Determinism in History

...The concepts of praise and blame, of innocence and guilt, of individual responsibility from which we started would be but small elements in the structure which would collapse and disappear...

...It does not go beyond the negative task of challenging every form of historical learning which pretends that historical events and configurations have ontological status or are analogous to natural events...

...It may be true...

...Nor does he define what essential structures in human nature make it possible to make moral judgments beyond the relativeness of cultural situations...

...If none were so, objectivity as a principle would be inconceivable...

...No memorial lecture in honor of a past hero has ever demolished as completely the hero's system of thought...

...Berlin challenges all forms of scientific or metaphysical determinism which regard the actions of men as determined either by causes which the social scientists may analyze empirically or by hidden patterns of history which may be analyzed metaphysically by the philosophers...

...But if it is true and we begin to take it seriously, then the changes in our language, our morals, our attitudes toward one another, our views of history, of society and everything else will be too profound to be even adumbrated...

...It might be more correct to assert that all historical knowledge has its subjective and historically relative and its "objective" aspects...

...Cultural relativism falls under Berlin's strictures, as well as determinism...

...But, if not, his strictures against cultural relativism are not well taken...

...Some of our attitudes are no doubt relative and subjective," he writes, "but others are not...

...Only thus can we escape too sweeping strictures on cultural relativism, on one hand, and the moral nihilism Berlin fears, on the other...

...Social determinism,' declares Berlin, "is at least historically bound up with the ideals of sociology...

...Reviewed by Reinhold Niebuhr This brilliant little volume by the distinguished Oxford philosopher was ironically, and somewhat inexplicably, the substance of his Comte memorial lecture...

...Perhaps he does not believe in these essential structures...

...or whether they be pessimists who think that no human effort will decrease the human suffering...

...In pursuing this negative task, his volume is brilliant and illuminating...

...It may be wrong to declare that "some of our judgments are relative and subjective, but others are not," for that betrays a too simple approach to the perplexing problem of the relativity of historical knowledge...

...So, also, in the problem of moral judgments, we must be aware both of the uniqueness of the occasion being judged and the bias of the judge, and of the perennial problems and structures underlying these moral judgments...

...He believes that freedom, without which responsibility would evaporate, is real...

...Since he is so conscious of the uniqueness of every historical configuration, which distinguishes the historical from the natural event, this critical attitude is the more surprising...

...But the interpretations of historical trends, analogies and recurrences are always relative to the historical locus of the interpreter...

...But he does not give us any precise definition of the curious compound of finite determinism and freedom which makes human history so unique and which enables a science of history to emerge, on the one hand, and a sense of moral responsibility to be preserved, on the other...

...and he suggests that the tendency toward determinism "springs from a desire to resign our responsibility, to cease from judging provided we be not judged and above all be not compelled to judge ourselves, from a desire to flee for refuge to some vast amoral, impersonal whole of nature or history...

...He insists, as indeed one must logically, that every form of determinism robs men of their moral responsibilities...

...In demolishing the pretensions of both scientists and philosophers in their claims to discern patterns and designs in history, he challenges not only Hegel and Marx and all the philosophers of history but also the social scientists who believe that their empirical procedures are akin to those of the natural scientists, whether they be optimists like "Turgot, Condoled, Saint Simon and Comic, scientific Utopians who arc convinced that the quality and variety of human happiness will increase...

...The weakness of this brilliant book may be revealed in this judgment...

...Those analogies and recurrences which can be statistically established are certainly "objective...