Isaiah Berlin as a Historian

Hubert CzyŻewski

History and Theory 61, no. 3 (2022)

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

Image by Arturo Espinosa.