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ABSTRACT
Isaiah Berlin has not attracted much attention from academic strategists. This is unfortunate, because his concept of value pluralism helps explain why strategic decisions are burdened by uncertainty. It also highlights the importance of political judgement in reducing this uncertainty and the role of history in educating political judgement.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Beatrice Heuser and two anonymous reviewers for commenting on an earlier draft of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. 613–4. Additionally, some aspects of this present article are more briefly sketched out in John Stone, Military Strategy: The Politics and Technique of War (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
2 Berlin’s long and interesting times are documented in Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998).
3 Indeed, the fact that Berlin never produced a major work of synthesis led some to question his intellectual significance. Such doubts have since been dispelled, not least by Henry Hardy’s edited collections of Berlin’s essays. In what follows I have drawn on: Henry Hardy, ed., The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996) [hereafter SR]; Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer, eds, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (London: Pimlico, 1998) [hereafter PSM]; Henry Hardy, ed., Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Princeton University Press, 2013) [hereafter AC].
4 John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (London: HarperCollins, 1995).
5 ‘Vico and the Ideal of Enlightenment’, AC, 152.
6 ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, PSM, 6.
7 ‘The Originality of Machiavelli’, PSM, 269–325.
8 ‘Vico and the Ideal of Enlightenment’, 151–63.
9 ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, PSM, 359–435.
10 ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, 1–16.
11 ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, PSM, 191–242.
12 PSM, 436–7. ‘Trust us to lead because we know what is better for you and the umma’ is a popular refrain within jihadi circles according to Fawaz A. Gerges, The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 38.
13 ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, 9. See also Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Peter Halban, 1992), 36–7.
14 ‘The Concept of Scientific History’, PSM, 17–58.
15 Ibid., 56.
16 ‘Political Judgement’, SR, 46.
17 ‘The Sense of Reality’, SR, 25; ‘Political Judgement’, 53.
18 For variations on this theme see: Colin S. Gray, The Future of Strategy (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 21; B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy: The Indirect Approach (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), 335; Peter Paret, ‘Introduction’, in Makers of Modern Strategy: from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 3.
19 Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, ed. Werner Halweg, 19th ed. (Bonn: Dümmler, 1980), 191–213.
20 Ibid, 347.
21 Ibid., 212.
22 ‘Political Judgement’, 49.
23 For a recent overview of Bismarck’s career see Edgar Feuchtwanger, Bismarck: A Political History, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2014).
24 ‘The Sense of Reality’, SR, 37.
25 ‘Marxism in the Nineteenth Century’, SR, 134.
26 See his 1871 essay ‘Ueber Strategie’ in Moltkes Militärische Werke 2/2 (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1900) 291–3. Also: Hajo Holborn, ‘The Prusso-German School: Moltke and the Rise of the General Staff’, in Paret, ed., 281–95; Gunther E. Rothenberg, ‘Moltke, Schlieffen, and the Doctrine of Strategic Envelopment’, in Paret, ed., 296–325; Gerhard Ritter, The Sword and the Scepter: The Problem of Militarism in Germany, Volume I: The Prussian Tradition 1740–1890, trans. Heinz Norden (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1969), 194–206.
27 For details see Gordon A. Craig, The Battle of Königgrätz (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965).
28 Gordon A. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 198, 202.
29 Otto Fürst von Bismarck, Gedanken und Erinnerungen, Zweiter Band (Stuttgart: Verlag der J. G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 1898), 57.
30 Craig, Politics, 201–02.
31 Ibid., 199, 201, 203.
32 Bismarck, 66.
33 Cited in Craig, Politics, 203. Bismarck (p. 71) remembered the wording differently but did not have the relevant document to hand when writing his memoirs.
34 For details see: Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961); Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–1871 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
35 Craig, Politics, 208.
36 Moltke’s anger at the continuation of French resistance is evident in his correspondence with his brother Adolf. See Letters of Field-Marshal Count Helmuth von Moltke to His Mother and His Brothers, trans. Clara Bell and Henry W. Fischer (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1892), 190–211.
37 Craig, Politics, 211–2; Howard, Franco-Prussian War, 436.
38 Bismarck, 122–39.
39 Craig, 213; Howard, Franco-Prussian War, 437–8.
40 Ritter, 225.
41 Bismarck, 120–21.
42 ‘Political Judgement’, 49.
43 Ibid., 47–8. He receives similar praise in Ritter, 242, 249.
44 Condoleezza Rice, ‘Campaign 2000: Promoting the National Interest’, Foreign Affairs 79/1 (2000): 46, 60–61.
45 See Bush’s prefatory letter of transmission to ‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America’ (17 September 2002).
46 Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’ The National Interest 16 (1989): 3–18.
47 Toby Dodge, ‘The Ideological Roots of Failure: The Application of Kinetic Neo-Liberalism to Iraq’, International Affairs 86/6 (2010): 1269–86; Edward Rhodes, ‘The Imperial Logic of Bush’s Liberal Agenda’ Survival 45/1 (2003), 131–54.
48 See note 55.
49 John Easterbrook, ‘Rumsfeld: It Would Be A Short War’, CBS, 15 November 2002, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rumsfeld-it-would-be-a-short-war (accessed May 2018).
50 For details see Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (London: Atlantic Books, 2006).
51 The relevant texts are excerpted in Thomas R. Mockaitis, The Iraq War: A Documentary and Reference Guide (Greenwood: Santa Barbara, CA, 2012), 103–4. In the event, some 150,000 troops were committed to Iraq in 2003. Numbers subsequently fluctuated, reaching a peak of 171,000 in 2007 before declining thereafter. ‘Troop Numbers: Foreign Soldiers in Iraq’, al Jazeera, 14 December 2011, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/spotlight/iraqschallenge/2011/06/201162864733970544.html (accessed October 2018).
52 ‘President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point’ 1 June 2002, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html (accessed May 2018); Bush ‘National Security Strategy’.
53 Dodge, 1275, citing Bob Woodward, The War Within: A Secret Whitehouse History, 2006–2008 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 433. Bush’s full sentence reads: ‘It’s very important, though, for you to understand that I have a set of beliefs that are inviolate: faith in the transformative power of freedom and the belief that people, if just given a chance, will choose free societies.’
54 Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (Penguin, 2018), 47. Mishra’s book is an impressive attempt to locate such assumptions within their wider intellectual history.
55 For example: Philip H. Gordon, Martin Indyk and Michael E. O’Hanlon, ‘Getting Serious About Iraq’, Survival 44/3 (2002): 9–22; Charles Tripp, ‘After Saddam’, Survival 44/4 (2002): 22–37. Some 33 academics in the field of International Relations took out an advertisement in the New York Times arguing, amongst other things, that ‘Even if we win easily, we have no plausible exit strategy. Iraq is a deeply divided society that the United States would have to occupy and police for many years to create a viable state.’ ‘WAR IN IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA’S NATIONAL INTEREST’, New York Times, 26 September 2002.
56 Fred Kaplan, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008).
57 Emma Sky, The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq (London: Atlantic Books, 2015), 13.
58 Mockaitis, 211–14.
59 Dodge, 1279–81.
60 To be sure, Bismarck did not prevent the continuation of hostilities consequent on the collapse of Napoleon’s regime, but he did at least succeed in retrieving the situation and ultimately gained his political goals.
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John Stone
John Stone is a senior lecturer in War Studies. He specialises in the history and theory of military strategy