Modern Mind

1986); Harold Schonberg,
The Lives of the Great Composers
(W. W. Norton, 1970); Roger Shattuck,
The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France 1885 to World War One
(Vintage, 1955); Quentin Skinner, ed.,
The Return of Grand Theory in the Social Sciences
(Cambridge University Press, 1985); Michael Stewart,
Keynes and After
(Penguin 1967); Ian Tattersall,
The Fossil
Trail
(Oxford University Press, 1995); Nicholas Timmins,
The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State
(HarperCollins, 1995); M. Weatherall,
In Search of a Cure: A History of Pharmaceutical Discovery
(Oxford University Press, 1990).
    This is not a definitive intellectual history of the twentieth century – who would dare attempt to create such an entity? It is instead one person’s considered
tour d’horizon.
I thank the following for reading all or parts of the typescript, for correcting errors, identifying omissions, and making suggestions for improvements: Robert Gildea, Robert Johnston, Bruce Mazlish, Samuel Waksal, Bernard Wasserstein. Naturally, such errors and omissions as remain are my responsibility alone.
    In
Humboldt’s Gift
(1975) Saul Bellow describes his eponymous hero, Von Humboldt Fleisher, as ‘a wonderful talker, a hectic nonstop monolinguist and improvisator, a champion detractor. To be loused up by Humboldt was really a kind of privilege. It was like being the subject of a two-nosed portrait by Picasso Money always inspired him. He adored talking about the rich But his real wealth was literary. He had read many thousands of books. He said that history was a nightmare during which he was trying to get a good night’s rest. Insomnia made him more learned. In the small hours he read thick books – Marx and Sombart, Toynbee, Rostovtzeff, Freud.” The twentieth century
has
been a nightmare in many ways. But amid the mayhem were those who produced the works that kept Humboldt – and not only Humboldt – sane. They are the subject of this book and deserve all our gratitude.
    LONDON
JUNE 2000

‘… he that increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow.’
    —Ecclesiastes
     
    ‘History makes one aware that there
is no finality in human affairs;
there is not a static perfection and
an unimprovable wisdom to be achieved.’
    — Bertrand Russell
     
    ‘It may be a mistake to mix different wines,
but old and new wisdom mix admirably.’
    –Bertolt Brecht
     
    ‘All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.’
    –W. B. Yeats
     

Introduction
AN EVOLUTION IN THE RULES OF THOUGHT
     
    Interviewed on BBC television in 1997, shortly before his death, Sir Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford philosopher and historian of ideas, was asked what had been the most surprising thing about his long life. He was born in Riga in 1909, the son of a Jewish timber merchant, and was seven and a half years old when he witnessed the start of the February Revolution in Petrograd from the family’s flat above a ceramics factory. He replied, ‘The mere fact that I shall have lived so peacefully and so happily through such horrors. The world was exposed to the worst century there has ever been from the point of view of crude inhumanity, of savage destruction of mankind, for no good reason, … And yet, here I am, untouched by all this, … That seems to me quite astonishing.” 1
    By the time of the broadcast, I was well into the research for this book. But Berlin’s answer struck a chord. More conventional histories of the twentieth century concentrate, for perfectly understandable reasons, on a familiar canon of political-military events: the two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression of the 1930s, Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, decolonisation, the Cold War. It is an awful catalogue. The atrocities committed by Stalin and Hitler, or in their name, have still not been measured in full, and now, in all probability, never will be. The numbers, even in an age that is used to numbers on a cosmological scale, are too vast. And yet someone like Berlin, who lived at a time when all these horrors were taking place, whose family remaining in Riga was liquidated, led what he called elsewhere in the BBC interview ‘a happy life’.
    My aim in this book is, first and foremost, to shift the focus away from the events and episodes covered in conventional histories, away from politics and military events and affairs of state, to those subjects that, I feel confident in saying, helped make Isaiah Berlin’s life so astonishing