Editing Berlin, Interpreting Berlin: Henry Hardy in Conversation with Kei Hiruta

Summary

An interview conducted for this volume at Wolfson College, Oxford, on 8 August 2008

Editing berlin

Hiruta It has been more than three decades since you started editing the work of Isaiah Berlin in 1974. How did you come to know him and his work in the first place?

Hardy As a result of coming here to Wolfson College as a philosophy graduate student in 1972. As soon as I arrived, I became involved in conversations with Isaiah, usually in the common room, where he would sit and talk for hours to all comers, mainly after lunch. Since I was a philosopher, I naturally took an interest in what he‘d written, although I didn't know anything about him or his work when I first came here. I asked people who were already here and knew more about him what I should read. They recommended Four Essays on Liberty, which had been published only three years before, in 1969. I read it on holiday one vacation and found it absolutely enthralling, and moving in many ways, and became a Berlinophile (though not an uncritical one) from that point onward, quite apart from already liking him as a person and finding his conversation absorbingly interesting. It is hard to exaggerate the transforming effect of talking to him. He said of geniuses that he had met personally that they made his mind race. If this is a criterion of genius, he was a genius. He made the world of the intellect intensely alive, important, exhilarating – and fun – in a way that was quite new to me, and made me glad in a way I could not have anticipated that I had returned to Oxford to do graduate work. He defined an intellectual as someone who wants ideas to be as interesting as possible, and that definition provides part of the answer to those who ask why he was so celebrated. I would defy anyone to name someone who better exemplified what Madame de Staël said of Rousseau: ‘He said nothing new, but set everything on fire.’ Except that Isaiah did say new things, which puts him ahead of Rousseau on that count, if de Staël is right.

Hiruta Your work as Berlin's editor has a prehistory: you constructed a bibliography of his work.