The proper study of mankind Book

This is a very rich book, it offers a great insight into the writing and understanding of history. It's impossible to cover all angles Berlin deals with, but the main one is his relentless attempt to show that tackling history with great theories and purely scientific methods ignores reality. One of the explanations is that the very act of writing history, compiling a story is not a perfectly logical activity; in reality, practical and intuitive aspects play a much larger role than (academic) methodical applications. For instance the urge to give the story a coherence and unity, and especially the urge to look teleologically at history (to reconstruct backwards starting from the result), are so strong that this approach does injustice to the reality of the past.

In his famous essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox" he describes how in many ways the reality of the past has a great "thickness" that is impossible to reconstruct, to the frustration of Tolstoy (his starting point for the essay). Moreover, we ourselves are so inextricably intertwined with our own "thick" history (past and present), that we can not possibly extract ourselves from it, and consequentely every scientific approach aimed at objective information is an illusion. According to Berlin, ultimately we can only appeal to a kind of wisdom of life, "a sensitiviness to the contours of the circumstances in which we happen to be placed", through which we intuitively can say sensible things about the past.

What Berlin says, makes sense; we cannot just wipe it off the table. But, too me, he is so extremely obsessed to prove the relativity of all scientific knowledge, that he ends up at the other extreme. And that's unfortunate; perhaps the point is to find the right middle ground: a marriage between scientific methods, transparent goals and intuition?

Addendum: much of what Berlin wrote about (in the 1950s and 1960s) has been recuperated and enlarged by the constructivist school and the linguistic/narrative turn. So in hindsight, his essays can seem a bit outdated. But that doesn't diminish his value as a pioneer!