In response to Michael Walzer, I am tempted to say that Berlin's greatest legacy may be his penchant for overstatement. But this was perhaps also his greatest virtue: the grand themes and generalizations that run through his many volumes of essays have furnished us with some of our more enduring categories for political philosophy and intellectual history, even if we find ourselves quarreling with the details or demanding qualification about even the larger claims.

Michael Walzer is moved by some of Berlin's observations from the 1978 essay, "The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West," but he is also moved to dispute some of the axioms that defined Berlin's overall political vision. In that essay, Berlin characterized utopianism as the political longing to realize a singular and eternal standard of human flourishing. I will begin with a summary of his argument.

On Berlin's view, utopianism is based upon the idea that "men have a certain fixed, unaltering nature, certain universal, common, immutable goals. Once these goals are realised, human nature is wholly fulfilled. The very idea of universal fulfillment presupposes that human beings as such seek the same essential goals, identical for all, at all times, everywhere. For unless this is so, Utopia cannot be Utopia, for then the perfect society will not perfectly satisfy everyone."¹

As we all know, this notion of a singular and fixed standard that might be used to underwrite political action made Berlin uneasy. If there really was one model for human happiness, then those who were tempted into believing they possessed knowledge of that standard would be inclined to think that any means could justify its realization. At stake was nothing less than perfect and universal happiness. Berlin urged us instead to recognize that there are a variety of human goods particular to different forms of life, not all of them rankable in a hierarchy and not all of them wholly compatible or commensurable with one another.

In fact Berlin saw the modern world as riven by a conflict between these two modes of political understanding. The first, again in his words, was the belief "that there exist eternal values, binding on all men, and that the reason why men have not, as yet, all recognised or realised them is a lack of the capacity, moral, intellectual, or material, needed to compass this end. It may be that this knowledge has been withheld from us by the laws of history itself; on one interpretation of these laws it is the class war that has so distorted our relations to each other as to blind men to the truth, and so prevented a rational organisation of human life. But enough progress has been made to enable some persons to see the truth; in the fullness of time the universal solution will be clear to men at large; then prehistory will end and human history will begin."

Against this view are those who declare that "men's temperaments, gifts, outlooks, wishes permanently differ one from another, that uniformity kills; that men can live full lives only in societies with an open texture, in which variety is not merely tolerated but is approved and encouraged; that the richest development of human potentialities can occur only in society in which there is a wide spectrum of opinions...in which there is liberty of thought and of expression, views and opinions clash with each other, societies in which friction and even conflict are permitted, albeit with rules to control them and prevent destruction and violence, that subjection to a single ideology, no matter how reasonable and imaginative, robs men of freedom and vitality."²

As Berlin explained ten years later, in his 1988 essay, "The Pursuit of the Ideal," recognizing the irreducible variety of human goods must chasten our pursuit of any utopian condition. All we may hope for is an "uneasy equilibrium" amongst conflicting values. Berlin granted that this was a "little dull," but he considered dullness preferable to zealotry. In the earlier essay, he had observed that "a liberal sermon which recommends machinery designed to prevent people from doing each other too much harm, giving each human group sufficient room to realise its own idiosyncratic, unique, particular ends without too much interference with the ends of others, is not a passionate battle-cry to inspire men to sacrifice and martyrdom and heroic feats. Yet if it were adopted," Berlin concludes, "it might yet prevent mutual destruction, and, in the end, preserve the world."³

Berlin's argument has a certain elegance to it. But Michael Walzer urges us to see that it is too simple. Specifically, the liberal vision of political equilibrium is more fragile than Berlin suggests, and Walzer details at least two reasons why this is so. The first and most obvious reason is that the equilibrium itself is not in the interest of those who hold power. There is something like a natural ambition towards "authoritarianism"-this tendency is like the original sin and it is almost constitutive of politics. Those who gain the institutional and economic upper hand will tend to consolidate that advantage, destroying plurality and hardening their monopoly over all the instruments of domination. Dullness is therefore a lot more dangerous than Berlin supposed. And this brings us to the second reason that the liberal vision is fragile: the authoritarian impulse can only be held in abeyance, Walzer suggests, if there are forces of popular dissent, forces that are typically motivated by utopian aspiration. So it turns out that liberalism can only survive if utopianism survives. If such forces are extinguished then authoritarianism is victorious. But if those forces are allowed to express their aspirations without qualification, then the ferocity of utopian ideals may overwhelm the equilibrium and liberalism will be again defeated. The problem of liberalism is therefore to somehow preserve but contain the forces of utopian aspiration. Berlin's simple contrast between utopianism and liberalism will not do, since liberalism remains dependent upon the utopianism it has disarmed.

