Repentance for a misspent youth

Jewish World Review ^ | Aug 25, 2009 | Jonathan Rosenblum

[TopQuark]

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | "In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they return to us with a certain alienated majesty," wrote Emerson. That pretty much captures my feelings upon finishing Michael Ignatieff's superb biography of Isaiah Berlin.

Berlin's command of the history of ideas grounds many of the intuitions that have guided my repentance over the past 30 years for the intellectual hubris of my friends and myself at Yale Law School. An important strand in Berlin's work was the demonstration of how the Enlightenment project of making human reason the measure of all things could end in the Gulag.

The anti-clericalism of the leading Enlightenment thinkers contained within it the potential for a new clericalism more authoritarian and murderous than that which it superseded, with intellectuals as its priests.

But Berlin was not just concerned with the most extreme deformations of the Enlightenment ideals. Though he defined himself as a man of the Left, he found that a similar cast of mind underpinned much left-wing thought from the French Revolution. Belief in a unitary human nature and a fixed hierarchy of values gave rise to the confident assumption that human reason can design a society in which the parts fit together harmoniously. The society thus designed would "free" man as never before by allowing him to fully develop all his capabilities.

The latter doctrine of "positive liberty," so admired in the young, "humanitarian" Marx, could easily end with Stalin's engineers of the soul. As Ignatieff sums up the matter: In Berlin's view, "the European Enlightenment was divided by a central contradiction between maintaining that men should be free to choose and insisting that they should be only free to choose what it would be rational to desire."

[Harry Wurzbach]

really liked this. thanks for posting.

[jocon307]

ping for later!