The Power of Ideas (Second Edition) by Berlin Isaiah Hardy Henry Margalit Avishai

Author:Berlin, Isaiah, Hardy, Henry, Margalit, Avishai
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

1 See G. V. Plekhanov, ‘Buki az–ba’ (1918), repr. in God na rodine (Paris, 1921), ii 257–68 at 268.

2 [This talk was broadcast in December 1956, shortly after the Hungarian Uprising.]

Realism in Politics

‘REALISM’ NORMALLY MEANS the correct perception of the characteristics of events or facts or persons without the distortions produced by feelings like hope or fear or love or hate, or by a disposition to idealise or depreciate, or anything else that interferes with accurate observation (or action founded on it) as a result of emotional pressure of some kind. It has a further, more sinister, sense when people say that they (‘fear that they’) are ‘realists’ – usually to explain away some unusually mean or brutal decision. This disagreeable sense of the word probably derives largely from Hegel and his followers, both conservative and radical, who were fond of contrasting their own unflinching vision of ‘reality’ – the ruin and cruel destruction caused by the ‘inexorable’ collisions of the ‘objective’ forces which composed the history of mankind – with the contemptible evasion of the facts by the foolish or the weak or the purblind, who shrank from ‘reality’ and lived in a fool’s paradise. In the more apocalyptic versions of this German creed there were, on one side, the poor creatures who had deceived themselves into thinking that all was peace and happiness and benevolent progress, and that their own kindly and provincial modes of life would go on for ever, when, in fact, some terrible historical upheaval was round the corner, and they and their peaceful inhabitants were doomed to the most violent destruction; on the other, the ‘realists’ who saw the grisly but tremendous truth, and realised that the more savage aspects of existence were the more important – nearer the ‘essence’ of the historical process, not to be covered over by the feeble rationalisations of men who cannot face the truth.

The view that what is cruel and disagreeable is more likely to be true or ‘real’ than its opposite is a form of sardonic (or savage) pessimism as romantic and as little supported by the evidence of empirical observation as the optimistic humanitarianism of the Age of Reason; and the great political movements which derive from either – Fascism and Communism (for all the pretensions of the latter to ‘objective’ scientific methods) – have on the whole failed to establish their claims to be more successful in interpreting or modifying the facts than many ad hoc, unsystematic assessments.

But there is a grain of truth in the ‘unpleasant’ attitude. It consists in the rejection by it of the hopeful views of the eighteenth century, when many ardent and intelligent thinkers were convinced that the vices, follies and miseries of mankind were due almost entirely to ignorance and idleness; that the lives of men, as of every object in nature, conformed to certain regularities of behaviour which could be codified in laws; and that these laws could in principle be made as precise and all-embracing as those

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