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Krakow
10 March 1987
Dear Sir Isaiah,
Thank you very much for your letter of 24 November. […]
I realise now how many questions I did not ask you during our meetings. I have
recently completed a chapter on some kind of an “outer” critique of your doctrine of liberty,
from the position, among others, of K. R. Popper. I have come across only two brief remarks
in your writings concerning Popper’s philosophy (i.e. in “Does Political Theory Still Exist?”:
“We might take as examples Karl Popper’s denunciation of Plato’s political theory”1 and in
“Historical Inevitability”, the footnote concerning Popper’s critique of historicism),2 so I am
worried about the adequacy of the line of defense that I try to interpret from your essays.
Your conception seems to be essentialist in Popper’s terms, which is a serious
objection, for he condemns essentialism as leading to insignificant and empty controversy
about words. (This is my interpretation; I have not found anything on your ideas in Popper’s
books concerning political philosophy.) I thought that this critique should be answered on
methodological grounds, so I looked for a reply mostly in your essay “Does Political Theory
Still Exist?” Incidentally, each time I read this essay, I learn quite new things and I wonder
whether I shall ever grasp it entirely. Do I interpret your (and Popper’s) ideas correctly when I
retort that it is impossible to avoid dispute on values in political theory, due to its
metaphysical rootedness, i.e. the underlying conception of man, formed in the framework of
the basic categories in terms of which we think and act? For this reason Popper’s postulate of
translating political theories “into the language of demands or proposals for political actions”3
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cannot be realised. In your another essay, “Political Theory in the Twentieth Century” I have
encountered an excerpt that seems to be directly addressed to Popper’s chief political maxim:
“Minimize unhappiness”: “men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals,
individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.”4
Was this statement somehow related to Popper’s views or not? I would also like to ask you
what you think about my own ideas on the topic, namely it seems to me that Popper is, in
some way, inconsistent. In his intellectual autobiography he claims to be a pluralist:
“we shall always to have to live in an imperfect society. That is so not only because even very
good people are very imperfect, nor is it because, obviously, we often make mistakes because
we do not know enough. Even more important than either of these two reasons is the fact
that? there always exist irresolvable clashes of values: there are many moral problems which
are insoluble because moral principles may conflict.”5 But, at the same time, he attempts to
stop the discussion on values. Returning to your ideas, Popper’s technological approach
would fit in with a vision of some monolithic society, which, for sure, he would not accept.
Moreover, it seems to me that Popper happens to betray his own anti-essentialism. I have
come across a passage in The Open Society and Its Enemies devoted to the critique of Plato’s
interpretation of the concept of justice. Popper claims that Plato distorted the meaning of the
concept, by having used it as a synonym for “that which is in the interest of the best State.”6
Popper asks a typical essentialist question: “What do we really mean when we speak of
‘Justice’?,” and provides an answer to it, though not without some reservation that it amounts
to his interpretation of “the humanitarian general outlook.”7 In this way, quite unintentionally,
he acknowledges the importance of conceptual analysis, at least to the extent to which
distortions are involved. Thus, Popper’s methodological naturalism in the social sciences
seems to me to be some sort of simplification for the sake of the unity of his philosophical
system.
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On the other hand, I have found some elements of methodological nominalism in your
doctrine. Your definitions of the positive and negative liberty satisfy Popper’s methodological
demands:
“The first of these political senses of freedom or liberty […] I shall call ‘the negative sense’
[…] The second I shall call ‘the positive sense’ […].”8 Moreover, your conception of freedom
is not an insight into the meaning or nature of freedom, but a critical examination of the two
main meanings that have been ascribed to it. Your thesis of the particular susceptibility to
distortions of the positive doctrines of liberty seems to be testable, as far as the practical
consequences of adopting each of the two concepts are concerned. Thus, your essay is less
essentialist that it might seem.
I have yet another, quite different problem. At the end of my stay in Oxford I met Dr.
Pelczynski, who criticized your doctrine of negative liberty as devoid of any conception of the
agent (either rational or emprical or any other). I must confess that I do not know whether this
is a serious problem and how to answer this objection. […]
Let me now once again thank you for the invaluable benefit that I gained from your
writings and from our conversations. Thanks to you the work on my Ph.D. dissertation and all
that has been connected with it has become one of the most important things in my life. Even
if my greatest intellectual adventure were to finish now, it will never lose its great
significance for me. Please forgive my boldness and my boring you with the problems that I
face. If I dare bother you it’s only because there is nobody here whom I could trust
intellectually so much. I shall be very grateful for your reply.
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Yours sincerely,
Beata Polanowska-Sygulska
1
Isaiah Berlin, “Does Political Theory Exist?,”in: The Proper Study of Mankind, ed. Henry
Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), p. 87.
2
Isaiah Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” in: Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), p. 101 footnote 2.
3
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1984 [1945]) 1: 112.
4
Isaiah Berlin, “Political Theories in the Twentieth Century,” in: Liberty, p. 93.
5
Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Biography (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1976),
p. 116.
6
Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1, p. 89.
7
ibid.
8
Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in: Liberty, p. 169 (my emphasis).