It is, of course, a commonplace today that “liberalism” as a peculiarly American political philosophy is on the wane. But what of the much more entrenched tradition of classical liberalism, which encompasses some of the most cherished Western values, such as respect for individual liberties and justice under law? Surprisingly, a number of intellectuals of nonleftist persuasion have come to question the classical liberal tradition, and wondered if the emphasis on individual rights has not masked other values that are important to preserving our way of life. Some of this rethinking has come from a newly resurgent communitarianism, which emphasizes the anchoring of the individual person in a “thick” sense of community, as opposed to the abstract idea of universal human community promoted by liberal theorists like John Rawls or Ronald Dworkin. Some thinkers have even begun to wonder whether liberal-democratic conceptions of state and society are just particular historical manifestations of certain Western communities, which have no universal validity or application—with the final implication being that even in the West this moment may be coming to an end.

Among this last group of pessimists is the noted British Conservative political theorist John Gray, a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. Not that long ago Gray identified himself as a liberal, but now thinks that liberalism is bankrupt and can no longer function as a living tradition. In the 1980s, Gray was a bright, young Thatcherite on the libertarian fringe—libertarian ideas, a novelty in Britain, having come into Tory thinking with great controversy through Mrs. Thatcher’s patronage of certain New Right think tanks. Now Gray calls himself a “postmodern Green conservative,” and he has come to his study of Sir Isaiah Berlin— probably the most eminent and celebrated sage of political thought in modern Britain —with a distinct agenda, and it may help first to reconstruct Gray’s recent intellectual hegira so as to grasp what he is up to in exploring Sir Isaiah’s ideas.

In common with some other conservatives and communitarians, Gray emphasizes the long-neglected importance to modern politics of civil society: the notion that the essential glue of society consists in voluntary, loosely rule-bound, private associations that have sprung up over time and provided mediating institutions between the state and individual persons. Drawing on the ideas of Friedrich Hayek, Michael Oakeshott, and James Buchanan, doyen of the American “Public Choice” school, Gray has argued that insofar as the state allows itself to corrupt or encroach upon the social “space” of civil society, either through authoritarian initiatives of its own, or through capture by special interests, it undoes the very bonds of community that lend legitimacy to government.

According to Gray, civil society has taken a savage beating in the wake of Mrs. Thatcher, as he has described in recent books, Post-Liberalism, Beyond the New Right, and Enlightenment’s Wake. For one, the New Right emphasis on marketplace forces über alles was too successful, as the new American-style libertarians were hell-bent on displacing many desirable features of traditional communal life that undergirded civil society. Second, Tories in power became intoxicated with statist power, reverting to earlier authoritarian Conservative thinking, and despite the agenda of privatizing industry, came to exert even more state control over ordinary people’s daily lives, thus displacing private civil associations. Finally, the growth of multiculturalism, connived at by a legalistic state regime imposing factitious minority “rights” on civil society—even more dire in consequence in the United States than in Britain —has undermined traditional communities, replacing them with the ersatz abstraction of “identity-based” group entitlements.

Except for this well-taken final point about multiculturalism, Gray’s diagnosis, in its blinkered perspective—apparently affected by internecine Tory wars—leaves much to be desired, as it leaves out so many anti-liberal corrosions of civil society. But even more peculiar than his diagnosis are his conclusions as to the proper treatment of the disease. Gray now feels that the traditional communities of the West have broken down completely and no longer support any efforts to prop them up; in the absence of these foundations we do more harm than good to pretend that traditional communal bonds still exist. The collapse of community shows that our way of life was just a contingent historical event that has now passed—as we have entered a “postmodern” age—and that we had better learn to disabuse ourselves of the “privileging” of liberal-democratic discourse; the notion that liberal values have timeless, universal truth is dangerous self-delusion.

As he describes in Enlightenment’s Wake, liberalism is but the last to collapse of the illusions fostered by “the Enlightenment project” of bringing “calculative” reason to bear on the human condition. Gray now asks us to turn toward alternative traditions to create a new world: hints are to be found, he tells us, in the “later” Heidegger, the mystical tradition, and in Buddhism. Embracing “Green” thought, he urges us to hew to the earth and to rethink our human chauvinism: apparently, birds and bees and plants and trees are people too.

Such is the strange, sobering odyssey of a conservative, which sets the context for Gray’s analysis of Berlin’s political thought. To be fair, Gray’s Berlin is a relatively scrupulous attempt to reconstruct a semi-coherent political philosophy out of Sir Isaiah’s scattered writings. For Gray, however, Berlin is the last liberal, and one who makes his stand in defense of liberalism on grounds that ultimately prove incoherent; thus it is Gray’s agenda to show how Berlin’s failure to prop up liberalism helps corroborate his own death certificate for the liberal tradition.

