It cannot be stated too strongly that for Berlin the origins of these errors were fundamentally intellectual. Few can have believed more profoundly in the sovereignty of ideas: “It is ideas — Marxism, Fascism, National Socialism — that have done it all — not as some historians would like to believe, social conditions or the relationship of economic classes, the effect of technology on culture”. If this was idealism with a vengeance, it was entirely free of utopian silliness. Berlin was sometimes presumed to lack a tragic sense of life. This seems to me mistaken. Few can have conceived both the liberating possibilities and the terrible dangers of political thought so intimately. Berlin was never an epistemological pluralist. Moreover, his moral pluralism was strictly limited, cast as the best way of countering, rather than of yielding, to the temptations of relativism. But he was a cultural pluralist because he believed that anything else must ultimately prove not simply unsatisfying but also coercive. It is by no means clear that he was wrong in this last respect.

Put another way, Berlin’s pluralism defined his liberalism, not the other way around. He was, in many ways, a rather strange liberal. He believed in the natural freedom (and, to that extent, equality) of man. Yet he did not subscribe to any doctrine of natural rights. He saw in liberalism more of a method to secure the varieties of life, similarly toleration between communities, than to establish justice between all men and women. This was closer to a “liberalism of fear” than a “liberalism of hope”. It also put a strict limit to his commitment on the proper sway of democracy. He was a democrat. But wisely, he loved it best by loving it moderately.

Writing to Geert Van Cleemput, a Belgian classicist and parliamentary aide, Berlin defined a “true democracy” as “one where the government does not feel too safe”. This may not be a very accurate characterisation. It is not a bad idea all the same. He conceived of “liberal democracy”, the best regime of which mankind was capable, as being characterised “first . . . by toleration [for] a certain degree of multiplicity of cultures” (i.e. not individual rights). He never doubted that stable societies must possess a “central culture”, to which “the minority must adapt .  . . itself”. But he took the latter requirement  to be reciprocal in nature and properly grounded in mutual respect rather than legal limitation. Unsurprisingly, he cited English Jewry as the best example of  what he had in mind.

For all his upbeat manner, Berlin was not an optimist. He believed that he had lived through a terrible century and also that he was witness to cultural decline. It was not just that the world of his dotage was less exciting than that of his youth. It was also inferior. These late, melancholic, reflections were grounded in a general understanding. It is difficult to believe that they were not also rooted in a very particular view of things. Reading these Letters to the end, it is almost impossible not to be reminded of the Diaries of Count Harry Kessler. Of course, the similarities are far from exact. Kessler was a German aristocrat, a self-conscious aesthete and a homosexual. Berlin, to the best of my knowledge, was none of these things, though he was very musical. That said, Kessler wrote as an heroic, self-conscious, witness to the suicide of German, liberal, civilisation. He died in 1937. Whatever else they do, Berlin’s Letters stand as a monument to European, Jewish, liberal civilisation in what may prove to be the last century of its recognisable flourishing.