The way to preserve utopian energy in politics, on Walzer's view, is by means of procedures and bargaining techniques recognized as legitimate by all the various factions vying for power. Dissent over rival ideals of the good can be adjudicated if there remains a consensus over the procedures by which to debate those ideals.

Now, what I believe Walzer to have shown us is that Berlin's pluralism was only coherent given a certain background assumption of what all human beings share. One might think of this shared background as being merely procedural: Walzer makes reference to Robert's Rules of Order and bargaining tactics, and seems to imply that these illustrate the sort of procedures upon which all members in a liberal polity might agree notwithstanding their divergence over questions of value. But I must confess that I have my doubts as to whether a merely procedural notion of justice as fair play is sufficiently thick to give us a common world in which we can all realize diverse conceptions of the good. I am inclined to think that the procedural standard already embodies a rather thick notion of the good. Why, after all, would anyone find Robert's Rules of Order compelling? It is only against the background of a shared culture with a shared commitment to certain substantive values of order and reasonable argumentation that those sorts of procedural matters feel obligatory. But that sort of larger and shared background should alert us to the fact that value-pluralism is only workable within a larger horizon of value-agreement. And this is why I think that Berlin was wrong to believe that he could embrace pluralism without monism, as if the first was all promise and hope while the second stood for dangerous utopian longing.

It seems to me that monism-some singular vision about what we all share and what we must aspire to as human beings-is in this sense built-in to any workable pluralism. I believe Walzer himself implies something similar when he notes that utopianism, rightly modified, must continue to inform liberalism if liberalism is to survive. Walzer makes the persistence of utopianism sound like an external pressure that acts against the incipient oligarchy of liberal institutions. But-if I may put the claim somewhat differently-we can also think about this persistence as a continued aspiration to wholeness or perfection, without which liberal societies cease to be liberal. Phrasing it in this way we might say that utopian aspiration is internal to liberalism and not just its external corrective.

I began by noting that Berlin's virtue was overstatement. This was obviously meant in irony. An overstatement is the sort of thing we associate with the hedgehog, the species of animal who prefers to know one big thing rather than many. But Berlin thought of himself as a fox, the animal who knows many things. Unfortunately this fanciful piece of zoology does not adequately describe the way human animals actually think, nor does it capture the ideals to which Berlin himself actually subscribed. For when we use these terms to understand our political experience we betray a readiness to categorize the variety of political events in accordance with quite general patterns. And it is the monist, not the pluralist, who believes that behind the many is the one. The attempt to distinguish between monism and pluralism may itself betray a hedgehog-like penchant for monistic generalization. This is one reason why the affirmation of pluralism invites qualification.

The deeper reason, however, is that pluralism itself seems to embody a thick and quite non-pluralistic vision of human flourishing. As Malachi Hacohen has recently noted, Berlin's thought is marked through and through by the Cold War. Modern politics was for Berlin a dramatic confrontation, between the dull but humane pluralisms of the democratic West and the passionate but terrible totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Stalinist, whose certitudes were the culmination of the monistic philosophies of the Enlightenment. To say that Berlin founded his own pluralistic politics on skepticism rather than certainty seems to me evasive, since Berlin truly believed as a matter of philosophical description that there just is a plurality of ideals and that these values differ. The objective description of this plurality is what saved him from the self-defeating paradoxes of relativism. (And we know that Berlin abjured relativism.) I am therefore not at all confident that Berlin was ready to conceive of pluralism as merely one form of life alongside of and no better than others. Everything in his written work rather suggests that he wished us to believe in pluralism as the singular and highest political ideal, because it is the special form of life that corresponds to the way the world really is. To be a pluralist and to really defend it against its enemies one has to be, I suspect, a hedgehog at heart.

1. Berlin, "The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West," 20.
2. Berlin, "The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West," 46.
3. Berlin, "The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West, 47-8.