In Gray’s view, the heart of Berlin’s contribution to political thought is his theory of “value-pluralism”: the notion that, pace Plato and Aristotle, there is no one idea of the Good, which exhibits an essential, if hierarchical, unity, but rather there is a plurality of goods, and in fact they exhibit an inherent incommensurability which renders either unity or hierarchy impossible. Gray makes clear that we should not ascribe to this idea the weak thesis that moral values may often be found to conflict with one another. That is a truism, which does not really shake the foundations of Platonic monism. For Gray, Berlin’s “subversive” insight is that values can be not just conflicting but fully incommensurable, meaning that they cannot be measured on the same scale—thus defeating monism at its heart by showing that no value can be privileged above any other. Put simply, we may pursue many different, unrelated goals in life, and that is the way things are; we do not need a Platonic moralist telling us to shape up and pursue coherent, unified goals toward some higher end as the supposed “real” purpose of life.

If it sounds a bit flip, it is a philosophy earned by fire. Berlin, in common with other Europeans of his generation like Hayek and Karl Popper, formed his ideas in the hellish crucible of totalitarianism. Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1909, Berlin had moved with his family to Petrograd in time to witness the Russian Revolution of February 1917 and then the Bolshevik coup that November. He fled to England in 1921, and was lucky enough, particularly as a Jewish foreigner, to be afforded the kind of education which, along with his gifts, landed him at the Oxford that he was to make his home for most of the rest of his life. (Long retired from teaching, he is still a fellow of All Souls College.) Much of his family was not as lucky, and perished in the Holocaust.

Haunted, then, like so many of his generation by the twin horrors of Soviet Communism and Nazism, he struggled to find political principles that might ensure the survival of human liberty and dignity. Like Hayek in particular, Berlin saw Communism and National Socialism as the final embodiments of rationalism about the human condition taken to abominably dehumanizing extremes. He came to believe that promoting abstract principles divorced from the complexity and sheer messiness of real human lives, however well-intended, would inevitably lead to human destruction and political tyranny. In this line of thinking, to affirm the liberal-humanist abstraction, “the Universal Rights of Man,” is to evoke the sulphuric taint of revolutionary terror from the guillotine to the gulag. By contrast, for Berlin, to give pride of place not to universal ideals of justice but to the plurality of human goods is a profoundly humanizing gesture because it frees man from the despotism of reason’s striving after unity and coherence.

In a passage quoted by Gray in his book Post-Liberalism, Berlin connects clearly the wariness about this century’s “political religions,” as Gray calls them, with the notion of value-pluralism:  

The conviction that, once the last obstacles— ignorance and irrationality, alienation and exploitation, and their individual and social roots—have been eliminated, true human history, that is, universal harmonious cooperation, will at last begin, is a secular form of what is evidently a permanent need of mankind. But if it is the case that not all ultimate human ends are necessarily compatible, there may be no escape from choices governed by no overriding principle, some among them painful, both to the agent and to others. From this it would follow that the creation of a social structure that would, at the least, avoid morally intolerable alternatives, may be the best that human beings can be expected to achieve, if too many varieties of positive action are not to be repressed, too many equally valid human goals are not to be frustrated.

There is much that is noble in these sentiments, but Berlin, unfortunately, does not help us discover how we are to find a safe harbor from morally intolerable alternatives if we are devoid of principles with which to give order to moral choices. As is hinted at in this passage, and expressly alleged by Gray, Berlin believes that all acts of moral choice are irrational: since we cannot weigh incommensurable goods, we have no rational principle of choice; apparently we gamble on the alternatives. How any form of political system could help ensure the integrity of such irrational choice-making is quite mysterious. According to Gray, Berlin feels that the liberal tradition best fosters the opportunity to preserve this blessed plurality of choices because of “negative liberty”: the mere absence of coercion by the state, or tolerated by the state, of individual human will. This negative virtue of the liberal polity at least leaves people free to do, well, practically any stupid thing they want to do. This doesn’t seem much like a political philosophy at all, but a form of quietism at best.

Gray does not find this a satisfactory defense of liberalism either, but for different reasons. For Gray, Berlin’s value-pluralism holds the trump card over his liberalism. If no value can be privileged above others, how can Berlin say that the liberal value of negative liberty is what stands between us and the abyss? What he has affirmed is just the essential incoherence of the tradition, which has no universalist claims but only particularist claims that arise out of Western “forms of life” and that may not be replicated anywhere else. In fact, for the postmodernist Gray, promoting liberalism may be a jingoist act, thwarting the plural goods to be realized out of other native traditions. So committed is Gray to the notion that no good can come from outside a matrix of communal values that he endorses the abstract principle that any non-liberal community that stays intact, unlike our own, could promote even better ways of life than what we have cherished in the West. This far, I think, Sir Isaiah, even with his radical beliefs, would not be tempted to tread.

What sense, we must ultimately ask, does it make to trash our own traditions? Berlin, it seems to me, would rather live with the incoherence of his ideas, if that is the case, than give up his humanism and his liberal faith. If Berlin has not come up with a successful political philosophy, as I believe is the case, his is an honorable failure because it was undertaken in the right spirit— indeed, a liberal spirit in the widest sense of the word. He is, after all, the product of an older academic tradition, whose worst excess was a kind of unworldly donnishness. Gray, on the other hand, inhabits the market-ridden milieu of the contemporary university, where there now resides a malign willingness to sacrifice liberality, humanism, and even truth to the Next Big Idea. If “postmodern Green conservatism” is the next big idea then we can only hope that the complete marginalization of academic political theory that would doubtless ensue could be followed not by new ideas but by respect for what we, barely, still have.