we didn't talk about this at all between academic presses and trade presses.
And one of the things that was interesting to me about your book was that I didn't get a sense of that.
I didn't get a sense that there was such a difference in kind between academic presses and trade presses.
Does that cut any ice with you? Is there any objective distinction, as it were, between academic and trade presses?
And and if so, has it changed? Well, obviously, there's a there's an overlap between academic and trade.
And one of the things that the market trade publishes,
the more up-market trade publishers try to do is to persuade academics to write books that can be sold as trade books so that, you know,
there are obviously popular books written by academics and there are more like monographs, as are sometimes called,
which are perhaps more specialised and less likely to appeal to the wider readership which a trade publisher is looking for.
So there's always been that crossover, if you like, and the publisher of Berlin's works in England,
Chouteau and Windass was a or the Hogarth Press it was which published the books originally.
And that was the imprint run by Leonard in Virginia Woolf.
And that was very much a kind of crossover of the trade and of the academic world with the literary world, if you like.
So I think that kind of publishing still goes on, doesn't it?
I mean, I think there are popular books being put out by academics all the time.
And so I don't think that that's died or change particularly.
What is it that you think has changed in the relationship? Well, again, this is all very anecdotal and extremely personal.
I don't pretend to to be aware of things in any systematic way whatsoever.
But frankly, I don't see things that are of intellectual substance and particularly interesting on the whole.
That's not to say I don't see that at all, but I think that that trend seems to be diminishing.
I definitely see that there are lots of academics who are writing books for trade presses.
There is a very strong desire to popularise, slash, trivialise.
This perhaps makes me sound like a snob, but but I just can't help notice these things.
Learn seven steps to quantum gravity or neuroscience or whatever it is,
or learn learn how to be a brain surgeon in 15 minutes or, you know, these these types of books,
which I think, quite frankly, at the risk of sounding incredibly churlish, I think they do a great disservice to the whole process of of of knowledge.
But anyway, I'm sure this is something that I don't think the world needs to hear my cranky
old limitations on how the world is going to [INAUDIBLE] in a handbasket.
Let me move away from that and let me ask you a more personal question, a penultimate question you'll be glad to know.
Thank you very much for your time. You've given me an awful lot of it. I can imagine that writing in search of ISSI upper then was both a rewarding,
personally rewarding and perhaps even at times exhilarating, but also potentially depressing work.
It must have been a very personal work because I can imagine and I'm speculating,
and so I'm going to throw it over to you to actually find out whether or not my speculations have any merit whatsoever.
But in some ways, it was, I guess, a form of leave-taking for you of Isiah.
Is that is that fair? Is that correct? Was it difficult for you to write this book?
Did it have any of these personal associations that I'm alluding to or was it not like that?
Yes, I think what you say is true. It wasn't a complete goodbye in the sense that I'm still working even now on an ISIS material and as far as I know,
will continue to do so as long as I have my wits about me, because there's an unlimited amount of stuff that needs doing.
But I wanted to I wanted I suppose.
Yes, you're right. Just to describe and to sum up that part of the process which took place when he was alive,
there was a whole nother chapter which took place where it was still taking place after he was.
And that would be you know, whether that's worth writing about is another matter,
but it's it's a completely different process because the whole point of the period that I wrote
about in the book is that it was the period when he and I were interacting with each other.
And that really, I think, is what makes makes it interesting, setting his line against mine and the sparks that flew off that.
And so, yes, it was a sad and depressing thing in some ways.
In particular, I would say, and this may have come out,
my failure to make clear to him and persuade him of my views about the incompatibility of pluralism and universalist religion.
I mean, I I flatter myself that I can express myself pretty clearly when I want to.
And I thought that I. Had repeatedly expressed to him my reasons, which seemed to me good ones, for thinking that there was this tension between.
Universalist religion and pluralism, and I was perplexed and disappointed that we never seem to really get to grips with this head on,
we all seem to be talking to one side of one another in some way.
And I think it comes out I hope it comes out that I felt that I had failed in
that and that I I regret that he died before we came to an agreement on it,
although there was a little glimmer right at the end when I wrote a piece on it,
which he commented on in a letter to me and said that he did agree with me.
And so I think I think he was perhaps partly being kind because he was responding to a very critical
account of my article by a philosopher he knew who said that the article proved I was no philosopher.
And I think he thought that was a bit that was a bit tough on me.
And I think he was trying to encourage me and make me feel better about it.
But he did he did say in terms that he agreed with what I said.
So possibly, possibly we got there in the end, but.
I was puzzled then, and I'm still puzzled now that, you know, in what I thought were perfectly clear and persuasive ways I'd set out the case.
And it seems from what you've said, that you you find the case persuasive yourself.
