Isaiah Berlin and the Shadow of the Enlightenment

Abstract

The paper aims to examine one of the main ideas of Berlin's work. For this author, some of the enthusiastic ideas of the Enlightenment will later have a particularly dramatic political course. In the eagerness to make all reality rationally intelligible, in the attempt to forge a single interpretation of the world, in the effort to disseminate the benefits of knowledge and progress and in the zeal to model a new society with mathematical rigor, the Enlightenment opened the door to ultra-rationalism and to political and moral monism. According to Berlin, the Enlightenment rests on the questionable idea that once a rational system of morality, politics or even aesthetics is assembled, society will automatically overcome all doubt, conflict and confusion. That is: through rational social management, the perfect society will be achieved. In this new society, everyone will be assigned a reasonable place in a Whole, from which there is no way out. Behind this logic lies the idea that society is one more component of Nature and that, as such, it is governed by certain eternal and immutable natural laws. In the twentieth century totalitarianisms will take up the reasoning to implement regimes that will turn out to be the very negation of the Enlightenment program.