Isaiah Berlin on the Relevance of the Nineteenth Century

 From Isaiah Berlin's prologue to Political Ideas in the Romantic Age:

Fascists and Communists, imperialists and totalitarians, liberal republicans and constitutional monarchists too, to this day, speak the language not merely of Burke but of Hegel; social scientists of all brands, planners and technocrats, New Dealers and social and economic historians use, without knowing it, the notions and terminology of Saint-Simon virtually unaltered. And it is not only the traditional irrationalists and the enemies of democracy and the disciples of Charles Maurras who inhabit a violent world brought into being, almost single-handed, by Joseph de Maistre. Nor should it cause as much surprise as perhaps it might to find so much of modern anti-intellectualism and existentialism (particularly of the atheistical type), and much of the 'emotive' ethics, not merely in Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or Bergson, but in the writings of Fichte, and in forgotten treatises by Schelling.

This is not merely a question of tracing sources and attributing responsibilities. Few activities are more dangerous to the cause of historical truth than the attempt to find a fully grown oak in the acorn, or the attempt to stigmatise (or praise) thinkers living in and speaking to a society remote from us for the transformation, and often degradation, which their ideas have often undergone at the hands of demagogues and popular movements which have taken what they needed from such doctrines and put them to their own cruder uses, and have as often as not totally perverted, or at best violently oversimplified, the original vision of a great man whose name they place upon their banners. But during the years of which I speak, the issues debated were literally identical with those which stir individuals and nations in our own time (2).

And a few pages later, an interesting aside on method:

It is a platitude to say that each age has its own problems, its own imagery and symbolism and ways of feeling and speaking. It is a lesser platitude to add that political philosophy derives its intelligibility solely from the understanding of such change, and that its perennial principles, or what seem to be such, depend on the relative stability and unchanging characteristics of human beings in their social aspect. If the supersession of eighteenth-century doctrine, which evaluated everything unhistorically, by a more historical or evolutionary point of view has any value, it should teach us that each political philosophy responds to the needs of its own times and is fully intelligible only in terms of all the relevant factors of its age, and intelligible to us only to the degree to which (and it is a far larger one than some modern relativists wish to persuade us that it is) we have experience in common with previous generations. But to the extent to which it is so, it is idle to expect progress in this enterprise; the confusions and problems and agonies of each age are what they are, and attempts at solutions and answers and nostrums can be judged properly only in terms of them (12).