Maybe that's because you're predisposed to do so. But both in his case and indeed, I have to say, in the case of others who who hold religious views,
I found very strong resistance to what seems to me a clear case.
And I'm still disappointed and depressed by that.
I wish I'd got through to him better. Well, in the spirit of valuing pluralism, surely you recognise that,
that it's it's appropriate to respect and value of other people's views, even if you feel that they're inconsistent.
Yes. Or just quite simply incorrect. Absolutely. Yeah, of course I agree with that.
I mean, I believe like a true liberal I hope in toleration. I believe in tolerating views.
Even when you think they are wrong, absurd, evidently absurd and possibly even damagingly absurd, although there comes a point,
of course, on that continuum where the damaging this becomes an argument against tolerating them.
For example, I'm not going to tolerate and accept the views of the Taliban because it leads to them
killing people for no reason other than that they disagree with the Taliban and that,
you know, that's just way, way too far. So, you know, there are limits even to toleration.
Absolutely. Absolutely. But I've had a splendid time talking to you, I want to ask you one more question, which is a better question.
Is there anything that you would like to add? Is there anything that you feel we've highlighted or we haven't given its due or that you'd like
to make a connexion between some things that we said earlier that that weren't brought to light?
Is there anything you'd like to add at all? I don't think so. I, I.
Don't feel that I've given a good account of myself, I'd like to go right back to the beginning and do it all over again.
But I don't think there's anything that I don't think that there's any particular prospect that if I did so, it would be any better.
It would just be different. I mean, there's a sense in which I feel a bit of a fraud.
And when I read the list of people that you did a good God, you know,
these are all amazingly important people and just somebody who corrects people semicolons,
you know, and I feel like a window cleaner who's drifted into a conference on architecture or something like that.
So I think that there are all sorts of interesting questions that you've raised that I shall think about further.
And I would probably have more to say about on another occasion.
But I just hope you manage to extract enough out of what we have said.
That will make an interesting podcast. Well, I'm sure I will.
And I'm I'm relieved to hear that the profound British tradition of modesty still lives on.
And I want to say that we all know that the whole correcting people semicolons is just nonsense and and that it must
have been a tremendous opportunity and a tremendous privilege to be able to interact with not only Isaiah Berlin,
but also all of those individuals in that circle in Oxford and beyond.
And to be able to exchange ideas with these people, listen to their ideas, be be part of that atmosphere.
And, of course, you have ideas of your own.
But but it's a tribute to you that aside from using the opportunity to probe Isaias ideas and other things, you don't impose them on the reader.
You don't impose them at all. You you are clearly in awe of what he has done in his life.
And you very much value the friendship. And I think it took a great deal of courage for you as well to be able to present the story,
warts and all, because as I said at the very beginning, you don't always come off very well in this.
No, you certainly seem at times to be quite pushy and you're obviously young, your robust.
You are extremely determined to carry out your various programme come what may.
And it's clear to me, even though obviously I wasn't there and I don't know,
it's clear to me that that must have generated a tremendous amount of respect from Isaiah,
who recognised both your intellectual property, your determination,
and the fact that your efforts were important and should be followed through, despite the fact that I'm sure he wanted to kill you many times.
But that's all part of the book. Yes. The relationship.
Yes. OK, OK. I mean, respect may be an overstatement, but but no acceptance at any rate.
But yes, also irritation, frustration, anger at times.
I mean, he really was cross about no elhanan, for example. And yet, as I said before, he let it happen.
So at some level, he must have thought it was OK.
So and I do think, although I quite agree with you, that I'm pushy, obstinate, obsessive, pedantic and all the things which you might list.
I do think that the almost unreasonable way in which I persisted at times was a necessary condition of achieving the result,
which I feel absolutely certain was with everything that I did.
Yes, well, I quite agree that you're absolutely right to feel that way.
I'm just going to reiterate what I said, which is I think everyone recognises whether they're happy with your own particular philosophical views,
whether they like you or they don't like you, whether they think you're a window cleaner at an architect convention.
I mean, there is no end to the level of pettiness and bitterness that academics can exhibit.
We all know that. Absolutely. But notwithstanding all of that, everybody recognises that without your work, without your incredible effort over many,
many decades, we wouldn't have these works available to us to be able to read and and stimulate ourselves from and enjoy.
And for that, we all owe you an enormous debt of gratitude. And so thank you very much.
Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this podcast.
Those interested in more information about ideas for our show are directed to ideas Roadshow dot com.
For those who are curious about me and other projects I'm involved in, I recommend it to visit Howard Bertan dot com.
Thanks very much for listening and I hope you'll tune in to another ideas for your podcast and the new books network soon be released.
A new one each Wednesday.